00:00Mamma, all'inizio, hai mai pensato di invitare altre persone?
00:05Non potevamo fidarci. Dovevamo pensare a te.
00:16C'è qualcuno qui.
00:23Riesci a vedere da dove è entrata?
00:26No, e c'è un chilometro di roccia sopra di noi.
00:30First of all, I would say that in a certain way, The Act of Killing, the first film, documentary that I made, was really also a musical.
00:36There's musical numbers in it, there's gangster scenes, there's cowboy scenes, so it was its own kind of genre mashup.
00:43After I made those two films in Indonesia about the genocide, I wanted to make a third film about the billionaires who came to power by exploiting a country that was terrified of them.
00:55The oligarchs who became powerful that way.
00:57But I wasn't allowed to return to Indonesia, and I'm still not allowed to go back to Indonesia.
01:03So I started investigating oligarchs elsewhere who'd made their money through violence.
01:07And I found an oil tycoon from Central Asia who had used his country's army to basically push people out of the way so he could build his oil wells.
01:19And he believed that the world would one day, civilization would one day collapse due to climate change.
01:26And he was buying a bunker, much like the one that you see in the end, built into a mine, quite different from the mine you're in now.
01:33But he was buying a bunker like that for his family, and he invited me along to see that bunker.
01:42And as we toured this place, I was haunted by questions of guilt.
01:47How will you cope with your remorse for the catastrophe from which you're fleeing?
01:53How will you cope with your remorse for leaving loved ones behind?
01:57How would you raise a new generation in such a place that's never seen the sky as a kind of blank canvas onto which you could paint some idealized portrait of yourself?
02:11And I knew they wouldn't be able to answer these questions if I asked them, because the whole bunker was a physical manifestation of their denial.
02:18I thought the musical is the quintessential genre of self-deception, of a kind of blind optimism that says,
02:35yes, we can continue as fast as possible toward the abyss and just telling ourselves,
02:42the sun will come out tomorrow, our future is bright, as they sing in the end, and everything will work out fine.
02:47That's not optimism. That's not hope. That's the wolf of despair running around in the sheep's clothing of hope.
02:54The idea that we can bury our heads in the sand and be completely passive. And so that's how the end came to be.
03:00The whole reason we made this film is because there's still time for us to face reality and change course.
03:29I think very quickly, if I was all alone in a bunker, whatever book I brought would become torture, however beautiful it is.
03:37Whatever movie I brought would become like fingers on a chalkboard scratching.
03:42Everything would remind me of the deepest pain. And that makes me think about the issue of the very end of the film.
03:50At the very end of the movie, we hear the same music that we have in the overture that leads us into this salt mine.
03:56And it's kind of eerie and slow, but then it rushes in this beautiful kind of rush of strings and violins.
04:09And it becomes very kind of like birds taking flight.
04:13And at that point, at the end of the movie, we cut to black and we see the names of the people who made the film with me.
04:19Tilda Swinton, George Mackay, Michael Shannon, Moses Ingram.
04:23And we're reminded of the still living human beings who work together to create this cautionary tale.
04:30And the only reason we did it is because for all of us, for you who come to see the film,
04:35there's still time to heed the warning. The end has not come.
04:39There's no point despairingly imagining what book you're going to bring when you're all alone.
04:46Don't bother with that. Don't be alone.
04:49These times, as the world drifts toward dictatorship and authoritarianism,
04:53these times call for us to not be alone, to be in solidarity, to widen our community and our family
04:59so that our circle of empathy grows to include the whole human family.
05:04I promise you don't have to see it in a salt mine like this one.
05:24When you leave the film, you'll walk out of that theater and there will still be a beautiful sky
05:29on a still beautiful earth and we still have time to avoid the end.
05:34So come see it in the movie theater and then think about how we can save ourselves.
