Volker Bertelmann scores like boiling water in A House of Dynamite. The flame is lit and the heat rises throughout Kathryn Bigelow’s nuclear thriller, in which a nuke flies toward Chicago. Bertelmann’s music is well-calibrated tension that screams doom even at its most subtle cues.
It’s another accomplished piece of work from the Academy Award-winning Bertelmann, who scored Conclave and All Quiet in the Western Front. House of Dynamite isn’t his only new film on Netflix; there’s The Ballad of a Small Player as well. The composer described the surreal gambling drama to What’s On Netflix like a descent into hell during a recent interview all about his unnerving work in A House of Dynamite.
You previously worked with Netflix on All Quiet in the Western Front. Any lessons from the past about, in the case of A House of Dynamite, compression and streaming? How to best preserve the score?
I had this experience for a while, but it’s always a question of time. It’s the same when you transfer the score into a record, which is also when you transfer it into a stereo mix without dialogue. And that means, in the first place, you have to, in a way, do another mix where just the music is in the foreground. Nothing else.
The music obviously sounds different on a soundtrack because you want to give the listener an experience where the music itself is a joyful experience to listen to, rather than one where you’re always like, “Why is it so quiet?” Yeah, of course, the dialogue isn’t there, but I learned on All Quiet on the Western Front, definitely.
I love seeing things on big screens and getting the experience a little bit physically closer to you. I’m a big fan of that, to have both. That’s important for me.
When you look at this film and Conclave, your music dances very well with heavy dialogue. How do you want music and dialogue to come together?
Well, specifically I would say with films like House of Dynamite and Conclave, it was in a way a similar thing where you have a very realistic scenario. People are talking a lot, but they also have a lot of interesting things to say. Even if the music isn’t there, these films already have a lot of content. They have to deliver a lot.
My approach is finding elements that sit in the areas where, let’s say, we have no conversation, or in the frequency range where they don’t interfere with the listening experience of the dialogue. They just support, let’s say, the tension underneath the current. You just feel like, “Oh my God, there’s something happening.”
I had an interesting conversation yesterday with someone who saw the film, and he said, “Until halfway through the film, I didn’t realize there was so much music.” He slowly recognized it as part of the film. That was a compliment, not like, “Hey, they mixed your music very low,” but more that it became part of the overall art form of the film.
They were feeling the music, which you want the music to be tangible, in a way almost like you could reach out and grab it. With A House of Dynamite, how did you want to achieve that effect?
I was using a lot of low brass, but not in the sense that they were blowing into their instruments normally. We used them a little differently, where they were moaning and humming into the instrument, trying to get these animalistic sounds out of it, which I love. Maybe it’s also a kind of signature sound of mine.
These kinds of drones do a lot for me, too. They can go from one note to another, or up an octave. What I like about that is this kind of movement and loss of pitch. It creates instability and a kind of loneliness, because you’re always asking, “Where’s the pitch?”
We did a lot of experiments with those moaning and drone sounds, and in the end, it was a mixture of different instruments doing the same thing in different ways. We stacked them up with sometimes four instruments, sometimes three, then one, then eight. That was the beginning, to make it maybe sound a little animalistic.
How’d you want to establish that at the very beginning?
When the film starts, you hear these sounds creeping under your skin, and you feel like, “That’s not good.” At the same time, I recorded everything not dry, but very close. I wanted to capture the bowing, the breathing — all the things in an instrument that you normally take out, I tried to amplify. I did that as well when I did All Quiet on the Western Front. I put a lot of microphones inside the harmonium to get the whole machine — the wood and the mechanics — into the foreground, like an old ship.
A House of Dynamite. Gabriel Basso as Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington in A House of Dynamite. Cr. Eros Hoagland/Netflix © 2025.
Why animalistic sounds for this score? Bigelow does shoot a lot of shots of animals, reminding us humanity isn’t alone in this potential destruction.
Yeah, yeah. But I think it maybe wasn’t from the same purpose. I use animalistic sounds much more as a sign of danger. I think Katherine used them much more as a reminder that nature is so beautiful and must be preserved, and that this is in danger, that it might not be there anymore if we have atomic explosions or don’t take care.
So these come from different angles, but they represent something very rudimental. I mean, we are human beings. We exist mostly out of water, and we have a certain amount of time on earth, and that’s it. We have to make sense of that.
In a way, when you go in the woods or watch animals, you’re reminded that you’re part of something much bigger than creating cities or making money. There’s something much more fundamental. I think those elements are represented.
She’s such a great filmmaker and patient yet so propulsive at the same time. What did you find about the pacing of her filmmaking style that influenced the rhythm of your score?
The wonderful thing about her, from what I’ve experienced now with this first film — I mean, there are others who’ve worked with her many more times already — but even the work now gave me the feeling that her work is very, very well thought through. That gives you a lot of confidence because there’s no nonsense in the film.
There’s a lot of research, things that are really explored down to the bottom of every problem, looked at, and described. That gives you the feeling you can’t get away with cheating. You have to find your own truth. It can vary for others watching or listening, but at least for yourself, you have to be very truthful.
And then, for example, when we do an interview and I talk about it, I quite know what I was thinking when I was doing it. That initial feeling comes from Katherine’s way of working on a film and bringing all the ingredients together, including every department and person involved. My impression, after getting to know the other departments, just continues. It’s consistent throughout.
The piano is your weapon of choice as an artist. How did you want the piano to unnerve the audience? Any distortion?
In this film, the piano has a little bit of an under-role. It’s not used so much melodically. I used the piano a lot for ticking and percussive elements, the sequences that are normally played with a synthesizer. I made the piano strings very short with art erasers — things you can put on each string so that they suddenly sound like a synthesizer.
I used a lot of distortion, but sometimes more subtle distortion, not like heavy metal distortion. It’s much more about giving the sound saturation and presence in the movie, so it feels like an artificial instrument in a way.
Sometimes I used it for low percussion, where I’d bang a roll of gaffer tape against the piano frame and record that. Then if you distort that and pitch it down an octave, you get an interesting bass drum.
I sometimes also do that with walls, putting a contact microphone on a wall and banging on it. If it’s a cardboard wall, not solid, it has a lot of resonance, like a big bass drum. Every house has a room with thin walls and hollow space. They’re great percussion instruments.
Where’d you record A House of Dynamite’s score? What did you appreciate about the acoustics there?
When we recorded at AIR Studios, we recorded a lot of the brass instruments and woodwinds with a piano in the middle of the group, and we pressed the sustain pedal. So, the reverb of the piano was recorded and put through an amplifier in the staircase.
We had a big distorted amp in the staircase, and some microphones about five meters higher up. So we had a whole tail of sound, sometimes just the piano reverb, or the piano reverb plus the echo chamber in the staircase.
You can do that with plugins, of course, but there’s always something about air traveling toward a microphone that sounds different, and that’s what makes a score sound really good.
A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE – (Featured) Kyle Allen as Captain Jon Zimmer. Photo by Eros Hoagland. © 2025 Netflix, Inc.
Obviously, there’s the ticking clock element in this movie, and so much of the bass in the score sounds like a bomb going off.
Oh, yeah, yeah. It’s the undercurrent of the events where you feel like, “Oh my God, what are we talking about?” You could put a beautiful melody underneath, but you’d quickly disconnect from what you see. So, you need something underneath that creates tension.
A lot of my work is intuitive. I might drop a bass drum a little earlier, and it suddenly sits so much nicer. If I put everything perfectly on a grid, the film would fall into a regular meter. What I try to get are “mistakes,” like in a punk band — mistakes that are awesome. You play one note that no one else did before, and suddenly that sound makes the song strong.
Being on the meter is great for some films, but when you create tension, it has to feel alive.
When you reached the end of the film, how did you want the score to either resolve the film or, maybe given the ambiguous ending, not provide closure?
I would say toward the end, when the president is alone with the guy with the suitcase and has to make decisions about the world, the question is, is he reacting or not reacting? Because there are no solutions to that, it makes you think about it yourself.
I wanted strings for the end, but I also wanted them to sound more modern, not lush or overwhelming. I used a lot of cutoff filters for the strings. You record a full string ensemble, then cut off the high end, which makes it more vulnerable.
It still sounds like a string ensemble, but more damped. I love that it gives space to the dialogue and warms up the situation. You can hear the melodies, but it’s like someone is playing under a blanket, and when you lift it briefly — wow. Then you cover it again.
I love that effect. It worked for me in All Quiet and here too. Maybe that’s part of my sound now. You don’t want to throw away something that works beautifully.
