Nordic Film Talks: Signe Byrge Sørensen and Joshua Oppenheimer

Producer Signe Byrge Sørensen and writer/director Joshua Oppenheimer set their ambitions high for their first fictional feature together, The End. It’s not only the world’s first post-apocalyptic musical, it’s also a complicated six-country co-production that needed 45 shooting days across Germany, Italy and Ireland, and took eight years to finance, plan and shoot.

In the latest episode of the Nordic Film Talks podcast, the pair talk about the creative and logistical challenges of tackling such a complicated creative endeavour.

Sørense says it was a “learning process, if there ever was one. Like a real learning curve, and almost like a backflip curve – there were a lot of things to learn for both of us.”

She has previously co-produced a few fiction works, but not on this scale – “There were so many practical things for me to learn of how this whole system of fiction works.” To help educate herself at a high level, she attended ACE workshops and the Inside Pictures programme. She also had to teach herself the ropes dealing with big international and American casts and agents and lawyers. “I know so many lawyers now,” she says with a laugh.

Oppenheimer, born in the US, but living in Copenhagen for many years, and Sørensen, started collaborating back in 2007 as he was pitching what would later become the Oscar-nominated creative documentary feature The Act of Killing(2012), which they followed up with The Look of Silence (2014).

The End has a surprising origin story related to those films – Oppenheimer had wanted to do a third documentary about the Indonesian genocide and its legacies, this time looking at how oligarchs had profited from the atrocities. Because of the notoriety of the earlier films, he realised he wasn’t allowed to freely visit Indonesia any more, but his research did inspire his first fiction foray.

“I found an oil tycoon who'd enriched himself through violence and was buying a bunker for his family,” Oppenheimer recalls. “When I visited this bunker, I thought, ‘How are you going to cope with the guilt for the catastrophe from which you'd be fleeing? How would you cope with your remorse for leaving loved ones behind? How would you raise a new generation in such a place as a blank canvas on which you could paint an idealised image of yourself to ease your own regrets and soothe your conscience?’ I couldn’t ask those questions of them, and I realised the film that would be really interesting to make with these people would the documentary 25 years after they moved into the bunker. Obviously, I wasn’t going to do that, so instead I thought: ‘How can I explore the denial inherent in this situation?’”

The same day he visited this bunker, he watched one of his favourite musicals, Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), “just to clear my head”. And that’s when he realised his story set in the bunker would need to be a musical: “Something Signe and I talk a lot about is how does a project's form embody its content? Somehow the form of musicals embodies a deep-seated cultural denial…the wolf of despair in the sheep’s clothing of hope.”

Set 25 years after an apocalypse, The End delves into the lives of the last family living in a palatial underground bunker, coming to terms with their role in the end of the world and grappling with the lies they tell themselves.

Sørensen, one of the founders of Danish production company Final Cut For Real, is usually a documentary specialist. So she had to reach beyond some of her usual partners: Neon co-financed the international co-production with collaborators from Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the UK, and Sweden. The Nordic film institutes, Eurimages and Nordisk Film & TV Fond are amongst the backers. The final budget came in at around $17.7m (€16m).

Tilda Swinton, George MacKay, Michael Shannon, Moses Ingram and Bronagh Gallagher star in the film, which premiered at Telluride and also played in Toronto and San Sebastian. Neon released it in the US on Dec 6, and the international rollout will start in January. Scandinavian Film Distribution will handle the Nordic release, with MUBI releasing in countries including Germany and the UK. The Match Factory handles international sales.

Oppenheimer co-wrote the script with Danish screenwriter Rasmus Heisterberg, whose credits include A Royal Affair(En kongelig affære). Oppenheimer also wrote the lyrics for the film’s 13 original songs, which were composed by Josh Schmidt.

Oppenheimer knew his cast didn’t need to be professional singers - they could all hold a tune and were game for voice training. “What they're singing is not just a kind of ecstatic expression of what they truly believe is their truth, the songs would actually be sung by fragile, vulnerable human beings in crisis. So they had to be musical in the sense that their voices had to be just right for the character – lovely enough to hold the songs, but not very polished, the way some Broadway vocalists are.”

He adds: “The challenge here was to find actors whose faces would register every flicker of doubt, every flicker of dread, every strain of longing – so the subtext of those scenes would be fully explored in their faces to justify them moving into song.”

In the podcast episode, Sørensen and Oppenheimer also talk about combining public and private financing; about how Oppenheimer spent a whole day talking in rhyme to get in the right headspace to write lyrics; the logistics of shooting in a salt mine; and how Successionstar Jeremy Strong had creative input during the film’s development.