‘House of Dynamite’ and the Art of the Ticking Clock Screenplay

The race against time is a near-perfect cinematic device. The level of tension a ticking clock can bring to a story is extremely powerful and forces characters to make urgent, often life-saving (or life-threatening) decisions.

Kathryn Bigelow knows tension. Her Oscar-winning film, The Hurt Locker, puts its characters into stressful situations as it follows a bomb squad unit in Iraq tasked with defusing IEDs and other explosives. She’s also directed films surrounding the capture of Osama bin Laden, as well as the spark that lights the Detroit race riots in 1967.

In her latest film, House of Dynamite, the United States government must react to a nuclear missile launch. The short time from launch to landing is filled with tension as the clock ticks down and the government must determine who was responsible, how to respond and the consequences of their choices.

Regarding the ticking clock, House of Dynamite is broken into three chapters in which decisions must be made in just 18 minutes.

“We decided to break it into three chapters in order to stay in real time, because an 18-minute journey would have been too brief for a feature,” Bigelow says in a Cinema Daily interview. “We broke it into three phases in order to do a deep dive in each one of the halls of power.”

Writer Noah Oppenheim says in the same interview, “The reason we constructed it that way was so the audience could feel what that pressure of 18 minutes would be like. And experience the disorientation that the decision-makers would feel when something like this would first happen.”

In Freakier Friday, four women (a grandmother, mother, daughter and the daughter’s enemy/soon-to-be-step-sister) swap bodies and, if they don’t find a way to return to their original bodies by a certain time, they are destined to remain there.

While a comedy, the idea that the characters have a finite amount of time drives suspense and keeps the plot moving – there’s simply no time to slow down.

With House of Dynamite, there is 18 minutes to make a decision that could literally end the world. With the race against the clock, there’s no time to spare which forces characters to make decisions quickly with only a little information that may or may not be accurate.

TV explored the ticking clock concept with a show from 2001 titled 24. Each episode was a single hour within the day with a ticking clock leading into each commercial and the show ending at the top of the hour. The show followed a counterterrorism agent who, in each season, had just 24 hours to stop an assassination or nuclear weapons plot.

Having a finite time adds a sense of urgency and helps keep the viewer on the edge of their seat.

Not to alarm anyone, but the people in charge of the nuclear arsenal aren’t prepared for an all-out nuclear war. And putting a microscope on those people within the military is what drove Bigelow to create House of Dynamite.

“In looking at the mindset of the military-industrial complex, what’s most interesting are the vulnerabilities,” Bigelow says in an interview with Letterboxd. “In the United States Strategic Command, they rehearse the nuclear protocol 400 times a year. The president, however, will almost never [rehearse]. Yet, the president has sole authority to make decisions about whether to retaliate or not to retaliate, in the event of such a situation. That was quite surprising and a little disarming, for me.”

Oppenheim, who wrote the script following conversations with Bigelow, broke it down into three chapters with each one focusing on a different group of characters and how they react to the ticking clock.

“First, the watch officers in the White House situation room and the soldiers at Fort Greely, Alaska, who are the first line of defense, and who are noticing the missile get launched,” Oppenheim says in a Deadline interview. This was meant to show the complications of coordinating the conference call on which all the decision-makers are going to gather and provide the information they are gathering in real time.

The second chapter takes the audience into the head of the U.S. Strategic Command, the general in charge of the nuclear arsenal and the national security advisor.

“And let’s end with the person upon whose shoulders the ultimate responsibility rests, which is the president of the United States,” Oppenheim concluded.

After the first chapter, the audience knows what’s going on, and the following two chapters have characters acting normally in their day-to-day lives. We as the audience know what’s happening; they don’t. This adds another element in the race against time, and keeps the audience engaged because these characters are just living their lives that we know will be disrupted.

“Even at the White House, these are people who wake up with sick kids, failing relationships, hangovers, whatever it is, and that influences how they do their jobs. Showing that felt important,” Oppenheim says in an interview with The Playlist.

“It’s so important to humanize a situation as abstract and terrifying as this,” Bigelow says in an AP News interview.

For example, Jared Harris plays the secretary of defense who becomes too distracted thinking of how to save his estranged daughter, who is potentially at ground zero of the nuclear strike, to be of much help.

“Opening the window, when you can, on those moments of human frailty is what’s fascinating about playing stories like this,” Harris said.

Regarding the role of president, Oppenheim took an approach to George W. Bush being in an elementary school classroom when he heard about the 9/11 attack starting.  The character is placed in an impossible situation with no foreseeable means of rehearsing for it.

“That is the point we wanted to make, which is that even in the best-case scenario, if you had a president who is thoughtful, responsible, informed, deliberative — to ask someone, anyone, to make a decision about the fate of all mankind in a matter of minutes while he’s running for his life simultaneously is insane,” Oppenheim shares in the Deadline interview.

Oppenheim, who was a journalist by trade before screenwriting, wanted to open the door and reveal the real humanity in characters who are important.

“If there’s any through line in the things I’ve written, it’s that I love peeling back the curtain on public figures and revealing their humanity,” Oppenheim says to the Playlist. “When you meet them, you realize pretty quickly they’re no different than you or me. There’s no secret floor of grownups who have all the answers. It’s just people muddling through, often under impossible pressure.”

The race against time adds suspense but the audience needs characters to root for. That’s the delicate balance in stories like House of Dynamite. And the more writers can show the human side of the situation, the more invested the viewer will be. It’s also not a matter of making someone a hero or a coward but finding those gray areas where the term “I don’t know” lies.

The ticking clock forces decisions and turns “I don’t know” into decisive action and having the characters face those impossible decisions.