28/03/2025 - The acclaimed Copenhagen-based US filmmaker speaks about his fiction debut, a fierce indictment of our collective gravitation towards bystanderism and self-deception

(© Petra Polčičová)

Copenhagen-based US filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer is best known for his first two films, the documentaries The Act of Killing [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2012) and The Look of Silence [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] (2014), about the mass genocide in 1965-66 masterminded by then-President Suharto, backed by the USA and the UK. Despite intending to make a third film for a trilogy, he was unable to do so for safety reasons and instead created The End [+see also:
film review
interview: Joshua Oppenheimer
film profile], marking his fiction feature debut. After world-premiering at Telluride and enjoying a victory lap around the festival circuit, The End opens in UK, Irish, German and Austrian cinemas on 28 March.

Through the style of a Golden Age US musical, The End tells the story of the last family on Earth (George McKay, Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon), comfortably living in a bunker, as we also slowly learn how they are implicated in a global climate apocalypse. Cineuropa sat down with Oppenheimer to discuss how his newest film is just as much about impunity and collective ignorance as his first two works.

Cineuropa: How did you develop this style of neoliberal critique that you use in The End, which could be considered more “subtle” than that of your first two films?
Joshua Oppenheimer: If The End is making an intervention like The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, it’s forcing us to look in the mirror and think, “How am I lying to myself?” It operates in two allegorical layers at the same time. It’s an allegory for the entire human family and a fading US empire. At the same time, these nameless characters are all of us and our families. All of us know – because it animates everything we do – that it is in our nature to die and lose the people we love. Therefore, the most fundamental question that we ought to care about, but which we’re too afraid to address, is: how shall we live? How do the lies and stories we tell ourselves obscure the nature of our relationships? I’m not talking about climate change or the economy any more. I’m talking about the way I hurt you as a child, or the way I shoved you as a parent into a nursing home when I knew you actually really wanted to live with me, and we never talked about it.

You work with micro-level personal elements and macro-level societal ones. How do you imbue your stories with both?
It’s a shifting thing in me. With The End, I started with the macro because of the genesis of the project: a real oligarch who was buying a real bunker. I saw that it could obviously head towards satire. The decision to dig into the characters has to do with my sensibility as a person. I have this sense that I make films because I want to know what it’s like to be other people. Everyone I look at with my cameras, I’m holding them in such a tight embrace that I can almost slip into their skin and feel what it’s like to be that person. […] With The Act of Killing, there was quite a satirical-sounding pitch: “Death squad members make a musical.” This is actually how I thought of it, because Anwar Congo [death-squad executioner and a lead subject in Oppenheimer’s first film] really loved those two musical numbers that he made. There was a long process of getting very close to him. There was a second process where I realised, “Now we’ve gone into his dreams and his personal fantasies, but we need to build up the social context around him.”

What is your cinematic relationship to narrative- and history-making as well as the innate power imbalances that exist?
One of the things I only came to realise in the last few weeks about The End, inherent to its vision and the entire way we staged it, is that the eponymous “end” is really the surrender of Moses Ingram’s character at the end of the movie. […] It’s a story of capitulation that all of us in our own lives have to go through, usually as children, in so-called coming of age. Because she’s never been a part of society, in the final song, she’s desperately trying to convince herself that her future is bright. She finds some relief in the self-deception. The fact that this happens in a form that is recognisably a product of a whole culture of false optimism – that’s reached its most crystalline perfection in this genre of American musical – deeply implies that we feel this form has reassured us that we are masters of our own destiny. The truth of this form is that it’s anaesthetised us and lied to us.

You speak a lot about self-deception. Where do you draw the lines between that, performativity and lies?
I’m just being speculative because I’m not quite sure I’ve thought about it in those terms. My first impulse is to say it’s all performative, but it’s performative for oneself. Often, we think of performance as always intended for an audience, but then we make the mistake of thinking that the audience is other people – the audience is first and foremost ourselves. Most of the songs are active and shot in single takes, where we’re bearing witness to people trying and failing to convince themselves of these lies. It doesn’t mean they recognise the truth. […] My work finds its truth, and therefore its hope, when we move beyond words and scripts, and when we move beyond forms of storytelling that are inherently always fictitious.