Mother (Tilda Swinton) is having a nightmare. Sleeping next to him is the sweet and affable father (Michael Shannon). She comes out of a nightmare and her husband comforts her. She lies to him and tells him she's fine, but she clearly isn't.
How could it be her? She knows everything. He knows that if he got out of bed and left his house, he would find a cold mine of salt. He knows that directly above the salt mine the world is on fire and that everyone is dead. She knows that the person responsible is the man she sleeps with, that sweet and gentle husband. And she knows she's not innocent either.
The end is a musical with songs sung by the six survivors who live in a luxurious bunker. They are all benefactors of the oil business, that is, they are still alive. It's a carefully constructed house of cards that after 20 years of living underground has become routine. But when Girl (Moses Ingram) arrives, their false sense of security is threatened and the lies they've told themselves to survive each day slowly begin to erode.
It is a curious and surprising project from director Joshua Oppenheimer, best known for his impressive documentary. The act of killingin which he and his co-directors ask their subjects to recreate mass murders they were involved in during the Indonesian civil unrest in the mid-1960s. I sat down with Oppenheimer before The endThe expansion of theater nationwide. We talked about the obvious: his big leap from documentary filmmaking to musicals and, more curiously, what it tells us about people when their wristwatch costs more than a car.
The Verge: I want to start with the obvious question: why did this story demand a musical? What is it about that genre that you wanted to explore?
Joshua Oppenheimer: Musicals are really the quintessential genre of false hope, and I say false hope because I think it's really desperation disguised as hope.
The idea that no matter what happens, the sun will rise tomorrow, or its most extreme form at the end, that our future is bright, which is what the family sings as they stare into the abyss at the end of the day. movie, desperately trying to convince himself that's the case; It's completely passive because little Orphan Annie, when she sings “the sun will rise tomorrow,” is simply hoping it will and counting on good luck.
And I think passivity comes from this deep place, from a deep sense of disempowerment. It's an American genre because we claim to be a democracy, but in some ways we've always been a brutal, rather crude oligarchy, with a Constitution that's not democratic at all, with everything from the electoral college to the Senate to manipulation of lifetime appointments. in the Supreme Court and our systems of checks and balances. Here is a country that tells itself it has all the power to shape its future, but not only do we have less social mobility than almost any other industrialized nation. The rags to riches story turns out to be a lie. But democratic history is also a lie.
The endThe opening is interesting for its warmth. You have Father comforting Mother after a bad dream, but as time goes by, we learn that these characters have done some pretty bad things.
We set up several things in that scene. We organize persecution and repression. We create a warm and affectionate Father. We establish a bad relationship because the Mother immediately lies to her. We organize some kind of Mexican showdown or whatever the problem is: they can't talk about it because the Father has to act like it's okay.
That scene used to appear elsewhere in the script and later in the film, and that was an inspiration in the editing to put it at the beginning because it offers the keys to unlock all the dynamics of the first choral song: The Mother's ill at. Calmly, the father leaves the dining room and sings “Forever the Strength of Our Family.” The mother immediately turns around and heads towards the flowers. We connect that instantly, for anyone paying attention, to the scene that preceded it. Whereas before (in the original cut) that scene was there, people would miss it.
Michael Shannon's performance is especially amazing. It is very sweet and endearing. And his song is so human. How did you know that was the right voice for this role?
He has a mellow, calm voice, like the kind of knitted sweaters he wears. But he is so sincere that he does not have that macho fear of almost regretting his longing for love. So he enters the tones, in falsetto, with ease, both in singing and in speaking.
He becomes almost like Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith goes to Washingtonbut with this kind of turbulent rage that can turn into self-hatred or rage and that, at its core, is inherently dangerous and unbalanced. I think he's much more interesting than Mr. Smith.
But he is very fatherly. And I love that. And then it's so surprising. (Shannon) is so free as an artist, as a performer, that he will just go where his inner life takes him and that makes him sincere and broken. I mean, everyone I chose has something that shares that nonchalance that I think makes them collectively not so much a troop as… I've come to describe them as members of the Doomsday cult who register for the rapture. They're hopeful, they're lost, and they're surprisingly deadly.
I loved how cold the bunker was. And it's knowing that everything is on fire outside, right? How did you go about finding the location for that and also, why is the apocalypse so cold?
It really all came from the songs. When the songs were these desperate attempts to convince themselves that everything will be okay, set to music like in all the Golden Age musicals and set to music with false hope, I realized that the audience should be able to forget sometimes that they are in the bunker. As we hum along with them as they sing, we must forget with them that they are trapped in a bunker. And that meant that there should be exteriors that take us into this sort of bunker model termite colony or ant colony where you have a big underground cavern structure, and then some of the caverns are finished in these beautiful rooms, and some of them They are just raw.
And that led to the idea that we would have exteriors like the salt mine. We filmed three weeks in a salt mine and we had the feeling that it should look like moonlight. There's a lyric, “You can shine like snow in the moonlight,” and I think that inspired (cinematographer) Mikhail Krichman and me to make the salt mines kind of cold and blueish. And then the rooms could be cozy, in contrast to what they are not. However, when they are not, the paper flowers would be a shocking red.
The layout of the rooms was then built in the studios, and the layout was determined by the structure of the songs. You're seeing people literally burst into song. We want to be patient with that, which means it didn't feel right to cut if we didn't have to. We tried to figure out how the lead vocalist, in any number, could lead us through his natural action to the next person. That led to certain plans and ideas.
We found floor plans that could accommodate all the songs in our set. That became the design of the bunker. And in a sense, the bunker shot actually has the structure of the songs as its DNA.
I want to ask you about the role of luxury wristwatches in this film. Everyone wears something special, which is a common class symbol in movies, but in an underground bunker they felt especially poignant.
There are two things. First, I wanted to make a third film in Indonesia with the oligarchs who came to power through the genocide there. And I couldn't because I couldn't safely return to Indonesia after The act of killing. I started researching oligarchs in analogous situations elsewhere. And I found out that someone was buying a bunker, and that inspired me. The end indirectly. But while I was on that trip and in the years I worked in Indonesia, I always knew that a sign of corruption was when people (and a sign of a corrupt country in general) was when people's watches cost more than their cars. This is how it became known that government officials were corrupt.
I really got interested in watches while making those two documentaries in Indonesia and researching these real-life oligarchs. I collected lines similar to those the Son says when he gives a watch to the Girl. He talked about rose gold and alligator skin and the most accurate watch ever made. And that was like in the back of my head. Then I wrote that song about the weather. (singing) The seconds pass very quickly before you realize it and they disappear. But I remember times when moments didn't disappear, when you closed your eyes, a single breath could go on and on forever. So the few breaths we had left didn't mean much.
That lyric cemented the role of clocks in the movie because… Now I get to the real point: ultimately, time is the antagonist, right? From the beginning? Son is doomed to end alone because mortality is the antagonist in all the stories. And when the parents die, the child will end up alone. Will he choose to commit suicide? Will he live the rest of his days in desolate solitude? The movie is about this family, these nameless characters are all of us because the family is each and every one of our families. But at the same time, it's the entire human family and we face the existential antagonist of time as we collectively decide whether or not we're going to address the ecological crisis, whether or not we're going to address climate change before it's too late.
Time is really something I want the viewer to be very aware of. And also how else we can't be present with each other because we lie to each other or because we can't apologize for the way we heard each other. Therefore, we are constantly worried about tiptoeing into forbidden areas that empty our relationships, and then we lose quality time where we can simply be together and share this story of who we all are.
