Joshua Oppenheimer on Post-Apocalyptic Musical ‘The End,’ the Power of Solidarity and His ‘Inveterate Optimism’ Under Trump 2.0: ‘We’re Going to Fight Again’
Joshua Oppenheimer is tired.
The two-time Academy Award nominee isn’t simply spent at the tail end of an exhausting week for the American body politic. Nor has he tossed and turned his way through countless sleepless nights, doomscrolling through the nightmare scenarios of what a second Trump administration could mean for Americans’ civil rights, the rule of international law, women’s bodies, the fate of the planet — take your pick.
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Speaking with Variety at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, where the “Act of Killing” director’s first fiction feature, “The End,” is the closing film, Oppenheimer has just arrived from Japan, where he spent two weeks with his husband, a Japanese novelist, visiting the in-laws while his partner researches his next book.
The filmmaker barely managed to sleep on the plane, though he is poised, thoughtful and gracious to a fault as he powers through his festival press junket. He is also determined and defiant, seeing in Trump 2.0 echoes of his formative years as a young gay man and activist in the early-’90s, coming of age at a time when the U.S. government stood by with “indifference” as HIV decimated his generation.
“That was an awful time, but it was also a discovery of a deeper way of being human that comes from being human in solidarity and creative collaboration,” he says. “Not fearlessly, because we were all frightened, but through that communion and solidarity to face, acknowledge and then overcome fear and find the inevitability of resolve. And I think it’s time for that again.”
However determined Oppenheimer is in the face of Trump’s victory and the rightward swing of much of the American electorate, last week’s election results were nevertheless a bitter pill to swallow. “It was heartbreaking,” he says, “and unlike people in the United States who went to bed still with some hope, it was on Wednesday all through the day [in Japan]. The results were coming in and it was devastating. And then the next day, I felt I needed to have quiet.”
So Oppenheimer and his husband, Shu, fled Osaka and traveled to Nara, where they visited Hōryū-ji, a Buddhist temple built in the early 7th century.
“I went inside and I sat down and just started to sob. I was pretty shaken,” he says. “But when I left this dark temple hall, I was looking up at the sunshine coming through the pine trees around the temples. And I felt a kind of peace, because I knew that I have no choice, other than to pay very close attention, muster all of my creativity and my thought about how we respond. And then reach out in solidarity and work with other people to stand up for truth,” he continues, “to stand up for decency, to stand up for human rights, to stand up for the just and inclusive economy that neither party has successfully brought us anywhere close to. And to stand up for the viability of our biosphere.”
Oppenheimer, who turned 50 this year, was born in Austin, Texas; studied at Harvard; and — one MacArthur Fellowship, two Academy Award nominations and nearly three decades later — now lives in Malmö, Sweden. He is best known for his work as a documentary filmmaker, earning Academy Award nominations for his astonishing debut, “The Act of Killing” (2012), and its 2014 companion piece, “The Look of Silence,” two films that explored the legacy of mass murders carried out after Indonesia’s 1965 revolution, when more than a million “communists” — in actuality, any real or perceived enemies of the newly installed regime — were killed, only for their perpetrators to not only walk free, but later enrich themselves and be celebrated as national heroes.
His third film, “The End” is a marked departure from his previous work. The director’s first foray into narrative fiction, it is a post-apocalyptic musical set entirely inside an underground bunker 25 years after a climate emergency has rendered the planet lawless and all but uninhabitable. It stars Tilda Swinton (Mother), Michael Shannon (Father) and George MacKay (Boy) as a wealthy and dysfunctional nuclear family that has hoarded fine art — and a seemingly endless supply of food and wine — as they wait out an apocalypse for which they are in no small measure complicit.
They’re joined by a personal doctor (Lennie James), a butler (Tim McInnerny), a maid (Danielle Ryan) and an old family friend (Bronagh Gallagher), each of them seemingly determined to live out their — and the planet’s — final days in a haze of nostalgia and denial. That comes to an end with the arrival of Girl (Moses Ingram), a survivor of the climate apocalypse who’s somehow found her way into their underground sanctum, and who forces them to confront hard truths about the self-serving narratives they tell themselves (while frequently breaking into song). Their reckoning is set to music written by Joshua Schmidt, with lyrics penned by Oppenheimer.
A story of rapacious capitalism, climate collapse and the plutocrats who seem less concerned with the planet’s survival than their own, “The End,” which will be released by Neon in the U.S. on Dec. 6, is very much a tale of our time. Yet for all its darkness, the director sees his “cautionary tale” as “a work of optimism.”
“It may be too late for the family [in ‘The End’], but I strongly believe it’s not too late for us,” he says. “We’re going to fight again.”
Variety spoke to Oppenheimer about staying hopeful in the age of Trump 2.0, writing the soundtrack to the apocalypse and why he feels compelled to “love all my characters, even if they’ve done monstrous things.” The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you feel once the results of the election finally sunk in?
I was thinking afterwards about my experience coming out as a young man in the early-’90s, at a time when there was no treatment yet for HIV and half the gay men in the city where I was living were HIV positive, and were just, for all we knew, going to die. And there was just this massive indifference, and the way — as part of Act Up at the time — we came together as an alternative and inclusive family and got ourselves arrested each and every day. We were involved with a needle exchange, and it was illegal in Boston to give out needles in shooting galleries to people who otherwise were going to be sharing needles and then infecting each other with HIV.
That was an awful time, but it was also a discovery of a deeper way of being human that comes from being human in solidarity and creative collaboration. Not fearlessly, because we were all frightened, but through that communion and solidarity to face, acknowledge and then overcome fear and find the inevitability of resolve. And I think it’s time for that again. I think it’s time for that again just because of the climate. I think it’s time for that again now with the potential for autocracy in the United States and elsewhere. And I think, just sort of knowing that’s what we’ll do — that’s at least what I’ll do, if that’s what it comes to — gave me a sense of peace. And sadness, that it comes to this. But peace.
It’s interesting that you said earlier that you “don’t have a choice,” because you use that phrase often in the film. Not in a good way.
“I don’t have a choice” is an excuse.
Exactly. Father, for example, uses it to justify his lifestyle, and his career in an oil industry that has contributed to the climate apocalypse that has rendered the Earth uninhabitable. And it was something I was thinking about in the context of the election, and this idea of what our choices are as Americans, when nearly 75 million people voted for — chose — Donald Trump.
I think there’s two types of hope, and I think the film is a cautionary tale about false hope. They sing at the end, “Our future is bright,” and they have a child, but to me, they’ve descended from one circle of hell to a couple circles deep.
It’s a very dark ending.
It’s a very dark ending, but you don’t make a cautionary tale unless you believe that people will heed the warning, and that it’s not too late to issue a warning. I’m — and I know Tilda [Swinton] is, too, and George [MacKay] — we’re a troop of inveterate optimists, but it’s a genuine optimism that says, “Look, if we stop, acknowledge the mistakes that we’re making and take responsibility for them — only then can we change course. But if we don’t change course, if we just tell ourselves that everything is going to be fine and stay the course, we’re headed toward the abyss.” And the latter is despair. It’s the wolf of despair in the sheep’s clothing of optimism.
The film, like all cautionary tales, is a work of optimism. The act of making the film and giving it to the world is a work of optimism. It’s, in a sense, the same offering that the girl brings to the family. The offering of truth and acceptance with the conviction that it’s not too late to change. Now, it may be too late for the family [in “The End”], but I strongly believe it’s not too late for us. We’re going to fight again. And of course, I have a choice. I could sit idly by. I just realized in a moment of peace coming out of that temple the other day that that’s not the choice I’ll make.
This film came out of what you thought was going to be a documentary project about an oligarch who was building a bunker for his family.
That was 2016. I wanted to make a third film in Indonesia about the billionaires who came to power through mass murder, and who enriched themselves by exploiting a populist that was terrified of them. And continuing to get away with murder in their business practices. By the time “The Act of Killing” came out, I had shot “The Look of Silence,” but not yet this third film. And I found I couldn’t return to Indonesia at all safely. I still can’t go back to Indonesia. I therefore started researching and approaching oligarchs who were in a structurally similar position elsewhere. There was one elsewhere in Asia who secured his family’s oil concessions through violence — through quite shocking political violence. And he was also interested in living forever, so he was investing his money in life extension remedies, and one of his little immortality projects was to buy a luxurious bunker so that his family could weather the apocalypse.
As part of a research trip with this family, we went to look at this bunker he was planning to buy. And I was haunted by all these questions that I did not know him well enough to ask yet, such as how would you cope with your guilt for the catastrophe which you’re fleeing? How would you cope with your remorse for not bringing loved ones and friends? How would you tell your story to the next generation that you raise inside this bunker, and would that be a way of whitewashing your past for your own benefit so you could live with yourself? And all those questions I realized I couldn’t discuss with them. But then I thought, “Man, the film I’d like to be making is in this bunker 25 years from now as the fly-on-the-wall documentarian that I would never be in my documentary work.”
Why a musical?
On the way home, utterly baffled about how, or if, I would ever use any of this, I watched one of my favorite films on my laptop, just to cleanse the mind and give me a reprieve. And that was [Jacques Demy’s] “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.” As I finished the film, it came to me. I’ll make a musical, because the musical is the quintessential genre of false hope. The idea that every tomorrow will be better than today, everything will work out for the best. It’s an American genre, it’s really the genre whose wings take flight on that false hope and sings that false hope.
And you started writing during the pandemic.
When the pandemic started and we were locked down again, I just focused exclusively on it. I had a strong script and first drafts of all the songs by January 2021. So this is really written under a Trump presidency. And one of the things that just occurred to me is that this film, as awful as it is, is right at home in the present.
I can easily imagine Trump as a character in that bunker.
Luckily, Michael’s Father is much more likeable. What motivates me to make films and to spend so much time working on characters and their stories is a longing to be close to people. I want to get close to my characters. I see my filmmaking as an attempt to see people as deeply as I can. Not merely from an anthropological distance, but also to hold them in as tight an embrace as I possibly can.
I love all my characters, even if they’ve done monstrous things. Even Anwar Congo [the mass killer who was a protagonist of “The Act of Killing”]. He was not a friend, but I felt a love for him as a human being. And therefore, Mike’s father is capable of monstrous acts, but he’s also like a “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” avuncular figure, who unlike Jimmy Stewart’s character is haunted by self-hatred and anger.
And in a way, your characters are singing their way through those emotions.
What gets them singing is the self-deceptions — these crises of doubt as they start lying to themselves. They sort of reach for new melodies with which to console themselves. They start lying to themselves in song. And we’re humming along in our head and we’re identifying with those lies. We’re feeling what it is like when we make excuses to justify our own actions. What is it like when we tell ourselves everything will work out for the best when really, we know in our heart of hearts it probably won’t? And that is about also slipping into their skin and feeling with them in an almost haptic kind of identification.
Does that process of “slipping into the skin” of people we might otherwise struggle to identify with feel even more urgent to you now?
First of all, we have to remember that most people didn’t vote for Trump. Most people didn’t vote [at all]. And the 70 million or something that voted for him, I don’t believe these are people — most of them, not all — who wouldn’t call the fire department to stop their migrant neighbor’s house from burning down. I don’t believe these are people who just in their day-to-day behavior are hateful. I believe that hate becomes normalized, making it easier and easier, and more and more inevitable, that people will act in hate in their day-to-day interactions. And that’s when life gets very scary.
I don’t think we’re quite there yet. I think we live in an era of online instant gratification, and especially if we’re angry, we have one party that’s giving expression to that anger, albeit in a very toxic way, and another party that hasn’t read how angry people are correctly. When we’re angry, we look for something akin to hitting an angry emoji on Facebook, or firing off some nasty tweet on X. And I think Trump’s dark genius is to realize that he can offer the closest thing to that in electoral politics. But like the vote for Brexit in the U.K., it’s ultimately, even for the people who are voting, an act of self-harm, as I think they will realize if we do the work necessary [to show them].
How has “The End” been received since its premiere?
It divides people. I know that. It’s interesting because it divides critics much more than it divides audiences. I see that at screenings. The audiences are rapt and with the film, and that’s who I make the film for. I’m really happy with it. I’m very grateful that I got to make it.
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