A Conversation with Joshua Oppenheimer (THE END)
Noted documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer (The Act of Killing) makes his fiction-feature debut with The End, a post-apocalyptic musical starring Bronagh Gallagher, Moses Ingram, Lennie James, George McKay, Michael Shannon, and Tilda Swinton. Set a quarter-century after a major climate catastrophe has affected life on our planet, the film follows a wealthy family whose patriarch (Shannon) is an oil-company executive partly responsible for the collapse. With his vast resources, he built a lavishly appointed underground bunker where he, his wife (Swinton), and their now twenty-something son (McKay) live a full, if lonely, existence far below the surface, accompanied by a doctor (James) and the mother’s best friend (Gallagher). When a stranger from above (Ingram) shows up one day, they struggle to figure out what to do. All the while, they sing and ponder the past, present, and future of themselves and humanity. I had a chance to interview Oppenheimer by Zoom recently, and here is that conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Hammer to Nail: Why did you want your first fiction feature to be a post-apocalyptic musical?
Joshua Oppenheimer: Well, I, I wanted to make a third film in Indonesia about the oligarchs who came to power and enriched themselves through the genocide. But I couldn’t safely return to Indonesia after The Act of Killing came out. So I started investigating oligarchs in other places who would enrich themselves in analogous ways.
And I found an oil tycoon in Central Asia who had commissioned violence in order to obtain his oil concessions, and he was buying his family a bunker. He took me to see the bunker with his family, and I was dying to ask questions—how would you escape? how would you cope with the guilt or the catastrophe from which you’d be fleeing? How would you cope with your remorse for leaving loved ones behind? How would you raise a new generation in this place as a way of whitewashing your own past for yourself? how would you tell your story to the new generation that you would raise in this place as a way of revising your history for yourself?—and I couldn’t ask those questions because I didn’t know him well enough, first of all. And secondly, I could see that if I were to ask the questions, he wouldn’t be able to answer them. The whole project of buying the bunker was rooted in denial.
And I was desperate to figure out a way, desperate to figure out what I would like to do with this family. And I thought what I’d like to do is make a documentary in the bunker 25 years after they moved in. And I realized I wasn’t going to do that. So on the way home, I watched one of my very favorite films, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, by Jacques Demy, just to kind of clear my head. But as I watched it, my head wasn’t clear. On the contrary, I suddenly understood what I would do, that I would make a musical set in a bunker like this, 25 years after the family moved in. And I knew that it would be called The End. I knew that I would make the family American because it’s a quintessentially American genre, and I think a quintessentially American form of desperate denial and hope.
HtN: Although, following The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, you could have done it in French, and certainly in The Act of Killing, you have done this kind of broad staging of certain scenes. So this is not your first time doing something like that.
JO: There are musical numbers in The Act of Killing, too.
HtN: Exactly. So, speaking of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, you cast as they did—and also as they did in La La Land—actors who are not necessarily known for their singing talents, apart from Bronagh Gallagher, who is a well-known singer. How did you choose them, and did you consider people from musical theater first, or was this always your plan to put actors like this in your movie?
JO: I think the most beautiful thing are voices that are true to the character. And I think Tilda has an appropriately reedy soprano, which I think works with the tightness of her character and the tautness of her desperation as she tries to double down on her illusions through song. Michael has, I think, a beautiful, honeyed voice. So does George. Moses’ voice is a revelation just by any standard. Bronagh is a singer. I think I was looking above all for actors who have the depth of inner life and that these particular roles require. And I think that I was looking for faces that would register every flicker of doubt, every flicker of dread, every tremor of longing.
And I find that very often Broadway stage actors are not being looked at in close-up, and they’ve never refined that gift. And I find the voice also sort of buffed to something grotesque. I think the most radiantly beautiful and vulnerable thing is the true voice of the character in crisis. These are character voices that I don’t think sing perfectly in tune; their pitch is perfect, but they’re just not this grotesquely over-buffed product, which I think would be wrong and a lie in a film where the songs are meant to hold the deepest truth.
HtN: So that underground tunnel of theirs is quite visually fascinating, the part leading up to the apartment. Not to link your film to the Dune movies, but it almost looks like it was created by a giant sandworm. It’s quite beautiful. How did you and your production designer come up with that design for the tunnel?
JO: It’s a salt mine under Sicily. We shot for three weeks in the mine, during which time we didn’t see daylight because we’d go in the dark and leave in the dark of night. I think the thing that reminds you of a sandworm was, in fact, our air supply. It’s these massive tubes that suddenly inflate as air is moved to an area where people are going to work. Shooting in a mine was a way of creating exteriors in counterpoint to the interiors. Because in this musical, the characters do not sing their deepest truth. The cliché about musicals is you sing your deepest truth, and when the truth is too big for speech, you burst into song. In the end, the characters sing out of a desperate attempt, double down on their lies or to cobble together new lies as their bubble of delusion has been pierced by the truth of the arrival of a girl or the coming-of-age of a son or whatever the case may be.
George McKay & Tilda Swinton in THE END
So they’re singing in these crises of doubt, and they manage to reassure themselves through this luminously beautiful music that their future is bright, that all is well in their world, even though evidently it’s not. And that told us that, once we’ve established the melodies, we need to be humming along with them. We should be familiar enough with the melodies by that point that it’s a reprise. The melodies are catchy. We’re humming along, which means we are kind of physically feeling and being transported by the lies that the characters are telling themselves. And we identify in our musical selves and our bodies what it’s like to lie to oneself.
We all know we have all made excuses for behavior we know is wrong. We have all told ourselves things are going to work out, probably hopefully work out for the best when we actually, in our hearts, know they might not. And so implicating the viewer through the music was key. And that meant that we should be able to forget that we’re in a bunker when the characters forget that they’re in a bunker. And that meant that there should be exteriors. We shouldn’t just have a concrete, windowless structure. The finished beautiful rooms should be kind of finished caverns within a much bigger, subterranean complex. And for that we chose a salt mine, and this particular exquisitely beautiful salt mine in Sicily.
HtN: It’s gorgeous. But what about the design of those apartment spaces? How did you choose which paintings they would have on their walls? Obviously he’s an oligarch, he’s brought these treasures with then, but you had to choose some. How did you choose what you chose?
JO: One of the things that was crucial, and it was also an inspiration in the music, was this particular romantic American landscape painting that comes from the Hudson Valley School called American Luminism. And they’re these massive paintings of the Rocky Mountains or the Sierra Nevadas, but not like the actual Rocky Mountains. They’re like these kinds of almost Tolkien-esque idealizations.
HtN: You have some Bierstadt in there, I saw.
JO: Exactly. And then there are also these romantic paintings of the apocalypse. So, behind Father’s Desk is this incredible painting of the biblical deluge, the flood. And it relates to the production design for the bunker as a whole. When you have a space with no windows and you spend two-and-a-half hours in windowless rooms, you’ll feel claustrophobic unless you have a sense of light and you have something instead of windows and you have exteriors. So the mine provided the exteriors, the paintings provided these windows and specifically these glimpses onto a beautiful, luminous nature that never actually existed as such. They are glimpses onto a world that has been lost and that has been remembered through these paintings, commemorated through these paintings as an idealization, as a lie, like the stories the mother and the father are telling the son about their pasts. And then there are these roof lights, which were skylights inspired by the White House where you have daylight or simulated daylight streaming through and diffusing among the different rooms.
HtN: What was the process of writing the songs with composer Josh Schmidt like? What were you looking for in the melodies as you wrote?
JO: When I first met Josh and he read the script without songs, he said to me, “This film is so full of hope.” And I remember my heart sank because I thought, “Oh, has he misunderstood the ending? Is it not clear?” Because it’s a tragedy. And I would just pause for a moment to say, while the story may be hopeless for the family, the last human family, it is a cautionary tale. And in telling a cautionary tale, that’s where the hope lies. It lies in the room, in the cinema, in the space between the viewer and the screen. It’s saying that while it may be too late for the family, this is a cautionary tale made from the belief that there’s still time to heed its warning. There is still hope for us watching it. When you leave the movie, whether you’re at home or whether you see it in the theater, you go outside and there’s still a sky. We can still come together and solve the catastrophe of global warming, and time is late, but it’s made from the conviction that to surrender to despair is actually to lie about our capacity for creation and invention and change.
Tilda Swinton & Michael Shannon in THE END
But first I thought Josh Schmidt misunderstood the script, and I said, “Well, do you really see the ending as optimistic?” He’s like, “No, no, no. I mean, it is full of hope. For the characters, the music is what gets them out of bed in the morning, the music is what enables them to look themselves in the mirror and live with their crimes and their trauma because it obscures what’s in the mirror from themselves. It obscures themselves from themselves. So it’s a hope rooted in a lie. It’s the wolf of despair and the sheep’s clothing of hope, but it is still felt as hope.” And that was something that Josh Schmidt and I both felt is common really to all the Golden Age musicals, these musicals that were made at a time, spanning from the Great Depression through the World War II and the Holocaust, through the age where nuclear annihilation was at the tip of our fingers. The Golden Age was always a dark age, and its sunny disposition was always a lie. That’s something that we felt that now, more than ever, we needed to explore. But it is still hope. And so the music has these harmonic references to the Golden Age and is sort of reworking that genre.
HtN: So, this entire film has a surreal edge to it, I think. But most of what happens appears to be grounded in actions that are actually occurring to the characters. But then you have that Michael Shannon song where he climbs the tower within the tunnel, and that feels very different. Can you explain that choice?
JO: I think once I realized that the songs are these crises of doubt, these desperate attempts to shore up their denial, and that at their most intense they would be breakdowns on film, I realized that we’re not looking at 12 musical extravaganzas or production numbers, because we’re bearing witness to characters for whom we feel great empathy and a sincere care, even if they’ve done some terrible things in their past. And that’s common to my documentaries, as well. We’re bearing witness to them as they fall apart. And that means that the songs are shot in these single takes. There tends to be a movement from the rooms into the salt mine, because there’s a movement from delusion into truth. Sometimes the movement is embraced by the characters. They rush into the salt mine because they need to get out of the lie and into the truth. But sometimes they inadvertently find themselves in the mine.
And here’s a moment where Father is singing about climbing up the beautiful mountains that he sees in the Bierstadt painting into the sky, but actually he’s just climbing, scaling the cliffs inside the mine. And there’s a moment where the sun rises in the mine. He sees one more sunrise. And I guess we don’t give too much away by saying that he pitches himself off a ledge in what appears to be a suicide. And yeah, does Father really commit suicide there? No. But does Father really, in his emotional life—to which we’re bearing witness through the song and in the emotional journey of the song—fantasize about being suicidal and thereby reassure himself that he’s a good person because he’s finally acknowledged his egregious crimes and thinks he should kill himself? And does his apparent suicide or fantasy suicide make him feel like he’s better? And thereby is the fantasy self-serving? All of that’s very truthful to who Father is. So it’s a fantasy, but it’s not an escape as fantasy. It’s one that’s illuminating exactly who he is as a resolute survivor and one capable of righting himself, like those little weebly-wobbly figures that always right themselves. They always come back to vertical. You can’t knock them down and they can’t fall down.
HtN: You open your film with an epigraph from T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”: “The houses are all gone under the sea. The dancers are all gone under the hill.” How did you land on that particular quote?
JO: Well, I was looking for some way, at the purely lyrical or poetic level, of establishing an apocalyptic shadow over the film. And I’ve always loved the “Four Quartets,” and I think T.S. Eliot is our great poet of the apocalypse, and I remembered that quotation, and I thought it has an incredible doubleness now, with the houses “all gone under the sea.” What T.S. Elliot couldn’t have envisioned is that it’s a concrete image of climate change of the rising seas. That was not a reality in his time. And then the dancers all going “under the hill,” they’re either dead or they’re escaping and they’re sort of celebrating. They’re escaping from any accountability for life above, or they’re dead. But in our case, it’s a musical set underground. So I love that the original meaning is there, but then it has this insane doubleness because of the times we’re living in and the kind of film that we’re watching, which is a musical set under the hill.
HtN: I want to thank you for talking to me, Josh.
JO: Thank you so, so much.
– Christopher Llewellyn Reed (@ChrisReedFilm)
Neon;Joshua Oppenheimer; The End
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