Mother (Tilda Swinton) is having a nightmare. Sleeping next to her is the sweet and friendly father (Michael Shannon). She talks herself out of a nightmare and her husband consoles her. She lies to him and says she is fine, but she clearly is not.
How could she? She knows everything. She knows that if she gets out of bed and leaves the house, she will have to face a mine of cold salt. She learns that just above the salt mine, the world is on fire – everyone is dead. She knows that the man she is sleeping with, a loving and friendly husband, is responsible. And she knows she's not innocent either.
Ending is a musical with songs sung by six survivors living in a luxurious bunker. They are all beneficiaries of the oil business, which is to say they are still alive. It's a carefully constructed house of cards that has become routine after living underground for 20 years. But when the girl (Moses Ingram) arrives, their false sense of security is threatened and the lies they tell themselves every day slowly begin to unravel.
This is a curious and surprising project from director Joshua Oppenheimer, known for his brilliant documentaries act of murderIn which he and his co-director ask their subjects to reenact mass murders in which they were involved during Indonesia's civil unrest in the mid-60s. I sat in the front with Oppenheimer EndingNationwide theatrical expansion of. We talked about the obvious thing – his big jump from documentary filmmaking to music – and more curiously, what it tells us about people when their wristwatch costs more than a car.
The Verge: Let me start with the obvious question, why was there a demand to make this story a musical? What is something about that genre that you want to know?
Joshua Oppenheimer: The musical is really the quintessential genre of false hope, and I say false hope because I think it's really despair in the sheep's clothing of hope.
The idea that no matter what happens, the sun will come up tomorrow – or a more extreme form of it at the end, that our future is bright, is what the family is singing about as they stare into the abyss at the end of the film, desperately trying to convince themselves of this. She believes that this is the case – it is completely passive because little orphan Annie, when she sings “The sun will come out tomorrow”, she just wants it to be so and is counting on good luck.
And I think inaction comes from this deep place, from a deep sense of disempowerment. It's an American style because we claim to be a democracy, but in a way we've always been quite a rigid and brutal, brutal oligarchy with a constitution that is not democratic at all, from the Electoral College to the Senate. Everything is there. Promoting lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court for our system of checks and balances. Here is a country that tells itself that you have all the power to shape your future, but not only do we have less social mobility than almost any other industrialized nation. The story of rags to riches turned out to be a lie. But the democratic story is also a lie.
EndingIts beginning is interesting because of its warmth. Your dad is consoling mom after a nightmare, but as time goes on, we learn that these characters have done some very bad things.
We established a lot of things in that scene. We established exorcism and oppression. We established a father who is loving and caring. We establish a bad relationship because the mother immediately lies to him. We set up some kind of Mexican standoff or whatever the problem is – they can't talk about it because the dad has to act like it's OK.
That scene comes up elsewhere in the script and later in the film, and there was an inspiration in the editing to place it at the beginning because it provides the key to unlocking all the dynamics in the first choral song: The Mother's Ill at Ease, Father comes from the dining room and sings “The Strength of Our Family Forever.” Mother immediately turns and goes to the flowers. For anyone paying attention, we immediately connect it to the scene immediately preceding it. while before [in the original edit] That scene was there, people will remember it.
Michael Shannon's performance is particularly astonishing. He is very sweet and cute. And his singing is very human. How did you know it was the right voice for the role?
She has a sweet, smooth voice, like the knitted sweater she's wearing. But he is so honest that he does not have that manly fear of almost eagerness in longing for love. So he easily moves into falsetto, into pitches, both in song and speech.
He almost becomes like Jimmy Stewart mr smith goes to washingtonBut with this kind of fiery anger that can become self-hatred or anger and, that is inherently dangerous and unbalanced in some way. I think he's much more interesting than Mr. Smith.
But he is very strange. and I like that. And then that's amazing. [Shannon] As an artist, as an artist he is so free that he will go where his inner life takes him and that makes him honest and broken. I mean, everyone I've cast has something that shares that insecurity that I think makes them collectively not that much of a group… I kind of think of them as members of the Doomsday cult. I have come to describe those who are signing up for enthusiasm. They're hopeful and they're lost and they're surprisingly mortal.
I loved how cool the bunker was. And this is with the knowledge that everything outside is on fire, right? How did you find the location for this and also why is Apocalypse so cool?
Everything really came out of the songs. When the songs were desperate attempts to convince myself that everything would be okay, like all Golden Age musicals musicalized and false hope, I realized that audiences sometimes need to be able to forget that. They are in the bunker. When we hum along with them and they sing, we should forget with them that they are trapped in a bunker. And that meant there had to be exteriors that lead us to this type of termite colony or ant colony bunker model where you have a big underground cave structure, and then some of the caves end up in these beautiful rooms, And some of them are still raw.
And that led to the idea that our outer regions would be salt mines. We shot for three weeks in a salt mine, and it just felt like it was supposed to feel like moonlight. There's a song, “You can shine like snow in the moonlight,” and I think that inspired it. [cinematographer] Mikhail Krychman and I will make the salt mines cool and blue. And then the rooms may be cozy on the contrary when it is not. However, when they aren't, the paper flowers will be a shocking red color.
The rooms in the studio were then laid out and the layout was determined by the structure of the songs. You literally see people crying in the song. We want to keep it with us, which means it doesn't make sense to make cuts if we don't have to. We tried to figure out how the lead singer in any number could lead us to the next one through his natural action. This led to some floor plans and ideas.
We found floor plans that could accommodate all of our choruses. That became the design of the bunker. And in a way, the floor plan of the bunker is actually somehow similar to its DNA, the structure of the songs.
I want to ask you about the role of luxury wrist watches in this film. Everyone is wearing something special – a common class indicator in movies, but in an underground bunker, they felt especially poignant.
There are two things. At first, I wanted to make a third film in Indonesia with the oligarchs who came to power there through genocide. And I couldn't do that because I couldn't return to Indonesia safely after that act of murderI began researching oligarchs in similar situations elsewhere. And I found out someone was buying a bunker, and that inspired me Ending by proxy. But when I was on that trip and working in Indonesia for years, I always knew that a sign of corruption is when people – and a sign of a corrupt country in general – is when people's watches cost money. More than their cars. This is how you knew that government officials were corrupt.
I became really interested in watches while making those two documentaries in Indonesia and researching these real-life oligarchs. I collected lines similar to what the son says when he gives a watch to the girl. He talked about pink gold and crocodile skin and the most perfect timepiece ever. And that was kind of in the back of my mind. Then I wrote that song about time. [singing] Before you notice, the seconds pass very quickly and they are gone. But I remember a time when moments didn't disappear, when you closed your eyes, a breath lasted forever. So, how few breaths we exhale does not really matter.
That song cemented the role of clocks in the movie because… Now I'm getting to the real point: time is ultimately the antagonist, right? from the very beginning? The son is ultimately doomed to be alone as death is the antagonist in all the stories. And when the parents die, the son will be alone. Will he choose to kill himself? Will he spend the rest of his days in loneliness? The film is about this family, these unnamed characters belong to all of us because this family is the family of each one of us. But at the same time, this is the entire human family and we are facing an existential paradox of time as we collectively decide whether we are going to solve the ecological crisis, we are going to solve it before climate change happens. Are there or not? Its very late.
Time is really something I want the audience to be keenly aware of. And also if we can't be present with each other because we're lying to each other or unable to apologize for the way we've heard each other. So we're constantly worried about wandering into uncharted territory that drains our relationships, then we lose quality time in which we can just be together and share this history that we know. What are all?