Oscar Nominee Joshua Oppenheimer Worries His ‘Home Country Is Becoming a Dictatorship’ but It’s Not ‘The End’ Just Yet: ‘Above You, There’s Still a Sky’
U.S. filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer, now based in Denmark, worries his “home country is perhaps becoming a dictatorship.”
“It remains to be seen. The question we all face, each and every one of us, is this: ‘Is it too late for us?’ I encourage you to look up and see that above you, there’s still a sky,” he said at Sweden’s G?teborg Film Festival on Sunday.
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“When we read about the genocide in Gaza – which horrifies me particularly because it’s committed in my name as a Jew – when we read about thousands of people drowning in the Mediterranean Sea every year, trying to escape conditions of misery that we knowingly impose on them so that our clothes, our electronics, our food and our energy remains cheap… We feel heartbroken for a second and then we look for suitably heartbroken emoji,” he noted.
“Through that sentimental gesture of placing that emoji, we abdicate our responsibility to do anything further. We escape from the horror of what we’ve just witnessed and place ourselves in a bunker. Do we still have time to do that?”
Oppenheimer, behind Oscar-nominated documentaries “The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence,” directed starry musical “The End” featuring Tilda Swinton – who produced alongside Oppenheimer and Signe Byrge S?rensen – George MacKay, Moses Ingram and Michael Shannon.
Initially, he was supposed to make another doc about wealthy people “exploiting a country that was terrified of them.”
“People who could literally get away with murder as they were building their business empires. But I could not return safely to Indonesia after making ‘The Act of Killing.’ I began investigating oligarchs who had enriched themselves through violence elsewhere and I found a particular oil tycoon, I won’t say where, who invited me to see a home he was building. It turned out to be underground, much like the bunker in ‘The End,’” he recalled.
“Touring that place, I was haunted by questions. ‘How would you cope with your guilt for the catastrophe from which you’d be fleeing? How would you cope with your remorse for the loved ones you left behind? How might you raise a new generation in this place as a kind of blank canvas onto which you could paint an idealized portrait of yourself?’ I instantly felt this whole place was a manifestation of denial, of delusion. On my way back, I watched one of my favorite musicals to wash it all off. The concept of the film came together in a flash.”
He opted for English-language protagonists as a musical is a “quintessentially American genre and a quintessentially American form of false hope,” he admitted. “They are nameless because they are you and they are me.”
“There’s this idea you can bury your head in the sand when you know you’re on a path toward destruction. The sun will come out tomorrow, as little orphan Annie sings. When they’re staring into the abyss, that’s not really hope. It’s the wolf of despair in the sheep’s clothing of hope. Making a musical turned it into a film about delusion, denial and that kind of false optimism.”
Oppenheimer also opened up about his “really odd” background, from theoretical physics and cosmology studies – “I quickly realized I wasn’t going to find my answers there” – to working with sex workers in Calcutta’s red-light district on a street theater project.
“I was interested in how art could intervene in the world. I was working with some of the most wonderful people I’ve ever known, seeing some of the most awful things I’ve ever seen. And I really felt that whatever I’d done up to that point was useless,” he said.
Other life-changing trips followed, also to the Karakoram mountains.
“I hiked all the way up to see this glacier. It was completely black. I was sitting on a rock, looking at this black glacier and I just started to weep. I’ve never loved film all that much but when I was done crying, I thought: ‘I’ll be a filmmaker’.”
He started to explore the idea that people “are not just their pasts. They are also the stories.” But nothing prepared him for the difficulties of making a musical and coming up with the songs.
“I was tasked with writing the lyrics and I was terrified of that – especially when Joshua [Schmidt, composer and lyricist] told me they should rhyme. That seemed much scarier than working with death squad leaders in Indonesia,” he added.
“In the golden age of musicals, characters would burst into songs when their truth is too big for words and for speech. And it’s the opposite here, really. The excuses they’ve made for themselves are starting to fall apart because the truth is threatening to burst their bubble. Rather than singing their truths, they are singing their lies.”
“It’s like Wile E. Coyote running off the cliff chasing after Road Runner. He’s in freefall but hasn’t realized it yet. I wanted to see this, I wanted to dream it and share it with you.”
Asked by an audience member about “being brilliant,” Oppenheimer burst into laughter. “The people I love would start shouting: ‘No, no, no, you don’t know this guy at all.’ There’s nothing special about me, but I think I’m compassionate. I regard everyone in front of my camera as someone I wish I could hug as tightly as possible so that I could feel what it’s like to be there. What is it like to see through your eyes?”
He added: “My husband’s Japanese and he taught me this beautiful Zen mantra he grew up with. ‘It is my nature to grow old. It is my nature to get sick. It is my nature to lose the people I love. It is my nature to die. How then shall I live?’ I think that’s the question.”
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