Our world is combustible’: Kathryn Bigelow on AI, Andy Warhol and nuclear Armageddon

Danny Leigh Guardian, 18 Oct 25

‘Our world is combustible’: Kathryn Bigelow on AI, Andy Warhol and nuclear Armageddon

The record-breaking Oscar winner explains how her new film, A House of Dynamite – starring Idris Elba as the US president – is rooted in her cold war childhood and the urgent threats we all face todayFri 17 Oct 2025 15.00 AEDTShare

Kathryn Bigelow has been thinking about death: hers, and mine, and yours as well. History will always remember her as the first woman to win a best director Oscar, which she did in 2010 for The Hurt Locker. But in her new film, A House of Dynamite, history may not have long to run. It is the story of a nuclear missile, launched at an American city. The rest is about what happens next. Bigelow would like you to consider Armageddon.

“Someone I know said the bomb for the audience is realising this is possible,” she says. She smiles. “I’m glad if people come away from the movie as concerned as I am.”

Today, though, her bearing is Zen. Almost six feet and wearing tinted sunglasses, she looks like a rock star, and younger than 73. Her own memories of the nuclear era stretch back to the early 1960s, and a cold-war childhood in California. School involved “duck and cover” drills, teaching kids to stay safe in a nuclear attack. “I grew up hiding under my desk. Of course, I was too young to understand what I was doing down there.”

A House of Dynamite is a belated answer. Bigelow’s previous movie, Detroit, was a 60s true story, an account of racist police violence. Now she is back in the period she most likes making films about: right now. It is an age of ironies. On our phones, nothing is beyond the pale, and everything makes us furious. And all, she says, while ignoring a nuclear stockpile able to render our online dramas irrelevant. “It’s the one thing we never mention, much less question. It’s crickets out there. It isn’t on TikTok, so it doesn’t exist.”

The movie, then, reminds us of a terrifying fact of life. “Our world is combustible. And it’s extraordinary to me how that ever became normalised.”

The cast includes Rebecca Ferguson as a White House security analyst and Idris Elba as the US president. Rich with closely researched detail, the film shows us the same nightmare experienced by multiple characters. Who fired the missile is never clear. Retaliatory strikes are still prepared. The film does exactly what its director intends. It makes everything else you might be thinking about feel absolutely trivial……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

She says she sees a clear relationship between her hot potato films of the past 20 years and her new one. K-19 left her haunted by nuclear ghosts. Then, while others had their say about her, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty sharpened her self-image as a film-maker adjacent to journalism. “The films start with my own curiosity, and then there’s a desire to provide access to information the public doesn’t have that I think might be important.”

The other link, of course, is the military. A retired three-star general acted as a consultant on A House of Dynamite. She points out she has never sought endorsement from the Pentagon. Indeed, the story is more than sceptical about the accepted wisdom of mutually assured destruction – and the billions spent maintaining it. “Our nuclear armoury is a fallible structure,” Bigelow says. “Within it are men and women working thanklessly behind the scenes, whose competence means you and I can sit and have this conversation. But competence doesn’t mean they’re infallible.”……………………………………………………………………… https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/oct/17/kathryn-bigelow-ai-andy-warhol-nuclear-armageddon-a-house-of-dynamite

October 19, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | media