Stories of Self-Delusion With Joshua Oppenheimer
This episode features a conversation with film director, Joshua Oppenheimer. It was recorded in March 2025.
Joshua gained notoriety through his documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, which, amongst their many accolades, gained him Academy Award and BAFTA nominations.
In fact, back in 2012, it was his extraordinarily beautiful and bizarre film, The Act of Killing, which follows former Indonesian death-squad leaders in reenacting their mass-killings through cinematic set pieces and lavish musical numbers, that put Joshua on my radar. The Guardian called it “The most compelling thing you’ll ever see.” I tend to agree.
His latest film, entitled The End, hit cinemas in the UK and Germany last week.
The End stars Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, and George MacKay, as a wealthy family living isolated lives in a luxurious bunker, two decades after an environmental catastrophe renders Earth's surface uninhabitable. But this isn’t your run-of-the-mill, seen-it-before disaster take, The End is a genre-bending tale that urges us to reconsider the illusions we hold about the fate of our planet and, perhaps crucially, our role in shaping that fate.
Amongst other things, Joshua and I discussed The End, why we often find living in lies a more comforting situation than facing reality, and the need to challenge the silence and the self-deception that is all around us when it comes to climate.
Additional links:
The End is out now in Germany and the UK. Get tickets to cinemas near you here.
Find out where to stream The End in your location by going here.
Watch the trailer for The End.
Get a sense of Joshua’s inspiration from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
Check out the trailers for The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence.
Here’s the panel discussion I mentioned, discussing silence around fossil fuels in Norway.
Creatives for Climate is the largest and most diverse network of change-agents using creativity to drive climate action.
Read George Lakoff’s book, Don’t Think of An Elephant.
Dickon: Hi and welcome to Communicating Climate Change, a podcast dedicated to helping you do exactly that. I'm Dickon and I'll be your host as we dig deep into the best practices and the worst offences, always looking for ways to help you - and me - improve our abilities to engage, empower and ultimately activate audiences on climate related issues.
This episode features a conversation with film director, Joshua Oppenheimer. It was recorded in March 2025.
Joshua gained notoriety through his documentaries, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence which, amongst their many accolades, gained him Academy Award and BAFTA nominations.
In fact, back in 2012, it was his extraordinarily beautiful and bizarre film, The Act of Killing, which follows former Indonesian death squad leaders in reenacting their mass killings through cinematic set pieces and lavish musical numbers, that put Joshua on my radar. The Guardian called it, “the most compelling thing you'll ever see.” And I tend to agree.
His latest film, entitled, The End, hit Cinemas in the UK and Germany last week. The End stars Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon and George Mackay as a wealthy family living isolated lives in a luxurious bunker two decades after an environmental catastrophe renders Earth's surface uninhabitable. But this isn't your run-of-the-mill, seen-it-before disaster take, The End is a genre bending tale that urges us to reconsider the illusions we hold about the fate of our planet and, crucially perhaps, our role in shaping that fate.
Amongst other things, Joshua and I discussed The End, why we often find living in lies a more comforting situation than facing up to reality, and the need to challenge the silence and self deception that is all around us when it comes to climate.
So, let's get on with it, this is Communicating Climate Change with Joshua Oppenheimer.
From your perspective, how can communication best contribute in humanity's response to the climate crisis?
Joshua: We live in a time of cognitive dissonance. I think we live in the first moment in human history where the revelation of how we will go extinct, if we continue unabated in exactly the direction we're in, if we don't radically transform how we're consuming energy and how our economy consumes energy, we will very likely go extinct.
This is the first time in human history where, embedded in the logic of our present, is the end. And we know that. And so, when we know something that profound about ourselves and do not change, I can't help but feel that anything we can do now, not to necessarily scream louder about the risk of extinction, which I think most people know, or the risk of catastrophic consequence of continuing as we are, but actually to make people reflect, feel and question the awful consequences of self deception and cognitive dissonance can throw sand in the gears of the mechanisms of cognitive dissonance, which are manifold.
And especially now when the media landscape has not just been fractured into kind of echo chambers, but we have these social media bubbles that we live in, which are sort of turbocharged by AI algorithms that flood us with whatever narrative is sort of existing in each of those bubbles. I think we have big parts of the population that are just being fed lies and I actually think to some extent people know that and I think some of the kind of embrace of those lies is not that they've just been convinced but actually embracing those lies or surrendering to those lies feels good or satisfying, or like the best of several bad options for a lot of different reasons. It can feel good because it gives a cultural expression to grievance, which I think we see in some of the sort of embrace of Trump from people who know he's a liar.
I think it can also feel like a relief because it lets us off the hook of our responsibility for action. I think it can feel like a relief because we live in a society, especially in American society, where the possibilities for genuine democratic expression have become more and more constrained. Long before the mainstream media has been calling the Trump administration a kind of oligarchy directly, I think it was oligarchic in the sense that the influence of money in politics, the fact that there's a kind of legalised corruption where corporations can buy politicians - which would not be legal for example in Sweden, where I live - that that so constrains the possibilities for genuine democratic expression, even before Trump, that one has a choice between despair and helplessness which, certainly in an American culture which celebrates rugged individualism, can feel shameful, or a kind of embrace of the lie.
So, I think anything that can make us reflect honestly about what are we doing when we accept the falsehoods and we accept the minimising and we accept the “Oh but somehow it'll work out for the best” logic, and makes us really reflect on how we diminish ourselves and our capacity to cherish everything we love from our children to this beautiful planet, can be effective. That we can intervene in cognitive dissonance by making people aware of it and feel it and identify with it and see it in their own lives.
Dickon: I live in Norway, so very near by you, and I was just on a panel last week and I got asked what the difference was between climate discussions internationally and climate discussions I run into in Norway, and the only thing I could think of was that nobody talks about oil here. The oil industry has been so good at disconnecting climate from oil, you find conversations about nature and gender and all these intersecting aspects. But not oil. Nobody talks about the oil. And this film really hit home for me as “Wow, God, this is such an allegory for Norway.”
Joshua: Wow, that's interesting because I live in Sweden, outside of Copenhagen in Denmark, which doesn't really have oil. Not much. And Sweden, which doesn't. Where there's just so much talk about climate. I can understand that strange complicity in Norway.
You know, I when I was making The End, I I faced a dilemma. How explicit should I be about the source of the world's collapse? And I felt that, you know, Jean Paul Sartre says, “an artist ought to be married to the era.” And I thought, how can I not deal with the unique risks of climate change for the very reason that I mentioned earlier, that we are living in this unique moment in human history where we see embedded in the logic of the present, our own end, and in a sense, part of what inspired the idea of an allegory set after the end of the world is the recognition that we are already living post apocalypse and let me explain what I mean by that. I owe a little bit of this argument to my friend Srećko Horvat, the Croatian philosopher who wrote a beautiful little book on this. But, the idea that “apocalypse”, as a word, has in its etymology, its Greek etymology, “uncovering,” “revealing.” That's why the Book of Revelation is called Revelation in the Romance languages, but actually comes from the Greek apocalypse. And the revelation that we're living with is the revelation of our ending. It has already been revealed to us, as humankind, that we will destroy our habitable world if we continue as we are. So, if we don't very quickly find an exit ramp, this freeway is going to dump us right off a cliff. And that's a unique moment.
So while yes, runaway AI could do something destructive or an asteroid could hit us and we also know that eventually the Sun will turn into a red giant and swallow the earth in billions of years. This is the first time where we know how we're going to end. And I felt I have to address that, making a film post-apocalypse by offering enough clues in the story that that's what happened. And some people have said there's so much subtlety and nuance to the dynamics of cognitive dissonance, the self deception in the family, the secrets they hold, but it's kind of hiding beneath this very clear political framework, and I just think it's important. So also as part of your first question there about what we as storytellers need to do, I don't think we need to mince words and I don't think we need to be unclear because there's something unique about the climate threat. We are, as I said, post revelation. We already have got the message and then the question is: What does this moment demand of us? How shall we live, given what we know?
Dickon: To bring any listeners who aren't so familiar with your work a little closer to it and to our conversation about your latest film, I wonder if you could explain a bit about how The End serves as an informal third part of a trilogy about Indonesia, as well as how you arrived here, at a work of fiction which stands in some contrast to the documentary works that came before it.
Joshua: Yeah, I sort of had already made two post apocalyptic films set in the aftermath of genocide that were about, not so much about the killings themselves, as they're often glossed, but really about what happens to a society when the perpetrators win and impose their narrative on a terrified society.
The genocide was in 1965 and brought the kind of current regime of corruption and impunity into force in Indonesia, and somewhere between half a million and two and a half million people were killed. I wanted to make a third film there about the billionaires who enrich themselves by exploiting a nation that was terrified of them, but after the first of those films came out, The Act of Killing, I could no longer return safely to Indonesia, and ultimately I was fully banned from entering the country.
And so I started to investigate oligarchs elsewhere who’d made their money through violence. And found an oil tycoon who’d used violence and used his country's military to clear the land for his oil fields. As I got to know the family and he happened to be on the market for luxury bunker that he was creating out of a former Soviet command bunker inside a mountain. And he invited me to take a look at it with his family. And on the way there, I was chatting with his wife, who was constantly texting her cousins and siblings and nieces and nephews - really like gregarious with her family. As we toured these underground caverns, it became clear they were going to bring very, very, very few people. And I was haunted by that contrast and specifically the questions of guilt: How would this woman cope with the remorse for leaving everyone behind? How is she already betraying them by not telling them that she intends to leave them behind? How are those relationships already hollowing out because she knows that if she should ever have to move to this place, she would abandon them? How would the father, this oil man, cope with his remorse for the catastrophe from which they would be fleeing? And he explained that he thought that the indirect effects of climate change would be what renders the world largely uninhabitable, or too dangerous to inhabit, and what he meant by that was that the mass movement of, you know, billions of people from areas of the world that become too hot or too arid or too inundated by water to inhabit would be on the move, and you just wouldn't be able to stop that with whatever border security you might have in other countries, and you would end up with the total breakdown of nation states. And some of those being nuclear armed would fall into warlordism and you'd get nuclear weapons in the hands of warlords. And then you would get regional nuclear war and then spiralling into broader, global nuclear war and just the world would become kind of a dystopia. And it was kind of multiple threats piled on top of each other but triggered by catastrophic climate change.
And so I thought, how will you cope with your guilt for this crisis from which you'd be fleeing? And then more sort of interesting questions: How might you raise a new generation in such a place? Children who never see the outside world, as a kind of blank canvas onto which you could project some idealised or paint some idealised portrait of yourself. To ease, your own conscience. And I couldn't ask them these questions because it was clear that the whole bunker was a kind of physical manifestation of, and monument to, their delusion.
So, what I could do was sort of despair and think “I don't know how to make a film with these people anymore, unless I were somehow invited to make the documentary of their life in the bunker decades after they move in.” And that was not a viable production plan or film project.
So, on the way home, not knowing what I would do, I watched one of my very favourite musicals: Jacques Demy’s 1964, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. And afterwards it simply came to me: I will make a musical set in a place like this, the family will be American, because I think the Golden Age musical’s a kind of quintessentially American genre, but also this kind of false optimism, baseless optimism, that no matter how passive we remain, no matter how much we bury our heads in the sand and do nothing, we still can believe that everything will work out for the best. That the sun will come out tomorrow. That isn't really hope or optimism at all. That's a kind of sentimental lie. It's despair in the sheep’s clothing of hope. And I thought that sort of pre-social media maybe, was a particularly American cultural formation rooted in the kind of frontier nation mentality, but actually I think it's become with social media, our global culture. And yet I thought this film should be an American film in its narrative and sort of resonance. So, I thought I will make a film called The End set 25 years in a bunker, decades after the environmental collapse has occurred, and the film should be a Golden Age musical. And so that that was how that that was how the film began.
It occurs to me as we speak, as I tell you that, that one of the things that messages that I often get when people just hear sort of the pitch for the story, from smart climate activists and climate thinkers, is that we need to keep hope alive. We can't tell a post apocalyptic story. We have to keep emphasising hopefulness. And then I often get the question: Am I an optimist? And obviously, that the family is living after the end of the world is an allegory, somehow, for the post apocalyptic moment that we are living in that we live with the knowledge yet are doing nothing, or we're not doing enough, many of us are doing things and there's all sorts of innovation coming and so on. But, that's kind of distilled down into this allegorical family.
Of course, in that allegory, in that tragedy, it's too late for the family. But the film is a cautionary tale, and we would not have come together, the hundreds of us who made it, to tell this cautionary tale, if we did not fervently hope that there's still time to heed the warning.
When you leave the cinema after seeing The End, or you step away from your screen and look outside, there's still a a sky. And there's still a chance to ask yourself honestly, what does this post apocalyptic moment demand of us? How can we be part of a radical, transformative change? And sort of brings out two little points about, to go back to your first question. One is I don't think we do anyone any favours by emphasising individual lifestyle changes we can make. That whole Neoliberal emphasis on individual behaviour was a determined part of the fossil fuel industry's campaign of misinformation about what needs to be done to prevent there from being collective action and collective regulation.
This isn't to say that you shouldn't fly less, or you shouldn't become a vegan. By all means, do whatever you need to do so that you can feel authentic in the positions you take and the things you campaign for, but human beings have never solved our problems alone. We solve them collectively in solidarity, so reach out to others, join a movement, get used to raising your voice loud at a march. If you're up for civil disobedience and you're in part of a movement that can actually support that, and you can handle the potential consequences of that, I believe we're at a moment where we are called upon to genuinely resist. And at the same time, I also don't think that what we need to do is say, “yes, things are bad, but look at all the good news.”
I think that's actually what failed the Democrats in this last election. People knew the economy was terrible and the Democrats were saying “Yes. But look at all the good things we've done,” without giving kind of expression to the underlying feelings of anger and despair that people felt about the economy. This is an analogy, but it's the same thing here. We know, people believe by now, at some level or know at some level, that the climate is in grave danger. And so why are they turning away from that? Why are they not focused on that? Because they've been made to feel helpless. They also know that becoming a vegan isn't going to change the world. And so we need to sort of acknowledge where we are, the gravity of the situation. And we need to emphasise hope and possibility for real transformation and call upon people to overcome, or help people overcome, their cognitive dissonance. But simply kind of beating the drum of the optimist. It's groundless. People are just smart enough to know that for 30 something years now, we've known about this problem and things haven't gotten better. They're just getting worse. So, I think now is the time to actually be honest about why, which I think has everything to do with cognitive dissonance and corruption and the need for a real social movement.
Dickon: What role do songs and structuring the film as a musical show play in presenting the characters’ self deceptions? Why did you opt for this form?
Joshua: The cliche about the Golden Age musicals that characters sing when their truth is too big to be contained by ordinary speech, and going back to what I said about musicals being a kind of form of delusion and sort of sentimentality and escapism and a kind of false hope, I think that was always a bit of a lie. I think the truth they were singing was often an escapist fantasy. And I wanted to therefore draw that out and make that explicit. And so often the songs in The End appear to be kind of the inverse of that formula, where, as all the lies and stories and delusions that the characters cling to to cope with their pretty bleak situation unravel… Unable to face the truth, they try to pull themselves out of that abyss through song. They reach for new lies, new stories, new dreams, new delusions through the act of singing. So, the songs are active. They're not like kind of escapist fantasy numbers, as you might have seen in some of the Golden Age musicals, they're these kind of active attempts to convince themselves, by reaching for these luminously beautiful new melodies, that happen to be lies.
Josh Schmidt, the composer, has written this sort of rich, dark, beautiful counterpoint in the orchestration, almost like an undertow or current, that sort of sucks them back down to the truth. So, as they try to lift themselves up through song, they often fail, and the kind of new melodies or new excuses they're spinning and the lyrics start to fall apart even as they're spinning them. And they hit a kind of wall of truth where they can't sing anymore for a moment. And that's really where the reality, the truth screams through, in those silences. So kind of an inversion of the normal formula, the music often embodies the lies while the silence holds the truth.
Dickon: The film plays with the theme of restorative nostalgia, with the characters clinging to the past that can't return. Do you see nostalgia as a useful tool in how we process crises such as climate change or as more of a hindrance?
Joshua: Just so we're specific in the language, I think if we start from the restorative nostalgia that you identify in the film, it's a hindrance. Because what they're clinging to is like, classically conservative. They're clinging to an old logic of family, an old logic of nature, an old logic of consumption and meaning that has become laid bare and kind of exposed by the absence of a society that had conferred meaning upon those structures.
So, everything that was meaningful no longer is meaningful. The father’s writing a memoir, but for no one. There's art hanging on the wall that once had a meaning in the society and to the public, but no longer does, because there's no one to appreciate it. So, it's simply become commodity, fetish, trophy, status symbol, that they have this great art collection.
I think at the deepest level, because embedded in the logic of that civilization was the seeds of its destruction, it's what I said at the very beginning, because we are in this post apocalyptic moment where if we continue as we are, we go off the edge of the cliff, what they’re nostalgic for are all the destructive patterns of behaviour and all the lies that dissemble those, dissimulate, hide those destructive patterns of behaviour that we're addicted to today. That kind of nostalgia isn't going to be constructive.
Michael Shannon, after making this film, got tattooed on his arm, I think a quotation by Albert Einstein that says, “you cannot solve a problem with the same way of thinking that created the problem.” And I may be getting this slightly wrong, but I believe that's what the tattoo says. And so nostalgia for a culture that that we all know is dooming us is not constructive.
At the same time, the young man played by George Mackay and Moses Ingram, who plays the girl who enters the bunker, are able to try and make a life that's meaningful where they actually embrace the very same emptiness that the family is busy denying. And that is really the end. There's a lyric that they sing together, you know, “clouds catch fire in the last rays of sunlight,” or, as Girl says, maybe even more beautifully, she sings, “I remember time when moments did not disappear when I closed my eyes, a single breath could go on and on forever. So how few breaths we might have left meant nothing much at all.”
So, even though they were born doomed, like we all are in a way to die, they realise that if they can live honestly. They can still have meaningful lives together in this no place. But this place that they embrace is underground. It's sort of darkly beautiful. It's starkly evocative of the natural world that has been destroyed. There's paintings on the wall of this bunker, of these kind of romantic landscapes painted by Albert Bierstadt - it's a kind of school of American romantic landscape painting called American Luminism. And there is a kind of nostalgia for nature, which I really share. I find the paintings utterly captivating. But I suppose the real, the liberatory and constructive, lesson that Son and Girl hold for us is that they can build meaningful lives with what's left. And what's left for them is very little.
The American West no longer looks like it does in those paintings. That doesn't mean we shouldn't conserve and cherish what remains. But somehow we should embrace where we are and find a way of making that beautiful. I remember hearing, actually, Bill McKibben speaking about how we should embrace landscapes with windmills, because that should become something we find beautiful. Because that's humanity creating energy that's clean and sustainable, and I think that's right.
At the same time, where I think there might be a role for some nostalgia, is in our longing for nature, our need to connect with it, our need to see beauty in the clouds, in the mountains, in snow and ice and longing not to let that just disappear into the past with the despair that, “Well, one day will go extinct and the nature will be able to regenerate itself for no one.”
I feel like that's despair, that's a kind of cynicism in the environmentalist community. And I think that's not a good form of nostalgia. But I think the idea that we actually embrace what we love in nature and find beauty in it and connect to that, so that we can cherish it and protect it, because that's also what we need to do now. I think there is a role for that.
But the kind of conservative nostalgia for the very culture and patterns of behaviour that led to our destruction, that's at the core of this family's way of living, is not constructive.
Dickon: So, you walk a line between humanising the privileged and exposing them. How did you make decisions about when to invite empathy and when to create distance?
Joshua: Ultimately, the characters are nameless in The End because they're me, and they're the people I love, and they're you. Yes, it's an allegory for the entire human family. This one last family. Yes, it's also an allegory for the class inequalities that structure the entire human family now.
But most of us, most of us listening to this podcast, will be on the wealthier end of that spectrum, just by virtue of where we're listening to this from, and closer to perpetrators than we like to think, and certainly a lot closer to perpetrators than the media would normally kind of interpolate us, or normally kind of position us to believe we are. And so I really hope that the film implicates viewers, invites us to look in the mirror.
There's a passage late in the Bhagavad Gita about a kind of race of destructive beings who are addicted to monstrous patterns of behaviour, and I say monstrous patterns of behaviour, not monsters, because if this film is anything, it's kind of a rejection of the idea that you can divide the world into angels and monsters. Good guys and bad guys. And tell stories that ultimately serve to reassure us that we are good guys or teach us how to remain good guys, in contrast to the monsters. But so the Bhagavad Gita talks about a kind of race of beings who are so destructive in their patterns of behaviour that they're destroying the world. But it describes them as living in hell because living that way is kind of to live in a vacuum of meaning. It's an empty life. And when I think of Donald Trump, there's a human being who's profoundly injured, for whom I can have compassion. Who has all the power and wealth in the world, but his life seems like an utter hell to me. I can't imagine anything worse than being him. Noisy. Ugly. Cruel. Painful. Frightening. What the Bhagavad Gita notes is that the only way the world can be saved from the destructive actions of these powerful beings stuck in hell, is for them to experience such compassion that the longing for change blossoms in their own hearts. And they realise that they need to change, they need to stop this destruction. And I'm not saying that we can get Donald Trump to change by loving him. But I'm saying maybe we are the people addicted to monstrous patterns of behaviour.
I think one of the things we all tried to do in making this film was to treat these characters who, yes, embody our powerful archetypes, with such compassion that the viewer is invited to see themselves in the mirror, to recognise themselves in these people. And, I felt compassion and love for them as I wrote them. I think everyone I film, I kind of approach wanting to give them such a tight embrace that I can feel what it's like to be them. I know that the cast did that with each of these characters. They really dug deep in their own personal experience, and what they know about life. And tried to sort of defend and understand who these people are so that you can see yourself in them.
And then this question of when do you appall and signal the absurdities and the ironies of their situation? And when do you kind of invite people to embrace them? A lot of that has to do with the structure of the story you're telling, how you orchestrate an audience’s identification over the course of an ensemble story. But one thing I will say in general is that sometimes you get people to zoom way out. You get the audience to zoom way out from these people and see the awful phenomenon of who they are and what they've done, with an absurd or violent or destructive moment. But then immediately you focus on their vulnerability. What you're tempted, as a viewer, to distance yourself from suddenly becomes very, very close. And very human. And very tragic.
At other moments, I work with humour, where you're not laughing at the absurdity of the situation or something awful, or the irony of what they're doing that's clueless or awful, but you're laughing with them. The character’s just been so generous in her unfurling, for example, there's this moment where Mother, Tilda Swinton's character, who hasn't seen birds in 30 years and can barely remember how they sound suddenly opens up, dares to open up, about her memory of bird song and decides that she was once great at imitating birds and does this impromptu concert for Moses Ingram's character, who confides that the only bird she ever saw living on the surface of the Earth had been a chicken. And it's just so generous and beautiful. Both Tilda's performance, but what this woman, this character, does. That you can't help but not only laugh, but laugh in a way that makes you love this person. So, that then when they do something destructive later because they're unable to do otherwise, it's all the more painful. So that kind of humour, that kind of intimacy, where a character's deeply humanised and laughs and makes us laugh because they just open up in the most human way. It just makes it more painful, makes the tragedy more painful later, when they are unable to change, because for them it's too late. While as I said, for us, it hopefully is not.
Dickon: The Son’s character seems to represent a reality shaped by selective truth, whether intentional or, indeed, unconscious. How did you think about his role in the family dynamic and what, if anything, does it reveal about the influence of mis- and disinformation in the real world?
Joshua: The Son is younger, a generation younger, than everyone else in that household, and he's the only one who's younger, before the young woman arrives. So, he grows up knowing that he's doomed to end up alone. If everyone were to die a natural death. And that awful knowledge embodies the failure of the whole project. They build a bunker to save the family, but they end up condemning their son, their most beloved son, to end up alone. He can never, lest he should confront his parents with their delusions, which they're unable to cope with, or else they wouldn't be living in a bunker which embodies delusion, it’s this forbidden topic that he's doomed to end up alone.
And I think that fundamental silence, the fact that he embodies in his very being, the failure of this whole project, then occasions or opens the way for, kind of, endless other lies and silences and illusions. So, everyone else in the bunker who's a generation older, they kind of have an unspoken pact with each other not to reveal each other's secrets before the Son. So, the Son becomes this audience to everyone's lies, everyone's idealised sense of themselves. It's why I mentioned earlier, you know, how would you raise a younger generation in a bunker as a blank canvas onto which you can paint an idealised portrait of yourself? He's writing a memoir for his father, you know, whitewashing his father's life. He's making a diorama of the world as sort of grew out of homeschooling but now as a hobby, where he's sort of searching for truth and full of longing for the world that's gone, both of which are sincere. But it's an idealised vision of the world that will not offend anyone. He's reassuring his mother about all of her lies, but he knows that one day he'll end up alone and he's going to have to somehow survive. So, he's looking for the tools he needs to lead a bearable, if not meaningful or good life, once he's alone. And of course, what he needs to do that is some truth.
One of the things George Mackay and I talked about very early on, if you grew up in a kind of ecosystem of lies, you inevitably develop because you need it, a radar, a kind of instinct, looking for truth. So, his parents may think he doesn't know any of their secrets, but actually we see, if you watch the film attentively, that he's quite aware of many of their deepest secrets. Even things that, when they're spoken, it's quite explosive for him to hear. Part of what makes it hard for him to hear those secrets is that he actually already knew and was complicit with the cover up.
And I think that sort of allegorizes how we're all complicit with the cover up, when we turn out of despair to addressing climate through private changes in our consumption, “Oh I'll fly a little bit less or all pay £20 for the carbon offset on this ticket.” If that's the decision we make, we're kind of knowingly complicit with the lies we're being fed because we haven't demanded of ourselves a real moment of truth.
Dickon: The mine itself is, as you alluded to earlier, a stunning immersive environment. How did working in that space influence the performances and the filmmaking process, and what lessons does that hold for folks thinking about setting and atmosphere in their own storytelling?
Joshua: You know, we spent three weeks of the shoot, of a nine week shoot, deep in the Madonia mountains of Sicily somewhere between 1000 and 3000 feet underground, depending on where we were in the mine. In one of the most incredible man made structures anywhere. It's a kind of underground salt mine. Which is like a cathedral or an incredible termite nest.
The idea was that we needed exteriors to kind of mirror the nature that we see on the paintings on the walls of the lavish rooms which serve as kind of windows. Then they can leave the beautifully appointed rooms and be out in an exterior that just reminds us of the void where they're living.
And the idea that the mind came to embody the truth, the emptiness. The nothingness that's left for them. That had a powerful effect on everyone, not least because we were shooting in the winter, so we'd go in, it was still dark when we’d go in and when we’d leave at night it was dark again. So for three weeks we really didn't see any daylight.
And just to be so far underground and so cut off, there was only one landline that connected the entire production base outside of the mine, to us inside. And you had to queue up to use it. Although we weren't very far from the surface, we were really cut off. And I think that was powerful.
Location is crucial in film. It's a character in film at the very least. And in my filmmaking, I often use nature to expose the delusions and lies of the characters. So, I do that in my film, The Act of Killing, where Anwar Congo, the protagonist, a death-squad leader imagining himself in heaven, being thanked by all his victims, is standing beneath an enormous waterfall that just dwarfs him. He's just so small. It's beautiful, the waterfall, but he's dwarfed. And it just sort of reveals how irrelevant all of his vanities and delusions are.
And I think in the same way, when you spoke of restorative nostalgia, the mine has this kind of incredible backdrop. Just gives the lie to all of that. Locations as truth in film, up against the delusions of human beings.
Dickon: Speaking of The Act of Killing, reenactment has played a major role in your previous films, and does so in this one too, where Michael Shannon, as Father, confronts the consequences of his actions, not unlike the executioners and warlords that we meet in The Act of Killing. In your experience, how can reenactment help people process crises and traumas differently than more straightforward approaches to recounting the past?
Joshua: There are ways of using reenactment as a kind of post traumatic therapy. I don't think that's what I do consciously, but I think accidentally it sometimes becomes that, in crucial moments. But I think what I'm always exploring is the gap between how people want to be seen, how they want to see themselves, and how they really see themselves. And that gap between the performance, how I want to be seen by you, and the questioning of who's my imagined audience and why, as a defensive cover for how I really see myself, means that I'm not just filming reenactment for its own sake, to illustrate what happened. The camera is always looking for the cracks where that gap becomes visible, and I'm always pursuing those cracks.
And I think in the film The End, the songs are analogous to some of the reenactments in The Act of Killing in the sense that characters experience a crisis where their excuses start to feel hollow. So they shift modes. They either search for new excuses through songs, or they shift modes all together to something where they romanticise their predicament. They sentimentalise it and seek to escape through that. But the lyrics of the songs, or my camera and the reenactments in the documentaries, doesn't allow that as they try to escape. They only encounter the truth through sort of the back door. It comes and bites them from behind. But I'm always looking for that gap.
In that sense, I'm always looking for cognitive dissonance, how they are struggling to tell themselves one thing. But the truth exists, embodied in, and maybe this is why reenactment is important, the truth exists in their bodies. It's a kind of physical excess almost that cannot be fully contained by whatever, ultimately vain project of performance and self presentation, they're struggling to achieve, whether it's through a song, a performance of daily ritual for the sun in The End, or a reenactment for my camera in in one of my documentaries.
Dickon: What's the single most important aspect of communication that we should be paying attention to in our communication endeavours?
Joshua: I think it's really important that we get people to question how they think and reflect on how they process information because we've tried bombarding people with science, we've tried packaging that in a hopeful way, we've tried packaging that in the doomsaying way. And I really think we need to intervene by making people aware of how they lie to themselves, how they dismiss, how they disregard, when they know they shouldn't.
And I think we need specifically to emphasise collectivity now. You know, every time we read a story, whether it's climate refugees drowning in the Mediterranean Sea escaping conditions of misery, that we knowingly impose upon them - or if you're a Norwegian, that your whole society knowingly imposes while seeing itself as a force for humanity and human decency and democracy, pumping out far more carbon per capita than most countries ever get around to doing - every time you encounter a story about the refugees from that process drowning by the hundreds or thousands even, in the Mediterranean Sea, and feel heartbroken, and then search for just the right emoji to express that feeling, while all alone in front of your screen… And through that sentimental gesture, give yourself permission to shift your attention to something more fun and easier to process, you're living in exactly the same bunker that my film depicts.
And the single most important thing we can do to intervene in that pattern of behaviour is to stop being alone in our response to our existential crises. We're not going to solve them alone and isolated individual behaviour is not going to work. What's going to work is coming together in solidarity.
I was recently asked to speak at the climate march by Luisa Neubauer of Fridays for Future, in Germany, just before the election, and I was terrified to get up there and and speak before that many people. And I got up on the stage there and there were some 10,000 people standing there. But my fear just melted away because I saw, “Aha, here's the solution to the crisis.” Here are thousands of people who overcame the social media shaming where it's called “cringe” in inverted commas, to actually be sincere. And they've reached out to their fellow students, their parents, their children, their fellow trade union members, their neighbours, their colleagues and inspired each other's creativity and energy and courage to come together and be part of a movement and get used to being part of a movement to fight collectively. And that's what we need to do. And I think the single most important thing we can do in our communication now is to address people collectively and to always talk about collective solutions.
Dickon: The flip side of that is what's the biggest mistake that you see communicators make when attempting to engage the public on climate change issues?
Joshua: We've talked about hope, false hope, just sort of feeling like “Oh well, we have to be hopeful.” I think, “we have to give people something they can do that's easy”, also encourages individual action as opposed to collective action.
I just want to linger on that for a second because when you do something individual like, write a cheque, send some money to an organisation. Well, yes, that is feeding into a collective process, especially if it's a membership organisation and you join, but that kind of action deprives people of an experience of solidarity which I believe is fundamentally not just enriching, but fulfilling, of the true nature of what we human beings are and can be.
So as the dark clouds of totalitarianism built in Europe, and maybe, dominate in the United States. If we come together and resist collectively in the streets in solidarity, that's the experience of humanity, whether or not we succeed is much more than a silver lining because each of us individually in our lives have only one chance to have a meaningful life on this earth. And I don't think you can have a meaningful life alone in front of your screen or sending money to an organisation. I think coming together collectively is a huge source of our potential as human beings.
So I think addressing people, giving people easy things they can do as individuals, rather than emphasising the need to get out there collectively, I think is a mistake. And I think also especially when profit’s involved, like if you're making a movie that's supposed to become a blockbuster, creating anything that replicates the most destructive lie that film and television usually tells, which is that the world is divided into good guys and bad guys, the innocent and the guilty, and ultimately reassures the guilty mob, which includes me that we are innocent, and offers the pleasure of pointing fingers at the bad people and mocking them as a way of reassuring you that you're good, that's destructive. That's part of the problem, in my view.
Dickon: It was lovely talking to Joshua for this episode, but what in particular stuck with you from our conversation? What will you take from it and apply it to your own work?
For me, since our chat, it's been fascinating to be a little bit more aware of when I self-censor. Not on climate necessarily, but on anything. When I don't like this or that post on social media, despite perhaps resonating with its content. Or when I don't mention this or that issue in conversation, just because. The many little moments when we think better of what we want to say. That's the stuff I've noticed more than ever. And is something I want to be more aware of moving forward. Where and why do I do that? When should I resist my own silence? And when is the instinct to apply the filter strategically sound? There's a whole lot of self reflection to be done there, and I guess I'd challenge you to do the same.
Next, I really appreciate Joshua's insistence on avoiding the binary of good and bad, hero and villain, and accepting the complexity of our realities. Sometimes people we might consider to be good do bad things, and likewise, folks we think of as bad are more than capable of doing good and contributing meaningfully to society. This line of thinking really reminded me of a book that has helped me understand more about the people who might often be thought of as our opponents or detractors. That book is Don't Think of An Elephant by George Lakoff. It digs into the values and deep narratives underlying the kinds of conservative standpoints that seem to be on the up all around us. When it feels so easy to point at the other side and call them evil, stupid, or many other things, I can't recommend it highly enough for coming to terms with the shortfalls of such conclusions and how unhelpful they are in developing meaningful strategies to move forward.
But then, let's wrap this up. The End is a film that lingers. It haunts through gorgeous flashbacks and musings to the beautiful scenes, the powerful moments, or indeed the silliness of Tilda Swinton making bird noises. No matter how it sticks with you, though, the truth about our complicity, coming in through the back door of those daydreams and memories, is never far away.
Joshua, through this film, has positioned each of us in the role of those warlords and gangsters from The Act of Killing. He's turned the very mechanisms that made that film so noteworthy on us all.
As someone who works to shine a light on the things we can do, as communicators, in response to that kind of confrontation, I don't find it paralysing. Quite the opposite, in fact, I find new energy for my work. But I accept that perhaps this won't be true for everyone.
For those folks, and for you if you're in that category, I urge you to find your people, your communities, your collective power. As Joshua suggested, get out in the streets if you can, and find out how fun and raucous and freeing a demonstration can feel.
If that's not a viable option for you, as it wasn't for me not so long ago, then online networks like Creatives for Climate can offer so much when it comes to finding your voice, your power, and your purpose. Plus, they're always organising meetups - real life, in-the-flesh meetups - in cities all across the world, where you can meet people just like you who want to, or perhaps already are, do something awesome and inspiring.
Beyond that, across the interviews in this series, there are umpteen examples of other ways to take action in meaningful ways through community and solidarity. For some inspiration on that stuff, I would point you to my conversations with Hikaru Hayakawa, Robin Webster, and Thomas Coombes.
So, that's what I'll be taking with me. But how about you? What did you hear? What will you be incorporating into your communications endeavours?
Thanks to Joshua Oppenheimer for sharing his time and insight with the show. It was great. You can find links to some relevant resources in the show notes.
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