Joshua Oppenheimer's apocalyptic musical with Tilda Swinton is about the last family left on Earth
The Oscar-nominated filmmaker stopped by Here & Queer to talk about his audacious take on the end of the world
Here & Queer is a Canadian Screen Award-winning talk series hosted by Peter Knegt that celebrates and amplifies the work of LGBTQ artists through unfiltered conversations.
"It's an allegory for all of humanity," Joshua Oppenheimer says about his new film, the apocalyptic musical The End. "It's about the last human family, and the power structures of our societies are mirrored in that family … But at the same time, it's any family. It's your family. It's my family. And it's about all of us."
The End stars Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon as the heads of a very wealthy family who are living in a bunker years after the end of the world. It actually began as a documentary project Oppenheimer was working on about a family similar to the one in the fictional film he eventually made.
"[They were] in the energy business and had done some pretty violent things to secure their oil empire, and they were buying a bunker," he says, recalling his early research for the documentary projectt. "I travelled to see this bunker with them, and I immediately switched lanes and thought, 'I need to make a musical in a bunker decades after the world has ended, haunted by the regrets that this family must be trying to keep at bay. And it has to be called The End.' But I didn't know Tilda Swinton would be the lead."
Swinton's presence on set helped Oppenheimer achieve something pretty remarkable.
"I feel the film is filled with the most magnificent human radiance, but also human vulnerability," he says. "And I felt that on set each and every day. I mean, not only [is everyone] singing live, but they're sometimes singing ensemble songs in single takes, like the whole song. Six characters singing in harmony with complicated blocking all in one shot. So it becomes like a penalty kick in soccer, everyone and everything has to align just perfectly. And Tilda has a song in the film, which is a four-and-a-half-minute breakdown in song, and it must be one of the most emotionally and musically complicated pieces that anyone has ever had to sing in any musical."
Oppenheimer says The End is very much connected to his previous films, even if it's a departure in form.
"All of my work is concerned with how we become who we are through the stories we tell, both as individuals and as a kind of a human family," he says. "How we tell stories to obscure the world from ourselves and to obscure ourselves from ourselves, and how we make up and then cling to excuses to ease our regrets. How somehow we managed to get ourselves to believe those excuses, even though we know we've made them up. That is to say, all of these films…are meditations on the uniquely human ability to lie to ourselves. Other animals lie. You know, a bird will feign a broken wing to lead us away from its nest. But I don't think birds lie to themselves. And that's maybe a tragic flaw that makes us human. And the one that will lead to our downfall if we don't open our eyes and look very directly at the biggest problems confronting us so that we can solve them before it's too late."
The End opens in Canadian cinemas on Dec.13.