by Gill Pringle at San Sebastian International Film Festival
If the end of the world doesn’t seem like much to sing about, then Oscar-nominated director Joshua Oppenheimer asks you to think differently with his bizarre yet fascinating musical, The End.
Twenty-five years after environmental collapse has left the Earth uninhabitable, we meet Tilda Swinton’s “Mother”, Michael Shannon’s “Father” and George MacKay’s “Son” confined to their luxurious underground bunker clinging to the rituals of daily life.
An urgent and cautionary tale, the family try to maintain their blind optimism through song, although their idyllic existence crumbles when Moses Ingram’s stranger “Girl” arrives, enchanting “Son” with news from an outside world which he has never witnessed for himself.
When Oppenheimer began assembling his dream cast for The End, he tells FILMINK how he made it clear that singing was mandatory.
“I don’t think the singing put any of the cast off for a second. Everyone was so intrepid and just embraced the idea of singing,” says the director when we meet him at the 72nd San Sebastian Film Festival where the film was screened in the Official Selection.
“It was just something that everyone threw their hearts into and learned. It was very important to me that when ‘Mother’ sings, we don’t hear a switch to some super polished, Broadway style voice. It was very important that all the characters sing in their own voices because these songs are very often emotional breakdowns and so they have to be deeply rooted in the character because they are singing their hopes and delusions. They sing their lies.
“They sing the stories that they tell themselves so that they can cope with their situation. And so, it was crucial to me that those lies and hopes and delusions be beautiful and seductive, so that when we hear them, we’re humming along with them, and in a sense, slipping into their skin and swept up into the beauty of the lie with them.
“So, that meant we should be able to forget that we’re in a bunker. We shouldn’t feel like we’re in a claustrophobic concrete box,” says Oppenheimer, best known for The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence.
In order to achieve that aesthetic, we see the wealthy family’s bunker filled with art and antiques although – just outside their doors – is a barren white landscape which they shot in an Italian salt mine.
“The singing was one of the great challenges about being a part of this production,” admits MacKay, whose eclectic career highlights include 1917, Captain Fantastic and True History of the Kelly Gang.
“We had an incredible singing coach from Tasmania called Fiora Cutler, who helped us all massively.
“Moulin Rouge was a big film for me growing up. I love a musical, but I would by no means call myself an expert. I grew up in London, so I saw a lot of shows and I love the theatricality of musicals. I’ve always been really interested in bombastic performances as well. Like, John Leguizamo is an actor I really love, because of his work with Baz Luhrmann.
“So, for ‘Son’, who is a very fragile and sensitive character, his circumstance is so extreme, it was fertile ground for an expressive performance, and that was egged on by the fact that it was within a musical as well as hopefully making a Grammy performance!” he jokes.
“So, that’s the kind of intrigue with the music. And it was just a genuine pleasure to dive in and Fiora helped all of us leaps and bounds. It’s like a muscle – you work out if you have stunts for a job, you train. You get stronger. And with this, our voices all got stronger.”
Beneath Oppenheimer’s musical conceit of The End, he hopes it’s a way to make his urgent message more palatable. “I want my films to be mirrors. I try to invite, cajole, sometimes even force viewers to acknowledge their most urgent truths. This inevitably requires confronting our self-deceptions, exploring their sometimes terrible consequences. Our ability to lie to ourselves is probably the tragic flaw that makes us human. And it will surely be the one that destroys our species – unless we stop and find the courage to recognise our lies for what they are,” he argues.
“Other species may have brought about their own extinction, but I can’t imagine that they saw it coming. They never discussed it, fretted over it, planned in detail how it might be avoided – and then did nothing. Imagine how foolish we would appear to them? We see the abyss ahead of us, we know we are racing toward it, yet we do not change course.
“We tell ourselves that the cataclysm will never arrive; the day of reckoning will be postponed. Like in an action film, every time we cut back to the approaching disaster, it’s a little farther away than it should be, giving our hero just enough time to save himself.
“Some – of limitless means – believe they can afford to give up on collective solutions and decide, instead, to save themselves. They think it is too late for the human ship to correct its course, but having enjoyed such power and privilege, why should they go down with everyone else? They will survive the apocalypse alone with their families, cut off from the broader human family. They tell themselves they can live on, in complete isolation, and still remain human. Their humanity is self-contained. And why not? Our economy is based on this same idea – that the isolated and self-interested individual is the fundamental unit of being,” he says.
MacKay found the project irresistible. “When Josh got in touch, it was an amalgamation of the script itself and what it was looking at. And given the way that Josh has looked and studied and excavated this theme in his previous work so extraordinarily, this script profoundly articulated his vision.”
If Joker: Folie a Deux perhaps buried the fact that it is a musical in its marketing campaign, then Oppenheimer wants to shout it from the hilltops.
“There is no hiding that this is a musical, because it has to be a musical. If it were not a musical, it would be bleak and a scary science fiction story about a family trapped in a bunker trying to survive alone after the world has ended,” says Oppenheimer.
“But the fact that it’s a musical is what makes it a film about delusion and denial and storytelling. I think if you were to hide that aspect of the film, it would backfire profoundly, because the audience would come into the film expecting something utterly different than what they get.”
