Fittingly, I meet American filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer at the end of the world. Or rather the top of it. We are in a hotel bar at the Tromsø International Film Festival, 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle. He is here to present his new film The End, a post-apocalyptic musical in which Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon belt out songs of dissonant optimism; one is called “The Future is Bright”. It’s a bold, fascinating film — a La La Land for the despairing with a healthy dose of quirk.
“I wrote it in the very far north of Norway, near the Russian border, a place called Kongsfjord, a 12-hour drive north-east of here,” Oppenheimer tells me. “The aurora borealis were overhead a lot, and one night they were flickering with a special kind of vehemence. And I thought, these are the kinds of actors we need for The End, actors whose faces flicker with every ripple of doubt or longing, every moment of unease. Only some actors’ faces do that.”
Swinton and Shannon certainly have those faces. They play a mega-rich couple who have escaped a global environmental catastrophe and retreated to the safety of a luxurious bunker, complete with art gallery and swimming pool. She rearranges the pictures while he writes a self-aggrandising memoir of his days as an oil executive with the help of an adult son (George MacKay). Their orderly life of high art, emergency drills and fine cuisine is interrupted by the arrival of an intruder from the surface, played by Moses Ingram (The Queen’s Gambit): “I saw Moses’s work and I thought: that’s her. Her face is like the northern lights.”
And Oppenheimer already had his eye on Shannon. “I wanted him because of his performance in Nocturnal Animals and because of Werner’s film.” The film is 2009’s My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, and Werner is Werner Herzog, the legendary German filmmaker and godfather of many a meme.
The two directors had already formed a bond, Herzog having been instrumental in bringing Oppenheimer’s remarkable 2012 debut documentary feature The Act of Killing to the screen and international acclaim. Co-directed by Christine Cynn and an Indonesian filmmaker credited only as “Anonymous” for fear of reprisals, the film recounted the mass killings in Indonesia during the military dictatorship of the 1960s, with accomplices of the regime re-enacting the murders and tortures they had committed as surreal cinematic tableaux. It was followed in 2014 by an equally potent companion piece, The Look of Silence.
Herzog and his wife Elena advised Oppenheimer on The End as well. “Werner spent his 80th birthday, September 5, 2022 in his back garden with the line producer who works on his documentaries, combing through our budget, trying to help us find ways of cutting so that we could greenlight the film.”
Having started out as another documentary project, The End again shows Oppenheimer’s knack for turning non-fiction in revealing dramatic directions. Lush music counterpoints the bleakness of the doomsday situation, even if the execution is sometimes strained. But being off-key is part of the point. “The songs emerge from these moments of unease, as the lies the characters tell themselves are pierced by the kinds of truths that enter their bubble.”
Joshua Schmidt wrote the music and Oppenheimer the lyrics. “Part of the length of time I spent doing this film was the fact it’s three writing processes,” the director says. “You have basically the Frankenstein of two works that have to become one dramatic work, and it has to become one piece of music, like a symphony or an opera. And that was a third part of the writing process, revising both the script and songs. We had an extended workshop with excellent actors in Denmark to test how the songs were growing out of the scenes.”
Oppenheimer, who is 50 and lives in Malmö, wears black and possesses an intellectual coolness while contemplating the possible end of the world. He speaks softly and carries a big stick of ideas: “The End is about cognitive dissonance and the ways we tell ourselves stories to obscure the world from ourselves and, indeed, to obscure ourselves from ourselves.”
Environmental disaster seems a particularly timely subject with the Los Angeles fires still fresh in the memory. But why has cinema been reluctant to confront the climate emergency?
“The End is divisive, and no doubt some viewers’ eyes glaze over when the climate comes up. But I hope that for people whose hearts are at least somewhat open, the film grabs them at a personal level, and makes them ask the question that answers your question: what stories am I telling myself that allow me to disregard this? And likewise, what stories am I telling myself that allow me to sleepwalk through my own life? This is an ancient dilemma. This is Socrates saying the unexamined life is not worth living. The stakes are everything for every single person in this hotel, on this planet, because each person, each consciousness, has only one shot.”
So, it’s bigger even than climate change? “It’s much bigger than climate change,” Oppenheimer says. “We have no idea what we are or why we’re conscious or why we’re sitting here having this conversation, or what this metre and a half of space between us is, but here we are, and this is our chance at being. And that question — how then shall I live? — is vital at the individual and collective level.”
Oppenheimer argues that our cultural response is no longer fit for purpose, with its “sole purpose is to extract profit” or, worse still, offering false self-understanding. “The most pernicious and ubiquitous is ultimately what I call the Star Wars morality, which says: the world is divided into forces of good and evil, and individuals inhabit or choose one or the other.” This Manichean outlook is not confined to Hollywood films, he says, and can just as easily be found in art-house cinema.
Nor does he think that innovations such as AI are going to improve matters. “I just had a chance to work with the Veo 2, the new Google AI video generator. All these things do is rehash the most predictable things we’ve created in the past.” Oppenheimer compares them to termites, which build their nests without understanding the mathematics that underpins the architecture.
“There’s this wonderful book, The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas. He asks: what is our termite nest? Our collective project that we create all the time without having any idea how we do it? And it’s language. We’re constantly innovating and adjusting language, but language is creating us more than we are consciously creating it. If you expand it to include institutions and structures and all the things that emerge, those models are what create us and condition our consciousness . . . All our intelligence has been artificial intelligence from the moment we developed language.”
As we part ways in the darkness of the Arctic winter, I feel strangely elated by this meeting with an articulate, sensitive and moral artist. The End might not be a crowd-pleaser exactly, but there’s something bracing, exhilarating even, about facing up to the facts.
‘The End’ is in cinemas from March 28
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