When Michael Shannon and George MacKay start singing in the first few minutes of The End, it’s a touch shocking, even if you were anticipating it.
An ideal morning, As he completes an intricate diorama of a fictionalized all-American environment, complete with pine trees, a strong train track, and, just for good measure, the Hollywood sign, MacKay croons, extending the o in morning. If I were a cat, I would be purring, but no one is moving. Bespectacled and business-casual, Shannon begins his own song with a lovely falsetto, “To think this all leads to us / It’s quite beautiful even to think about.” He then praises his son’s artwork.
Their singing is genuine, and the musical arrangement supporting their voices is beautiful. Even though this father and son are inside a sunless bunker six miles deep, praising the beauty of the dawn, no one is winking or making fun of them.
It soon becomes clear that they are lying to one another and to themselves in order to cope, disassociate, and self-soothe. And what better medium than a musical to tell a lie?
The other shocking fact is that Joshua Oppenheimer, the director of the gruesome Oscar-nominated documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence about the 1960s Indonesian genocide, was the inspiration and director of The End, a song-driven postapocalyptic drama that opens in theaters on Friday and stars Tilda Swinton, Bronagh Gallagher, and Moses Ingram.
Films
Joshua Oppenheimer on The Act of Killing, reconciliation
The filmmaker of the Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer, talks about the film’s production and aftermath.
All of this sounds somewhat like Mad Libs. As he states over Zoom from the Catskills during the week of Thanksgiving, Oppenheimer, 50, a profoundly reflective interviewee, adds that the theme in all of his work has been the gap between the stories we tell ourselves and the mystery and miracle of who we truly are. It’s the universe’s awakening and self-discovery—the emptiness and everythingness.
Werner Herzog, a well-known figure, advised Oppenheimer to make a fiction movie when The Look of Silence debuted in 2014.
I simply said, “No, flat out,” remembers Oppenheimer, who had started planning a new documentary on a wealthy oil-business family in Japan who were shopping for a luxurious underground bunker. His mind was spinning after touring their end-of-the-world complex, which was equipped with a swimming pool and a wine cellar.
How in the world would this family deal with their responsibility for the disaster they were escaping? He ponders. How would they handle the guilt of abandoning loved ones? With little exposure to the outside world, how would they raise a new generation that would be a blank canvas on which they could paint any picture of their history they desired?
Oppenheimer’s crazy epiphany occurred as he was watching one of his favorite comfort movies, the breezy French musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964).
Referring to his radical, unsettling novel The Act of Killing, he says, “One of the great things about making a film [for] which the logline could be Death Squad members make a musical to dramatize their memories of genocide is that it really buys you license to propose any crazy idea and have it taken seriously.”
Oppenheimer, who has a soft, gossamer voice and speaks almost professorially, took his own notion seriously since he believed the issue he wished to explore required a sung approach.
By way of explanation, he says, “Perhaps the positive spin that musicals tend to put on a chaotic reality is what has always drawn me to the form.”
The filmmaker is fully aware that the height of American musicals’ popularity on stage and cinema took place in the midst of the Holocaust, World War II, the Great Depression, and the threat of nuclear war. Carousel was doing boffo business on Broadway in August 1945, when the United States detonated atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The chorus of the show’s concluding number sings, “Hold your head high when you walk through a storm, and don’t be afraid of the dark.”
Musicals are frequently delusions that were created during violent and destructive periods. With such a fitting last name, Oppenheimer refers to the genre as the “wolf of despair in the sheep clothing of hope.”
A British music arranger and producer who has worked on a number of movies, including Moulin Rouge! and La La Land, was contacted by him in 2016.De Vries was sold right away: “You really don’t have to say anything else,” he said. The concept of fusing a musical with a post-apocalyptic movie is simply so fascinating and insane.
Selecting the ideal composer was a crucial first step. Oppenheimer hired Kimberly Akimbo and Jeanine Tesori, the Tony winner for Shrek the Musical. Tesori persuaded the writer-director to compose the songs himself, which he acknowledged was a scary task and something he had never done before.
When Tesori’s mother was diagnosed with cancer, she decided to put the project on hold in order to concentrate on caring for her. At that point, Tesori had started putting some of his ideas to music. She introduced Oppenheimer to Joshua Schmidt, a Milwaukee native who has written seven musicals, including the off-Broadway production Adding Machine, and two anthology operas. Schmidt has also composed music and designed sound for live theater in Chicago, New York, and London.
Schmidt had a preliminary interview with Oppenheimer over Skype. Schmidt, who had read the screenplay, implied that the story was essentially about optimism before observing the director’s obvious deception.
According to Oppenheimer, “I felt he was the wrong composer for that reason.” “What do you mean there’s hope?” I asked. Did you interpret the plot and conclusion incorrectly? He responds, “No, no, I just mean that the music is their form of hope.” Even if it’s a fictitious hope, it’s what motivates them to get out of bed in the morning. Therefore, the music must have that soaring, aspirational character that grows from tiny seeds, glimmering rays of promise.
Schmidt was employed on March 5, 2020, a week before the world shut down, after they suddenly clicked. Then I entered the bunker,” Schmidt, 48, jokes, remembering the deeply meta experience that showed him directly how easily some people lose their minds when confined within when the outside world becomes intolerable.
Why would people begin to express their emotions through song?
When characters need to express a reality that is too strong for spoken words, they often break into song. This is one of the typical rules of musical theater. Here, however, skepticism served as the inspiration for the songs. For more than 20 years, these elite survivors have been telling themselves tales of their own bravery and virtue, despite the fact that they were directly responsible for the climatic disaster and left family members to perish. However, Oppenheimer claims that as those storylines begin to deteriorate, the protagonists are more akin to passengers thrown into the water from a shipwreck and are frantically grabbing debris to construct a life raft.
He clarifies that those are the tunes. In order to compose fresh anthems of false hope, they are searching for melodies.
The Joshuas first connected via Skype. Schmidt from Milwaukee and Oppenheimer from Copenhagen wrote a book of twelve songs in the unique rhythm of each character’s inner monologue and speech almost every day for seven months throughout the pandemic. Swinton’s mother sings about how strangers used to be everywhere, while Shannon’s father sings about the vast, blue sky. Son (MacKay) attempts to man up about ejecting the Girl (Ingram) who appears inside the bunker one day; she is reluctantly allowed to stay, and her first song, a wordless keening, is the first tremor of actual truth.
Frequently, the lyrics are meaningless clichés. Oppenheimer calls them the equivalent of the politically overused phrase thoughts and prayers and often a character s train of thought will run out of steam and they ll reach for a new melody midsong. Schmidt built the entire thing as a recursive feedback loop appropriate for the confined environment, with fragments being repeated and intertwined.
It’s important to note that both Oppenheimer and Schmidt preferred actors with singing abilities above professional vocalists. These were character songs, and once Swinton came onboard, she argued that this was like a fairy-tale challenge: Whoever agreed to sign up for such a bizarre, audacious assignment was the person who should be cast.
Shannon says he has always loved to sing, participating in a youth chorus in his hometown of Lexington, Ky. He was never a musical theater kid, although he did play upright bass in his high school production of Bye Bye Birdie.
Ever since I was a teenager, this subject has been at the forefront of my mind, Shannon, 50, says of Oppenheimer s concept. I think it s urgent and important and I liked exploring it in a very different way you know, as opposed to just banging people over the head with information.
The cast rehearsed in Ireland for four weeks before shooting. Fiora Cutler, a venerable Hollywood vocal coach, was on hand to make everyone feel safe and supported. Schmidt expected that he might need to alter his sometimes complex, rangy melodies for these untrained singers, and he encouraged them all to find the right voice for their character.
Tilda loves to sing up in the stratosphere, Schmidt says. It s a strange, beautiful-sounding instrument up there, and that s where she prefers to sing. Michael sings the lowest note that he can up to the highest note that he can, but he sings it in a voice that is relevant to his characterization of the Father.
Still, he adds, you d be surprised how little we had to change.
The actors vocals were performed mostly live, with just a simple piano accompaniment playing in an earpiece. Intricate blocking and choreographed camera movements allowed for long takes with multiple actors overlapping in song.
Films
The three filmmakers who saved the world
Forty years later, we catch up with the directors of The Day After, Testament and Threads, films that shocked viewers and changed the minds of politicians.
When we were rehearsing, Shannon says, I just had such a hard time imagining how you spend that long underground and you don t completely lose your mind. And I think one of the ways they found to do that is through this music. Not that any of them, I believe, are the ideal of mental health, but they hold on. They re holding on through this music.
Oppenheimer acknowledges that his film feels all the more timely now thatquestionable attitudestoward the climate are on the rise. And he s surrounded by the world s richest men, the director says of the president-elect, to whom he owes favors. I think we can expect an oligarchy now.
He continues to smile and speak gently as he says all of this. Oppenheimer has stared the ugliest facets of humanity right in the face, and he knows how close we are to the brink of self-destruction. Still, he argues that The End is a cautionary tale and therefore, ultimately, positive.
It seems to be about the future, he says, but really it s a dark vision of the present, made in the conviction that while it may be too late for the family in the film, it s not too late for us to embrace genuine hope. And genuine hope, in contrast to false hope, is the belief that if we actually stop and look honestly at our problems, we can actually solve those problems and there s still time enough to do so.
Note: Every piece of content is rigorously reviewed by our team of experienced writers and editors to ensure its accuracy. Our writers use credible sources and adhere to strict fact-checking protocols to verify all claims and data before publication. If an error is identified, we promptly correct it and strive for transparency in all updates, feel free to reach out to us via email. We appreciate your trust and support!