Joshua Oppenheimer is probably best known for his two Oscar-nominated documentaries, “The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence,” both about the mass murders that took place in Indonesia in 1965 and 1966.
A musical might not seem like the logical next step for a documentarian, but Oppenheimer’s documentaries actually have quite a bit in common with “The End,” his new apocalyptic musical film. In “The Act of Killing,” former Indonesian death squad leaders are asked to reenact their crimes as if they were making a movie. In “The End,” people use the art of song to perpetuate the lies they tell themselves in order to survive.
“The End” follows a wealthy family living in an underground bunker in a salt mine decades after the end of the world – an end they very well might have directly contributed to. Unlike most musicals, where characters break into song when their feeling and truth becomes too much for words, characters in “The End” break into song when the characters are at their least truthful.
Rough Draft Atlanta recently spoke with Oppenheimer about the making of the film and his thoughts about storytelling’s ability to perpetuate lies or the truth. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve made narrative shorts and experimental short films, but I would say your most well-known works are the two documentaries that you made about Indonesia’s mass killings that came out in the 2010s. For your first feature narrative film, why did you decide you wanted to make a musical, and what was your relationship to the movie musical as a genre before this?
Joshua Oppenheimer: I’ve always sort of had musical as a genre in the back of my head, not because I wanted to make or had an ambition to make a musical, but because I feel the musical is a quintessential genre of a delusional hope – the kind of despair that masquerades as hope, where we just tell ourselves that everything, no matter what, is going to be fine, in denial of whatever crises we might be facing, and therefore in denial of whatever changes we might need to make, lest we just proceed right over the edge of the abyss.
Like “The Act of Killing,” like “The Look of Silence,” this is a meditation on denial, on the lies we tell and how we lie to ourselves. Ever since Anwar Congo in “The Act of Killing” wanted to make musical scenes, I always had the idea of this genre that just sings its denial, that sort of spreads its wings and soars when the characters are actually least honest, while claiming that the characters sing because they’re expressing their deepest truths. I always felt that this genre was sort of – I don’t know, like my spirit genre, my spirit animal.
So after making “The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence,” I wanted to make a third film initially in Indonesia, with the oligarchs who came to power through the genocide, who enriched themselves because the entire nation was terrified of them because they committed mass murder, and could therefore get away with murder as they built their economic empires. But then I could not return to Indonesia, so I started investigating oligarchs elsewhere and found an oil tycoon from another country in Asia who had committed profound acts of violence in order to secure his oil concessions. He and his family were buying a bunker, much like the one in “The End,” and we went looking at it. Out of that trip emerged the idea for a musical in a bunker, set decades after the family had moved in.
I’ve read a lot of interviews with you where you’ve talked about those themes of denial and delusion, and what Michael Shannon’s character is doing in this movie reminded me a lot of what happens in “The Act of Killing” – recontextualizing your life and the things you’ve done, the atrocities you’ve committed, etc. You’ve sort of started on this already, but it makes me curious about your thoughts on storytelling as a way to continue those delusions, but also as a way of breaking them. I’ve always found that storytelling can be a way to continue that cycle, but it can also be a way to discover the truth and figure out what to do with that.
Oppenheimer: Yeah, absolutely. We’re a species that subsists in language, that’s sort of unique, in that … we’re the universe. We are all. Our consciousness is born of stardust assembled in this strange way that comes to know itself and model the world. We do it through language and through dreams and through images. And just for lack of a better word, let’s call all of that stories. We can use stories to justify our actions, to ease our regrets, to obscure the world from ourselves, to make it more palatable or easy. And we can also use it to look honestly at our situation and condition, and creatively figure out how we might change course before it’s too late.
You know, Michael Shannon recently brought a quote to my attention – which, I think yesterday he just may have got tattooed on his arm – which is from Albert Einstein, which says, you cannot solve a problem with the same level of consciousness that created it. So we need to wake up and tell different stories, and I feel that’s the role that I’m privileged to try to play as a filmmaker – to bring something new, new stories into the world that jolt us, or cajole us or seduce us into facing our most painful truths and also our most extravagant mysteries that we just otherwise are too distracted to process.
I think that’s really what The Girl [Moses Ingram’s character] does in “The End.” She comes in with this gift for the family, which is the gift of honesty. Saying, you know, if we can look honestly at ourselves and admit guilt without shame – shame being concerned with how you appear in the eyes of others, guilt being an internal feeling of remorse – then we actually have a chance of building good lives, even here. The family is too defensive to accept that gift. That’s the source of the film’s tragedy, and also therefore the source of the film’s cautionary tale, which leads to, I think, a heartbreaking ending – the message of which is that while it may be too late for this family at the end, it’s not too late for us. The film, like any cautionary tale, is offered as an act of hope. Because you don’t tell a cautionary tale unless you believe that there’s still time for people to hear the story and heed its warning.
The film itself is one of these stories that’s meant to be an intervention in the lies we tell ourselves. It’s not just the family that lies to itself. The characters in the film are nameless because they’re all of us. This family is all of our families, and the cast committed to depicting them with such vulnerability because we all wanted to implicate all of us, and have us all reflecting on how we’re living in a bunker – how we’re living in our own bunkers, within our families, within our denial of our role, of how we are part of the destruction of the planet. How we accept and turn away from injustices and cruelties that define our societies each and every day, probably dozens of times a day. Unless we stop doing that, we have no choice but to continue down a path of destruction until we are extinct.
It’s interesting you bring up that word “choice.” That comes up a lot in this film. I feel like every character at some point says something along the lines of, “I didn’t have a choice,” or “You always have a choice.” I felt differently about that statement depending on who was saying it. I wondered how you feel about that phrase, “I didn’t have a choice.” Can that ever really be true for someone?
Oppenheimer: I think we genuinely feel we don’t have a choice. But I think when Moses’s character says, “I had a choice,” and Son [George MacKay’s character], when he’s most open to change, says, “You always have a choice,” and attributes that to Moses’s character – when Son and Girl are saying, “You always have a choice,” they’re right.
I think in the film, on a second viewing you would see that whenever a character said, “I had no choice,” or “What else could I have done,” they’re making an excuse and it’s destructive. When they’re saying, actually yes, I did have a choice – and we all have a choice – that’s the way that they may yet escape from the trap that they’re in and build meaningful lives, even at the end. I’ve chosen to, as I said, make a film where it’s too late for this family, but also in such a way as to show the audience that it’s not too late for us. But, you know, in the crisis that we’re living through now, there is indeed very little time, but still time yet, I believe, for us to wake up and acknowledge that we do have a choice, and come together in solidarity, through activism and through, if necessary, non-violent civil disobedience, and demand change. It’s something we’ve done before. It’s something we can do again.
I believe this at the level of the society. I think this is what we’ll have to do as Americans and citizens of the earth. I think it’s something that we can all look to do in our families, to be more honest. Because I think ultimately, the film is about – this may sound strange or trite – but I think it’s ultimately about love, and how our capacity to love depends on honesty. When we lie and we create no-go areas in our most intimate relationships, we hollow out those relationships. We end up tiptoeing around what really matters. We diminish our capacity to care for each other and protect what we love. And the same is true, obviously, of the planet, which is still beautiful and we must cherish.
I’m glad you brought up the idea of us living in our own singular bunkers – I wanted to talk about the cast a little bit. I was reading an interview with you where you mentioned that when the actors came in, they all had such different ways of working and approaching the material, which made the act of coming together really interesting. I think that’s an interesting point, in terms of differences bringing people together to create something cohesive. Could you talk a little bit about that process?
Oppenheimer: There were workshops with each of the cast members either individually or in pairs as they joined the cast. But then there was a month of rehearsal, which really formed us into a kind of family. There was a thinking through of, you know, the older generation in the bunker – that is to say, everyone apart from Son and Girl – have these secrets … although they never talk about [them] and they have different versions they tell themselves, they share these these secrets that they know, and that they have a kind of unspoken pact must never be revealed to Son – who actually gleans bits and pieces of them, and knows much more than they think he knows.
Finding what those shared secrets were was a crucial element in rehearsal, and also – especially with Michael [Shannon], with Tilda [Swinton], with George [MacKay], Moses [Ingram], Bronagh [Gallagher] – going into our own personal histories, and being very transparent about where these dynamics come from in my own history, and letting them then understand that and leave that alone, and mine where that comes from in their history, and sort of figuring out what we want to share as a troupe and what we want to have as secrets from which we’re each working. That was a crucial part of that rehearsal. And then also, how do they get over these conflicts? Each of the scenes often ends in a kind of impasse or crisis, but they have to somehow overcome it. So improvising around the scenes, and especially what would happen afterwards, to figure out how on earth had they survived for 25 years in this situation? How would they revert to respecting the no-go areas, revert to silence, revert to gaslighting? That was something that we explored in rehearsal and was really thrilling.
I was often thinking about – particularly with the bathroom fight between Tilda and Michael – how often has this happened over the past 25 years? How often have they had the same fight? Which is an interesting thing to think about.
Oppenheimer: What did you think?
I think they’ve definitely had it before, but I’m not sure how many times. But it felt like something that had been rehashed.
Oppenheimer: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think we felt something similar, like it was something that may have come up very early, when the Mother was still in grief and trauma … because she’s very traumatized, the Mother. In the grief and trauma of leaving her family, there may have been a version of that, but then they probably never spoke about it again. And now, decades later, the Girl arrives, and it comes again. I find it terrifying. I think we all found it terrifying, especially because there’s some physical violence in that scene. They’re violent with each other in an ecosystem where they have to tiptoe around each other and walk on eggshells, in a certain sense, lest they provoke someone’s trauma or even provoke someone into revealing a secret that would shatter their whole world. Suddenly, when there’s violence, it’s awful, and is, in a certain sense, even more claustrophobic when the Father, very understandably, says, “We cannot be at war with each other.”
Speaking of the ecosystem of it all, you mentioned this came out of researching for a third Indonesian movie, and then moving along to oligarchs and bunkers. Why did you settle on a salt mine for the location? What was visually interesting to you about that location?
Oppenheimer: Well, it all grew out of the principle that gets them singing, that they sing out of these crises of doubt. That unlike in the sort of cliche about a musical, that characters sing their deepest truths – when their truths are too big for speech, they sing – we realized that they sing when the lies, the stories that they’re telling themselves unravel, because of the truth that the Girl has brought into the bunker – they reach kind of desperately for new music, for new ditties to reassure themselves. When we realized that, we realized that we should reprise melodies – [composer] Josh Schmidt and I realized that we should reprise melodies from song to song, so that when a melody is sung at its most intense and fateful manifestation, we’re humming along, and therefore unconsciously sort of identifying – bodily, musically, rhythmically, melodically – with the characters as they sing these luminously beautiful lies, and as they specifically desperately try to convince themselves of these luminously beautiful lies, allowing us to feel and remember what it’s like to convince ourselves of something that in our heart we want to believe – and even can manage to make ourselves believe – but in our heart, know is not true.
It’s about getting people to feel that cognitive dissonance, and that directly connected to the design, because we realized that, with the characters, we should be able to forget that we’re in a bunker. When they succeed through a song, of convincing themselves that their future is bright, that everything is good in their lives, we should forget with the characters that they’re in a bunker. Or, if they try to convince themselves of that but fail, because the lies unravel under their own absurdity, we should have the option to leave the rooms, these beautifully appointed rooms which embody the lies that they’re telling themselves, the illusion in which they’re living, and move into a realm of truth – something that would stand in for the devastated earth, the ruins of an industrial civilization that has contributed to the earth’s destruction.
That led to this whole realization that there should be exteriors. We shouldn’t just be confined to interiors, to the living rooms and bedrooms of the house. And that led to this model that the bunker be a compound of rooms that are finished caverns within a much bigger underground cave structure – it should be manmade structure. And that led to the idea of a salt mine. So it would be sort of like a termine colony, or an ant colony. That led to a search for a mine that was beautiful because … instead of windows – you know, when you have rooms that are windowless, it also feels claustrophobic. So we decided to replace windows with the Mother’s art collection, and we decided to make her a connoisseur of these romantic landscape paintings so you would glimpse a nature that’s lost, but also which never existed as we see it in the paintings, because the paintings are these idealizations. We wanted a kind of dark version of that as the exteriors, and so we looked for just the most luminously beautiful salt mine that we could find. We looked at about 15 mines – I visited 15 mines and chose this one in Sicily, where we spent three weeks shooting.
