Sound designer Paul N.J. Ottosson first worked with director Kathryn Bigelow on her 2009 Best Picture winner “The Hurt Locker,” beginning a partnership that would continue through “Zero Dark Thirty” (for which Ottosson won an Academy Award), and “Detroit.” Having become one of Bigelow’s most trusted collaborators, Ottosson is in a privileged position when it comes to being involved early on her films — a fact he used to his advantage on their latest and greatest film, the anxiety-inducing “A House of Dynamite.”
“Kathryn generally gives me the script very early on,” Ottosson told IndieWire. “I’m maybe the fifth person reading it.” That allowed Ottosson to take a deep research dive into the world in which “A House of Dynamite” takes place: the world of military leaders, civilians, and politicians who work in the government to respond to nuclear attacks. Given Bigelow’s mandate for authenticity, getting every detail right was paramount.
“The rule is that if it’s not real, we don’t have it in the movie,” Ottosson said. “That creates a challenge because you can’t just pick any effect because it sounds cool.” The demand for realism was particularly daunting on “A House of Dynamite” because most of the movie takes place in locations — like STRATCOM, the military command post tasked with handling nuclear strikes — in which very few people are ever allowed.
“These are places none of us have access to,” Ottosson said. “Kathryn got into STRATCOM for around three minutes. The White House, eight minutes. With no phones, no cameras, nothing, everything just had to be from memory.” Luckily for Ottosson, he had a “man on the inside,” a three-star general who served as an advisor and answered all of Ottosson’s questions about what it sounded like the rooms where history-changing decisions might be made.
More importantly, the general was able to advise on what the rooms felt like, something Ottosson felt was essential in creating the proper soundscape, especially since the environments in which the movie takes place are largely sterile interiors — this is a movie of people talking in rooms that manages to have the intensity of a horror film. In fact, Ottosson used one of the core principles of horror filmmaking as a guideline in creating his sound design.
“A lot of the time, seeing the monster is not the scary part,” Ottosson said. “It’s not seeing it, but knowing it’s there.” In “A House of Dynamite,” the unseen monster that we know is there is a missile hurtling toward Chicago, and while Ottosson credits composer Volker Bertelmann’s score with doing the heavy lifting in creating tension, he also admits to manipulating the viewer in subtle ways to keep ratcheting up the sense of unease throughout the film’s running time.
“A lot of the scenes early in the White House are just casual conversation,” Ottosson said, noting that for the background sound, he spent three days recording group voices — two of which were scripted by writer Noah Oppenheim. “We start out in the normal world, with a lot of ‘blah, blah, blah, how are your kids doing?’ Then we got into a phase where it’s a lot of information.”
Once that information starts coming quickly at the audience, Ottosson manipulates it to keep the viewer on edge, purposely obscuring certain lines so that we become tense with worry over what we’re missing. This is something that the movie’s unusual structure, in which the same 18 minutes or so are repeated three times from different perspectives, made possible.
“That structure allowed me to mess with you in the first chapter,” Ottosson said. “I knew I could later clarify the information in the second one, or the third one. That gave me a weapon in my arsenal of being able to give you an insane amount of information where you can’t really discern what’s going on.” By making the dialogue more cacophonous as the pressure mounts, Ottosson replicates the feelings of the characters, who have trained hundreds of times for various scenarios — but are now experiencing something that goes beyond their typical exercises.
“I wanted to underline how fragile this whole system is,” Ottosson said, noting that in a scene where a character is trying to talk to the highest reaches of his government on his cell phone, the reception is bad — something that’s not only relatable but creates an almost unbearable level of anxiety in both the characters and the audience. Ottosson was also sure to make some information that the audience might not care about clear, while more vital information was left in the background or interfered with in some way. “I felt that would add even more stress to the situation.”
For Ottosson, these decisions are less intellectual than intuitive. “In movie making, it’s hard to do it by the numbers,” he said. “If you were to ask about a certain sound, ‘Why did you do that?’ I can just say it felt right.” Ottosson credits Bigelow’s confidence and her decision to bring him on early in the process with enabling him to trust his instincts and follow them where they lead him — even when they’re wrong.
“Having that time allows me to try things and hate them,” Ottosson said. “Sometimes you need to make a bunch of mistakes to find what’s right. I think if I had never made a mistake I wouldn’t be certain that I ended up with the right thing. This process with Kathyn allows me to try it again and hate it again. And then I try it, and I love it. And then I send it to Kathryn.”
“A House of Dynamite” is currently streaming on Netflix.