Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Fittingly, I meet American filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer at the end of the world. Or rather the top of it. We are in a hotel bar at the Troms\u00f8 International Film Festival, 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle. He is here to present his new film The End, a post-apocalyptic musical in which Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon belt out songs of dissonant optimism; one is called \u201cThe Future is Bright\u201d. It\u2019s a bold, fascinating film \u2014 a La La Land for the despairing with a healthy dose of quirk.\u00a0\u201cI wrote it in the very far north of Norway, near the Russian border, a place called Kongsfjord, a 12-hour drive north-east of here,\u201d Oppenheimer tells me. \u201cThe aurora borealis were overhead a lot, and one night they were flickering with a special kind of vehemence. And I thought, these are the kinds of actors we need for The End, actors whose faces flicker with every ripple of doubt or longing, every moment of unease. Only some actors\u2019 faces do that.\u201d\u00a0I hope this film grabs people and asks them: what stories am I telling myself that allow me to sleepwalk through my own life? This is an ancient dilemma Swinton and Shannon certainly have those faces. They play a mega-rich couple who have escaped a global environmental catastrophe and retreated to the safety of a luxurious bunker, complete with art gallery and swimming pool. She rearranges the pictures while he writes a self-aggrandising memoir of his days as an oil executive with the help of an adult son (George MacKay). Their orderly life of high art, emergency drills and fine cuisine is interrupted by the arrival of an intruder from the surface, played by Moses Ingram (The Queen\u2019s Gambit): \u201cI saw Moses\u2019s work and I thought: that\u2019s her. Her face is like the northern lights.\u201d\u00a0And Oppenheimer already had his eye on Shannon. \u201cI wanted him because of his performance in Nocturnal Animals and because of Werner\u2019s film.\u201d The film is 2009\u2019s My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, and Werner is Werner Herzog, the legendary German filmmaker and godfather of many a meme. The two directors had already formed a bond, Herzog having been instrumental in bringing Oppenheimer\u2019s remarkable 2012 debut documentary feature The Act of Killing to the screen and international acclaim. Co-directed by Christine Cynn and an Indonesian filmmaker credited only as \u201cAnonymous\u201d for fear of reprisals, the film recounted the mass killings in Indonesia during the military dictatorship of the 1960s, with accomplices of the regime re-enacting the murders and tortures they had committed as surreal cinematic tableaux. It was followed in 2014 by an equally potent companion piece, The\u00a0Look of Silence.Herzog and his wife Elena advised Oppenheimer on The End as well. \u201cWerner spent his 80th birthday, September 5, 2022 in his back garden with the line producer who works on his documentaries, combing through our budget, trying to help us find ways of cutting so that we could greenlight the film.\u201dHaving started out as another documentary project, The End again shows Oppenheimer\u2019s knack for turning non-fiction in revealing dramatic directions. Lush music counterpoints the bleakness of the doomsday situation, even if the execution is sometimes strained. But being off-key is part of the point. \u201cThe songs emerge from these moments of unease, as the lies the characters tell themselves are pierced by the kinds of truths that enter their bubble.\u201d\u00a0Joshua Schmidt wrote the music and Oppenheimer the lyrics. \u201cPart of the length of time I spent doing this film was the fact it\u2019s three writing processes,\u201d the director says. \u201cYou have basically the Frankenstein of two works that have to become one dramatic work, and it has to become one piece of music, like a symphony or an opera. And that was a third part of the writing process, revising both the script and songs. We had an extended workshop with excellent actors in Denmark to test how the songs were growing out of the scenes.\u201d\u00a0The End is about cognitive dissonance and the ways we tell ourselves stories to obscure the world from ourselves and, indeed, to obscure ourselves from ourselvesOppenheimer, who is 50 and lives in Malm\u00f6, wears black and possesses an intellectual coolness while contemplating the possible end of the world. He speaks softly and carries a big stick of ideas: \u201cThe End is about cognitive dissonance and the ways we tell ourselves stories to obscure the world from ourselves and, indeed, to obscure ourselves from ourselves.\u201dEnvironmental disaster seems a particularly timely subject with the Los Angeles fires still fresh in the memory. But why has cinema been reluctant to confront the climate emergency?\u201cThe End is divisive, and no doubt some viewers\u2019 eyes glaze over when the climate comes up. But I hope that for people whose hearts are at least somewhat open, the film grabs them at a personal level, and makes them ask the question that answers your question: what stories am I telling myself that allow me to disregard this? And likewise, what stories am I telling myself that allow me to sleepwalk through my own life? This is an ancient dilemma. This is Socrates saying the unexamined life is not worth living. The stakes are everything for every single person in this hotel, on this planet, because each person, each consciousness, has only one shot.\u201d\u00a0So, it\u2019s bigger even than climate change? \u201cIt\u2019s much bigger than climate change,\u201d Oppenheimer says. \u201cWe have no idea what we are or why we\u2019re conscious or why we\u2019re sitting here having this conversation, or what this metre and a half of space between us is, but here we are, and this is our chance at being. And that question \u2014 how then shall I live? \u2014 is vital at the individual and collective level.\u201d\u00a0Oppenheimer argues that our cultural response is no longer fit for purpose, with its \u201csole purpose is to extract profit\u201d or, worse still, offering false self-understanding. \u201cThe most pernicious and ubiquitous is ultimately what I call the Star Wars morality, which says: the world is divided into forces of good and evil, and individuals inhabit or choose one or the other.\u201d This Manichean outlook is not confined to Hollywood films, he says, and can just as easily be found in art-house cinema.Nor does he think that innovations such as AI are going to improve matters. \u201cI just had a chance to work with the Veo 2, the new Google AI video generator. All these things do is rehash the most predictable things we\u2019ve created in the past.\u201d Oppenheimer compares them to termites, which build their nests without understanding the mathematics that underpins the architecture. \u201cThere\u2019s this wonderful book, The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas. He asks: what is our termite nest? Our collective project that we create all the time without having any idea how we do it? And it\u2019s language. We\u2019re constantly innovating and adjusting language, but language is creating us more than we are consciously creating it. If you expand it to include institutions and structures and all the things that emerge, those models are what create us and condition our consciousness\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009All our intelligence has been artificial intelligence from the moment we developed language.\u201d\u00a0As we part ways in the darkness of the Arctic winter, I feel strangely elated by this meeting with an articulate, sensitive and moral artist. The End might not be a crowd-pleaser exactly, but there\u2019s something bracing, exhilarating even, about facing up to the facts.\u00a0\u00a0\u2018The End\u2019 is in cinemas from March 28Find out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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