Spoiler alert! We're discussing the ending of the Netflix movie "A House of Dynamite."
For Noah Oppenheim, “A House of Dynamite” began with a single question.
“If there was ever a missile attack on the United States, what happens? What are the procedures that get followed?” says the journalist-turned-screenwriter, who collaborated with director Kathryn Bigelow on the stress-inducing Netflix thriller (streaming now).
The film painstakingly imagines the government’s response to a nuclear warhead launched at the U.S. As a former president of NBC News, Oppenheim interviewed numerous high-level officials who have worked at the Pentagon, the CIA and the White House to get an accurate picture of what the minute-by-minute might look like.
Bigelow, too, “has relationships of her own going back to 'Zero Dark Thirty' and 'The Hurt Locker,' and has enormous respect in the military community,” Oppenheim explains. “We started getting on the phone with people who worked inside these rooms, and built the story that way from the ground up.”
