“A house of dynamite” star Tracy Letts fear we may be boiled.
“Consider the possibility. There’s a couple of existential crises we’re facing. So we should probably consider what it means if, maybe not in your lifetime, but your child’s lifetime or whatever. What if we’re just all done?” said Pulitzer-winning playwright and character actor extraordinaire, who plays General Anthony Brady in the new political thriller directed by Academy Award winner Kathryn Bigelow. The film provides a chilling look at what might happen if a nuclear missile were fired at the United States.
Letts sits with IndieWire on the patio of a West Hollywood hotel, finally taking a breather after two intense days of opening his play “Mary Page Marlowe” at the Old Vic Theater in London, waking up at 6 a.m. the next day to fly 14 hours to Los Angeles and attend two screenings of “A House of Dynamite,” including the Los Angeles premiere. But even before it became the most watched film on Netflix in one week, Letts was already pleased with how the audience responded. “People seem to dig the movie, people like it, which is cool,” he said. “Or if they’re not, they’re not telling me, which is probably wise.”
Before landing on what the film’s message might be, Letts wrote “A House of Dynamite” simply “because it was a Kathryn project. And then when I read the script and saw the role she had in mind for me, it didn’t make it any less interesting to me,” he said. “Everything about it for me was just, ‘Go, go, go.’ I didn’t hesitate.” Although he most identifies with playing the father of the title role in “Lady Bird” (“I’m a guy who likes to sit and read the paper and let the women make all the decisions”), the military role still felt close to home in a way. “I’m a general and give orders and the voice of authority, I can do it. They’re probably all just impersonations of my dad or whatever, but I can do it,” he said. But “everyone who knows me knows I’m an old softie.”
Early questions Letts had for director Bigelow included “Is he George C. Scott in ‘Dr. Strangelove’? Is he a (war) hawk?” As he would later learn from his interactions with real-life generals who advised him on his performance, there is little time to discuss politics with only 18 minutes until a major American city is about to be obliterated by a missile. “He’s really just talking game theory. “If you do this, they will. If you don’t do this, then they can.” It’s game theory. He’s just putting it out there for the president’s consideration. I was comfortable with all that because the argument made sense to me,” he said.
Again, Letts had access to several three- and four-star generals who had sat in STRATCOM and run through scenarios like that seen in “A House of Dynamite.” He left impressed. “These guys know their jobs inside out,” he said. “They drill (these scenarios) 400 times a year. So they’re very practiced at it. And the goal in the moment of crisis is simple. Gather information, pass information on.” If anything, it’s the efficiency and clarity of his character in particular that makes “A House of Dynamite” all the more terrifying.
“The scenario it presents is frighteningly likely. There’s not a lot of things that happen that couldn’t happen. It’s not a Martian showing up, right? This is not science fiction. This is right next to reality,” Letts said. “If you’re going to make that kind of film, you can’t miss any of the technical details. All that stuff has to be right.”
It all starts with the script from Oscar nominee Noah Oppenheim, who, as the former head of NBC News, has rubbed elbows with many of the players who would be involved in a national security emergency. “People get mad at me if I do accessible research,” Letts said, but “you do what you have to do. And certainly in a case like this where so much of the research has been done for you, like the dramaturgy is on the page, the research has been done, it’s been vetted, re-vetted, they surrounded me with all the context I would need to pretend to be an authority to really pretend to be an actor. to be able to cut a good haircut and put on the uniform and go out on the set and know the lines, hopefully, and be able to deliver them with some authority, (and) carry that language in a way that feels natural.”
By going through those motions, informed by all that research, the film showed Letts that Americans “are not as prepared as we think.” He added, “This movie shows a scenario where everything is going right. The government is working pretty well. Not all the equipment is necessarily working the way we’d like it to, but I think they even quote at one point that these (ground-based interceptors) are supposed to work at a 61 percent success rate, but even that’s under ideal circumstances.”
In the world of “A House of Dynamite,” “everyone in government works well and thoughtfully, that is if everyone accepts the gravity of the moment and does their job well.” And the President of the United States, played by Idris Elbaseems reasonable. “Imagine a scenario where he might not be all the way there, or maybe even blatantly irresponsible. Then it becomes a much scarier consideration,” Letts said.
In the end, “we’ve built a machine, a very complicated unit. If all the parts work correctly inside that unit, if everything works the way it’s supposed to work, civilization is over,” the star said in what his new film highlights. “What if we just completely re-engineer the machine?” Letts mentions that he has recently been asked about an image of the bust of Lincoln in “A House of Dynamite” and what it might evoke, something that also stood out to him the first time he saw the film.
“Of course you immediately think of the presidents who have come to the moment, the ones who haven’t,” he said. “But the second time I saw it, it was like, ‘Oh, none of that matters.’ Civilization is wiped out. President? Pointless. It doesn’t matter. It’s all gone.”
“Kathryn’s not going to take this on,” but “artists are starting to wrestle with this idea of what does it mean if we’re really done here?” Letts said. He uses Thomas Vinterberg’s latest series “Families like ours”, about Denmark being evacuated in response to climate change, as another example. These projects provide the warnings that, if not heeded, prove that “it’s not going to get better. It’s just going to get worse.”
With all that said, the actual experience of making “A House of Dynamite” was still enjoyable. “It’s an ensemble piece. Everyone pitches in to help where they can, which is the beauty of it,” Letts said. “There’s no one who’s the obvious type of prize player. It’s like we don’t have to. So everyone’s there for the right reasons. It’s just Kathryn, Kathryn, Kathryn.”
Having now worked with Bigelow on her first film in nearly a decade, reminiscent of her other works like “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” both of which received academic recognition, Letts is more excited by the idea of the director dipping even further back into her oeuvre. “I’m old. I remember seeing ‘Near Dark’ in the theater very well. So I think of Kathryn as more varied than just this kind of documentary/military (style). I know she has more tools,” he said. “I hope she goes back to that, honestly. I heard the word ‘western’ at some point. I’d be happy if it was real.”
Letts himself has recently developed a reputation as the king of physical media, with a collection of around 11,000 DVDs, so there’s a slight irony in his latest film being distributed by a streaming service. “There’s going to be a moment when I have to hold my hand up to say, ‘We should have this 4K available, too,'” he joked, also campaigning for director David Fincher’s Netflix films and Martin Scorsese’s Apple film “Killers of the Flower Moon” to release physical 4K copies.
As much as the movie has made him feel about the world, Lett’s best experience with “A House of Dynamite” has been seeing it in a theater. “Having the Volker Bertelmann score just vibrate your sternum and kind of tell you when to breathe, or how to breathe throughout the movie, I just don’t think it’s going to play the same way at home as it is on the big screen. So I hope people check it out in theaters.”
“A House of Dynamite” is now out in select theaters nationwide and streaming on Netflix.
