00:04
Joshua Oppenheimer
I chose The Strife Between Carnival and Lent by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It's a tiny little painting.

00:14
Joshua Oppenheimer
You have a fat man representing Carnival being bit by what I think is an emaciated woman representing Lent, who has her eyes fixed on the distance, but also seems startled by what she's just done, like it was a starving impulse. The woman in the foreground is already in a daze, but is gnawing at the cheek of the skinny Lent figure. The fat man's eyes representing Carnival are watering with pain, and there might be a wince, but he too is distracted, and what could it be?

00:50
Joshua Oppenheimer
I sense an ancient mythical conflict, really, humans attacking each other, and being undone, literally, by what they're doing. They become someone else. It's as if I woke up from a dream and could feel and visualize every detail. It just took my breath away.

01:12
Joshua Oppenheimer
What motivates me in all my work are the ways that we really have no idea who we are and what we're doing until we find ourselves doing it. And all our attempts to sort of impose control through the stories we tell about ourselves are illusory the moment those stories fall apart.

01:38
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
My name is Tina Jøhnk Christensen, and I'm the host of Danish Originals, a podcast series created in partnership with the American Friends of the National Gallery of Denmark and the National Gallery of Denmark. Our goal is to celebrate Danish creatives who have made a significant mark in the US.

01:56
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today our guest is Joshua Oppenheimer, an American Danish filmmaker. Welcome, Joshua.

02:02
Joshua Oppenheimer
Thank you so much. It's so exciting to be here as a Dane.

02:06
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It's lovely having you as a Dane. Your story actually started in the US. You are an American who has lived in Denmark for more than a decade. Do you see yourself as an American in Copenhagen or do you feel American Danish by now?

02:21
Joshua Oppenheimer
I feel American Danish by now, because I have a real sense of home in Denmark. I have a lovely community of friends, colleagues, collaborators, and just a sense of being at home, belonging in the culture, especially what I think inspired me to stay to begin with, which is an openness, a curiosity that you feel in Denmark.

02:46
Joshua Oppenheimer
One thing that frustrates me about America, and Americans will recognize it, is you'll sit next to someone on a plane or in a waiting room, and if they strike up a conversation, they'll ask you little questions, trying to size you up, trying to kind of put you in a box.

03:01
Joshua Oppenheimer
Oh, so you're a filmmaker, uh-huh, uh-huh. And they kind of think, is he famous, is he not famous, have I heard of him, have I not? It's all about kind of where one is in a power hierarchy.

03:11
Joshua Oppenheimer
And what I found that really struck me and I'd never experienced before moving to Copenhagen was when someone doesn't know you, very often, it's not true all the time, but the best of Danish culture is a kind of curiosity and excitement to meet someone new, an eagerness to find out more.

03:29
Joshua Oppenheimer
If you're doing something unusual, rather than dismiss it as experimental or non-commercial or probably irrelevant or not worth knowing about. If it's unfamiliar, that can just inspire curiosity. And that innocence, in the best sense, is something I really love about having Copenhagen as a home.

03:50
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You were born in Texas, you grew up in DC and Santa Fe in New Mexico, and you spent 14 years in London. How did you end up in Denmark?

04:00
Joshua Oppenheimer
I moved to Denmark to edit a film called The Act of Killing. My producer Signe Byrge Sørensen is a Danish documentary producer. I had no luck raising film industry finance in the UK for the film. I had this one academic grant which allowed me to shoot a lot of the film, but then it was completely exhausted by the time we had to edit it.

04:21
Joshua Oppenheimer
We had 1,200 hours of footage. That's weeks and weeks and weeks of material. 1,200 hours of footage and no money to edit it. And she said, do you need a producer? And we said, yes. And she raised money for the film from the Danish Film Institute, which required that we edit the film in Denmark.

04:38
Joshua Oppenheimer
And so in March 2011, Shu and I, my husband and I, moved from London to Copenhagen temporarily to edit the film. But it wasn't temporary, we stayed.

04:48
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And Signe's become significant in your life. How did you meet her?

04:53
Joshua Oppenheimer
I was part of a little kind of collective of filmmakers in London. We called ourselves Vision Machine, and two of my colleagues, Andrea Zimmerman and Michael Uwemedimo were invited by CPH:DOX, a documentary festival in Copenhagen, to present some work in progress. And one of the projects was my Indonesia project, which became The Act of Killing and then The Look of Silence, although the latter I hadn't started shooting it yet.

05:17
Joshua Oppenheimer
And then they had a project of their own. And Signe was in that presentation, and reached out to me afterwards because she was captivated by it. And I was shooting in Indonesia at the time and I said, you know, can we talk when I got back to London? And she said, is there anything I can read about the project?

05:36
Joshua Oppenheimer
But I didn't have a treatment that was in any way up to date because just the whole notion of the thing had been categorically rejected in the UK. But I did have a doctoral dissertation that I had done as a way of getting at least some academic support for the film.

05:51
Joshua Oppenheimer
And I said, I can send you the kind of written part of what was a practice-based, a filmmaking thesis. And she's like, yeah, I want to read it. And I said, but it's academic. It might not be what you're interested in. And Signe, speaking of that curiosity and that openness, she said, no, that's even better. And so I sent her this long and turgid doctoral thesis. She read the whole thing. She got in touch immediately and said, Yes, call me when you're back.

06:17
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Exciting. I usually ask Danes who move to the US what it's like to arrive at a huge airport, as for instance, LAX or Kennedy. You landed in a small airport in Copenhagen. How did you feel when you landed in Kastrup and how did you first react to Copenhagen? What was it like to meet the city and the Danes?

06:39
Joshua Oppenheimer
I'd been to Copenhagen a number of times, because I was working with Signe already from the beginning of 2008. So we'd been, for three years, while shooting the film, she was raising money for it and then preparing for the edits. I'd come several times.

06:53
Joshua Oppenheimer
But she found a little apartment for us near the office, which was by Kastellet. I lived in a pretty tough neighborhood in East London. There had been, in the five years we lived there, seven murders just on a little square below our front door. And—

07:12
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Which part of London was that?

07:13
Joshua Oppenheimer
It was in the East End, in Hackney. And it was just a particularly volatile corner in a time where there was a lot of knife violence.

07:22
Joshua Oppenheimer
And I get in the car and she drives me to what was a very modest andelsbolig, a little co-op apartment, but it was on Toldbodgade just by Amalienborg by the harbor. And it was kind of a fairy tale initially, because it was amazing that I got to live right by the harbor and then get on a bicycle and bike along the water, eight minutes, and around an old citadel, Renaissance-era Citadel, and come to the editing room every day. So it felt like some kind of idyllic artist residency.

07:54
Joshua Oppenheimer
I came to really value, in Copenhagen, this community of very passionate creatives who understood that you might dedicate years of your life to something that may not generate any obvious income, frankly. And a sense of judgment that I felt all the time in the United States and sometimes in the UK, just wasn't there.

08:16
Joshua Oppenheimer
And then I felt what was amazing was that people still had time to have children. I had friends my own age, in London, who were also filmmakers. No one could have kids because no one could afford in London to be a filmmaker, unless they came from money. And all my friends in Denmark were talking about having children. And they had this lovely work-life balance.

08:37
Joshua Oppenheimer
And while I edited The Act of Killing, as intense as it was, I don't think Niels Paugh Andersen, the editor, and I ever edited later than 7 pm in the year and a half that we worked on it. It was like entering a new culture. It was a culture where people had children. That's a totally different civilization than one where they don't.

08:55
Joshua Oppenheimer
And then the other thing, I love these pockets of nature in Copenhagen. So I would go to the back canals in Christiania. I thought, what kind of city allows this much real estate in the very center of the city to be a commune? And while it's not, I learned, of course, it's by no means perfect, that was beautiful to me. And the sense of being in the countryside when you were really in the center of the city I loved. I was also startled by the eye wateringly high prices of everything.

09:23
Joshua Oppenheimer
And then there are problems in Denmark. I mean, things I really think that we as a civilization need to look at that are at the core of the movie, The End, that I'm sure we'll talk about later.

09:34
Joshua Oppenheimer
We're talking three days, I guess, after the first day of the second Donald Trump presidency. And on that day, he ended asylum and basically all legal immigration into the United States, unless you're invited on a work visa from abroad. And violating the law, violating international agreement.

09:54
Joshua Oppenheimer
And Denmark has unfortunately, I think unfortunately for the Danes, for the culture of Copenhagen, for the diversity that could be there, but it's not. Denmark has, to some extent, hollowed out what it might be, by shutting the door to foreigners long before that was the zeitgeist all over the world. And I think that's a great shame. I think it is our great shame as Danes.

10:24
Joshua Oppenheimer
You asked me, do I feel Danish? There was an Italian historian who said, if you have more than one nationality, you know what you really are by the country, not that you're proud of, but by the country you're ashamed of.

10:38
Joshua Oppenheimer
And I am definitely an American. Not to say there's not things I absolutely love about America. I love many things about the country. But I am ashamed of many things about the country. And that proves what an American I am. But I am not proud of Denmark's cold hearted policy toward migrants.

10:59
Joshua Oppenheimer
I don't say that as a scold from a country that's doing any better. I say that because I think it hurts us as Danes to forget what every moral tradition, every religious tradition teaches us, which is to extend welcome to the stranger in need.

11:17
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah, I recently heard of an Englishman who had lived in Denmark for 12 years, and then they found out he'd had a speeding ticket in the UK, and thus he couldn't become a Danish citizen.

11:29
Joshua Oppenheimer
Oh my gosh.

11:31
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I know, I mean.

11:32
Joshua Oppenheimer
The cinematographer of The End is Russian, Mikhail Krichman, and his son Vlad is a conscientious objector and a pacifist. What's more, his mother's family's from Kiev, and so he was evading the draft, because he's a conscientious objector.

11:51
Joshua Oppenheimer
Just before he was about to be arrested, he came to Denmark, actually, to participate in the film. But when he arrived, he was utterly terrified and sought asylum because he couldn't go back to Russia. And he has been rejected. It's now being appealed. I think I'm optimistic that somehow he'll get it.

12:10
Joshua Oppenheimer
But just witnessing that process up close, it is not a pretty sight and it is an ugly part of all of our societies in the West that is kept out of sight from us because its victims are not citizens. They're not voting. And I've been an immigrant now to the UK and to Denmark, and I've seen the ugliness of the immigration services everywhere. But it's done in our name, and it is a shame that's committed in our names.

12:41
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I couldn't agree more. Your debut feature was a documentary that you made, as you mentioned, while living in Denmark, called The Act of Killing. It came out in 2014 and you had turned 40 at the time. What made the climate in Denmark right for you to venture into making films there and not to focus on the academic work that you were doing before?

13:06
Joshua Oppenheimer
The academic work was always just a way of getting some resources for the filmmaking. It's true, because of that PhD I got, I am still a professor at the University of Westminster in London. And it's something I value, but I was always a filmmaker.

13:21
Joshua Oppenheimer
And why I stayed in Copenhagen, it had to do with that embrace rather than skepticism for experimentation. And it had to do with a kind of work and culture that becomes possible when there's still public support for culture, and how we communicate and tell stories to each other, when that's considered a public good.

13:45
Joshua Oppenheimer
Denmark has a kind of film culture that's supported by society through the Danish Film Institute, underpinned by a film law which gives directors final cut over every film that they make that's supported by the Danish Film Institute.

14:03
Joshua Oppenheimer
And that allows for experimentation and creativity and a fearlessness, which allows one to become very, very quiet or very, very exuberant or sometimes both, to dream up the most wild, fanciful, unimaginable things that the world, you're quite convinced as a director, at least must see, needs to see, but which in any other context would be completely unimaginable.

14:32
Joshua Oppenheimer
So, The Act of Killing, while I didn't dream that up in Denmark, to have had the time to really design an editing process that was well enough resourced that it actually could deliver the full potential of that material, to come up with the kind of crazy second film, The Look of Silence.

14:48
Joshua Oppenheimer
And then to make something that's very provocative, utterly strange, totally divisive, which is my new film, The End, that depends on a public sphere that's saying, Yes, culture is not just a commodity. It's not just something you make to sell tickets. It should be as wide an audience as that thing should get, but the thing has a value.

15:11
Joshua Oppenheimer
That thing should not be sacrificed just so it's commercial or popular. Dreaming up the visions that have the possibility of galvanizing and enlightening us so that we can live differently and live better. That is a public good that everyone's invested in, and that's why I stayed.

15:31
Joshua Oppenheimer
Yeah, and it wasn't about the money, because the money that comes from the Danish Film Institute, while totally welcome, is a tiny percentage of The End's budget, but it's part of a system throughout Europe of public finance where 70 some percent of the film's budget can be raised.

15:48
Joshua Oppenheimer
And were it not for post-COVID inflation, it'd be virtually the whole budget coming from that. So there's an essential value placed on culture and storytelling and art and the human imagination as a public good. It is under assault in Europe, but it still exists and we need to fight to protect it.

16:09
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Your two documentaries, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, which is from 2016, were both shot in Indonesia, as you mentioned, and they deal with the atrocities of genocide, which happened there in the 1960s. They were both nominated for Oscars. And in my humble opinion, they are so unique, extraordinary, and exceptional that they should both have won. What were the seeds of these films? How did you get inspired to do them? And why Indonesia?

16:40
Joshua Oppenheimer
I was asked to do a documentary project, not really to direct it, but to facilitate a group of plantation workers on an oil palm plantation in Sumatra about their struggle to organize a union in the aftermath of the Suharto dictatorship. I didn't know anything about Indonesia, anything about plantations, anything about Suharto.

16:59
Joshua Oppenheimer
But I went, learned the language, and became very close to the families on this remote oil palm plantation. It's the same plantation where The Look of Silence is set. And I discovered to my immediate horror that the women on the plantation were dying of liver failure in their early 50s, and they had the job of spraying the pesticides and the herbicides with no protective clothing.

17:26
Joshua Oppenheimer
And the question was which of these chemicals were killing them. And we traveled some two hours each way to an internet cafe because dial-up internet, that's all there was back in 2001. And we found out that there was one particular chemical called Paraquat, which was an ingredient in Agent Orange and which is entirely banned in Europe, in which you have to wear a moon suit to use in the United States, that they were spraying with no protective clothing. They were ingesting it, they were breathing it in. It was killing them.

17:56
Joshua Oppenheimer
And one of their first demands as a union was that we shouldn't have to spray this chemical or indeed any toxic chemicals without protective clothing anymore. They protested. And the company hired a paramilitary group called Pancasila Youth, which is at the center of The Act of Killing, to beat them up.

18:12
Joshua Oppenheimer
We had a meeting afterwards and they said, well, we have to drop our demands. This is too dangerous. And I said, look, I understand that being beaten up is totally traumatic, but no one was badly hurt. And these women at this meeting, well, they're really getting sick. And so do you really have a choice to drop this?

18:30
Joshua Oppenheimer
And then they explained to me, there was a mass killing here in 1965. Our parents and grandparents were either killed or put in concentration camps for years just for being members of the plantation workers union. And the group that did the killing for the army and committed the pogroms against the plantation villagers, was this same paramilitary group. And now they're more powerful than ever.

18:51
Joshua Oppenheimer
And so I realized what was killing these women was not just the chemical, but fear. And then after they made their documentary, under the title The Globalisation Tapes, they said, now would you make a film that we cannot make — it's too dangerous for us to make — about why after all these decades we're still so afraid?

19:10
Joshua Oppenheimer
And I was only 27. That's 23 years ago. That's crazy. But I could not look away. And I went back and started filming the survivors, but would get arrested every day after shooting. And it felt dangerous to the crew. We went through three cameras because the police would destroy or confiscate the cameras. We couldn't afford it. I said, this is not going to work.

19:33
Joshua Oppenheimer
And I was invited to a midnight meeting at one of the survivor's house. It's actually the house in The Look of Silence where the parents live. And they said, don't give up. You're here, you speak the language. If you can't film us, film the perpetrators, they'll tell you what they did. They're not ashamed of it.

19:49
Joshua Oppenheimer
I think they're deeply ashamed of it. In fact, that was the revelation of The Act of Killing. And their response to shame is a total defensiveness, which makes them boastful. I didn't imagine that was going to work. But that led me to film the perpetrators, and the perpetrators were almost uniformly boastful, wanting to show me what they did. I had the feeling what they were showing me was less a kind of sober effort to remember, and more performance, and performance is always intended for an audience.

20:17
Joshua Oppenheimer
And my question was, who is their imagined audience? How do they want to be seen? By me? By the world? And how do they really see themselves? And so that led to this long process of making a film with perpetrators, where I let them perform what they did, in whatever way they wished. And then when that was over, I turned and made the second film with this family of survivors confronting the men who killed their son.

20:41
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You were nominated for an Oscar for both of them. I was wondering what it was like for you to represent these films in this surreal glamorous environment, that this Oscar celebration is. I mean, of course, it puts the word out about your movies. But how was that experience for you?

20:59
Joshua Oppenheimer
You know, it was absurd because the realm of the Oscars, frankly, resembled most closely the realm of the oligarchs in Indonesia who had enriched themselves by exploiting a country that was terrified of them. That was the only time I'd ever been in that kind of milieu of tuxedos before. I felt very far from the home of those films.

21:21
Joshua Oppenheimer
Those films were appreciated across the world, I think for two different reasons and among two different groups. The people who deeply appreciated the films were willing to see them not as a window onto a far off, terrible aftermath of atrocity, but as a mirror in which we see our own most dysfunctional and vulnerable selves.

21:44
Joshua Oppenheimer
And then there were people who saw them as sort of, well, I didn't know about this and it's worth knowing about. And I think that's a much more superficial engagement with the film. I think the people who didn't want to see themselves in the mirror, didn't want to see those films as allegories for all of us, they could appreciate the film because it was sort of like eating your vegetables. You know, you should know about a genocide, especially one you've never heard about. And that meant there was a kind of consensus around the films.

22:10
Joshua Oppenheimer
But where the films really mattered was Indonesia. I always thought of the films and defended the films as Indonesian films, because they're in the Indonesian language. We worked exceptionally hard for them to have an authentically Indonesian view and to be directed toward Indonesians as a mirror and for Indonesians. That's what it means if a film is French or Danish, it's not a film about France, it's a film for France or for Denmark.

22:35
Joshua Oppenheimer
And inside Indonesia, of course, these two films were hugely confronting and polarizing. Yes, they transformed how the country talks about its past. They did it rather quickly because they were like a spark in a tinderbox of silence. I have not been allowed to return to Indonesia since The Act of Killing premiered.

22:55
Joshua Oppenheimer
And as I release The End now, of course, at the most superficial level, The End appears to be about climate change. It is about climate change in part, but that's not something around which there's a lot of silence, there's a lot of talk around that. So the impact of The End will be slower.

23:11
Joshua Oppenheimer
This new film I've made is controversial and polarizing. So were those other films inside Indonesia. I so wanted to be at that first screening of The Look of Silence after thousands of screenings of The Act of Killing where mobs would come to some of them with rocks and with batons and sometimes with guns and protests would be held to boycott the screenings.

23:32
Joshua Oppenheimer
Suddenly, the National Human Rights Commission of Indonesia, the Arts Council of Jakarta, stepped up and said, we are government bodies, we are going to host the Indonesian premiere of The Look of Silence, and we're going to invite Adi Rukun, the protagonist of the film, as a kind of secret guest, secret to protect his safety. To be there and witness the change that the two films sparked in that country, would have been magnificent.

23:59
Joshua Oppenheimer
The absurdity of award ceremonies — because the Oscars, and I say this as an Academy member, are really pretty stupid and really pretty absurd. They're not even a metric of quality in any real sense, it's just what it is. It's a kind of PR device, which I welcome a little bit, because they help films that wouldn't reach a wide audience reach a slightly wider one. That's good.

24:23
Joshua Oppenheimer
But as a member of the Academy, I think there's a lot of introspection we could have about what we're really doing with the Academy Awards. For me, to experience the film getting wider attention in the United States and in the Western world and outside of Indonesia was gratifying because I could not be in the place where it mattered to literally everyone.

24:44
Joshua Oppenheimer
Everyone knew about the films. Everyone cared about the films. They were totally divided over them. Over those three years that the two films rolled out in Indonesia, they transformed how that country talks about its past. And it was a surreal spectacle. And that's something I wish I could have experienced up front.

25:03
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Your first narrative film is bleak. It's called The End, which is basically about coping with the end of the world as we know it. Did you feel that a musical is better than a documentary? And why did you all of a sudden venture into making a narrative film about this subject?

25:23
Joshua Oppenheimer
I'll give you a little of the story since we've spent so much time talking about the two Indonesian films. I wanted to make a third film in Indonesia about the billionaires who I said reminded me of the milieu around the Academy Awards, the oligarchs who came to power and enriched themselves, because everyone was terrified of them. And they were able to basically get away with murder as they built their business empires because they were untouchable, they were beyond the law. But I could not return to Indonesia since The Act of Killing.

25:54
Joshua Oppenheimer
And so I started investigating oligarchs elsewhere, and found an oil tycoon from Central Asia, from one of the former Soviet Republics. It turned out to be dangerous, that documentary project, so I won't name the place. He had obtained his oil concessions, his drilling rights, through commissioning and sponsoring acts of violence, bribing, paying the army, basically, to commit acts of violence and intimidating communities into accepting his presence or his company's presence.

26:27
Joshua Oppenheimer
And he also happened to be buying a bunker like the one in The End for his family. And he invited me to tour a bunker he was considering purchasing with his family. He believed that the consequences of climate change would soon render the world an extremely dangerous place. He believed that the consequences of climate change would lead to social collapse as billions of people in a span of the next few decades, and he didn't know where the tipping point would come, would be on the move because big parts of the world would become uninhabitable.

27:02
Joshua Oppenheimer
And he believed that the kind of immigration policies we talked about in the US and Denmark would be totally ineffective. You wouldn't be able to keep out three billion people. And you would get the collapse of nation states, you'd get regional wars, you'd get warlordism replacing governments, nuclear weapons would fall into the hands of warlords, you'd get small nuclear wars spiraling into bigger nuclear wars. You just basically get a very dangerous situation on the surface of the earth. And he thought that he could use a bunker like this as a bolt hole where he could hide from the weather storms and then go back up when things got safer.

27:37
Joshua Oppenheimer
But he always believed it could be possible that he would never be able to come up again. And not because you couldn't breathe the air, but just because it was so dangerous or there was no civilization to depend on anymore. So he was buying this bunker. And as we toured the place, I was dying to ask, how will you cope with your guilt for the catastrophe from which you would be fleeing? How would you cope with your remorse for leaving loved ones behind? And how would you cope, if you had to raise a new generation down there, how would you use and misuse them, use and abuse them as a kind of blank canvas upon which you could paint some idealized portrait of yourself as a way of easing your own regret?

28:19
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And that is the big question of The End, right?

28:22
Joshua Oppenheimer
Yeah. And I couldn't ask these questions. We weren't close enough yet for me to ask such things directly. And had I asked them, they wouldn't have been able to answer the questions. And I realized that the film I wanted to make with this family would be the documentary set in that bunker 25 years after they moved in. And obviously I wasn't going to make that either.

28:41
Joshua Oppenheimer
On the way home on the plane, I watched one of my very favorite films, a musical, called The Umbrellas of Cherbourg by Jacques Demy. And it just hit me. This is the genre of a kind of false hope that we Americans really excel at. Danes are pretty good at this too, actually. It's the kind of idea that no matter what, things will be alright, things will be fine. You'll be fine.

29:06
Joshua Oppenheimer
And in the American version and in the musical version, it's best maybe encapsulated by Annie, in the pastiche of the Golden Age musical Annie, where she says the sun will come out tomorrow. It's a kind of totally passive vision of the future. You can bury your head in the sand, you can do absolutely nothing, but it'll all be fine.

29:24
Joshua Oppenheimer
And it strikes me that that kind of hope was never hope. It was self-deception. It's actually the wolf of despair in the sheep's clothing of hope. And it undermines real hope, which is the idea that if we come together with the courage to acknowledge our mistakes, to acknowledge where we're heading in the wrong direction, we actually can marshal our collective creativity, fix some of the damage, apologize for the things we've done wrong, where we need to take responsibility, and correct our course away from the edge of the abyss towards something sustainable.

30:02
Joshua Oppenheimer
And I saw in the idea of making a musical set in a bunker like this and in those questions that I wanted to ask the oligarch, a perfect marriage of form and content. And I saw in those questions, universal questions that are not just about humanity's end, but each of our individual ends.

30:20
Joshua Oppenheimer
I found kind of a Zen proverb that I now hold tightly as I meditate, which gives me a great sense of uplift and peace, but is really what the film in a way is about. And it goes like this. "It's my nature to grow old. It's my nature to get sick. It's my nature to lose the people I love. It's my nature to die. How, then, shall I live?" And the present moment, which is really all we have, our time, Tina, your time with me right now, my time with you, our time with the audience.

30:54
Joshua Oppenheimer
This is a sacred thing, the moment, and it unfurls like a flower that just never stops blossoming, that never stops creating new petals, if you just can be in it. And I realized that those questions about a billionaire's family in a bunker, just as I said, The Act of Killing is not a window onto people on the other side of the world and we point fingers at them, but a mirror where we can see ourselves, those questions are universal questions about all of our lives.

31:24
Joshua Oppenheimer
And I came to understand that by telling a story about one family in a bunker, and by leaving them nameless, each of those characters becomes all of us. The family becomes, yes, an allegory for the entire human family, but also in their specificity and in their recognizable dysfunction and in their recognizable and very radiantly portrayed vulnerability, each and every one of us.

31:50
Joshua Oppenheimer
And it's at that level that these questions about climate change and inequality and how we treat strangers deepen into an exploration of love, and how when we lie to ourselves, when we lie to the people and when we impose lies that becomes ossified silences on our relationships and no-go areas so that our most important relationships, rather than sustaining us, become these kind of unpleasant minefields where, yes, we get a little affection and a little support, but we're kind of tiptoeing around each other, that undermines our capacity to love and to cherish and to be present with one another.

32:31
Joshua Oppenheimer
Which is to say, it undermines and squanders the one chance we have to really live. And so, I didn't make the film to scold the audience about climate. And I didn't make the film to point fingers and satirize the 0.1%. I made the film to point at the climate catastrophe, yes; to point at incredible inequality, yes. But to challenge all of us to ask: how are we living in bunkers and how are we living in bunkers personally inside of our relationships? How are we living in bunkers in our communities and politically when we look at our collective future?

33:10
Joshua Oppenheimer
We think of ourselves as having these little tight nuclear families in opposition to, in contrast to the broader society. They sing that in the film. The final song ends with "Once the world was full of strangers, we kept our distance, so many dangers, we trusted no one," but actually, every one of us, and every family is dependent upon and coextensive with the entire human family, the entire biosphere.

33:40
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Nicely said, Joshua. In the film, the characters that are played by Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, and George McKay are a family who have survived the end of the world and left their family above to die. They live in a luxury bunker, as you mentioned, under the surface of the world, and they have selected a collection of beautiful art.

34:01
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
They use the art to keep the illusion of normalcy alive there, as well as other things they've created, like a luxury apartment underground. You see glimpses of the reality that they are underground here and there. There are pieces of Monet and Hammershøi, for instance. How did you pick the art pieces that you wanted in the film and which significance do they have in terms of the narrative of the film?

34:28
Joshua Oppenheimer
I think it's varied. First of all, it goes back to the songs in the film, actually, that the songs are these luminously beautiful, musically, I think, lies that the characters sing as a kind of desperate effort to convince themselves of their lies. So the songs are active, they're not kind of fantasy numbers where they kind of escape the world into these dreamy fantasies that allow them to subsist, which is often how musical numbers work.

34:56
Joshua Oppenheimer
Here, there's always a struggle in the singing as they try and often fail to convince themselves that all is well in their world, but because the melodies are so beautiful that Joshua wrote, we made sure that they were reprising through the score, that it wasn't 12 songs, it was a single piece of music.

35:13
Joshua Oppenheimer
And that meant that as you hear the songs, the melodies that the characters are singing, you're sort of humming along unconsciously in your head, which means you're familiar with them, and you're slipping in that sense into the character's skin. And as they console themselves, you're being consoled by those melodies, if you like them. And you're identifying bodily and musically with the characters as they deceive themselves, as they convince themselves that they're living the best possible life that they could.

35:44
Joshua Oppenheimer
And that's what makes the movie about self-deception in contrast to the old musicals where people just sort of dishonestly assert that the future will be wonderful and romanticize every aspect of their life. That told us that we should be able to forget sometimes that we're in a bunker. And how do you do that in a space cinematographically when there are no windows?

36:06
Joshua Oppenheimer
We realized first and foremost that we could use paintings as a kind of window onto a lost world, that these paintings are also always idealized, romanticized. So there's these beautiful American romantic landscape paintings of the American Luminist School, specifically by Albert Bierstadt, but also by Martin Johnson Heade and others that I've always loved that provide these kind of windows onto a nature that we human beings are complicit in destroying and now only retain in this kind of romanticized form.

36:40
Joshua Oppenheimer
All we remember is the lie that we told about them, about the world. We've forgotten the world and we only remember the lie. And it's a beautiful lie, like the music. And so that's one function of the paintings. Then there are paintings that have a mystery or an indictment or a secret that kind of stare at us from the wall, bearing witness.

37:03
Joshua Oppenheimer
All the humanitarian principles that a Hammershøi, for example, held are on the wall right there looking at us and being misrecognized by the family and misused by the family. Because one thing that's apparent, and one of the ironies of the film is that the mother has collected all this art to kind of hide her working class background and kind of give herself a patina of culture, so that she felt a sense of belonging in the father's more aristocratic background.

37:33
Joshua Oppenheimer
And she brought all this art, not because it spoke to her deeply, but as a collection of trophies, as a collection of commodities. And in fact, the oil tycoon's family that was buying the real bunker that I saw, had a huge art collection. They were planning an art vault. And the reason it never occurred to them to put the art on the walls and look at it is because they never cared about the art as something to look at.

37:58
Joshua Oppenheimer
It was always something to be in a vault. And in fact, where was their art? It was in the Geneva Freeport, hidden away. And these were masterpieces, these were Picasso's and Monet's, and whatever, disappeared into the tax free zone, erased from human culture except in reproduction. And they were going to take advantage of some moment of social dislocation, disruption, and abscond this work from the free port at some moment when they wouldn't have to pay tax because the tax authorities would be gone and bring it into this black hole of a bunker in which they were going to build an art vault.

38:33
Joshua Oppenheimer
I thought, okay, that was the original idea here. But let's put the art on the walls and have it indict us. It's the past looking at us, by a family that has brought art instead of human beings. It's an irony that is referenced a few times. There's one painting that seems to be looking directly at the viewer, as the Mona Lisa does, but it's not the Mona Lisa. And the mother says it makes her uncomfortable because she should have brought another one of his paintings because this one's always staring at me, indicting her, accusing her.

39:07
Joshua Oppenheimer
And so the art has this beauty that is ignored by the family, but seen by the audience. It's a distancing device in these interior scenes. I do something similar when I film people in the mine, dwarfed by the vast landscape of the mine where they've built their bunker.

39:24
Joshua Oppenheimer
And finally, these trophies. A quotation that's important to me and always on my mind — and was on my mind when I made both The Act of Killing and The End, and I guess also The Look of Silence — by Walter Benjamin, the cultural critic and philosopher. He said, every artifact of civilization is at the same time an artifact of barbarism. And I would say that's true of all the art, however well intentioned it was in its genesis, on the walls, and it's true of my films as well.

39:56
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I should mention for full disclosure's sake that our director of Danish Originals is also an executive producer on The End. Do you yourself, Joshua, enjoy art and does the art on your walls at home say anything about you, if that's not too odd of a question, and what kind of art do you like to surround yourself with?

40:20
Joshua Oppenheimer
I have a very eclectic taste in art and in music and in literature, but visual images and music are for me very strong. On my walls at home, I have drawing after drawing after drawing by my grandmother, and nothing else. I don't listen to music in the background. When music's on, I have to listen to it, it just captures me.

40:45
Joshua Oppenheimer
Art has to have a kind of a crack, something that takes my breath away, because it's not what I expect. And that's what as a director I'm always looking for. I think I probably need the same thing in music. It doesn't have to be a kind of temporal crack. It can be something in a rhythmic dislocation. Really buffed, polished, popular music seldom moves me.

41:11
Joshua Oppenheimer
I'm not a big ambient consumer of art and music, but I will sit and look for hours at a Bruegel book that I have. I think I look for those moments that I instantly recognize as a revelation because I never expected it and that just takes my breath away and it's usually an openness to something unresolved in the composition and it can be a vulnerability where you don't expect it.

41:37
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Joshua, what did your grandmother draw, and what would you bring in a bunker if you had to live there forever, artwise?

41:47
Joshua Oppenheimer
My grandmother fled Germany and the Holocaust and she, throughout the worsening years of anti-Semitic oppression and the race laws in Berlin, stayed sane by drawing and painting mainly human forms. She made a series of ink drawings and made hundreds of them. She did them incredibly quickly and almost all of them were kind of lost or ripped up or disappeared or she threw them out or she painted on the back of them.

42:16
Joshua Oppenheimer
That's what I've surrounded myself with at home. The images remind me of her. That's one reason they're there. And the other reason is they deeply remind me of my family's journey, and our history, and our past. My father's mother was an abused woman too, and so then she painted as a refuge from my grandfather's violence.

42:36
Joshua Oppenheimer
I like the work and having it around me is about unflinchingly being surrounded, I guess, by those contradictions. I'm reminded that what's ambient is not someone's vision of something that I only understand through the work, but my history. And that we are our past, is something I've said again and again, and it's true of The End as well.

43:00
Joshua Oppenheimer
Faulkner said, the past is not dead, it's not even past, we are our past. And especially maybe living as an expatriate American in Denmark, having the work around me and having my family's history around me and not just a pretty part of the history, not an idealization, not posed snapshots where we're trying to remember our time together as more simply monochromatically joyous than it actually probably was. I get a comfort from that connection to the past and the honesty.

43:33
Joshua Oppenheimer
The question about what I would bring with me to the bunker. I wouldn't move into a bunker. I would be too curious about what's happening above. Of course I might, out of fear, seek shelter, but I would be haunted, and the art would be very secondary to me. And I would say of The End, what's worth preserving of human civilization?

43:53
Joshua Oppenheimer
I want to say, if we had the wisdom to discern when we're being honest, when culture is encouraging us to confront something truthful and honest versus when it is lying, encouraging us to lie to ourselves. And The End is ultimately, as I've said, a film about self deception, and it's a polarizing film because cinema is guilty again and again, not just Hollywood cinema, but art house cinema as well, of re-inscribing the most dangerous human self-deception, namely that the world is divided into good guys and bad guys, and watch this movie and you'll feel good about yourself, you'll feel inspired.

44:30
Joshua Oppenheimer
That's the Star Wars morality, by the way. And it's a lie, and I think it's our most destructive lie. And most cinephiles love it because it makes them feel good about themselves. I find it despairing and when it's really effective, I find myself sometimes crying because a story is moving, even if it has that form, but I find myself crying another tear because I feel the tragedy of that fucking lie because I think it's a lie and it's destructive every time we tell it.

45:02
Joshua Oppenheimer
Going back to my family's history, Primo Levi said of the Holocaust, that there may be monsters among us. But they're too few to worry about, if they exist at all. What we have to worry about are the ordinary people like us. And The End is a mirror challenging us to recognize our dysfunction, in the dysfunction of these people we'd rather point fingers at and say it would be much easier, much more comfortable to say they're bad people, they're awful people. Why do I have to spend such time with them? Why should I care about them?

45:31
Joshua Oppenheimer
That would be really reassuring, only the performances from Tilda and Michael and George and the entire cast are so humane and so rich that we can't help but see ourselves. And I think that makes some viewers pretty angry, but I kind of say, I say, bring it on. And I say, like with the art on the walls, what should we preserve of our culture? If we have the wisdom to know when we're lying to ourselves, then we should bring everything, because we should not erase our pasts.

45:58
Joshua Oppenheimer
I think self-deception, I'm sometimes asked, is it ever valuable? I don't think it's really ever valuable. It can get you through a hard patch. But that should be very temporary, because it just hollows out your one chance to have a meaningful life on this planet.

46:16
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
So that leads me to my final question. I could keep talking to you forever, but our time is soon up. If you knew that the world was ending in a couple of months, what would you hurry up and spend your time doing in these two months?

46:32
Joshua Oppenheimer
It's a very hard question.

46:34
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I know.

46:35
Joshua Oppenheimer
The honest answer is, I don't know. But I'm human and I would be terrified and I would try to quiet the fear and find the acceptance, and surround myself as much as I could by the people I love, and things I love. I sometimes wonder, when I hear about people who are terminally ill and they talk about being able to read, I sometimes find myself wondering what I want to read. Because I might just want to be very still and be present and talk and cry and laugh and let the waves of panic wash over me.

47:08
Joshua Oppenheimer
Maybe the best way to answer that question is actually a lyric in the movie. The girl, Moses Ingram's character, has a song. None of the characters have names. She's referred to in the script and credits just as Girl. She sings about her family's experience of time living in a world that had already ended, and where they expected to die every day.

47:31
Joshua Oppenheimer
She'd never seen a working watch before she comes into the bunker. Her father, who died, never makes it to the bunker, had a watch from before the world's collapse, but it had long broken, and she'd never seen one working. And the son gives her a watch, and she sees the second hand working, and at first she's delighted, and then, she's watching the second hand, she listens, and she's wondering: What is a second? What is this useless piece of time?

47:56
Joshua Oppenheimer
What is the purpose of counting such a brief piece of time? And she sings, "The seconds ticking past so fast, before you notice them, they're gone. But I remember time when moments did not disappear. When I close my eyes, a single breath could go on and on forever. So how few breaths we might have left meant nothing much at all."

48:22
Joshua Oppenheimer
I would hope in those last moments of my life, or in a moment if suddenly I learned the world was to end, that I could, together with my loved ones if possible, and even strangers, open my heart to the present, and have that experience of time.

48:40
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Thank you so much for all your wise words, Joshua. We really appreciate you being on Danish Originals.

48:46
Joshua Oppenheimer
Thank you so much.

48:50
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For today's episode, Joshua Oppenheimer chose Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Striden mellem Fastelavn og Fasten, or The Strife between Carnival and Lent from 1562 from the collection of the National Gallery of Denmark.