With 2012’s The Act of Killing and 2014’s The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer directed two of the most powerful documentaries of all time. So powerful, in fact, the American filmmaker found himself unable to return safely to the country in which they were shot. “I’d been hoping to make a documentary about the oligarchs I’d met in Indonesia,” says Oppenheimer, who speaks carefully and softly, emphasising each syllable. “They were people who earned their billions through terrorising a country in the aftermath of genocide.”
The Act of Killing challenged perpetrators of the 1965 Indonesian genocide to fictionally recreate their crimes, while The Look of Silence focused on the victims. Oppenheimer’s planned follow-up would have been a non-fiction feature about an oil man who, along with his family, took life-extending medicines and wanted to live forever. Oppenheimer joined one of them on a shopping trip for bunkers, and observed his existential quandaries. If you fled an apocalypse that you helped cause, how would you cope with the grief of leaving people behind? If your bunker contained your extensive art collection, would those status symbols haunt you forever? Moreover, what future would your children face in this isolated, underground world?
“These questions were screaming in the silence,” says Oppenheimer, sat across me in a bunker-like meeting room in King’s Cross. “I would have loved to have made a fly-on-the-wall documentary about this family 25 years after they’d moved into the bunker.” Instead, the 50-year filmmaker came up with an alternate plan that didn’t involve cohabiting with a billionaire away from sunlight for several decades. “On the way home from the trip, I watched The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and it struck me that I should make a musical in a bunker set 25 years after the world has ended, the family should be American unlike this one, and it should be called The End.”
Nearly a decade later, The End has materialised as Oppenheimer envisioned with an all-star, all-singing, sometimes-dancing cast, none of whom play characters with names. Not to worry: the ensemble keeps it simple with a mother (Tilda Swinton), a father (Michael Shannon), their 20-year-old son (George MacKay), a friend of the mother (Bronagh Gallagher), a butler (Tim McInnerny), and a doctor (Lennie James). For 25 years, Earth has been uninhabitable, and in a luxurious bunker this group of six – it was five until the son was born – have passed the time by reading books, analysing paintings, and doing everything aside from acknowledging the elephant in the room. (If elephants still exist on the planet, that is.) Everything changes when a young Black woman (Moses Ingram) miraculously arrives at their doorstep, forcing the family to readjust their priorities.
In real life, bunkers are often furnished by companies who work on superyachts. For The End, though, Oppenheimer opted for a more spacious structure with caverns and adjoining spaces. “The songs are beautiful lies that they tell themselves to cope,” he explains. “You feel the lies with them, so you should forget we’re in a bunker.” To do so, the film was shot in a salt mine in Petralia Soprana, in Sicily, the pick of 15 salt mines that Oppenheimer visited. “We had simulated daylight flooding in through the ceiling to avoid the claustrophobia and to play with time. In some songs, the light goes from warm to cold, orange to blue, with simulated clouds racing past the sun. The paintings are windows. We have glimpses of a luminous nature that never existed – like the music, it’s a gorgeous, glorious lie.”
The End is a film about many things, but it’s also about whiteness. The idea that, in America, no matter how desperate the situation is, their son is going to be just fine – that is the whitest idea in America – Joshua Oppenheimer
While Oppenheimer is known for documentaries, he started out as an experimental filmmaker with shorts like A Brief History of Paradise as Told by the Cockroaches. Glimpses of the director’s origins are evident in the unnerving flights of fancy in The Act of Killing and The End’s musical numbers. In the latter, the songs aren’t designed to be catchy, nor are they perfected via ADR. “I thought lip-syncing would destroy the acting because they have to mine their inner lives,” says Oppenheimer. “95 per cent of the vocals are what were recorded on set, live.”
Oppenheimer wrote the screenplay from his home in Denmark and spent weeks workshopping early drafts with actors – one of them was “a friend from Copenhagen”, Jeremy Strong, who played what would become Michael Shannon’s role. Further changes were made following the casting of Ingram as a refugee: in the script, there was no mention that she was Black. “The End is a film about many things, but it’s also about whiteness,” says Oppenheimer. “The idea that, in America, no matter how desperate the situation is, their son is going to be just fine – which is what they sing – that is the whitest idea in America.”
Oppenheimer believed that if the film were set in Denmark, the refugee would have been from Gaza or Afghanistan, or at least not, as the director puts it, “a young, ethnically Danish or Norwegian woman”. Once the director decided upon America, he wished to comment on the country’s history with slavery, and the nostalgia whipped up by Trump and other right-wing politicians. “Moses and I, and then my co-writers Rasmus Heisterberg and the songwriter Josh Schmidt, we reworked and polished and wrestled with the material to have it scream through the subject of the situation, while also not presenting the family as racist.”
Oppenheimer admits he read reviews. “People talk about the film as if they want to kick the girl out because she’s Black,” he sighs. “If you watch the film closely, you won’t see that. There’s a very telling moment where the doctor is handcuffing the girl before they try to throw her out. She’s pleading with everyone, but when she looks to him, he says, ‘Don’t look at me like that. Why are you looking at me like that?’ That’s not an accident.”
The director also politely interjects when I describe The End as a film about rich people in a bunker. To him, the characters aren’t intended to be viewed from a distance. “The End appears to be about the future, but it’s not. It’s about the bunker we already live in as a human species. I don’t say that as a judgement. I say that about myself, and it pains me because it deprives me of the ability to live a fully meaningful and present life.” And if you’re paying to see The End in a cinema, you already have some privilege? “Well, it’s not just identifying with privilege. We all tell stories to justify our mistakes. We all diminish our capacity for meaningful lives by not facing painful truths.”
Oppenheimer refers to Anwar Congo, a gangster who’s estimated to have killed at least a thousand people. Towards the end of The Act of Killing, Congo vomits in front of the camera. “People see the undeniable humanity of Anwar Congo and start to see themselves in him,” says Oppenheimer. “Not that we identify with killing a thousand people, but we start to feel that he’s a human being. Every act of evil in our history has been committed by human beings like us. We are lying to ourselves when we try to divide the world into good people and bad people.”
We all tell stories to justify our mistakes. We all diminish our capacity for meaningful lives by not facing painful truths
Throughout our conversation, Oppenheimer’s answers are so detailed and thoughtful that we run substantially over my allotted time. My question about casting a Black actor for the refugee gets a 10-minute response, while, on the topic of melodies, he sings a few lines to tunefully illustrate a point. Before I leave, he wishes to go on record about the cast.
“When they realised they’d be singing live, they leapt at it,” says Oppenheimer. “They understood that it would lend the film a radiant vulnerability. This may sound arrogant, and I haven’t seen every film that’s been made in the last 10 years, but I would venture that you won’t see another film from the last decade where the cast are this committed. They’re like doomsday cult members signing up for the rapture. They’re hopeful, lost, and shockingly mortal.” That’s quite a big claim, I say. “Yeah, but take a look. See if you can find performances that are this committed, and then let me know.”
The End is out in UK cinemas on March 28
