The Craft Of ‘A House Of Dynamite’: How The Editing, Production Design, Score & Sound Design Keep The Tension Palpable

A House of Dynamite is the kind of movie that sticks in your mind for a while after viewing. The tension created when an average drill becomes a real, life-or-death situation is exemplified in the performances, but the feeling would not be the same without the support of the craft teams.

The tense scenes in Stratcom and the White House, built on stage by production designer Jeremy Hindle, wouldn’t be possible without the work of all of the craft departments. Editor Kirk Baxter’s approach to “natural continuity”, sound designer Paul Ottosson’s choice to bury dialogue and composer Volker Bertelmann’s score filled with silence all played an essential role in keeping the tension alive.

There is a moment in A House of Dynamitewhere the tone shifts to one of non-stop ebbs and flows of tension throughout the rest of the film. Upon reading the script, editor Kirk Baxter knew exactly how to handle that.

“The script screamed that this is an editor’s movie,” says Baxter. “I had a good idea of what was being asked of me, without seeing a frame of footage… I thought, we’ve got to do this fast and straight down the line. Not tricky, just let everybody hold on by their fingernails.”

Having worked with director Kathryn Bigelow on a commercial previously, Baxter says he was excited to work with her style of filming. “Kathryn shoots in a way where it feels like a documentary and there’s usually three cameras going at once, so I tried to stay within the natural continuity of the three cameras,” says Baxter. “Kathryn doesn’t care too much about continuity, but I find if you’re seeking realism, it’s good for [the edit] not to be glaringly manhandled.”

Realism was not an easy achievement for this film, as the real basis for some of the main sets are kept secret. “I’ve shot a lot of secure facilities, but these were the toughest because it’s the brand-new situation room at the White House and Stratcom, and they’re sets that are really off limits almost in any way,” says production designer Jeremy Hindle.

Initially, the only details he had to go off of were a few photos from when President Biden opened the new location and he needed to piece together everything from there. “As we progressed, I got into the Pentagon with Kathryn and we got into a situation room,” says Hindle. Although he says they managed to get 99% there on their own, every little detail helped with accuracy. “I had three minutes in the situation room, the real one, with nothing. I just got to scan the room, look around and run out and make notes.”

Once the locations were created, the next concern was about how actors from different sets would interact. “Everything I do is about accuracy and precision, trying to make it perfect,” says Hindle. To achieve that perfection, he realized that all of the sets needed to be built on stage since everyone is interacting with people in other locations. “With all the screens, they needed to be live links. Every set had different cameras so everybody could see each other, and then we started shooting it so that we could keep the energy alive.”

The live links allowed for Baxter to change locations in the edit, sometimes mid-sentence. “[Paul Ottosson] really helped sell location changes when you’re mid-sentence, going from one place to the next with all of that perspective shift of where the audio is coming from and his choice to bury dialogue as the movie unfolds,” says Baxter. “I think that speaks to what the movie was trying to portray, as in this impossible situation of all of us trying to communicate when you’re not in the right places to be communicating for something that important.”

The choice to bury dialogue gave each location and line its own sense of importance, even if they are buried in another chapter. “If you were to see the movie again, these very important lines in the first chapter are almost not even playing,” says sound designer Paul Ottosson. “We find these sound moments that are in every chapter, these recurring motifs of people saying and doing different stuff, but we play them in very different ways… then we get to another chapter, and we are actually with the person delivering that line and we see the impact of it immediately with him or her.”

Since the majority of the movie is taking place in static rooms, Ottosson says tension became the focus of his job. “We are stuck in a lot of static situations in the room, so that’s a ticking time bomb and essentially the beast of the movie is a blip on a screen we see on occasion,” he says. “It was not this immediate thing you can create anything sound-wise for, but I knew the tension around it would give us a lot of opportunities.”

Unlike an action movie, where he would design sounds as a response to what’s on the screen, Ottosson says his approach had to change. “In this movie, the sound is very built on the script and the tension where we are at in the story,” he says. “I would treat a room one way in the beginning of the scene and different in the end of the scene, because the whole focus has shifted from regular day to ‘we’re all going to die.’”

Ramping up the tension was not done solely through sound design, as composer Volker Bertelmann’s score also lent a hand. “I was thinking about the tension in these ramps,” he says. He opted for low woodwinds and brass instruments, like the baritone saxophone, to capture the highs and lows of the tension. “We also tried to find a way of humming into the saxophone while you’re playing notes so that they get this sound that is quite animalistic in a way, like yearning.”

Outside of the woodwinds, Bertelmann says the most important component of his score is the use of silence. “You have to find the moment where it goes into silence. For example, I love actually taking the sound away before a gunshot,” says Bertelmann. Rather than ramping up to a pop, he says the silence before the gunshot makes the impact hit harder. “It’s the same for A House of Dynamite. We didn’t ramp it up towards the end of a chapter, we just had it silent and that makes it suddenly feel like you’re left alone in a way.”