The apocalypse and musicals don’t seem like the most likely pairing, but that’s exactly why filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer wanted to make his new movie, The End. “They came to me as a package. I think the musical numbers are what make the film fundamentally about delusion, self-deception, and a destructive kind of hope rooted in denial,” he tells Vanity Fair at the Telluride Film Festival.
After making his two previous features, the documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, Oppenheimer learned about a wealthy family that was looking to buy a luxurious bunker in case they needed to survive the apocalypse. Oppenheimer decided to base a film on that story, imbuing it with musical numbers inspired by classic films like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
It took Oppenheimer eight years to make the wildly ambitious result, centered on a wealthy family (played by Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, and George MacKay) whose luxurious life underground is interrupted by an unexpected guest (Moses Ingram). Their opulent bunker, with walls covered in magnificent works of art, is deep underground within a salt mine—filmed in an actual salt mine in Petralia Soprana, Sicily—and tensions build as the cracks in the family begin to be revealed.
The cast and Oppenheimer spent four weeks in rehearsal, which involved practicing the scenes, blocking, and musical numbers (there are 13 original songs in The End), resulting in four incredible performances that explore how we lie to ourselves to ease our own burdens.
At the Telluride Film Festival, where The End had its world premiere, Vanity Fair sat down with Oppenheimer, Shannon, MacKay, and Ingram to talk about getting this story and music right.
Vanity Fair: What were you looking for while casting The End?
Joshua Oppenheimer: For the members of the family, I was looking for artists whose inner lives flicker across their faces in ways that betray doubt and discomfort. And some artists are better at that than others. I think George and Michael have that gift. When I approached Tilda and then George, I had spent much of the pandemic in the Arctic part of Norway in the polar night, and would spend the days and nights watching the aurora when I had time and they were overhead. There’s something about the way the aurora flicker in this chaotic quantum dance when they’re strong that I feel actually both of these artists have in their faces. That was a kind of metaphor that Tilda and I used when I was looking to cast.
Moses, I think you have that too. But Moses also has this very natural, down-to-earth presence that I thought could be a foil to a family that has to be constantly performing their myths for each other—guiding, misleading, gaslighting, manipulating, cajoling each other to stick to the hymn sheet.
What made you want to sign on to this incredibly ambitious film?
George MacKay: The script itself is just beautiful, just really beautifully written. And it’s a subject that’s not looked at because it’s too difficult to look at—the things that you tell yourself, the sort of justifications that you make. At the beginning of this, I’d just become a father. So I was looking at life quite differently, and it was making me reflect on a lot because I was trying to establish a base layer in my own life that I’d be happy for my kids to jump off from. So it landed at a very personal time.
