Some, of limitless means, believe they can afford to give up on collective solutions and decide, instead, to save themselves. They think it is too late for the human ship to correct its course, but having enjoyed such power and privilege, why should they go down with everyone else? They will survive the apocalypse alone with their families, cut off from the broader human family. They tell themselves they can live on, in complete isolation, and still remain human. Their humanity is self-contained. And why not? Our economy is based on this same idea – that the isolated and self-interested individual is the fundamental unit of being.

The End explores the logical conclusion of this self-deception: a family holed up in a bunker years after everyone else has perished, enjoying every comfort, a last flicker of human consciousness surrounded by the artifacts of a vanished species, desperately telling themselves that they are happy and good, and thus all is well.

Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.

I want my films to be mirrors. I try to invite, cajole, sometimes even force viewers to acknowledge their most urgent truths. This inevitably requires confronting our self-deceptions, exploring their sometimes terrible consequences. Our ability to lie to ourselves is probably the tragic flaw that makes us human. And it will surely be the one that destroys our species—unless we stop and find the courage to recognize our lies for what they are.

Milan Kundera wrote, “Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!”

The second tear is the beginning of sentimentality, and it usually is escapist. Consider the feeling of crying a second tear for something painful. Does it not allow us to flee from the concrete moral demand placed on us by the suffering of others, and escape into the “fellowship of humankind”? And does that not let us feel good about ourselves for joining “all humanity” in caring, while not recognizing that we have escaped from an all-too-real moral obligation into a fiction that lets us off the hook?

In my work, I try to bring the viewer to a place where we cry a third tear—where we understand the tragic consequences of the second tear and mourn the terrible costs of sentimentality itself. I want the viewer to feel the devastating effects of escapist fantasy, of lying to ourselves, of not confronting our most important problems. But we never cry the third tear without also feeling the first and second. (We must first empathize with the fear fueling the characters’ delusions. We are never moved to the third tear when we are satirizing, confident in our own superiority, certain that we are immune to the self-deception on which the characters depend.)

Which brings me to musicals. Melodies are introduced early on. When characters burst into song, the orchestra plays along, and the audience already knows the tune. In this way, characters’ private emotions are collectivized. And if there is a chorus, what began as an intimate moment between, say, two lovers magically transforms into an occasion shared by dozens of dancing girls (and the audience).

We all feel the emotions together. “How nice to be moved, together with all mankind...” The second tear is built into the structure of the musical, making it the only form of cinema truly honest about its own sentimentality.

This honesty—the fact that the escapism of the second tear is built into the genre—makes musicals an ideal form for provoking the third tear, for getting viewers to feel the tragic consequences of the musical’s own escapist sentimentality. This is particularly so if the characters survive by lying to themselves. In The End, the family faces doom with desperate, misbegotten optimism. The classic Hollywood musicals of Vincente Minnelli, Gene Kelly, and Busby Berkeley form, collectively, cinema’s most optimistic genre. Nowhere else do we see such naive certainty in the world’s ultimate harmony (created, it should be noted, right when humanity developed the ability to destroy itself, and the planet, at the push of a button). 

I love these films. I laugh like a delighted toddler every time a character opens her mouth to sing. Yet at the same time I shudder at the price we will pay for this cotton-candy cheerfulness, for the perpetually sunny forecast in the midst of a hurricane. That is, I feel my eyes welling with a third tear. That musicals provoke in me these contradictory feelings tells me that it is the right genre for the bunker’s desperate form of optimism.

It is an optimism born of fear. Afraid to face their own guilt, the characters in The End fear change, for to change would require acknowledging their mistakes and accepting their pasts. Until they can do that, they are condemned to lie to themselves, even in their private thoughts. Expressed in song, we hum along to their delusions, identifying with them while at the same time witnessing —and grieving for—their tragic consequences. That is, we cry a third tear.

If the characters’ hearts open to us when they sing, yet even in song they deceive themselves, a frightening question lies at the film’s heart: what remains of us when we lie to ourselves in our dreams and unconscious yearnings? But isn’t this question universal? Afraid of death and the moral reckoning it promises, don’t we strive for eternity through recognition, legacy, and influence? Aren’t we hungry for more because then we might just amount to something? And our rich but fleeting inner lives become echo chambers for these delusions.

The bunker in The End is a manifestation of such delusions. Therefore, there is no sharp contrast between “reality” and “fantasy,” between the dialogue scenes and musical numbers. The songs embody the family’s fantasies, but since these fantasies gave birth to the bunker, and before that to the civilization of which the bunker is at once culmination and nadir, this gilded tomb is suffused with music.

—Joshua Oppenheimer

On the journey home from our tour of the bunker, which included an art vault and wine cellar, pool, and gardens, I was fascinated by the absurdity but desperate for a reprieve from the ugliness of it all, so I watched one of my favorite films, the beautiful Umbrellas of Cherbourg by Jacques Demy. Only it wasn’t a reprieve; instead, it was an epiphany, and I thought, “This is what I have to do next.”

I knew then that I would make a Golden Age musical about one of the last human families, struggling to cope with doubt, meaninglessness, and guilt, decades after a disaster in which they themselves were implicated. Set in a bunker, the musical form would allow me to explore the denial and delusion, the fantasies and false hopes, that allow them to ease their regrets. It hit me like a bolt of lightning, this perfect marriage of form and content.

I also felt that musicals are these incredible empathy machines. When characters sing and we’re singing along with them, we feel their inner lives in a very physical way. And the songs would lend the film an emotional depth, a sweet counterpoint to the bleakness, an intimacy and warmth – even if that sweetness and beauty is a lie.

And finally, the musical form would make it raw: The characters molt as they sing: between melodies, between verse and chorus and bridge, between revelation and excuse, between one fantasy and another, in these moments of crisis, of shell-lessness, there’s a possibility for change.

Q: Apart from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, were there particular musicals you looked to for inspiration as you developed this idea?

Joshua Oppenheimer: Yes. I felt that the form and music should be inspired by the great American musicals of the 1950s, with their buoyant confidence in the future, for this is the genre of false hope, baseless optimism, delusion camouflaged in a cloak of sentimentality.

That it’s a musical in this tradition makes The End a film about storytelling: about how we tell stories to obscure the world from ourselves, obscure ourselves from ourselves, how we make excuses to erase our regrets, how we somehow manage to believe those excuses. That is, how we achieve the uniquely human feat of lying to ourselves – and the awful consequences of such self-deception: namely, how it prevents us from facing our mistakes and changing course, both as individuals and as a species, before it’s too late.

And this is what makes the film universal: it’s about how human beings lie to themselves rather than a bleak science fiction scenario of a family struggling to survive the apocalypse. Through song, they struggle to convince themselves (and each other) of the lies they need to go on living.

Q: How did you approach writing the script in collaboration with screenwriter Rasmus Heisterberg (A Royal Affair, In the Blood)? And writing the songs together with composer Josh Schmidt?

Joshua Oppenheimer: To ensure that we were writing truthfully about how human beings behave, Rasmus and I opened up to each other about our families, our parents, our extended families, families of friends, for The End is a family drama. In this way, we developed an intense and intimate friendship. Writing involved him coming to my house every day; we would talk about a sequence, then we would go into separate rooms and write drafts and swap them. We were utterly exposed to each other.

And about Josh Schmidt, let me start with this. He has given us, I think, one of the most beautiful musical scores ever written. He taught me that every line of lyric should be as dramatically active, and full of subtext, as the most important dialogue. This was the greatest gift because it means the songs become crucial to the drama. Some of the very most important turning points can therefore happen in song. Songs are never anthems or interludes, they are the film’s beating heart.

Josh began by declaring to me that the film is about hope. Initially, I was provoked, because I delineate sharply between the family’s false hope, rooted in denied despair and unfounded optimism, and genuine hope, rooted in the belief that if we face our problems and address them collectively, we can solve them and grow as a human family. Quickly though, I understood that Josh meant both kinds of hope: the false hope that gets the family out of bed in the morning, and the real hope that motivated us to make this film.

We also talked about beauty: the music should be hauntingly beautiful, infectious, and palliative – even if it’s a lie! We started from the divine beauty of the American luminists, whose paintings adorn the bunker’s walls. The music, Josh and I felt, must be so beautiful that it keeps the characters going. It’s what allows them to truly believe they are living happy, meaningful lives.

Josh can compose without lyrics, but he really loves to work from lyric. He would have me boil down the essence of a dramatic moment and write it as a kind of prose poem. I would send these to him, and he would respond within hours by sending me the most exquisite, polyrhythmic, kaleidoscopic, and deeply personal music. It was a magical process! I boil down, in words, a character’s truth and send it to someone who responds with music!? I felt like a sorcerer’s apprentice, who had no idea how the spells actually worked. And Josh is so transparent and collaborative. He’d invite me to suggest revisions, so I could say, “the melody here, what if it went like this instead of that?” Or “I really love this figure, but I wish it would develop differently, or continue to grow.” And he was open to that. It was the most amazing dance. And after eight months we had a full score.

Q: How did the casting process unfold? How did you choose Tilda Swinton as Mother, George Mackay as Son, Michael Shannon as Father and Moses Ingram as Girl?

Joshua Oppenheimer: I sensed Tilda would be the perfect traveling companion, and she would create the only possible Mother. I didn’t know she would be willing to sing, but I knew she’s the very definition of intrepid. The moment we spoke, there was this immense rapport. Finding her felt inevitable, like fate had brought me to this human being. I then wanted it to be like this with each role we’d go on to cast. Tilda found words for this. She said, “This is like a fairytale challenge where whoever takes it on is the perfect and only person.”

George Mackay was the second person we cast. When we cast Tilda, it was during the COVID-19 pandemic. I had been doing rewrites on the script on the north coast of Norway, in the winter, and I spent hours in the polar night gazing at the aurora. Aurora flicker in this kind of quantum dance as the solar winds hit the Earth’s magnetic field. George’s face reminds me of the Northern Lights. It flickers with his inner life, and I can’t look away. Indeed, this is crucial for The End, because this is a film about doubt, and I knew that I wanted characters’ doubts to betray themselves on their faces, their inner lives flickering until it compels them to try and suppress (or transform) these doubts in song.

Casting director Laura Rosenthal introduced me to Moses’s work. There’s something so fragile, open-hearted, trusting and dignified in Moses’s bearing as a human being and as a performer. I felt she would be a perfect foil to everyone in the bunker. After all, the virtue she brings to the family is that she’s able to accept her mistakes: she can feel guilt without shame. She can feel tormented by her past but finds no comfort in excuses. In that sense, Girl shouldn’t be performative in the same way as the rest of the family, and Moses is stunningly, seemingly effortlessly natural.

And then Michael Shannon! He seemingly has no vanity about depicting good or righteous people, even if, as an artist, he defends his characters fiercely. He’s interested in human complexity. He’s deeply concerned with inner torment and guilt, and their destructive consequences, because he knows that only by illuminating these darker emotions can he make something truly necessary. He had a deep sense of moral purpose about the project, too; he was concerned about what the film would say about climate, greed, the exclusion and disregard of the most vulnerable. And he has a beautiful sense of the absurd!

Q: With the screenplay and the cast in place, you embarked on a four-week rehearsal period in Bray, Ireland at Ardmore Studios in February and March of 2023. What sorts of discoveries did you make about these characters and how you wanted to approach the actual shoot during that time?

Joshua Oppenheimer: We needed to create a family, with a backstory that haunts everyone but is kept secret from Son. We also had to discover how they managed to maintain this delicate balance for decades, while always haunted by hopelessness, meaninglessness, and the abyss. For this work of discovery, we read the scenes, discussed them, then improvised around them.

In parallel there were singing, dancing, and blocking rehearsals. The cinematographer, Mikhail Krichman, and I spent months planning how we would shoot each scene, and then the sets were designed to accommodate those visual ideas. This previsualization was essential for learning how the musical numbers would function dramatically. A key purpose of rehearsal was to test and refine these plans. We had a studio space that was the size of our sets, and we taped out the walls on the floor with different colored tape. We started, of course, with a reading, and stumbled through a sing-through of the film as well. But then we would get people up on their feet and try and test out the blocking ideas to see if they would work. Some of the longer takes in the film are ambitious ensemble songs of several minutes, so this was crucial. Sometimes, we ended rehearsal confirming that a staging idea could work, but often we ended with a flurry of questions that could only be answered on the day of shooting. By the end of rehearsal, this cast, they were horses chomping at the bit to be let out of the gate.

Q: How did you work with production designer Jette Lehmann (Melancholia) to arrive at the look of the environments in which this family lives out their remaining days?

Joshua Oppenheimer: Jette and I started from the premise that as the characters lie to themselves, as they cling to hope, we should be free to forget that we’re in a bunker. After all, their home is a manifestation of their fantasy, which should be seductively beautiful. This meant the bunker could not feel claustrophobic or dark. The lack of windows would make this difficult, and cramped concrete spaces with low ceilings were not an option. Jette, Mikhail and I explored many approaches until we found the solution: a spacious but windowless manner home where a simulacrum of daylight streams in through the ceilings, then diffuses from room to room. In lieu of windows, we’d have Mother’s exquisite paintings. And crucially, the bunker’s rooms would be caverns, finished with walls, built inside a much larger underground structure, like an ant or termite colony. This would give us exteriors. We visited 15 mines before settling on the world’s most stunning salt mine at Petralia Soprana, Sicily.

Q: How would you describe the atmosphere that you fostered on set to ensure everyone was engaged and supported?

Joshua Oppenheimer: I had a dream of creating a playground for the cast to do committed, deep, passionate work, even though we all knew it would be incredibly challenging. The nature of the material—the story, its themes—would inevitably take everyone out of their comfort zones. And my God, they worked hard. Their commitment, the emotions that they were finding, the issues they were exploring, were thrilling, radiant and also sometimes very painful. I guess it was naïve to imagine it would be a playground, but we tried to create an atmosphere of mutual respect, even love. The set was almost silent, a focused temple for intense, very difficult, very beautiful work.

Q: You’ve talked about The End as a cautionary tale. What do you hope audiences take away from the experience of watching the film?

Joshua Oppenheimer: This is a film about a family 25 years after the world has ended, and they are at least partly responsible for the catastrophe that brought about the downfall of human civilization. It’s inherently too late for them—but it’s not too late for the audience.

I’ve always felt creating a cautionary tale is an act of hope, built on a conviction that it’s not too late for us to change. To open your heart and watch a film like this is also an act of hope because it shows an willingness to being challenged – and to change. I long for my films to be mirrors in which we discover ourselves through the work of empathy—that by empathizing with the people on screen, we recognize our most important truths, our most mysterious truths, our most beautiful but often painful parts of ourselves, that we normally have difficulty articulating. And we learn from that.

Q: Joshua has cited Golden Age musicals as a strong influence. Were there specific musicals that you looked to, and could you elaborate on how that kind of storytelling influenced your work on the film?

Josh Schmidt: When people talk about Golden Age musicals, often they’re referring to a period where the form evolved beyond Vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, when Rogers and Hammerstein started to work together. In those years, America was in a catbird seat in world geopolitics. South Pacific or The King and I, those plays feature a deeply Western perspective, and there’s a crazy amount of hope in all those pieces of music in that time. It’s a little naive, maybe, a little innocent. That spirit is implanted within this music. But what neither of us wanted was to make a satire or a joke about the characters’ situations and their feelings while they’re inside that bunker. The End is not a satire; it is not a tongue-in-cheek use of the form.

Q: When you began to write and compose the music for these lyrics that Joshua had written, what were your biggest sources of inspiration?

Josh Schmidt: We were in an exploration phase when I came aboard. The first proper song that Joshua and I started to write was “The Big Blue Sky,” which is Father’s number, and that music undulates in fragments all the way throughout the film. The next song was Mother’s song, “The Mirror.” In Caroline, or Change, Jeanine Tesori has this song called “Lot’s Wife,” and it’s essentially a long let-it-all-out monologue; maybe a very early predecessor of that is in Gypsy, with Sondheim and Jules Styne’s “Rose’s Turn,” which was constructed of fragments from other songs in the piece. The fragmentary nature of those songs presents a state of mind. It’s about somebody going through a bunch of different emotional things all at once. Little pieces of music all throughout Mother’s song work their way through the entirety of the film as well. How I like to work, particularly when trying to nestle in a bunch of music actively within a dramatic framework: The songs themselves can be very distinct, but the musical material that they come from has a sense of continuity. You get a sense that there’s a cohesive world at play.

Q: The End features a total of 13 songs. Could you describe how they came together, how you and Joshua collaborated on them early on, and how they evolved over time?

Josh Schmidt: Initially, we met every day, and we’d spend about four or five hours working together. We were deeply in synch over a six-month process of composing songs in piano/vocal form, just piano and singing. No orchestration. Then I did some demos with voices where I was living, and then Joshua and the team did a full demo recording of all the songs with singers in Copenhagen.

The people singing the demos were professional singers. And if you know anything about my music in the theater, I’ve grown up as a composer working with actors, particularly character actors. I’m a huge proponent of a very naturalistic performance, taking a song and shaping it according to the emotions of the character. But it was helpful for Joshua to get a sense of what it’s like to work with singers before working with the actors on how to get into and out of a song that’s holistically integrated into the drama.

After that, I did a first draft orchestration of the songs and wrote the basis for the overture. Then you throw the cards up in the air when actors are cast. They bring their own opinions. You have to customize everything to ensure they feel comfortable, that their personalities are woven into their songs.

Q: What role did Marius De Vries (La La Land, CODA, Annette) play in the production?

Josh Schmidt: I can’t overstate the value of having Marius as an executive music producer—his experience in working to bring out the best of everybody was invaluable. Fiora Cutler was also incredible as a technician of the human voice who got the cast comfortable with singing, and where certain ideas can land in their voice in interesting and healthy ways.

Q: Did the actors sing live on set or were they performing to pre-recorded tracks?

Josh Schmidt: Almost all the singing was recorded live on set. The actors had a small earpiece to hear a piano accompaniment. To prepare for this, we spent three weeks doing pre-records for all the actors so that we had a version of every song that they were comfortable with, interpretively. Then we decided which piano accompaniments could be live, affording the actors freedom of tempo, and which had to be pre-recorded because there were backup vocals involved. Whenever possible, we were live. It’s an extraordinarily complicated process, but the goal of the music department was to put everybody in the best position to give their best performance.

Q: What was your role on set during filming?

Josh Schmidt: I was on set whenever there was singing or dancing – in rehearsals, the studio shoots in Ireland and Cologne, and in the salt mine in Sicily. My job was to conduct the on-set pianist, and to work with Joshua whenever he needed to revise a song on the day. One of my favorite things is to hear your music come alive as an actor sinks their teeth into it and performs it. I can’t say enough good things about the cast. Everybody gave terrific performances, and they all embraced the idea of allowing their performance to be grounded and natural.

Q: When was the score recorded and finalized?

Josh Schmidt: We had a very tight post-production process in which orchestration was rewritten to match the intimacy of the material. We discussed orchestration and incidental music from July through January 2024. Then, we had a month to put together the incidental score and final orchestrations before we recorded in February with the Film Orchestra Babelsberg in Berlin.

Q: As a composer, what are you most proud of having achieved artistically with The End?

Josh Schmidt: This is my first foray into this scale of production, and first foray into film at this level. I’m still processing what I’ve learned, what I did well, what I could have done better. It has invigorated me and shown me vistas that I hadn’t even dreamt of beforehand. I’m proud to have worked with everybody involved in it, and I feel very grateful to them.