The End marks the narrative film directing debut from Oscar-nominated documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer, whose one-two punch was 2012's The Act of Killing and 2014's The Look of Silence. The former is as powerful as piece of cinema as you’ll ever see, and it would seem to serve as a jumping off point for his latest work.
On the surface, The End is a deeply moving musical about a family that survived the earth’s environmental collapse that leaves the world’s surface uninhabitable. Mother (Tilda Swinton), Father (Michael Shannon), and Son (George McKay), along with a handful of friends (including ones played by Lennie James and Bronagh Gallagher (as Doctor and Friend, respectively), live in a vast, fully stocked, palatial bunker built in a salt mine in an undisclosed location (even though most of the film’s actor are non-American, they all have American accents). As the film goes on, we pick up bits and pieces about their lives before the bunker (Son was born underground, so when he sings about the sun and sky, we realize these are things he’s never seen) and the possibility that this privileged few may have done terrible things to gain access to survival some 25 years earlier.
The survivors live by routine, which keeps their minds occupied so they don’t have to deal with their solitude or ask questions or face memories about how they got there. But everything is upended with the arrival of Girl (Moses Ingram), who has managed to exist above ground with her family, but is now alone and desperate for shelter. Not long after her arrival, she forms a close bond with Son and begins to ask question of the group that they simply aren’t used to hearing or dealing with. And suddenly, this idyllic existence begin to fracture, with long-repressed feelings of guilt, shame, resentment, and remorse surfacing to destroy the family’s fragile balance. And we begin to notice that the characters only move from speaking to singing when emotions are at their most tumultuous.
The film is equal parts strange and beautiful, and serves as a cautionary tale about suppressing the truth. But The End is also hopeful, as the family starts to see a different way of existing going forward. It's an incredibly special film from a filmmaker urgently in touch with his own feelings, and I was lucky to spend some time recently chatting with Oppenheimer about the film and its connection to his earlier celebrated works. Please enjoy our conversation…
From the first song, we know something is wrong with this family. I believe as the song wraps up, everybody is facing the camera, which makes us realize that they are somewhat delusional about their world. Why did you feel that a musical was the way you needed to tell this story? Did you ever consider telling it as a straight narrative?
No, I always knew that this would be a musical. Being a musical is what makes it a meditation on how we lie to ourselves. The musical being a genre that soars false hope, denial, and delusion. It’s the despair that masquerades in sheep’s clothing of hope and says, “No matter what, everything will work out for the best. Our future is bright.”
And you’re absolutely right to notice that about the first song. There are two things about that song: the way it’s staged is a little different from the other songs in that that final shape they assume tells us there’s no one else in this universe; we’re not going to meet anyone else, we’ve met the full ensemble. And starting with the mother’s nightmare and her inability to be honest with the father about it, we understand that there’s a crisis, trauma, repression, and what propels that song from the first lyric are little crises that everyone who sings is trying to paper over or deny, until problem after problem—micro-problems really, little problems—cascade and gather momentum until they form this big finale.
That is true, but also George is occasionally singing about the sun and the beautiful sky, and these are literally things he’s never seen, so we know he’s delusional. And I love that they’re in a salt mine—they have literally buried their heads and emotions. Talk about the literal being the figurative in that case.
I have so much to say about that. First of all, on the level of the literal, we as a film crew spent three weeks shooting thousands of feet underground, and during that period, didn’t see the sky or daylight at all. When we went into the mine, it was still dark and when we would leave in the evening, it was dark. The film grew out of an investigation I was doing with an oil tycoon out of Asia who had committed acts of intense violence to secure his oil concessions, and he was shopping for a bunker like this for his family, and I had gone with him and his family to this bunker, and I was full of questions about how would you cope with the guilt for the catastrophe from which you were fleeing, because they believed that catastrophic climate change from burning fossil fuels could lead to social disruption and the breakdown of nation states and cause regional wars, nuclear wars among warlords, and then a broader nuclear catastrophe.
If that all emerged from dislocation from climate change, how would you cope with the guilt of having contributed to that? How would you cope with the remorse of leaving loved one behind? How would you tell your story to a younger generation that might be born in this bunker? And would that be a way of easing your regrets, by making excuses narrating your life in a way that excused you and what you had done? All of those were questions I could not pose to the family, and what I longed to do is film them 25 years after they moved in, and then I had the idea to explore that denial and those delusions by making a musical set in a bunker.
So on the one hand, the film is inspired by the story of an oligarch and his effort to save his family even after having participated in the destruction of the world. At the same time, I understood that the story is allegorical on two levels: the family is the broader human family, and the characters are nameless because they are all of us, every one of our families. That was something that was intensely worked in the writing and the conception of the whole thing.
I have a feeling that, yes, while it’s about extreme wealth and equality, all of use live in a bunker; we’re all implicated. Every time we pass someone who we know needs our care or our help—whether it’s someone on the street asking for help or the stranger trying to escape conditions of misery in their country and come to our country for a better life—and we knowingly support policies to exclude them, we sign up for our own bunker. I live in Europe, and every time I read stories about hundreds or thousands of people drowning in the Mediterranean Sea, trying to escape conditions of immiseration that we have created for them, so that our consumer goods remain grotesquely cheap. We feel a moment of heartbreak, and then respond by posting a mournful or sad emoji on social media. We are able, by that sentimental gesture, to extricate ourselves from that sadness and feeling of responsibility and complicity, and turn our attention to something more diverting, and we sign up for our own bunker. For me, this is about all of us.
In that conception, did you have rules about when they would break out into song? Was it only in moments of a particular kind of emotional upheaval?
As we wrote the script, my cowriter Rasmus Heisterberg and I always felt like the songs should come out of moments of unease, and when we began looking closely, we realized that they were coming out of these crises of doubt. These moments when the stories and lies they’ve been telling themselves to convince themselves that they’ve made all the right choices in life and that their future at the end of the world is bright, despite the fact that they live in darkness, those are unravelling and fraying as truth about their sheltered existence with the arrival of Girl.
As their lives start to unravel, the characters have these crises like people who have been thrown overboard in a shipwreck and are reaching desperately for flotsam and jetsam to cobble together a life raft, lest they drowned. And the flotsam and jetsam are the melodies and lyrics of the songs; they are these desperate attempts to cobble together new melodies, new ditties, new lies, new forms of hope that they can inhabit, so that they can get up out of bed and face this otherwise beak existence.
At their most extreme, the songs are these breakdowns on film, because as the story progresses, the lies that they try to spin through music start to fall apart as they’re weaving them. As they’re telling them, the absurdity of it, the desperation, exposes the lie, and they hit these walls of truth where they stop singing. And in that sense, what we realized early on, was that in this musical, this luminously beautiful music that Josh Schmidt has written would hold the lies, and that the truth would scream through in the silence.
Did you write the lyrics?
I did.
The lyrics are very plain spoken, not exactly how you would find them in a Broadway musical, for example. And the transition between spoken and sung is seamless. How did you decide what was spoken and what was sung?
It would be interesting the think about those transitions from speech to song. I believe the lyrics, dramatic lyrics, need to have room available, not just for the subtext that’s brought about by music, but also for the intense dramatic subtext inherent to these performances. These aren’t big production numbers where the characters wax lyrical about deep emotions bubbling up. They are desperate attempts to remain or maintain their sanity.
The lyrics had to be conversational and spare in order to leave room for subtext. It’s something Sondheim has written about, the difference between lyrics and poetry; lyrics need to have this room available for music, whereas poetry doesn’t need to have that room because it’s about the music of the language and metaphors. That was a crucial early lesson, and that the lyrics would be as dramatically active as any line of dialogue. But there’s a moment when things get so awkward and uncomfortable or broken in the spoken scenes that there’s no resource left in speech or action that the characters can grasp, so they have to reach beyond speech to song.
It’s telling when Tilda sings her big solo in the mirror in the bathroom; she’s also at her most vivid and naturalistic, in a performance that is wholly vivid and naturalistic from the very beginning, so textured. But she’s at her most while singing. For the same reason, we shot the songs in these long takes, to give a sense that we’re bearing witness to people in crisis, and we used live vocals for everything. There’s nothing more beautiful than that.
I had a feeling those were live vocals. You and Wicked share that in common.
I didn’t know that about Wicked. It’s not something I was sure I wanted when I first thought of the project. Live vocals can sometimes sounds like you’re watching a concert, because you’re watching someone play the instrument of their voice, rather than a dramatic performance. But once the songs were placed and written and we realized these were breakdowns on film, it was clear that no one can access their inner-life while lip-synching with the richness of singing live. There’s nothing more beautiful than the voice of the character in full honesty in a moment of crisis and vulnerability.
Michael Shannon and Tilda Swinton are two of the boldest, bravest actors working today, and to cast them as a married couple seems almost combustible. Were they your first choices, and why them? I don’t think either one of them have the kind of singing voices you’d put on a Broadway stage, but they’re perfect for this.
Yeah, we weren’t looking for Broadway voices. For Mother, I thought Tilda has a beautiful voice for the vulnerability and fragility that is this woman who is constantly trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, reassemble her own shell. Her armor is constantly falling away, and she’s constantly trying to put it back together. Mike has this mixture of the avuncular and the self-hating in the performance that I think only he can execute. They were my first choices.
Tilda was the first person I approached at the time when we were originally scheduled to shoot. Mike wasn’t available, but then the shoot slipped and that gave us the opportunity to ask him again, and he was . I was looking for actors who are so brilliant and so precise that every flicker of doubt, dread or longing would register in their faces. That can’t be something you simulate or plan; that has to be something that emerges from your inner-life in the moment, and there are very few actors who have faces that are that vividly available to subtext and that brilliantly alive in the moment, that real and true in the moment. And that was what I was looking for, partly because I knew we would have to exhaust the subtext of speech in order to earn the bursts into song.
Joshua, best of luck with this, and thank you so much for your time.
Thank you so much, Steve.
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