Joshua Oppenheimer on How His Dystopian Musical ‘The End’ Might Sway U.S. Voters: “We Have a Choice Between a Bunker and Inclusivity”
Joshua Oppenheimer is optimistic. The filmmaker says his postapocalyptic musical film The End, starring Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon and George MacKay, is an opportunity to spark change.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter at the San Sebastian Film Festival, where his movie is screening, Oppenheimer described being motivated to make this film after visiting the bunker of an oligarch who, perhaps eerily, refused to discuss exactly why he was investing in a bunker.
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The End tells the story of a wealthy family living in their palatial bunker 25 years after environmental collapse left the Earth uninhabitable. Mother (Swinton), Father (Shannon) and Son (MacKay) are confined to the space and soon find themselves struggling to maintain hope and a sense of normalcy by clinging to the rituals of daily life. The family pushes harder to deafen the noise of creeping guilt — breaking out into show tunes about “a bright future.”
“When you’re surviving all alone in this bunker trying to preserve some semblance of status and wealth, how do you cope with the abyss of meaninglessness into which you’ve cast yourself?” says Oppenheimer of one of the key questions in The End.
The film premiered at the 51st Telluride Film Festival in August. It will be released by Neon in the U.S. on Dec. 6.
In an interview with THR in San Sebastian, the director discussed the daunting prospect of marrying a dystopian future with 1950s Broadway musicals, why he wants audiences to confront their regrets in the face of an ever-weakening planet, and how this film might urge voters to choose a particular leader in the upcoming U.S. election: “Donald Trump may escape justice, just like the father in The End, but neither of them, nor any of us, can escape punishment for the habitual disregard of our fellow human beings.”
Your background is in documentary filmmaking and this is your first narrative feature film. Was that daunting or exciting?
It was exciting. And I never thought of myself as a documentary filmmaker, per se. My training wasn’t in documentary filmmaking. In film school or university, I made narrative short films and experimental short films. But I always feel like what animates me to make a film is a question that I have to explore as deeply as possible. And I find the form and method that’s right for that. In this case, I was developing a documentary with an oligarch in the oil business who had sponsored political violence in his home country, and he was buying a bunker for his family. And I visited the bunker with his family and I noticed that they could not bring themselves to talk about anything, any of the urgent questions that were screaming from the walls.
When you’re surviving all alone in this bunker trying to preserve some semblance of status and wealth and your art collection, how do you cope with the abyss of meaninglessness into which you’ve cast yourself? How do you cope with guilt for your role in the catastrophe from which you’re fleeing? How do you live with the remorse of not having brought loved ones because they might be difficult or inconvenient, but are ultimately some of the most important people in your lives?
The film I really wanted to make was the documentary with them, 25 years after they moved into the bunker. And I understood at once that won’t happen. But what I would do is make a fiction film, that it would be a musical inspired by the great, forward-looking, optimistic, golden-age Broadway musicals of the 1950s — that it would not be a satire. It would be deadly sincere, and it would be called The End … It was very hard and daunting, to answer the second part of your question. It was like a second career. But if it’s not daunting, then you haven’t asked a question that’s important enough.
What was that specific question in your mind, if you could summarize it succinctly?
I think it’s about how we create our worlds at the most intimate level and as a human family by telling convenient and comforting stories. That is to say, how we somehow manage to make ourselves believe in those stories. How we lie to ourselves, and then what happens when those lies unravel? And actually, I’m an optimist, and making the film for me is an act of hope. And I know everyone in the cast, maybe with the exception of Michael Shannon, is an optimist. (Laughs.) No, I think he’s an optimist, too.
Secretly?
Not even so secret! But [there’s a] level of commitment to making this is an optimistic [film] — and it comes from the belief that animates any cautionary tale — which is that while it may be too late for the family inhabiting this dystopian vision, it’s not too late for us. And that if we can make a film that encourages people to face their regrets with honesty, to ask forgiveness wherever necessary, to forgive themselves and forgive each other always, then we can change course as a human family before we career right off the abyss into catastrophic environmental collapse.
There’s that moment where one of your characters says something like, “If I didn’t live the way I did, someone else would have.” He says it’s arrogance to think that anything you do could make an impact. But you’re saying that this isn’t just a denial that exists in the dystopian future. This denial exists in the present.
That’s true. That’s right. I think of something George [MacKay] said yesterday, it purports to be a film about the future, but it’s an allegory for the present. It’s a dark mirror held up to all of us. It’s like [Oscar Wilde novel] The Picture of Dorian Gray. It’s inviting us to acknowledge our mistakes before it’s too late.
This is a film that could be seen as quite important ahead of a historic U.S. election. Do you have any thoughts on how The End might urge voters to think about the kind of leader they elect?
Yeah. I think we face a meaningful contest within the context of a democracy that has been crippled by oligarchy, to some extent. In the United States, the country where I vote, we face a meaningful contest between a bunker where we exclude the other, where we build walls and tell ourselves that we’re putting ourselves first when we’re actually destroying our own humanity by doing so, and a more inclusive vision of the human family.
And I think any time we find our meaning and place all of our energies into preserving a family at the exclusion of the broader human family, we harm ourselves. To talk of impunity, Donald Trump may escape justice, just like the father in The End, but neither of them, nor any of us, can escape punishment for the habitual disregard of our fellow human beings. And even the people closest to us whom we love yet tell ourselves, “Well, I won’t address this hurt that lingers between us because it’s just too difficult. And we’ll be fine, we’ll be fine, we’ll be fine.” Up to the day that the private moment of reckoning each of us face as we age and approach death.
It’s a recipe for empty lives, and I think it’s unnecessary. And I offer the film out of the greatest optimism and hope that each of us can change all these levels, at once, on the biggest political level and on the private level.
Writing a musical, and crafting these sequences, is a whole other genre in itself.
Yeah, it was. I was, first of all, terrified of writing lyrics, and especially when I found out they should rhyme. But it was the most beautiful and magical experience. I felt like I suddenly found myself in a fairy tale, a sorcerer’s school for magicians, and I was like the sorcerer’s apprentice who was trying out all these spells and had no idea how they worked. So Josh Schmidt, the composer, would have me start by writing lyrics that embodied the most fervently held beliefs of the characters in that moment where the character starts to sing in The End. I would, kind of in the form of a little prose poem, and I would send it to him, and then he would within sometimes minutes, sometimes hours, sometimes a day or two, come back with a piece of music that was radiant and kaleidoscopic in its polyrhythms and soaring in its harmonies. But then he would give that to me, and he would start to set the music the lyrics to that, and I would have to adjust the lyrics often to match the meter of the music and the rhyming schemes that the music would suggest.
It was the height of the pandemic in 2020, when we started to write the songs, and it was just a joy. I would love to make another musical and I’d love to do it with him. My editor said to me recently, “We should sing more together, Joshua,” and I said, “Oh, why?” He said, “Because you can’t sing when you’re not happy.” There’s blues and genres of songs that are melancholy, but they’re also songs of self-consolation.
And of course, it helped that you had a wonderful cast at your disposal with Tilda, Michael and George. What was it like working with them?
They brought the most luminous human radiance to this piece. Their commitment was like that of a doomsday cult waiting for the rapture. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film where you sense the commitment of the cast more deeply. That works beautifully for my approach to filmmaking, which is a deep curiosity and love for everyone who’s onscreen, and that curiosity is what motivates me to make films, and they all work differently. So Tilda approaches a take like a sandbox for exploring. I’m always trying to give Tilda as many takes as possible, because she’s just discovering amazing things over several takes … George comes incredibly prepared, ready to offer a palette of related interpretations where different nuances or aspects of the character or performance can be adjusted at a word.
Michael comes also always in the right ballpark, but ready to explore and discover things from tape to tape that are just impossibly fascinating. And the beauty and challenge of working with Michael’s performance in the editing room is you have to be as smart as he is. You have to be attentive to make sure that there’s a throughline and there is. And the same is true of Bronagh [Gallagher], I think, in her portrayal of Friend and Moses Ingram in her portrayal of Girl. With Bronagh, there’s a pain and a vulnerability that I’ve really never seen before. And then I think Moses works with these layers of secrets, which is exactly why I cast her.
Are you excited to be here in San Sebastian?
It was beautiful being in San Sebastian. I love San Sebastian. They did a retrospective around The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence and films that may have inspired those films; that’s the other time I was here for this festival. My films are about how we make our world through the stories we tell about it, as I said. I’m also a political filmmaker and concerned with the direction of our society, and that means I’m looking at issues of power and again, impunity. And Spain is a particularly interesting country to visit because I’m always asked about that because they had an experience of fascism that virtually brought us to the 1980s. Far, far later than the rest of Western Europe experienced fascism, and there’s a real grappling with impunity and the legacy that impunity has left [here].
This connection between how victors write the history to conceal their actions, to ease their regrets and the obstacles we face, the urgent changes we need so that our societies are more just, and our survival as a species is sustainable. Those are somehow still vivid to people in Spain.
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