# ‘Musicals can be quite sinister’: Tilda Swinton and Joshua Oppenheimer on bonkers bunker singalong The End

Time is short for the family at the heart of Joshua Oppenheimer’s new film. Mother, Father and their adult son eke out their days in an underground bunker with walls decorated with priceless old masters, fine wine on the table and half a mile of bedrock above their heads. They gather each evening for formal dinners. They sing upbeat songs to keep the darkness at bay. “We thrive in our happily-ever-after,” they burble. “Together our future is bright.”

Time is similarly tight for the writer-director and his star when they beam in via video link from Berlin. It’s the last day of the film festival, a late scramble towards the finish line, and Oppenheimer and Tilda Swinton are each working to a separate schedule. Oppenheimer is scheduled to take part in a panel discussion; Swinton is booked on a plane out of town. Once Berlin is behind her, that is it, she is done. Hard deadline, clean slate. Her new life of freedom starts tomorrow, she says.

## Tilda Swinton

Inspired by a Russian tycoon’s survival bunker, the pair’s post-apocalyptic tale takes in environmental collapse, our facades and delusions – and big ol’ show tunes.

### The End

If you have to go out, you may as well go out with The End: a flamboyant, tear-stained final bow of a movie; a post-apocalypse musical sung by the last family on Earth. Swinton plays Mother, who is regal but fragile and claims to have danced for the Bolshoi in her youth. Michael Shannon is Father, a billionaire industrialist who poisoned the planet and is now dictating a hagiographical memoir to his innocent Son (George MacKay). The family have servants, food and show tunes to sustain them. Eventually, sure enough, their careful fabrications begin to break down. “I brought energy to billions of people,” Father splutters. “But sometimes I wonder if I did more harm than good.”

### Swinton's Interview

Oppenheimer is best known for The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, his groundbreaking documentaries about the Indonesian genocide. The End, too, began life as a documentary. Oppenheimer shadowed a Russian oil tycoon who was renovating a former Soviet compound in the Czech Republic. He met the tycoon’s family and took a tour of the bunker. “Afterwards, that bell could not be unrung,” he says. “I couldn’t imagine doing anything that did not investigate the questions that had haunted me that visit. How would you cope with leaving your loved ones behind? How would you cope with your guilt over the catastrophe that you’d fled? Can you raise your kids as blank canvases?” Fiction, he decided, was the only logical path. “I couldn’t imagine making any film with this family except a fly-on-the-wall documentary from inside the bunker, 25 years after they’d moved in.”



Down but not out … Swinton and Michael Shannon in The End. Photograph: Felix Dickinson/Neon

The songs in The End play a similar role. They are falsehoods that draw attention to themselves; they lie and confess in the same breath. The director has an ambivalent relationship with Hollywood musicals. He likes them and hates them; he is seduced and repulsed. In the end, their sunny positivity turns his stomach.

### Oppenheimer's Interview

“As a kid, there was a divorce in my family. My world was shattered apart and so I used to spend time with my grandfather and we’d take the train to New York. He loved musicals and we’d always go and sing along. As an eight-year-old, I loved it. The music was this little, safe bubble for me. But then later you realise that this sentimentality is fundamentally escapist and that the consequence of all this escapism is catastrophe. That might sound abstract, but I think it’s true. We live in a world where everyone is lying in well-intentioned ways to get along – and the consequences of that are bleak.”

The way he talks about musicals, they sound like a nesting ground for populism, even fascism. Swinton isn’t prepared to go that far. “But I think musicals do have a relationship with delusion and self-deception in a way that opera doesn’t,” she says. “It’s easy to be swept up, taken in, particularly if you’re singing along. I’m thinking of that great moment in Cabaret where the boy starts singing Tomorrow Belongs to Me until everyone joins in, one by one. It can be quite sinister.”



‘We had some gifted singers in the cast’ … Tim McInnerny, Shannon, George MacKay and Swinton in the film.



‘Musicals have a relationship with delusion’ … MacKay and Moses Ingram.

In her youth, the actor bounced from Communist party meetings to stints on stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company. That is her pedigree. Perhaps it established her core principles. She sees politics and art as connected, indivisible, with each side informing and affecting the other.

### Oppenheimer's Interview

Swinton explains that she can speak only for herself. “But I was in a privileged position and decided to use it. I thought: ‘What can I say that might be good for people to hear?’ I don’t mean in a delusional, panacea, ‘Oh, it will be all right, darling’ kind of way. Nor do I want to paralyse them with fear and loathing and division. And reminding people of that connection felt right.” She shakes her head. “Because if you look at all of this shitshow that we are in right now, the only way it works is when it’s possible to disconnect people and manipulate them. As soon as we remember our capacity to be connected, we have a fighting chance.”

Our time is up. The director disappears, chaperoned to a discussion panel next door. Swinton sticks around. Her flight is not until tomorrow. She is heading home to Scotland and has nothing in her diary.

### Oppenheimer's Interview

While in Berlin, Swinton received a lifetime achievement award. It was the festival’s tribute to a distinctive career that has wended from an formative association with Derek Jarman through Hollywood blockbusters and Oscar success to collaborations with the likes of Pedro Almodóvar, Jim Jarmusch and Wes Anderson. At the podium, she used her acceptance speech to criticise what she described as “state-perpetrated and internationally enabled mass murder,” while praising independent cinema as a melting pot, a port in the storm, “immune to the efforts of occupation … or the development of riviera property”. Swinton didn’t go so far as to mention Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu by name, but it was perfectly clear whom she was talking about.

## Tilda Swinton's Interview

In her youth, the actor bounced from Communist party meetings to stints on stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company. That is her pedigree. Perhaps it established her core principles. She sees politics and art as connected, indivisible, with each side informing and affecting the other.

### Oppenheimer's Interview

Swinton says that she can speak only for herself. “But I was in a privileged position and decided to use it. I thought: ‘What can I say that might be good for people to hear?’ I don’t mean in a delusional, panacea, ‘Oh, it will be all right, darling’ kind of way. Nor do I want to paralyse them with fear and loathing and division. And reminding people of that connection felt right.” She shakes her head. “Because if you look at all of this shitshow that we are in right now, the only way it works is when it’s possible to disconnect people and manipulate them. As soon as we remember our capacity to be connected, we have a fighting chance.”

The End is in UK and Irish cinemas from 28 March.
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