Podcast: Behind the scenes of "A House of Dynamite"

The White House’s Situation Room is one of those real-life places that, because it plays such a key role in historic moments but is so rarely seen by outsiders, takes on an outsized air of mystery. And while it’s recently captured the public’s imagination again, thanks to the Netflix film A House of Dynamite, the Situation Room is just one point in a complex web of government security and intelligence operations.  

On this episode of Access to Excellence, President Gregory Washington is joined by Larry Pfeiffer—director of George Mason University's Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security, and expert consultant for A House of Dynamite—to discuss his time in the Situation Room: both in the White House and on the sound stage.   

One of the things I really wanted to capture, and they did this remarkably well, was the zero to a hundred mile an hour nature of watch operations [in the Situation Room]. You know, you could come into work and you could just be doing the basics, just monitoring the, the reports that are coming in, sending them to the right people, maybe answering phone calls, passing messages, you know, helping to set up a meeting for a conference. And then suddenly the, the world goes to hell, and you're now operating at high revolutions per minute. And they captured that very well, um, in this movie, not only in the Situation Room, but in the, in the other environments as well. — Larry Pfeiffer