It seems likely that, whatever masterpieces he goes on to create, Joshua Oppenheimer will always be first remembered for two of the oddest, most disturbing documentaries ever made.
The Act of Killing, the best-reviewed film of 2012, went among murderers and torturers from the Indonesian mass slaughters of 1965 and 1966. Oppenheimer, a mild man of daunting intelligence, persuaded the culprits to re-enact their outrages with a chilling precision. In 2014 he followed that film with an equally troubling successor, further investigating the Indonesian atrocities, entitled The Look of Silence.
What did we expect next? Not a starry musical set in a postapocalyptic bunker. Filmed largely in Ireland, The End does indeed cast Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon as Mother and Father – billionaire tycoon and statuesque wife – sheltering underground as environmental catastrophe rumbles above. George MacKay and our own Bronagh Gallagher play Son and Friend. This is the sort of austere diversion that allows nobody a name.
The End is a fascinating piece of work. It does not require much brooding to recognise the wretched irony of a family that made their money from “energy” surviving climate meltdown in a simulacrum of pre-Fall luxury. Yet the film also offers a metaphor for western humanity’s continuing addiction to denial. All this delivered via Joshua Schmidt and Marius de Vries’s mournful songs.
How on earth did Oppenheimer end up here?
“I had wanted to make a third film in Indonesia, about the oligarchs who enriched themselves by exploiting a nation that was utterly terrified of them,” the American director says. “Oligarchs who participated in or supported mass murder and then profited off that. They had gotten away with murder and built empires on the basis of fear. But after The Act of Killing came out I could no longer return to Indonesia. I had already shot The Look of Silence by then.”
The response to those films continues to be more than a mere inconvenience.
“I still get threats on my life every day from the paramilitary group that is at the centre of The Act of Killing.”
Still?
“Yes, still some,” he says. “There is not a chance that I could return to Indonesia anytime soon.”
He nonetheless continued to research the oligarchs who had profited from terror and, in Asia, came across a “tycoon who had used violence to secure his oil concessions”. Apparently, this figure, like too many billionaires, had developed a desire to live forever. He invested money in life-extension medicines. He developed a plan to construct an underground refuge for his family.
That had not yet come into existence, but Oppenheimer was invited to a former Soviet command bunker set to be repurposed into such a luxurious shelter.
“It would have many of the same facilities you see in The End,” he says. “There was an art vault for their family’s art collection. There was a climate-controlled wine cellar. There was a hydroponic farming system. So you could have fish and aquatic life providing the fertiliser, from the excrement. It had an underground swimming pool, underground gardens. And they were already there. It was under construction by this bunker developer who was selling it.”
As Oppenheimer toured the development, the same brain that engaged so peculiarly with the Indonesian outrageous began teasing out the moral quandaries here.
“I found myself wanting to ask questions like, ‘How would you cope with the guilt for the catastrophe from which you were fleeing?’ ‘How would you cope with the remorse you might feel over leaving loved ones behind?’ ‘How would you tell your story to your grandchildren?’”
Oppenheimer is plainly someone capable of analysing the most intractable dilemmas into intellectual dust. I’ve rarely met anyone who can put together essay-length (and essay-worthy) answers with such fluency. Ask a question and you may not get to ask another for five minutes.
I am not remotely surprised to discover his dad was an academic and that, before releasing The Act of Killing, the younger Oppenheimer, raised in Austin, Texas, had clocked up a BA from Harvard and a PhD from Central Saint Martins college of art and design, in London. He is now professor of film at the University of Westminster, also in the English capital. His first cinematic memory is of his mother taking him to see Silkwood, Mike Nichols’s 1983 film about the nuclear whistleblower Karen Silkwood.
“My parents were animated by a sense that we make personal meaning, we make meaningful lives,” he says. “My parents are animated by the sense that we make meaningful lives by helping and supporting one another and making the world a place of less suffering and greater justice. I’m sure that affected me. I am sure I am inspired by that.”
He began filming in Indonesia as long ago as 2004. That origin story for The End suggests he has not quite escaped from the country’s grim history. The new film is, at a few removes, still pondering how guilt might work on the perpetrators of such genocides. It is more generally about how we live alongside global miseries without cracking up. The opening crisis in The End involves the arrival of an apparent refugee called simply Girl.
“We slough off our sense of urgency or responsibility in the face of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, where you have people behind walls being bombarded to the Stone Age – or actually to oblivion,” Oppenheimer says. “You have conditions of our making that are much like the world from which Girl flees. Every time we register that – and turn away from it, and carry on with our lives as if we are not all being grievously harmed – we agree to live in a bunker.”
None of which immediately suggests the material for a musical. The End will remind nobody of Singin’ in the Rain. The sombre, gently building songs allow the characters to evade their guilt as much as address it. The idea seems to have come together in the aftermath of his discussions about the oligarch’s proposed lair. A classic 1964 musical by Jacques Demy helped cement the approach.
I would go to the Wicklow Mountains on my day off. I would take long hikes over the headlands between Bray and Greystones
“I realised I wasn’t going to make a documentary with them 25 years after the world ended,” he says of the supposed bunker dwellers. “On the way home, a little despairing and trying to get some distance on the whole thing, I watched one of my very favourite films on my laptop, which is The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. And, when it was finished, it just came to me: ‘I know – I’ll make a musical! It’ll be set in a bunker like this. The family will be American, because this is a quintessentially American genre.‘”
[ Where does The Umbrellas of Cherbourg rank in the best movies of all time?Opens in new window ]
It is that. But nothing like Oklahoma! or The Pajama Game. The End is every bit as singular in its approach as was The Act of Killing.
“It was almost a career change, moving from documentary to fiction,” Oppenheimer says. “I look for a forum that perfectly embodies and resonates with and speaks to the themes I’m trying to explore. And I just felt a musical set in a bunker after the end of the world, where all of humanity has been reduced to this last human family, was exactly that perfect merger of form and content that I’m always looking for.”
It took a while to get here. Filming began almost exactly two years ago at Ardmore Studios, in Co Wicklow; the film premiered at Telluride Film Festival, in Colorado, last autumn. Don’t expect to see any shots of Wicklow’s blasted glens or dried-up rivers. The action takes place entirely within the claustrophobic opulence of the family’s underground suite. So how did that end up being built in Ireland?
“We probably approached Ireland for purely practical reasons of co-production funding,” he says. “But it ended up in Ireland as a great familial experience of solidarity and focused work. We had the most amazing contributions from the most amazing film workers, right the way from art directors and our gaffer, James McGuire, to the whole production department and on to the driver, Matt Thompson.”
If you are wondering, the huge caves that abut the bunker are, thanks to the magic of movies, found almost 2,500km from Wicklow, in a Sicilian salt mine. One imagines there wasn’t much time to bump about the country when filming such a complex film on a less than enormous budget.
“I barely got to Dublin during the month,” he says. “There were about three weeks of prep in Ireland and then a month of rehearsal. Then it was about four or five weeks of the shoot. I was staying in Greystones. We were shooting in Bray. I would go to the Wicklow Mountains on my day off. I would take long hikes over the headlands between Bray and Greystones.”
With luck audiences will take a punt on The End. One can understand why some at Telluride were left baffled by the experience. Clocking in at close to 2½ hours, the picture asks a fair bit of even indulgent viewers. But every scene has subtexts worth teasing out. And it has Gallagher, Derry’s finest, in full flow.
“Hats off to her,” Oppenheimer says. “Because the performance she gives in The End is exemplary of a cast that does not come together like a troupe but, rather, like members of a doomsday cult who’ve signed up for the rapture. They are hopeful. They are lost. They are shockingly mortal.”
So, yes. As we were saying, do not expect The King and I.
The End is in cinemas from Friday, March 28th
