Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon Sing Through the Apocalypse in ‘The End’

The apocalypse and musicals don’t seem like the most likely pairing, but that’s exactly why filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer wanted to make his new movie, The End. “They came to me as a package. I think the musical numbers are what make the film fundamentally about delusion, self-deception, and a destructive kind of hope rooted in denial,” he tells Vanity Fair at the Telluride Film Festival.

After making his two previous features, the documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, Oppenheimer learned about a wealthy family that was looking to buy a luxurious bunker in case they needed to survive the apocalypse. Oppenheimer decided to base a film on that story, imbuing it with musical numbers inspired by classic films like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

It took Oppenheimer eight years to make the wildly ambitious result, centered on a wealthy family (played by Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, and George MacKay) whose luxurious life underground is interrupted by an unexpected guest (Moses Ingram). Their opulent bunker, with walls covered in magnificent works of art, is deep underground within a salt mine—filmed in an actual salt mine in Petralia Soprana, Sicily—and tensions build as the cracks in the family begin to be revealed.

The cast and Oppenheimer spent four weeks in rehearsal, which involved practicing the scenes, blocking, and musical numbers (there are 13 original songs in The End), resulting in four incredible performances that explore how we lie to ourselves to ease our own burdens.

At the Telluride Film Festival, where The End had its world premiere, Vanity Fair sat down with Oppenheimer, Shannon, MacKay, and Ingram to talk about getting this story and music right.

Vanity Fair: What were you looking for while casting The End?

Joshua Oppenheimer: For the members of the family, I was looking for artists whose inner lives flicker across their faces in ways that betray doubt and discomfort. And some artists are better at that than others. I think George and Michael have that gift. When I approached Tilda and then George, I had spent much of the pandemic in the Arctic part of Norway in the polar night, and would spend the days and nights watching the aurora when I had time and they were overhead. There’s something about the way the aurora flicker in this chaotic quantum dance when they’re strong that I feel actually both of these artists have in their faces. That was a kind of metaphor that Tilda and I used when I was looking to cast.

Moses, I think you have that too. But Moses also has this very natural, down-to-earth presence that I thought could be a foil to a family that has to be constantly performing their myths for each other—guiding, misleading, gaslighting, manipulating, cajoling each other to stick to the hymn sheet.

What made you want to sign on to this incredibly ambitious film?

George MacKay: The script itself is just beautiful, just really beautifully written. And it’s a subject that’s not looked at because it’s too difficult to look at—the things that you tell yourself, the sort of justifications that you make. At the beginning of this, I’d just become a father. So I was looking at life quite differently, and it was making me reflect on a lot because I was trying to establish a base layer in my own life that I’d be happy for my kids to jump off from. So it landed at a very personal time.

Michael Shannon: I just think it’s a pretty urgent matter. So there’s a certain absurdity right now to what’s happening in the world. We all know what’s going down; we see it more and more every day. Nothing’s changing. People keep saying it’s going to change, but it doesn’t. I was talking to my stepmom the other day about the election, and a lot of people in their family are going to vote for [Donald] Trump. We were talking about that, and she’s like, “Yeah, but they’re good people.” I’m like, “Yeah, I don’t doubt that. I know your family. I like your family. I like your brothers; they’re all sweet. I get what you’re saying. They’re good people.”

And I think the people in this movie are good people. They’re good people—and yet this is happening. So how good can they be? You have to take responsibility for the decisions you make, and the actions you take, and realize that you’re part of something larger than yourself.

Moses Ingram: I had never read or experienced anything like it. And my first thought reading it was, I don’t know if I belong in this phase. I don’t know if I’m the body for this story. And then sort of questioning why I felt that way. Meeting Josh, he was so passionate, and so that was really exciting for me.

You’re acting, so it’s pretend. But we were really underground in the dark, and so you start to absorb some of that darkness, if you will.

Shannon: I get what you’re saying—the atmosphere. We were in this salt mine. I never really shot anywhere like that before. It was beautiful to look at, but it was uncomfortable.

How much rehearsal was needed for the choreography?

Oppenheimer: The rehearsal period was a month, and we had parallel rooms. So there was a room where we were exploring the scenes by reading them and improvising around them. And it became very interesting to improvise the moments after a scene ended, because that’s where we discovered that the characters had to find harmony again. They couldn’t afford for the conflicts that were in each scene to fester.

And then we had another room where we were working on the blocking, because [cinematographer] Mikhail [Krichman] and I had spent four or five months, cumulatively, storyboarding all of those long, single-take scenes. Those had to be tested and planned so that we’d have enough time to execute them on the shooting day. Then they had singing rehearsals when they weren’t with me. And then they had dance rehearsals.

Were there nerves around the singing and the dancing?

Shannon: I’d already tried to sing like George Jones [for the TV series George & Tammy], so I’d kind of already been on the top of the mountain. But the songs are very difficult. What I really love about singing in the movie is it doesn’t sound like your typical Broadway musical. Those people can belt it out, but a lot of times those voices don’t have so much personality in them. They’re just technically proficient. And I feel like the voices in this movie really are statements of the people that are making the sound, and like the personality and the conflict. I feel that way about everybody singing in the movie.

Oppenheimer: I heard George and Mike sing, but I hadn’t heard Moses. You introduced yourself as not a singer. And so when I first heard Moses sing, I think it was kind of heart-stopping.

Shannon: A fellow asked me on the street, “You guys were lip-synching, right?” I’m like, “No, we sing live.”

Oppenheimer: It’s almost a hundred percent [live singing].

You said onstage that you just finished the film a week ago. What took so long?

Oppenheimer: Why did the whole film take so long? It was a learning curve for me to make the leap into narrative, and I took every step of it seriously. So there was a long process with my cowriter, Rasmus [Heisterberg], working on the script. Then we started with one composer whose mother got sick. There was the pandemic; that took some time. It just took the time it took. I’ve been lucky to be able to afford myself the luxury of time. You can kind of lie to yourself when you don’t have enough time and say, Well, I went as deep as possible. Actually, you just ran out of time.

It’s a very appropriate theme for this movie.

Oppenheimer: And I hate that. I really resist that. And I think on set, 90% [or] 95% of the time—which I think is an incredible batting average—we had enough time to go as deep as possible.