In “East Coker,” the second poem in his “Four Quartets” collection, T.S. Eliot writes that there is, “at best, only a limited value in the knowledge derived from experience.” It’s a curious notion, one that critics suggest exposes a connection between salvation and personal annihilation. Eliot himself argued that the knowledge we’ve gained from our experiences reveals a pattern, one that is new in each moment, every moment being “a new and shocking valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.”
Opening his narrative feature debut, The End, with that passage was out of the question for Joshua Oppenheimer. Given that the deeper themes of his film were revelations that he wanted viewers to arrive at naturally as The End’s events unfolded, to tell them that the characters in the picture were adamant to turn a blind eye to the part they played in their planet’s demise would take away from the impact of the ensuing two-and-a-half hours. Instead, Oppenheimer began with a simpler Eliot prompt: “The houses are all gone under the sea. The dancers are all gone under the hill.”
That’s easy enough to parse: The world has been rid of its structure, and gleeful people now hide in darkness. But the brilliant thing about The End –which, in the simplest terms, chronicles a short period in the life of a wealthy family residing in an underground bunker 25 years after the end of the world, for which they are partly to blame – is its willingness to eschew the tropes of a typical apocalypse-set thriller. There are no zombies to speak of or run from; the flames that now engulf the land this family once knew as their home are merely mentioned, not shown. Oppenheimer would rather focus on what makes this family tick, albeit in their warped, shortsighted way, and to have them express their emotions in a manner one may not expect the acclaimed filmmaker behind two of the most brilliant and harrowing documentaries of the 21st century, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, to turn to: Music.
Indeed, The End is a Golden Age musical, sung, danced, and performed like one through and through. Better still, NEON has advertised it as one. In a studio landscape that seems to fear the response moviegoers will have when the film they wish to see is revealed to be told through song and dance, Oppenheimer and his producers have embraced the genre, fully leaning into the film’s score and original compositions — written by Oppenheimer and Rasmus Heisterberg — in its trailer and marketing materials. But more than anything, Oppenheimer wants it made clear that The End is “a meditation on storytelling.” Before the film’s international premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, he noted that the film is about “how we tell stories to escape from ourselves… It’s about our awful human ability to lie to ourselves.”
I spoke with Oppenheimer about the eight-year journey to get The End made, writing a musical, and the questions that urge him to create something new. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.
Geek Vibes Nation (Will Bjarnar): When I saw The End at [the Toronto International Film Festival], you introduced the film by noting that making it had been an eight-year journey. Why eight years? What went into getting it off the ground?
Joshua Oppenheimer: The initial idea of making a musical about a family in a bunker, 25 years after an environmental collapse had left the world uninhabitable, came about eight years ago. And for the first four years, I was writing the script but also developing two documentary projects, one in Japan and one in Greenland. When the pandemic hit, both of those countries completely locked down, and I completely focused on The End. I think The End took a while because, for one, it was my first narrative feature. So there was a huge learning curve for me, and I was determined to really embrace and study the craft. A musical is especially complicated. I think you can, of course, slap together anything, but to write a musical where the songs are tested, and how they grow out of the script and by which character is singing is rigorously worked through in each song. The score is weaving together melodies so that all of the songs sort of form a single piece of music. And in a sense, the whole movie is a single piece of music, even though there’s silence and no music in large parts of it.
GVN: Does that make it more complicated? Writing so that it feels like one single piece of music despite those moments of silence, as you said?
JO: That’s almost a whole second writing. It is a whole second writing process. It took as long to do that and to rewrite the script to accommodate that as it took to write the script itself. And then it was a fairly long production with a month of rehearsal and a decent-sized shoot, and then a long editing process, a long post-production process. It just all added up. But that month of rehearsal was crucial. The post-production on a musical where you’re committed to live singing and the beauty, the radiant vulnerability of the character’s voice in a moment of crisis… That’s what you get with live singing. And in a film where what gets them signing is not moments of ecstatic truth, but actually crisis, that takes time, too.
GVN: Wow, so they were singing live.
JO: Yeah, all of the singing [was live] with the exception of backing vocals and a tiny bit of repair, if we were on such a late take that voices were starting to fray. Tilda, when she sings her solo in the bathroom with all the mirrors, she just went so deep. The way she works, she treats the takes like a sandbox: She explores, she creates. I always gave her as many takes as we had time for because the work just gets more and more interesting and more and more surprising, more rich. It’s almost always the last or second-to-last take that I used with Tilda, and that’s her 31st and final take. After 31 takes of a three-minute song – that’s challenging for any singer, and she’s not a professional singer – the voice is strained. So there was a little bit of very delicate repair, but otherwise, it’s entirely live.
GVN: It’s funny, The End comes out just a few weeks after the release of the musical production everyone is talking about right now, that being Wicked. In that cast, Ariana Grande is a massive pop star, Cynthia Erivo is a Broadway performer and singer… The actors in your film have very good singing voices, something that audiences may not expect because they’re not singing actors, at least not typically. What guided you in the casting process? What led you to want to go in the direction that you did with non-professional singers like George MacKay, Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, and everyone else who didn’t have that background already?
JO: What gets the characters singing is crisis. The lies they’re telling themselves start to fall apart as the truth encroaches, and they desperately seek new stories as if they’re grasping for a life raft, those new stories being the songs. Once we understood that, we realized that these are existential emotional breakdowns in song, and that requires, above all, the deepest kind of dramatic acting. I think we decided very early on that if there was an actor who was also a singer – which was the case with The Friend (played by Bronagh Gallagher), and in a certain way with Michael, because he’s in a band and sings – that’s great. But we were first and foremost looking for people who had the musicality necessary to be able to learn to sing these songs, and were above all able to explore the depths required by these characters. That was an obvious direction we knew we had to go with the casting.
GVN: I was especially taken aback by George MacKay’s performance. He was in Femme earlier this year and gave an incredible performance.
Oppenheimer: He is amazing in Femme.
GVN: It’s one of the performances of the year. And then he goes in a completely different direction with this, not only playing someone vulnerable but somewhat acting in a vulnerable environment, too, doing something I hadn’t seen him do before. I thought it was a fascinating choice, his casting in particular, and it really, really works.
JO: He had been in musicals before, though! George was actually an actor who I knew could sing before we approached him. He’s amazing.
GVN: I read a while back that you feel like what animates you to make a film is a question that you have to explore as deeply as possible. What was the question or collection of questions that led you to write this film in the first place? I’m especially curious because you’ve mentioned that you were writing this during the pandemic, and also in a particular sort of political climate. It’s now releasing in something of a mirror image of that climate, in a way.
JO: I think that at the deepest level, the film is about love and how when we lie to ourselves and to the people we love, when we lie about the things that we love, we can’t protect what we love. And whether that’s within a family, when we know we’ve hurt someone and we can’t admit it, or at the level of the planet, when we can’t admit our role in its destruction and therefore tell ourselves, “Well, we’ll just carry on as things are,” we make it impossible to protect what we love. I think that’s fundamentally what the film is about. And I think the question that animated the making of it was an enduring fascination that I have with the world and how we are products of the stories we tell. How we tell stories to obscure ourselves from ourselves; how all the mystery and majesty and profundity of the world is misrecognized when we impose comforting narratives on it. And I think, here we are, as a human family, careening toward the abyss, knowingly, telling ourselves that everything will work out just fine, even if we acknowledge that we’re in a moment of crisis. I think the moment we finish this interview and go about our lives as if everything is normal, we are actually actively in a state of denial. We are actively putting our heads in the sand. We are actively entering our own bunkers. [The End is] telling a cautionary tale that appears to be about the future, but really is about our present. And yes, it may be too late for this family, but it’s not too late for us. The family’s false hope has them singing everything, you know, they’re singing, “Our future is bright,” even as they stare out into the abyss. That’s despair.
GVN: Which brings us to the second part of the question.
JO: Genuine hope comes from having the courage to acknowledge our problems so that we can actually solve them. Yes, it may be difficult, and yes, the hour may be late, and it may require sacrifice. It may even get us arrested. We have no choice but to look honestly at our situation in this political climate that you asked about and be very vigilant and committed to coming together in solidarity as a collective. Not just individual constructive actions like recycling more or becoming a vegan, but in solidarity. Standing up for things, for what we know to be necessary now. And I think that the film is made with the conviction that it may be too late for the family, but it isn’t too late for us. In that sense, it’s an act of genuine hope, the offering of this cautionary tale. Every cautionary tale is an act of hope in the sense that you make it with the conviction that it’s not too late to heed its warning.
The End releases in limited theaters from NEON on December 6.
Will Bjarnar is a writer, critic, and video editor based in New York City. Originally from Upstate New York, and thus a member of the Greater Western New York Film Critics Association and a long-suffering Buffalo Bills fan, Will first became interested in movies when he discovered IMDb at a young age; with its help, he became a voracious list maker, poster lover, and trailer consumer. He has since turned that passion into a professional pursuit, writing for the film and entertainment sites Next Best Picture, InSession Film, Big Picture Big Sound, Film Inquiry, and, of course, Geek Vibes Nation. He spends the later months of each year editing an annual video countdown of the year’s 25 best films. You can find more of his musings on Letterboxd (willbjarnar) and on X (@bywillbjarnar).
