BTS: A House of Dynamite

IBC

How filmmaker Barry Ackroyd takes audiences inside the bunker and gives them no control over the final countdown to nuclear Armageddon.

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A shaky camera and use of crash zooms are often highly distracting but in the right hands can immerse the audience into the story. That’s the case with A House of Dynamite, the latest movie shot by Barry Ackroyd BSC, a pioneer of docu-drama whose work with Ken Loach, Paul Greengrass and Kathryn Bigelow has inspired legions of filmmakers. However, as he tells IBC365, you can’t just mimic the aesthetic, you have to earn it.

“The nature of this kind of shooting is to give you a sense of being there,” says the twice Oscar nominated DOP (The Hurt Locker, Captain Phillips). “It should be frustrating because you’d like to intervene and say something to change the course of action but you can't of course. You can only watch and the camera is your eye.”

Netflix’s thriller A House of Dynamite is a thought exercise illustrating the strict protocols and inexorable logic triggered by a warning of nuclear attack. On the page it must have read like a group of people sitting and talking in a room filled with monitors, yet Ackroyd’s use of camera injects dynamism to proceedings.

“This film is a series of brief moves towards what happens in 18 minutes of real time,” he says. “Hopefully, you feel like you're in the room with them. Even though they’re not going anywhere you're listening intently to find out what the next move is.”

This is his third film with Bigelow following The Hurt Locker (2008) and Detroit (2017). While the director initially sought out the British DP following his work with Paul Greengrass on United 93 he credits her with challenging him to adapt his single-cam style to using multiple 16mm Aaton cameras on the tense drama about bomb disposal teams in Iraq (for which he won a Bafta).

Ackroyd explains that his approach to any film is to find its particular rhythm and texture. “The Hurt Locker had quiet moments of silence and other moments where we ran and chased with camera over rough terrain and down streets because that was what was happening in the story. Detroit had another different rhythm. Getting hold of that rhythm is the key to it. People push zooms in and out of subjects like a toy because they want some dynamism, but if the dynamism isn't there to catch, it won’t work.”

“[A House of Dynamite] is lots of people sitting in rooms making decisions - or not making them - and the important part was to capture their inner feelings. I then applied the technique that I would use on films whether for Paul Greengrass or Ken Loach which is to form a rhythm using the zoom and the observational documentary nature of it all to make it believable.”

A House of Dynamite is divided into three sections that replay the doomsday countdown from different perspectives. Ackroyd says he and Bigelow didn’t conceptualise the approach to each scenario differently.

“No, that would have been like pre-empting the storyline,” he says. “If you get too far down that route it’s like you’ve already drawn storyboards, which are perfectly fine to do for a stunt or a particularly complex scene, but trying to pre-empt a film like this I would find really disturbing. No matter what anyone draws or conceives upfront it will be different on the day. You have to react to the situation otherwise you will get a series of very contrived shots. You will know where the edit comes, how long the shot should be and where the move should be and where its focus is and the audience will feel this too.

“Maybe it's just my inadequacy but I can't do that. I don't feel that tells me the story. Although the films may be very beautiful I don't think beauty is the aim of the filmmaking process.”

Although the film has the polished sheen and A-list cast of a blockbuster Ackroyd says Bigelow adopts an indie-style where space is left for spontaneity when the camera rolls.

“They call it ‘show and tell’. It’s about shooting the situation for real,” he says. “Until we have the actors performing the words in the space that we've left completely open to them - where they have freedom to move - that’s where we capture the film.”

He continues, “Kathryn doesn't really establish camera moves or even moves for the actors. She puts the actors in the place that would be natural for the characters and largely leaves them to create their own choreography and movement.”

STRATCOM, the US strategic command responsible for nuclear operations, is an example. “Here, Tracy Letts (playing senior military officer General Brody), took the decision that he would get up and walk through the room, telling people to sit down.  This was great because that got him out of the chair. He understood that from an actor's point of view and it also aided the rhythm of the scene. Whether he had discussed that with Katherine or just did it on spur of the moment, I don’t know, but he knew that when he moved the cameras would capture him.”

Ackroyd has not made a film in which he hasn’t operated camera. Here he worked alongside two other hand-picked operators Katherine Castro and Gregor Tavenner, always covering with a foreground, mid-ground and background before diving into the subject of the scene.

“The idea of A cam, B cam and C cam isn’t really my cup of tea,” he says. “Everyone - the A, B and C of it - is making the same film. No one's going off to make a tricky Dolly shot or choosing to shoot in a different way. We're all tied together. That’s part of the method.”

Exteriors were shot in Washington, Iceland (for Alaska) and Kenya for the finale. 
Production designer Jeremy Hindle supervised the build of the main sets on stages in New Jersey.

“The rooms were huge and it was obvious where to put the camera,” Ackroyd explains. “The limitations were the geography of the room, the immovability of it. It was built to be realistic. It wasn't built to have elements that we could break away to make room for a track.  The point was to be covering the story and that means that every camera operator gets a piece of it.”

He elaborates, “I believe in covering all the actors in a scene and not necessarily just the ones delivering lines. That proves valuable in the edit when [editor] Kirk Baxter gets hold of it and brings the footage together. Sometimes the camera does the edit by anticipating and getting to the right place at the right time. That’s always a satisfying feeling. When the camera travels in motion blur and then lands on something and the shot comes into sharpness is all part of the drama where the skills of focus pullers and first AC's make for a great team.”

Ackroyd’s filmmaking is rooted in the dozens of documentaries he shot all over the world for the likes of Dispatches in the 1980s. He moved to drama enjoying a lengthy creative partnership with Ken Loach on films including Riff Raff, Carla’s Song, and 2006 Palme d’Or winner The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Throughout he has tended to shoot 16mm with zooms which, translated into digital for A House of Dynamite, meant ARRI Alexa 35 and his favoured 24-290 Angénieux lens.

“Using the zoom is an art,” he says. “It’s like playing jazz. It’s muscle memory for me. When I go to the camera, I always put my eye to the eyepiece, not to a monitor, unless it's impossible to get to the eyepiece. It's not necessarily on my shoulder, but next to my body and my hand is free to zoom so that you can do natural zooms. There are electronic zooms which work when you press a button but by the time your brain is deciding it should be moving and you’ve pushed the button, it's already too late. If your fingers are there and instinctively following your brain, your eye, then the camera and the zoom becomes part of the content. Using the camera becomes an extension of yourself.”

Ackroyd also draws attention to the work of the film’s composer Volker Bertelmann. His score combines sweeping moments of orchestral strings with tiny moments of silence to reflect the macro event of nuclear Armageddon and the reminders of its cost such as a scene of kids playing basketball.

“I've been listening much more intently to the sounds,” says Ackroyd. “I used to think that cinematography was the key but music can be very visual, driving and rhythmic as is it here and work closely with the cinematography.”

During research Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim spoke with a former chief of staff at the Pentagon who revealed that nuclear attack scenarios are almost never roleplayed by the President’s office (that’s any President not just the current administration) because they are too busy with a thousand and one other foreign policy or domestic terrorism threats. In contrast, STRATCOM’s leadership practice drills 400 times a year.

That the military are totally dialled into the decision-making process yet the president, who ultimately has to make the call within minutes is not, is the terrifying paradox at the core of the film. Are we complacent to the annihilation of humanity that nuclear proliferation entails?

Ackroyd says, “Politics always fascinates me. It’s one reason I make films and I hope this film prompts those ideas to be explored.”