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Based on a true story: last Friday saw the cinema release of the post-apocalyptic musical ‘The End’. Climate Curious co-hosts Maryam Pasha and Ben Hurst sat down with the academy award nominated and BAFTA winning director Joshua Oppenheimer to find out what inspired his bleak take on the surviving family of a energy exec after a world ending climate event.
Tickets: http://www.mubi.com/theend
Created by TEDxLondon
Executive produced by Josie Colter
Produced by Ben Beheshty
Curation by Deesha Chandra
Hosted by Maryam Pasha and Ben Hurst
Communications by Tara Cooper and Issey Gladston
00:00 Introduction to Climate Curious Podcast
01:43 Meet Joshua Oppenheimer
02:53 Overview of ‘The End’
04:08 Themes and inspirations
06:30 Real-life inspirations
12:57 Moral dilemmas and human nature
15:09 The role of art in climate change
33:07 Challenges in filmmaking
40:40 Final thoughts and farewell
Transcript
[00:00:00] Introduction to Climate Curious
[00:00:00] Joshua Oppenheimer: I started looking elsewhere and found an oil man and his family who was buying a bunker, like the one in the film, and then that gradually turned from documentary to
[00:00:14] Ben Hurst: musical. This is Climate Curious, the podcast for people who are bored, scared, or confused by climate change.
[00:00:21] Maryam Pasha: I’m Maryam Pasha, the director and curator at TEDxLondon, and the co-host of this podcast alongside the amazing Ben.
[00:00:28] Ben Hurst: Hi, I’m Ben Hurst. [00:00:30] Activist and advocate exploring what positive masculinities can look like and self-confessed climate norm me.
[00:00:39] Maryam Pasha: Hello, Ben.
[00:00:40] Ben Hurst: Oh, hey.
[00:00:41] Maryam Pasha: Hi. Um, you know what? I think it’s really fun that sometimes our homework for this podcast is that we get to watch films
[00:00:50] Ben Hurst: watching a movie. Can you imagine? I just feel like in life I never get enough time to sit down and watch movies. I’m like so addicted to series now.
[00:00:58] Maryam Pasha: I mean, you know me, I love [00:01:00] storytelling and film and all of this, and I am at the moment really like, not obsessed isn’t the word, but I’m really like engrossed in the idea of the role of like culture and film making, particularly in the climate conversation.
[00:01:14] Maryam Pasha: ’cause I think film has a, an ability to transport us and experience and feel things that really. Is super powerful. It’s like, I would say, only second personal experience. So anyway, I’m very excited. I.[00:01:30]
[00:01:32] Maryam Pasha: Um, so basically not gonna waste anyone’s time. Now just talking about my obsession. Let me tell you all about who we have on today’s episode. Can I do that then? Mm-hmm. Can I go? Yes,
[00:01:42] Ben Hurst: please.
[00:01:43] Meet Joshua Oppenheimer
[00:01:43] Maryam Pasha: So today we are joined by Joshua Oppenheimer. He’s an American. Oscar nominated Ooh, film director, known for his films, the Art of Killing and the Look of Silence.
[00:01:55] Maryam Pasha: So he’s now taken a step towards climate storytelling with a new film called The [00:02:00] End, A Post apocalyptic Musical about life. After the fossil fuel crisis ends the world told through the lens of a wealthy. Energy execs family who live in this kind of bizarre, strained life in total isolation underground in a salt mine cave.
[00:02:17] Maryam Pasha: Mm. Um, and after decades alone, the family encounters a stranger. Ooh. Now look, let’s be very honest, Ben, there’re gonna be some spoilers in this episode. Yeah, yeah,
[00:02:29] Ben Hurst: yeah, yeah.
[00:02:29] Maryam Pasha: Look, [00:02:30] I actually would say that if you have or haven’t watched the film, I would listen to this episode because. We talk about some stuff that’s gonna be super interesting, and I think we’d actually maybe even change the way some people.
[00:02:41] Maryam Pasha: Yeah, watch this film. Like I am excited to go back and re-watch it now listening to what Joshua is gonna say. So anyway, let’s get into it. Let’s just jump into our conversation with Joshua Oppenheimer. Now, Joshua, thank you so much for joining us.
[00:02:53] Overview of ‘The End’
[00:02:53] Maryam Pasha: I wanna jump right in and just say for the very tiny number of people who probably haven’t [00:03:00] watched this film yet, could you just give us like a quick overview of what the end is about?
[00:03:05] Maryam Pasha: Which I know is a really hard thing to ask someone to do, but will you just, will you try for us.
[00:03:12] Joshua Oppenheimer: The end is, is a golden age musical about a last human family surviving alone in a bunker. Decades after environmental collapse has left the world uninhabitable, and at the same time, this isnt. Oil man’s family.
[00:03:29] Joshua Oppenheimer: [00:03:30] So it, it sort of embodies the climate catastrophe at one level and at another level. It’s the entire human family. It’s an allegory. And at another level, the characters are nameless because it’s each and every one of our families. It’s each and every one of us to me. And so in that sense, it’s, and they, they go on almost as if nothing has happened.
[00:03:49] Joshua Oppenheimer: They try to pretend that nothing has changed. And so in a certain. Deep sense. It’s about denial and false hope, false optimism. That kind of is what makes musicals both [00:04:00] delightful and often cheesy, and in this case, tragic. And in that sense it’s, it’s, that’s why it’s a musical too.
[00:04:07] Maryam Pasha: Amazing.
[00:04:08] Themes and inspirations
[00:04:08] Maryam Pasha: And I have lots of questions about those choices, but I wanna ask because the last two films that people might know you from, were both documentaries about a different topic altogether.
[00:04:19] Maryam Pasha: What made you be drawn to making a film about the fossil fuel crisis and, and climate change?
[00:04:28] Joshua Oppenheimer: And I think that those [00:04:30] earlier films were also about. The unique human capacity to lie to ourselves. How, you know, we, we, we rationalize in action, we make, make up excuses to justify things we’ve done that we know are wrong.
[00:04:45] Joshua Oppenheimer: And I really wanted to take this home to all of us, the questions that were explored in those films by looking at how, you know, where is cognitive dissonance, where is self-deception, which is what I’m talking about really most urgent in our own lives. And I think that [00:05:00] the sense that. We’re hurtling toward extinction if we do not radically transform how we live on Earth.
[00:05:09] Joshua Oppenheimer: Now, that felt like the most pressing issue I could look at. It’s, it’s this little kind of academic sounding, but the word apocalypse comes from the Greek uncovering, uh, revealing to why the book of Revelations in the Bible is called. Revelation ’cause in Greek it was apocalypse and we are the first [00:05:30] humans in the world’s history who already know how we will end, how we will go extinct if we carry on, as we are so baked in the logic of our behavior, now is the end.
[00:05:43] Joshua Oppenheimer: Which means when we say we already know that it’s already been revealed to us, which is to say we are living post apocalypse already. Unless we change. And those two documentaries, which took place in the aftermath of a genocide where the [00:06:00] perpetrators had won, and it was a kind of dystopia of, of, of perpe, you know, of mass murderers in power and boasting.
[00:06:06] Joshua Oppenheimer: Those were post-apocalyptic too, in the sense that here was a society that had been so traumatized and everyone is living in fear. I wanted to make a third film there about the billionaires who enrich themselves by. Really exploiting a country that was terrified of them. But after those films came out, I couldn’t return safely to Indonesia.
[00:06:29] Joshua Oppenheimer: I was [00:06:30] banned.
[00:06:30] Real-life inspirations
[00:06:30] Joshua Oppenheimer: And so I started looking elsewhere and found an oil man and his family who was buying a bunker, like the one in the film. And then that gradually turned from documentary to. Musical.
[00:06:43] Ben Hurst: Oh my gosh. So this started as a documentary. That’s crazy. Who was the, no joking. Don’t tell. Don’t tell me who the person was.
[00:06:51] Ben Hurst: But that’s such an interesting, so this is actually based on a real life story that you were researching, I’m assuming.
[00:06:59] Joshua Oppenheimer: Yeah, exactly. [00:07:00] I, I found an once I couldn’t return to Indonesia, I found an oil tycoon from, I was researching oligarchs elsewhere who’d made their money through violence, and I found a tycoon who had obtained his drilling rights for his oil fields using violence and intimidation.
[00:07:16] Joshua Oppenheimer: He was from former Soviet Central Asia and he invited me to see, I was getting to know his family and filming with them a bit, and he invited me to tour. An underground cavern where he was, was [00:07:30] planning to build a bunker. And he explained that he was, I said, what would you be hiding from? And he said, well, the biggest risk is probably the indirect effects of climate change.
[00:07:40] Joshua Oppenheimer: He thought that, you know, you would have billions of people on the move migrating from parts of the world that were unin would become uninhabitable, and he thought there would be no stopping that, you know. Borders wouldn’t a border fence, no matter how fortified wouldn’t be able to stop billions of people he thought when pe people’s lives depended on getting [00:08:00] north or getting away from the sea, rising sea.
[00:08:03] Joshua Oppenheimer: And so he thought you’d have a breakdown in nation states. You’d have a, um, warlordism, you’d have nuclear weapons falling into the hands of local. Warlords and then you’d have sort of spiraling nuclear war regionally growing into global catastrophe. And he, we toured this underground cave system that he was yet to decorate into these sump, this sumptuous bunker.
[00:08:27] Joshua Oppenheimer: And it was meant to have many of the same features You. See in the [00:08:30] film an art vault for all of their fine, you know, for their, their, their incredible art collection, a wine cellar for the most important bottles of wine in history, um, ways of growing food in per, in perpetuity. And he, I just was haunted by questions of guilt as we walked.
[00:08:49] Joshua Oppenheimer: First of all, his wife had been on the. On, on her phone the whole way, the whole journey to this place. Texting with relatives, looking at nieces and nephews who were just born [00:09:00] or who were toddlers. And then there, there was one that had, she just had a new niece or nephew, I can’t remember, and she was just.
[00:09:07] Joshua Oppenheimer: Clearly gregarious with her family at the very least. And I thought, how will you cope with your remorse for leaving all these people behind? Because she didn’t intend to bring them. And I thought, how are you, how are those relationships already being hollowed out by the eventual betrayal that you are kind of.
[00:09:26] Joshua Oppenheimer: Holding in your heart at this point. Wow. How? Because she [00:09:30] wasn’t telling, I said, do they know about the bunker? And she said, no. And I don’t know that we’ll put this in the film. And then the father, I thought, how will you cope with your guilt from the catastrophe from which you would be fleeing? How would you.
[00:09:42] Joshua Oppenheimer: Raise a new generation in such a place as a kind of blank canvas onto which you could paint an idealized picture of yourself to re to, to, to, to whitewash your past from yourself. Which, if you know about my earlier work, that’s like my core theme, how we lie to ourselves about who we are, how we [00:10:00] live with guilt, and I just couldn’t imagine making anything else with this family other than the.
[00:10:05] Joshua Oppenheimer: Fly on the wall documentary set in the bunker, 25, 25 years after they moved in. And I, I wasn’t gonna be invited along. That was not a viable plan. There’s clearly no space in this. No. So I, I, um, on the way home, unsure what I would do with this. I watched one of my very favorite films, which is a musical, um, on the plane home.
[00:10:28] Joshua Oppenheimer: Uh, and I just, it, it hit [00:10:30] me, ah, this is the genre of. Sort of a kind of false hope, really a despair that pretends to be hope. The idea that the sun will, you can bury your head in the sand and be completely passive in the fa, even as you know, you’re running straight toward the abyss, even in this post apocalyptic moment.
[00:10:49] Joshua Oppenheimer: To go back to what I said earlier, you can go straight toward the abyss. And the sun will come out tomorrow as they sing in Annie, no matter what. That to me isn’t hope. [00:11:00] That’s not optimism, that’s just delusion. And I thought, this is the quintessential genre of delusion and we should, we should make a musical.
[00:11:10] Joshua Oppenheimer: About, about, about this family. And they’ll call it the end. I’ll make the Family American because it’s a quintessentially American genre, and America’s taken the lead and building up emissions. And now we have drill, baby drill, and it’ll be a golden Age musical. And Donald Trump has just announced we’re in our new Golden Age.
[00:11:29] Joshua Oppenheimer: So I thought I [00:11:30] didn’t know that yet. But yeah, so that’s how it came about. That’s how it came.
[00:11:34] Maryam Pasha: I think it will be. Absolutely mind blowing for people to hear that this is based on people who are actually planning to live the end of the world like this. Because I think when I was watching the film, all I could think about is God, I wouldn’t wanna be in that bunker.
[00:11:53] Maryam Pasha: Like I hope I never have to ever, you know, in my life, have a choice [00:12:00] like that. Or, or I hope I never. I just, I, I would, I don’t wanna be there is all, there’s that feeling of like, I just, and I just had a son who’s, who’s five months when we were recording this and I, I just thought of myself. How do you balance that feeling of being like, actually would I want to, for him, would I want to like be here and protect him?
[00:12:20] Maryam Pasha: Knowing that probably is the safest place, but then. Could, how could you choose who would be here with you? And it, it, it was [00:12:30] really like quite, and I thought to myself, well, it’s good. It is a part of my brain. Brain was like, well, it’s good that this is just fiction. And then, then to hear you say that actually there is, there are people who are thinking this way, it feels.
[00:12:44] Maryam Pasha: Incredible. Incredible to me,
[00:12:45] Joshua Oppenheimer: uh, I think it’s a beautiful response because when people ask me kind of the provocative question, what would you bring? I have exactly the same response. I wouldn’t want to ever make that choice.
[00:12:57] Moral dilemmas and human nature
[00:12:57] Joshua Oppenheimer: We all face similar questions [00:13:00] to this family end of in our own lives, you know, when.
[00:13:06] Joshua Oppenheimer: When, when you face an end of life choice, how many of us are tempted to just prolong medical intervention when you have a, if you know you actually have reached the end, or to prolong medical inform intervention for a loved one who becomes, whose quality of life is dwindled to nothing. Um, or, you know, I think about this a lot.
[00:13:26] Joshua Oppenheimer: The mother in the family who we. The, the mother in the real family, [00:13:30] it’s, and the mother played by Tilda Swinton in the end is revealed to have left her family behind and is suffering from the guilt of that. And I, I think, you know, something happened to my stepmother, for example, and I knew my dad wanted to move in with me and.
[00:13:49] Joshua Oppenheimer: Maybe that would be not the best decision for him or for me. I don’t know. But if we, I follow the path of least resistance and just arranged care for him, and then I [00:14:00] follow the next path of least resistance, which would be never to talk about it in that moment. We would kind of, I would’ve lost my dad in the last stages of his life, and then I would live with that forever.
[00:14:14] Joshua Oppenheimer: And I think. You know, in a certain way, the end is really a film about love, and it’s a call for honesty with ourselves and starting with the people we love most. Because when you have, when you kind of, when you impose lies or when you’re too [00:14:30] ashamed or defensive, I. Or scared to raise the difficult issues between the people you and the people you love.
[00:14:37] Joshua Oppenheimer: We all have experienced this. Our relationships, our friendships, our family relationships can become these kind of minefields of silence and no go these no go of no go areas. And we hollow out our ability to lead meaningful lives. And I do not say this when we lie to ourselves, I do not say this to be a scold.
[00:14:56] Joshua Oppenheimer: I say this because we have only one chance to have a [00:15:00] meaningful life on earth.
[00:15:01] Ben Hurst: It feels like a real, um, invitation to your audience to, to consider some things that maybe people don’t enjoy considering.
[00:15:09] The role of art in climate change
[00:15:09] Ben Hurst: I always think there’s this like, big existential question when it comes to creating art, which is like, do you make.
[00:15:16] Ben Hurst: Art for yourself, or do you make art for the audience that you are, you are create, like is there a audience that you were creating this for? And I’m wondering like when you made this film, did you have people in mind that you thought were gonna, like if, [00:15:30] was it directed at the oil executives or is it for the general populace?
[00:15:34] Ben Hurst: Or was it just for you? Was it just satisfying that urge to create that fly on the wall documentary 25 years from now? Like who, who were the people that you were building this for?
[00:15:45] Joshua Oppenheimer: I, it’s for the general audience in the sense that when, when I’m asked the question as a filmmaker, who’s your audience? I always think it’s someone like me who doesn’t know anything about the story, right?
[00:15:58] Joshua Oppenheimer: And that’s the only way. Now that [00:16:00] doesn’t mean it’s everyone. It’s like demographically like me. I’m looking at, you know, middle-aged guy like myself. It’s just that someone whose soul is open, who has all the biases. I might have all the whatever, open-heartedness I may have, whatever. And, and, and then. And, and that’s only because I don’t know how to honestly anticipate.
[00:16:24] Joshua Oppenheimer: I, I, I feel like I would be patronizing the moment I try to widen that like, oh, well, what would, you know, [00:16:30] what would the oil executive’s wife think? What would my, you know, my sister-in-law think. What would someone in, you know, who Survivor of the genocide in Indonesia, who appreciated my last two films, I end up.
[00:16:43] Joshua Oppenheimer: You, you start sort of patronizing or condescending, and I stop knowing how the ma I can only really, you know, I’m the first viewer of my film. I have to kind of trick my mind as I watch it, as I’m editing it to see how does this, as, to feel like I’ve never seen it before.
[00:16:58] Ben Hurst: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
[00:16:59] Joshua Oppenheimer: And then I can [00:17:00] broaden it out with listening to, you know, test audiences and stuff, which of course I do when I’m editing.
[00:17:04] Joshua Oppenheimer: But it’s for, it’s for every human being who wants to, who, who believes, you know. And, and, and I think, yeah, it’s, it, it does ask some challenging questions in the sense that most film, most television repeats the kind of what I call think of as the Star Wars morality, where the world, a Star Wars as a story has some complex, interesting moral dilemmas in it, of course, but, but as a, as an [00:17:30] overall view of the world, there’s like the, the, the light and the dark.
[00:17:32] Joshua Oppenheimer: There’s good guys and there’s bad guys. And most film and television reassures us that we’re like the, you know. You get to enjoy watching the bad guys get their comeuppance, and you get to feel reassured that ultimately, despite whatever complexity there is, there is, you’re one of the good guys. And I think that’s a lie.
[00:17:51] Joshua Oppenheimer: I mean in the sense that every act of evil in our history, every act of destruction in our lives. It that’s in, in our world, [00:18:00] has been perpetrated by human beings like us. The, the, the great thinker of the Holocaust and the, and survivor of the Holocaust Primo Levy wrote, you know, there may be speaking of the Nazis in the Holocaust, there may be monsters among us, but there’re too few to worry about.
[00:18:16] Joshua Oppenheimer: We have to focus on how ordinary people like ourselves get locked into destructive patterns of behavior. And if my work’s about anything, it’s about something we all know from our own lives, how when we’re defensive, we can double [00:18:30] down and keep. Keep and actually become more destructive. Not because we believe what we’ve done is right, but because we know it was wrong.
[00:18:40] Joshua Oppenheimer: We know it’s wrong, but we don’t see a way, there’s no choice to changing. Yeah. We don’t see a way of changing either because we feel powerless or we’re defensive and we therefore, if we change now we admit it was wrong before. That’s the big dilemma of mother. You know, there’s in, in the bunker in the end.
[00:18:57] Joshua Oppenheimer: I’m, I’m spoiling nothing really by saying this. A young woman [00:19:00] arrives and they. Say that they’re afraid of her and they, they say they’re, that she’s a danger. But actually mother blurts out pretty much immediately. We can’t let her stay because if we let her stay, what about all the other people we didn’t let stay.
[00:19:14] Joshua Oppenheimer: Suddenly I’m a murderer. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[00:19:17] Maryam Pasha: I wanna delve into a couple of specific bits of the film and ask you about them. The, the father is, I guess, writing his memoir for the world, which I found quite ironic anyway, that where I was [00:19:30] like, what world? Like what, what, you know, it seems pretty obvious that there’s nothing left.
[00:19:34] Maryam Pasha: And, and, and he’s writing this memoir and he’s getting to retell. I think his story, this is my interpretation of it, with his own lens, and I think, you know, you, you said that a bit, a few times, there’s, in this film, there’s this idea of like, I had no choice. I had no choice. I had to do it this way. And, and the same with the way that the father seems to tell the story and want to re rewrite parts of it.
[00:19:58] Maryam Pasha: I wanna understand like [00:20:00] that creative decision of having the father write this story.
[00:20:04] Joshua Oppenheimer: Yeah. First of all, you know the bunk, the idea of saving your family in a bunker and telling yourself the world sort of continues as if nothing changed. So instead of. Saying, whoa, that’s a wake up call. Let’s change how we live now.
[00:20:20] Joshua Oppenheimer: Even if we’re, which is sort of the message that the young woman, the Moses Ingram’s character brings. Yes. Um, the idea that you’re just gonna kind of carry on that your wealth, your [00:20:30] success, your prestige, your power will just continue in this kind of abyss of meaninglessness where they’re living. That to me is a, is a.
[00:20:42] Joshua Oppenheimer: That that’s kind of an immortality project. It’s the idea of, and it’s absurd. Yes. And I thought that that, you know, I mentioned earlier the father, what kind of. Pa you know, how might you use and misuse your, your, your kid as a blank canvas onto which you can paint [00:21:00] a kind of idealized portrait of yourself.
[00:21:01] Joshua Oppenheimer: The father’s enlisted his son and it’s an act of kind of abuse, mistreat, not, not physical abuse, but kind of manipulation that he’s made. He’s enlisted his son in lying about his own past, the father’s past, and thereby. Deprive the son of any knowledge of the world, that it was the idea that the son is sort of forced to do this in different ways for both parents.
[00:21:28] Joshua Oppenheimer: Mm-hmm. I love the absurdity of it. There’s a beautiful [00:21:30] moment where he’s telling where after they, after they finally allow, allow the young woman’s character to stay, they kind of have her for dinner over for dinner at a kind of welcome dinner where. They’ve almost just after they’ve almost just killed her by throwing her out again.
[00:21:46] Joshua Oppenheimer: And the father asked this question that I can absolutely hear my father asking at an awkward dinner. Well, I guess she’d like to hear, uh, a little bit of what we do around here. I’m writing a book and I. And it’s, and hopefully [00:22:00] someone will read it and the girl is like this kind of witness to the absurdity of that.
[00:22:04] Ben Hurst: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
[00:22:04] Joshua Oppenheimer: Um, so that’s one of the moments where the film, yeah. I guess hearing your question, Miriam, that it kind of tips into the absurd and it, it reminds us through the girl’s eyes, through the Moses Ingram character’s eyes of the, just craziness of the whole thing. And that’s, I think, structurally in terms of the story that.
[00:22:23] Joshua Oppenheimer: Aligns us with her. Yes. Makes us see that actually if anyone has the answers here, it’s going to be her. And it’s right out [00:22:30] of that that she starts opening up, sort of blowing the son’s mind. I think the other piece of it is that, you know, if you grow up the sun, the parents are constantly lying. I. To the son.
[00:22:40] Joshua Oppenheimer: And in a way, you know, he’s the young, before Moses is the young woman arrives, the son is the only member of his generation. Everyone’s older. Yes. And they kind of, the whole bunker’s really a pact of silence where they’re lying to her and she, I. Uh, um, it’s, there’s a kind of pact of silence among the [00:23:00] older people, not to tell each other’s secrets to the sun.
[00:23:02] Joshua Oppenheimer: Yes. But of course, over 25 years, things leak out until he actually knows a lot more than each of them think he does. Yes. And is kind of complicit with those lies. And we see it in that first memoir scene early in the film when the son’s writing a chapter for the father. You, you see him, him revealing.
[00:23:21] Joshua Oppenheimer: Sit writing things that he shouldn’t write about. The father’s human rights abuses in Indonesia of all places, and the father makes the father very [00:23:30] uncomfortable. And the son’s, oh, don’t worry, we’ll just write something else. Because it’s, there’s, there’s no human right. There’s no truth to worry about.
[00:23:36] Joshua Oppenheimer: What he has to worry about is pleasing his dad and that that whole way of creating the sun is someone who has like. As you would have to if you’re doomed to end up alone because he’s, yes, everyone else will die if they die natural deaths before he does. So he’s, he’s born into this trap of ending up alone.
[00:23:52] Joshua Oppenheimer: And you would, if you have to imagine how will you live a life alone in this place after everyone else is gone, you would need [00:24:00] truth. And so he’s developed this kind of radar for truth, and he’s like. His whole, the whole physicality by which George Mackay plays son is like that. He flinches and sort of twitches almost.
[00:24:11] Joshua Oppenheimer: Yes. Every time truth Pierces, pierces the bubble of illusion that he’s supposed to. Be living within or every time he remembers something truthful that he’s not supposed to know.
[00:24:23] Maryam Pasha: There’s something else that really struck me about this. When I, when I stepped back at the end and I thought of the film and I [00:24:30] thought, it is it, for me, it felt like, um, a metaphor and analogy, whichever of, of, um, how there is a, a, a thinking that there’s an appropriate amount of people to sacrifice for us to continue living our lives the way we want to live them.
[00:24:46] Maryam Pasha: And that. Eventually if you continue to sacrifice and sacrifice and, and, and save yourself, like whether we think of ourselves as our families or our countries or the West or whatever it might be, [00:25:00] there is no way to continue like the Sun Un until they were willing to save someone else. This woman who arrives, there was no future for the sun after a certain point.
[00:25:14] Maryam Pasha: And I, that’s what really struck me. And I, and I wonder if that’s deliberate, like if that’s something that you were thinking about. About, about how we are so focused on maybe trying to save a small group of people and let them preserve their lives exactly as they are while [00:25:30] sacrificing everyone else.
[00:25:30] Maryam Pasha: And how that is a dead end to itself.
[00:25:33] Joshua Oppenheimer: Yeah, I really believe that. We are, and this is kind of a moral view, this is, this has to do with the idea that, you know, however we die, whenever we die, whenever the species, if we go extinct because an asteroid hits us or we go extinct because of rogue ai, or we survive the climate catastrophe and all of these existential problems and we go extinct because the sun becomes a black a, a, a a red giant and then [00:26:00] swallows the earth and we die in a black hole or whatever.
[00:26:01] Joshua Oppenheimer: Mm-hmm. Whatever eventually does us in, because one, at some point something will, the question is how do we live? It’s in all of our natures to die individually. And the question I. If our lives are lives are to be meaningful, how do we live? And I feel that baked into that exclusive notion where we protect our own families or our own countries in opposition to the broader human family of [00:26:30] which we all know we’re part and of which we all know, on which we all know.
[00:26:34] Joshua Oppenheimer: We depend to feed ourselves, to clothe ourselves, to mine the rare earth’s earth metals that will get us out of this climate crisis and that are. Uh, at the core of these technologies through which we’re speaking now and recording this podcast, the idea that we can exclude them is, I believe, part of the same destructive logic that.
[00:26:58] Joshua Oppenheimer: Is leading us right [00:27:00] toward the end because it’s a, it’s a kind of me first, me now logic that prevents collective action that leads to pe leads people to think, I won’t bother to get involved collectively of the structural struggle against climate change, uh, and the fossil and fossil fuel misinformation and the fossil fuel.
[00:27:17] Joshua Oppenheimer: Continued burning of fossil fuels. It’s the, it’s the selfishness of isolationism and I think it takes on. So many destructive forms. Like if the film is a plea against anything, [00:27:30] it’s against isolation. You know, the, the, it may a family that has just continued down the destructive course right over the edge of the cliff, despite having already had revealed to them that if they continue as has been already revealed to all of us, we will.
[00:27:45] Joshua Oppenheimer: We will go ex, we will destroy ourselves. That family, the last human family can’t have a happy ending. So yes, the end is a tragedy, but as a movie, it’s, but it’s an at making it, it’s [00:28:00] also a cautionary tale. It’s also a wake up tale. It’s also full of sincerity and compassion and love for the these broken, these, these, these, these.
[00:28:11] Joshua Oppenheimer: Not always, uh, these damaged characters. Um. In that sense, the making of it is an act of hope. You don’t make a cautionary tale. You don’t deploy all these resources to make a cautionary tale unless you believe there’s still time for the audience to heed the [00:28:30] warning. So we will leave, you know, the audience will leave the cinema, you’ll finish the film.
[00:28:35] Joshua Oppenheimer: And you’ll look outside or you’ll leave the the cinema and go outside. And as Tilda always says about the film and when she first signed up to it, there’s still a sky out there. We still have time. And I just think, I think it was a beautiful point you made, Miriam, that we don’t have that, that idea that if we just keep prioritizing ourselves in opposition.
[00:28:59] Joshua Oppenheimer: To everyone [00:29:00] else. That is the core of the logic that’s leading us right off the, off the cliff. We need a, the widest possible compassion to have the solidarity necessary for change now.
[00:29:11] Ben Hurst: Hmm.
[00:29:12] Ben Hurst: While you were talking, I was thinking it’s like, uh, playing monopoly, and when you get to the end of the game and you win, then you pack the game up and put it away and then go and live your life and come back.
[00:29:20] Ben Hurst: But there’s no, like, I guess get into the end of this. Game if we gamify getting to the end and winning still results in losing, which is like a, a, a [00:29:30] pretty interesting framing.
[00:29:32] Maryam Pasha: I wanna ask, so, okay. One of your previous films, the Are of Killing, right? I read, um, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, that they showed it in Congress.
[00:29:41] Maryam Pasha: I. And they showed it in the US Congress, the United States Congress. And your hope was that it would, the US would admit to its role in what was happening in the genocide, Indonesia, that you talked about earlier. And as part of that, they declassified a whole series of files related to what was happening there.
[00:29:57] Maryam Pasha: And that was a pretty, and they, and I think they cited, [00:30:00] right, the impact of the film in their decision to do that. And that’s pretty direct, and I think pretty unusual for films to have that kind of very like clear, tangible, causal line. When you think about the end, if we zoom out and think about it, what is the impact as a creator of this, that you would like it to have?
[00:30:21] Maryam Pasha: Is there something specific? Is it cultural? Is it policy? You know, where does your mind go?
[00:30:27] Joshua Oppenheimer: Well, I think first and foremost, [00:30:30] I want it to. Push us away from the isolationist me first solutions, the kind of the kind of bunkering mentality. Mm-hmm. I want it to make us aware of, I want it and I want it to do so by making people aware of how they lie to themselves.
[00:30:49] Joshua Oppenheimer: I. How they rationalize inaction, how they say, oh, I can’t be bothered to actually go to a protest, to actually get involved with cli real climate [00:31:00] activism. Um, when we know actually that’s what this moment demands of us.
[00:31:05] Maryam Pasha: Do you feel that as storytellers or as filmmakers or as artists, what role do you feel you have?
[00:31:18] Maryam Pasha: In this climate movement or in this movement to help us not be marching towards this kind of end.
[00:31:26] Joshua Oppenheimer: I think for me, what I can do is [00:31:30] get people to recognize themselves with in, in, in.
[00:31:40] Joshua Oppenheimer: In the people they see on screen and just so I think that if you can get people to identify in these, ultimately quite broken people, mother and father, it’s what I did in my film. The act of killing too. If that film made an impact, it wasn’t just because it exposed new information. Mm-hmm. It was because viewers saw the humanity of the mass murderer.
[00:31:59] Joshua Oppenheimer: Mm-hmm. [00:32:00] And saw, oh no, this, that we have to, if we wanna prevent this, we have to think of other ways of living together. So this kind of behavior is not encouraged and doesn’t become, is, becomes impossible. Similarly, like, uh, if people can identify in the mother and the father and the son, I. How they in their own lives, minimize, rationalize, sentimentalize, lie to themselves and surrender to ultimately what I think people don’t think of as despair and fatalism, but is [00:32:30] I think we throw sand in the works.
[00:32:32] Joshua Oppenheimer: We throw sand in the gears so that next time everything in our culture encourages us to do that. We become, there’s just a little moment, it’s like harder. It’s like trying to think about how do you, you know, it’s hard to. Right walk. If you think about how you do it or hard to, something that becomes automatic, becomes unnatural, and it’s like, wait, no, this isn’t good enough.
[00:32:51] Joshua Oppenheimer: So in that sense, I hope that this film opens our heart to new [00:33:00] ways of being, because the current way we’re living. Is lonely and inadequate
[00:33:06] Ben Hurst: and people know it.
[00:33:07] Challenges in filmmaking
[00:33:07] Ben Hurst: One of the things that I’m really interested in is in the process of making this film, what did you come up against? Any resistance or any like challenges make, like either personally or professionally?
[00:33:21] Ben Hurst: Was this like something that everybody was completely behind? Was it something that like got green lit really easily? Was it something that was difficult for you to make as an individual? Was there [00:33:30] any moments of tension in the in the creation process? You know,
[00:33:35] Joshua Oppenheimer: the, my, my, we called them documentaries, but my earlier films are so wild in their conception.
[00:33:43] Joshua Oppenheimer: I mean, the act of killing if it had an elevator pitch was death Squad members make a musical and it didn’t have an elevator pitch, but it was so wild that it kind of bought me, um, freedom. To propose something [00:34:00] as crazy as this. I think where this film became
[00:34:09] Joshua Oppenheimer: has become, I think where the end hit Hit Headwinds was won in a. What was one financial as the, as covid kind, kind of completely transformed what was fundable. Mm-hmm. But maybe the, the given what we’re talking about the, the deeper and more [00:34:30] interesting, um, way it. Headwinds is, I think as we dug deep into the writing and then ultimately in the songwriting, and then in the integrating of the songs and the script into one kind of coherent piece, and then working with actors to deepen it further, and then bringing the cast in and then really rehearsing.
[00:34:52] Joshua Oppenheimer: I think everyone’s commitment to humanize these characters and make them vulnerable, [00:35:00] created an experience unlike anything else. And I think. We were able, and I think that I, I think it’s just unlike any other film that people have seen. And that of course, you know, the, the kind of cliches of how, about how films are made where you say, oh, it’s a cross between, it’s this, meets that.
[00:35:19] Joshua Oppenheimer: Um, you know, um, that stopped, that evidently stopped working as people saw, oh, this is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. And I think [00:35:30] that that. That means the audience sort of has to, or the, the audience and critics and the, the film going and, and, and, and, and the public just need to sort of. Open themselves and learn how to watch something that’s unlike anything they’ve seen.
[00:35:47] Joshua Oppenheimer: And we live in a time where very few, where almost every film ends with a happy ending or if it has a sad ending, there’s a kind of moment of grace for the main character, but then they’ve given something up. [00:36:00] Mm-hmm. So we’re telling story after story after story, and I think it’s the algorithms that drive this where.
[00:36:06] Joshua Oppenheimer: Where you’re inspired by the, the characters and that that’s not how it always was. I remember as a kid, people asking me, you have hol real Hollywood movies, like, do you prefer movies with happy endings or sad endings? And there was a divorce in my fan family and I used to say, oh, I love, I love the films with sad endings because that feels like.
[00:36:25] Joshua Oppenheimer: My world. And I think they don’t, we don’t make, we hardly make any [00:36:30] films with sad endings anymore. It always ends well, and I think even, even to create a cautionary tale in today’s world, and especially one where we’re asking the audience to see themselves in characters who are flaw human beings, who like us are flawed, and then to reinvent the language of.
[00:36:50] Joshua Oppenheimer: Of cinema that all of that Yeah. Makes the film. I, I, you know, makes the film, I think a really rewarding thing for people who open themselves to it and [00:37:00] also makes it, you know, hard to kind of just encapsulate I. I dunno. In a, in a, in a tweet or a, an Instagram post or whatever.
[00:37:13] Maryam Pasha: Mm mm You may not have an answer for us on this one, but we’re curious to know, do you feel like climate storytelling or, or stories about climate change and the impacts of it, or the hope around it is something that filmmakers are turning their attention to?
[00:37:29] Maryam Pasha: Is it [00:37:30] something that Hollywood is turning its attention to? What are your hopes or fears around that?
[00:37:37] Joshua Oppenheimer: I, I, you know, I think it’s really important that climate be integrated realistically into the stories that are told most ly. I mean, it’s a part of our lives that, you know, it’s not, it’s a major event that Los Angeles.
[00:37:55] Joshua Oppenheimer: Yes, big parts of Los Angeles burned down. It’s a major event that we have, you know, [00:38:00] killer heat waves every summer that you have areas of the United States that never should flood, that are completely inundated. That. And I think that the fact that that’s just kind of kept out of the backdrop of life in ways that, that, um.
[00:38:18] Joshua Oppenheimer: That other aspects of our lives are present is part of our culture’s denial. Mm-hmm. I also think that it’s really [00:38:30] important that, I really think that we’re at a time when we have an existential choice. I. Began this conversation by saying we’re living in a post-apocalyptic moment. Mm-hmm. Where we actually, it’s been revealed to us how the end will come if we don’t come together and change now together collectively, and we all know that.
[00:38:51] Joshua Oppenheimer: So I think stories that I. That constantly reassure us that, you know, yes, there’s bad people out there, but don’t worry, you are not [00:39:00] bad. That doesn’t encourage us to stop and acknowledge where we’re wayward. Mm-hmm. And, and adjust our course because that just encourages us to do this, to pat ourselves on the back and I.
[00:39:14] Joshua Oppenheimer: Uh, you know, you can’t solve a problem if you’re too complacent, too defensive, too frightened, or too ashamed even to acknowledge it. Yeah. Mm. And so I think we need to move. We need to demand [00:39:30] real change, and we need to build audience and culture for stories that don’t constantly address us. As the heroes of our, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the righteous heroes of our own lives and that actually show that we’re closer to perpetrators than we like to think in all aspects of life.
[00:39:50] Joshua Oppenheimer: And I don’t think we’re gonna just demand that by me banging on about it on a podcast like this. I think that’s cultural change is going to come from building a culture of resistance. And as the [00:40:00] dark clouds of totalitarianism build over the world’s democracies as ever. Leaker. Climate futures seem baked in, become more and more baked in it.
[00:40:14] Joshua Oppenheimer: It’s going to change either by. The Disney world illusion of harmony, just dystopian in a dystopian way, crumbling into something very, very ugly, or, or us coming together right now [00:40:30] collectively in solidarity as a, a single human family and demanding change and not stopping until we get it.
[00:40:40] Final thoughts and farewell
[00:40:40] Maryam Pasha: I think that’s a absolutely perfect way to end.
[00:40:43] Maryam Pasha: I really wanna just say thank you for taking this time with us. Thank you for making this film. Thank you for letting us be a fly on the wall. Mm. And experience this. It’s been wonderful talking to you, Joshua.
[00:40:55] Joshua Oppenheimer: Thank you so much. Thank you so much.
[00:40:59] Maryam Pasha: Thank you for [00:41:00] joining us this week. We really hope you’ve enjoyed this episode.
[00:41:02] Ben Hurst: If you did, please hit the follow button to make sure that you get next week’s releases.
[00:41:07] Maryam Pasha: And why not reach out with your very own climate confessions?
[00:41:10] Ben Hurst: While you’re at it, please leave a rating and a review.
[00:41:14] Maryam Pasha: Now, let’s shout out to our fabulous team behind the pod
[00:41:17] Ben Hurst: executive, produced by Josie Colter,
[00:41:19] Maryam Pasha: produced by Ben Beheshty.
[00:41:21] Ben Hurst: Music, also by Ben Beheshty,
[00:41:23] Maryam Pasha: communications by Tara Cooper and Izzy Gladstone.
[00:41:26] Ben Hurst: Curation by Deesha Chandra,
[00:41:28] Maryam Pasha: hosted by Ben Hurst.
[00:41:30] Ben Hurst: I’m Maryam Pasha,
[00:41:31] Maryam Pasha: and remember,
[00:41:32] Ben Hurst: stay curious.
