After fearlessly interrogating man’s capacity for evil in Oscar-nominated documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer returns with The End, a bunker-bound musical set at the end of the world. Despite that unexpected logline, the core themes Oppenheimer grapples with in his work––i.e. the nature of absolution and the self-deception that makes us uniquely human––are still very much present in his fiction-feature debut.
The End’s bunker is occupied by wealthy energy magnate (Michael Shannon), his wife (Tilda Swinton), and their son (George MacKay). An allegory, they are credited as Father, Mother, and Son. A few lucky others get to join them in waiting out the apocalypse––also nameless, their titles, their vocations: Butler (Tim McInnerny) and Doctor (Lennie James). Bronagh Gallagher has a meatier role as Mother’s best “Friend,” who also functions as the chef. Moses Ingram as Girl acts as the narrative’s disruptive force, an outsider who enters and gets Son questioning his parents’ role in the planet’s demise. Ingram’s casting led to some script edits, causing Oppenheimer “to think about the film in the context of whiteness,” he tells The Film Stage.
Not your run-of-the-mill basement bunker with Home Depot shelves and rations from REI, the decadence of The End’s bunker was inspired by Oppenheimer’s visit to a billionaire’s emergency bunker replete with a swimming pool and art gallery (two details he retains). And it’s all situated within a beautiful salt mine, shot on location in Petralia Soprana, Sicily. After discovering this particular salt mine during a wider search, Oppenheimer says they then “built the whole co-production around it, getting the Sicilian film fund and then the Italian Ministry of Culture in the film so that we could afford to shoot there.”
Over Zoom, ahead of NEON’s release this Friday, Oppenheimer also explained to me how he crafts sound design in an intentionally dream-like manner, and dismisses the value of lying to oneself, preferring instead optimism matched with realism.
The Film Stage: Formally, everything is so well-considered. With the color palette, you have these nice blues, and then the reds feel very specific with when characters wear the color. How did the aesthetics of the film come together?
Joshua Oppenheimer: So much of the film’s aesthetic emerged from the principle of why they sing. It’s a little bit of a tortuous answer, and forgive me for that. But when we realized, after writing a couple drafts of the script, that the songs should come in moments of crisis for the characters, when the stories they’re telling themselves, the delusions they hold, are crumbling, and they desperately reach for new stories, new delusions, new lies through song, that what propels them to sing is the desperate search for a new excuse––that meant that the music must be these soaring, luminously beautiful lies. Contrary to the cliché about musicals––that what gets the character singing is the truth that’s too big for speech––here the truth screams through in the silences when they hit a wall. It’s most obvious when they’re singing and they just can’t sing anymore because the ground they’re laying is crumbling under foot, the lies are falling apart as they’re spinning them, and they finally hit a wall of silence.
The whole movie is about asking the audience to reflect on the ways we all lie to ourselves––the way we all tell stories to justify our actions, to ease our regrets, to, in a way, obscure the world and our past from ourselves. One way of doing that was to have this beautiful music that you’re humming along to as you watch it. That meant conceiving of the songs not as individual songs, but conceiving of the score as a single piece of music through which melodies are reprising. So when a character sings, unconsciously we’re humming along. We’re slipping into the skin of the character, and in a sense, we’re lured into identifying with that act of self-deception that the music embodies.
As they console themselves through song into believing that they’re living the best possible life, then we should be able to forget with them that they’re in a bunker, and so the bunker should not be a brutalist concrete space as we might imagine it, but should actually, at times, be seductive, and at times a place you might even want to live.
How do you do that in a place where there’s no windows? Spending two-and-a half-hours in windowless rooms will feel claustrophobic. So we had this idea of simulated daylight that comes in through skylights and diffuses among the rooms; that was inspired by the White House, which has those. We thought that the mother’s art collection could replace windows. These luminous romantic landscapes––this school of American landscape painting is called American Luminism––would be views onto a nature that no longer exists, that’s been lost, that’s been destroyed, but also never existed because it’s being remembered in this idealized, romantic form. Therefore, all the various simulations of the outside world should have that seductive quality; the reds of the paper poppies that the mother’s creating should pop off the screen.
The final thing it made us realize was that we needed to have exteriors. The bunker would be self-contained within a broader cavern structure. We looked for a man-made but exquisite, post-industrial subterranean landscape that would mirror, in a dark way, what we see in the paintings on the walls. That led us to this deep dive into salt mines. We visited some 15 salt mines.
The blue palette came from an idea of moonlight, which was something they sing about: “You can shine like snow in the moonlight.” So the exteriors had this bluish light that simulated moonlight. The whole architecture of the space, of the rooms, was designed to serve how we imagined shooting the scenes. So [cinematographer] Mikhail Krichman and I spent months storyboarding and planning, with particular attention on the musical numbers, realizing that because these songs are moments of crisis for the characters, we wouldn’t be going into musical fantasy. That would be wrong. We should stay and watch the characters as they evolve through these real-time crises. That meant shooting in these long takes, which determined the architecture.
This was a very long answer. But everything grew from understanding what is the principle that gets them singing.
Joshua Oppenheimer. Photo by Pascal Buenning.
The film is about the lies we tell ourselves and how dangerous that can be, and I was thinking if that goes both ways? There’s this great Player Tribune essay by this former NBA player where he says, coming from where he comes from in Philadelphia, if he didn’t think he was the best basketball player in the world, he would have never made it to the NBA. This self-delusion allowed him to get to where he was. And then as an artist, perhaps if you were to reflect too much on what you’re doing, you might conclude: who’s to say that my point of view is important? Do the lies we tell ourselves ever have a practical value?
I’m just gonna blurt because that’s the honest response. My answer is: no, I don’t think they do. I might be totally wrong about this, because I absolutely lie to myself all the time to get through every day. And you’re probably right that I wouldn’t have made this film without degrees of self-deception. I remember sitting in every second screening that I actually sat through of The Act of Killing, thinking, “Oh, this is just awful. I just have been telling myself it’s good.”
But I honestly feel like if we could look honestly at things and find courage and ambition and vision from a place of acceptance––if we were capable of that, and I’m not sure we are as a species, but if we were––that would be better and more sustainable. The film is made from the perspective that it may be too late for the family in The End, but as a cautionary tale it’s implicitly an act of hope because it’s saying it’s not too late for the audience. It’s not too late for you and for me and for all of us to come together in solidarity, collectively from a place of honesty about our problems, and say, “Yeah, it feels awfully late in the day, but we now are going to marshal all of our creativity and find solutions. And if that involves standing up to power, we will do that up to the point of civil disobedience and even getting arrested, because that’s what the moment demands of us.” That involves a lot of courage.
At this moment, when the struggle to save ourselves from the worst of catastrophic climate change looks almost impossible, I submit it is not yet impossible. There is still time, and that involves finding massive ambition, massive commitment and energy, but the only way we’re going to succeed is if we do that from a place of realism. Just telling ourselves “we can do it,” just telling ourselves “it’s possible” is not enough. We actually have to do the work of building a movement now. Just telling ourselves it’s possible is actually probably just giving ourselves permission not to do enough.
Other species lie; birds will pretend to have a broken wing to lead you away from their nest when they’re on the ground. I have increasingly come to feel that we are the only species that lie to ourselves. It’s a consequence of how we use language and know ourselves and each other through language, and therefore tell stories. But I think the ability to deceive ourselves is what defines us as human, but it’s also probably our tragic and fatal flaw.
I imagine George MacKay’s Son might be tricky to write. You’re imagining his entire development of being born and raised in a bunker, so there’s no template to draw from with him. How was that journey in making him naive, but not too naive––riding this fine line regarding his development with how he figures out more about his parents and their lives?
The key to how we work together was to keep it very personal. So, with George, I opened up immediately about my childhood and how my parents divorced, and because of my age and role where, among my siblings, I was the kid whose job it was somehow to reassure both parents. I made it my job to reassure each parent of the correctness of their story, which meant I lost myself because the stories contradicted each other. I fell between the cracks of these two stories. I talked about that and George opened up about things from his own childhood and his own life, where he connected to the character.
A year before we started shooting, George and I spent three days together in London, starting from his song “Alone.” We started exploring all aspects of Son’s life and biography––from the perspective of how he moves and how his body physically registers any pinprick of truth that breaks the shell of lies in which he’s been cocooned––and we spent three days working through that song. So it was very embodied from the beginning, and I think that’s what allowed him and me to work on a character that otherwise could feel so alien. It was about keeping it very personal and starting with the movement and the music.
What were your conversations with the cast regarding the tone of the film? There’s an inherent comedy in a lot of these scenes. It’s such a specific tone. How did you get them to understand it?
We were having a discussion and someone in the cast asked, “What film has a similar tone?” I said, “No film has a similar tone. But maybe there’s one film we should all watch.” It just came to mind: A Woman Under the Influence. So we all watched it. I don’t say that The End has the tone of a Cassavetes film at all, but that warm regard of people who are fundamentally unmoored by a situation that is shattering all the structures of their daily life––that was a reference point. It’s the warmth that defines the tone. It’s common to all my films. In my relationship to the performance or what’s happening in front of the camera––it’s as if I’m trying to hug that person so tightly that I can feel what it’s like to be them. And yet the camera is not always in close up.
Sometimes in moments, especially of calamity and darkness and where something destructive is happening, the camera steps back to witness the unfolding catastrophe. That warmth and intimacy, but also, at times, the ability to pull back and be distant, to go and calibrate that: when do we stay back and watch the catastrophe unfold? When do we go very close, with the deepest empathy and warmth––that’s the key to the film’s tone. But from the actor’s perspective, it’s about knowing that we’re defending them at every moment. There’s no villains in this film. Everyone is doing the very best they can, which comes natural to how most actors work, anyway. It grew naturally out of the material.
In a very literal sense with warmth, there are key moments of warm lights that come in on Son when he’s singing, or with Father, there’s a big burst of warm light right before the faux suicide moment.
It’s his chance to see the sun. There’s the sun rising underground in the mine, which I just thought of, now, is like an answer to the New Year’s celebration, where they’re launching fireworks in the mine. Have you ever been on an airplane that’s landing in a city at New Year’s, and in the distance below you see the fireworks bursting? They feel inaccessible, like they’re happening in another world from the airplane. There’s something similar to that about fireworks exploding thousands of feet below ground.
Speaking of: the sound design includes a lot of loud bursts like when they’re shooting guns, or with those fireworks. What was your approach to the sound design?
One thing I talk about with my sound designer, Henrik Garnov, is a dream-like hyperpresent. There’s this shot where the mother’s sitting on the back of a pickup truck and suddenly there’s a very loud sound, and it turns out to be the ventilation tube right behind her inflating. In reality you’d hear that thing for a full minute or two before, down the tunnel as it’s inflating. This idea that you only hear at the moment you see it––that creates a hyperpresent that I experience in dreams. That’s crucial to how I think about sound.
I also think about how one atmosphere bleeds into another and not feeling the cuts––often I use that to create a downward spiral. Without giving too much away, the moment where Friend makes a fateful decision, and as she exhales that exhalation pushes the cut into Son underwater as he swims. You naturally listen to that; you want an inhale. But he’s underwater; if you were to inhale, he’d inhale water. So it’s a very uneasy silence. That deathly breathlessness then smoothly segues into a shot of the tunnel, and you hear just the sound in the distance of the tube inflating, almost preternaturally quiet.
Those types of attenuated sounds also happen in dreams for me. That attempt to leave realism and go into a kind of fever dream, through a hyper presence and the weird dissolution of one space into another space into another space––that’s crucial to my sound design. When Father and Girl are shooting in the mine and there’s the intense sound of the mine, and then it cuts to a tunnel with smoke just in the distance, and you hear two gunshots, and there’s two of them shooting. There’s a sense of menace. Did they just kill? Did someone just get shot? Then you hear Father say, “I brought energy to billions of people.” And that line hangs in the air as the dust is swirling. Then it cuts to him in the office, continuing that sentence, and all the pressure of the mine sound is there in the office, even though that’s not the sound of the office at all. That creation of a dream space through sound is essential to how the film leaves realism and becomes a fever dream.
The End opens in limited release this Friday, December 6 and expands December 13.