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By Burkhard Bilger
George Miller’s film career began with a slight shift away from violence. In 1971, while studying medicine in Sydney, Australia, at the age of twenty-six, he took a job in a structure while waiting to begin an internship at a hospital. . One day, he was standing next to another employee when a brick fell fourteen stories above them and hit the ground between them with a crack. “That was before helmets,” Miller told me recently. “I had an existential shock. ” He and his younger brother, Chris, had won a student film festival at the University of New South Wales. The first prize was a filmmaking workshop in Melbourne, but it never occurred to George to attend; Filmmaking didn’t seem like a serious career option. It was the falling brick that changed his mind. “I thought, ‘Damn, I shouldn’t be in this place,'” she said. The next day, he was on his motorbike and drove nine hundred kilometres to Melbourne.
“Violence in Film, Part 1,” the short film Miller made at the workshop, perfectly sums up the issues that have preoccupied Miller ever since. It begins with a clinical psychologist sitting in an armchair, talking to the camera. “Heavily saturated with violence” from trendy movies, he is shot in the face by an intruder and then commits a series of sadistic acts himself. When the short film was first screened at the Sydney Film Festival in 1972, it was shocking for its confidence in its content. Miller then returned to finish his internship at the hospital, and although he eventually quit medicine, his films have been marked by lighthearted chaos and an uncommon sensitivity to its consequences. They are action films, as Lo puts it, rooted in “the perplexity I felt in the face of the consequences of violence. “
“Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” Miller’s new film and sequel to his Oscar-winning film “Mad Max: Fury Road,” revolves around those consequences. His heroine is kidnapped at the age of ten and held captive in a citadel ruled by a warlord named Immortan Joe, and spends the next 16 years searching to locate her family. It’s a story of broken souls and Darwinian selection, told with monster trucks, combat zeppelins, and hot rods equipped with turbo-aspirated V8 engines. It’s about how young people navigate the world, Miller said, and how his character shows up in extreme situations. But, like most of his films, it’s also about the thrill of people and objects running through space.
When Miller directed the first of his five “Mad Max” films in 1979, action scenes were the main activity of hackers and assistant directors. “It was kind of a slum,” he told me. The director took care of the main unit and the elements that didn’t speak were left in the unit for the time being. “Miller saw something more essential in it. He longed for the purity of early silent films, which could only tell a story through movement. “How can you take a series of events, none of which are really impressive in themselves, and create a series of shots like a musical passage?” he asked. How can you make it bigger than its parts?»
Miller is now seventy-nine years old. He has directed everything from comedy (“The Witches of Eastwick”) and drama (“Lorenzo’s Oil”) to children’s films (“Babe”) and animated feature films (“Happy Feet”). However, he returns to action films. The “Mad Max” series chronicles his personal story and the meteoric evolution of the cinematic generation during his lifetime. When “Fury Road” came out nine years ago, edited by Margaret Sixel, Miller’s wife and close collaborator, it seemed like the culmination of everything Miller had sought to achieve as a young filmmaker: a realistic, completely imagined world, conveyed with speed, fluidity and visceral emotion. It won six Academy Awards, added one for Best Picture Editing, and was nominated for Best Picture and Best Director.
“Furiosa” is a very different movie, or the same movie in reverse. If “Fury Road” was all action, with a backstory delivered in choppy bursts, “Furiosa” is just a backstory, punctuated by moments of frenetic action. One film is fluid, the other episodic; One takes place over three days, the other over fifteen years. A sequel wants to be new and “particularly familiar,” Miller said, and “Furiosa” lives up to that saying. As the film’s great villain, Dementus, says at the end: “We look for any sensation that erases the dark, grumpy pain. . . The question is: do you have the courage to make this epic?
A few months after the release of “Fury Road,” Miller and I began a series of long and enriching conversations about his career and his craft. The script for “Furiosa” was already finished; Miller had written it with his collaborator Nick Lathouris before. filming “Fury Road”, but it took him another 8 years to finish the film. When, after all, we resumed our conversation two weeks ago, via Zoom, Miller was in Los Angeles selling the new film. He looked new and elegant in a black jacket and shirt, and said he felt “an unexpected degree of serenity,” given the rush before departure. The following exchange is taken from all of our conversations and has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
You were born in the small town of Chinchilla, Queensland, Australia, a day or two drive from the filming location of “Furiosa” and most of the other “Mad Max” movies. To what extent are those films based on your own experience?In this landscape when I was a kid?
I grew up in a remote rural area with my dual brother and younger siblings. They were years of game training. There were schools, there were textbooks, and there was the world in the open air. I’m not saying we were extraordinarily adventurous; We’ve been very cautious, but our parents didn’t know where we were until sunset. And I was lucky that there were young indigenous people in the village and we went into the forest with them. Their culture is said to be the oldest in mankind. History: sixty-five thousand years. It was very, very tied to the land, and some of those stories are still told. They explain everything in the world: its creation, where to locate water, where to locate food, as well as the stars and constellations.
There was a movie theater and every Saturday afternoon there was a matinee session. It was a kind of secular cathedral. Each exhibit would feature at least one cartoon, one news story and one series — “Batman” or “The Adventures of] Sir Lancelot” — and end with a cliffhanger. These have had an enormous influence. They were our fuel for my brothers and me who played in the bush. If the soap opera were “Sir Lancelot,” we’d make swords and paint tin shield caps. We do small shows, in a garage like a shed. Don’t forget that if you close all the doors and kick up the dust, little rays of light will come out of the cracks. So, from my childhood, there was an unintentional learning curve for what I do today. One of the principles that guides and organizes the concept of those films is that each and every object will have to be made from discovered objects and reused. And we were constantly doing things with our hands.
When I was sent to college, I set out to see as much as I could, to understand how films are edited. What is this new language that is less than a hundred years old?Then I went back to silent films. I had read “The Parade’s Gone By” [a seminal history of silent cinema, published by British historian and filmmaker Kevin Brownlow in 1968]. His fundamental thesis was that most of the work on cinematic language had been done before sound. All the shots in this new language – the close-up, the wide shot, the moving camera, the passage from one thing to another – were in fact explained in silent films, and specifically in action films. It is a language that has been acquired and evolves. The advent of sound disrupted the general syntax of cinema. The chambers were closed and everything looked like a theater, a proscenium. But all the wonderful filmmakers (John Ford, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton) got their start in silent films and feature films. Then I found myself going back to them and seeking to perceive them.
Which ones from the sound era have influenced you the most?
Obviously Hitchcock, “Bullitt,” the wonderful action series of “The French Connection. “I was incredibly inspired by Steven Spielberg’s first film, “Duel. “I even thought, boy, he understands syntax very well and how to construct it. And Polanski’s films were brilliantly directed, even though he didn’t direct any action films. He once said that there was only one better position for a camera at any given time. This caught my attention and I have shown it with my own eyes in animation. You can take the exact same ingredients and, by moving the camera and adjusting the shooting pattern, you can change the scene. You can do anything else with it.
The chariot scene in William Wyler’s version of “Ben-Hur” was huge for me. It was superbly constructed: the contours, the camera positions, and the editing. It was a long series and it was very transparent what each of them was doing at any given time. Not only did they install a lot of cameras and what to do with the footage in post-production. And what was at stake was the central rivalry between two very productive friends. When we were making “Fury Road,” I kept repeating that action shows are the equivalent of discussion scenes in other movies. When Max and Furiosa meet, they don’t exchange words – I think she says “Water” and growls. It was like a scene of argument, unless we regularly had words that we fought against. But it had to be built in such a way that you could be informed of anything at any given time. This is, in fact, what emerges from “Ben-Hur. “
In “Furiosa”, Dementus drives a tank pulled by 3 motorcycles.
It was based on a black-and-white news story from the early 1930s, when local police staged giant competitions at Sydney’s cricket ground. In between were photographs of a chariot race based on the silent edition of “Ben-Hur. “In a way, “Ben-Hur” influenced the police, and the police influenced Dementus.
Director Robert Bresson, in his book “Notes on Cinema”, writes that a film “is born first in my head, dies on paper; It’s resurrected through the living people and the real objects that I use, that die in the film. “But, placed in a safe order and projected on a screen, they come back to life like flowers in water. Film editing is such a mysterious art. How did you find out about it?
The most productive school I went to was when I filmed the first “Mad Max. “The shoot cost $350,000. It was very ambitious. Everything went wrong. I was absolutely baffled during the project. For a year, I faced all the mistakes I made: “Why did I do this?Why didn’t I do that? Obviously, that’s not what I’m cut out for. It was a hit in Australia, then it became a huge hit in Japan, then in Spain and Germany, all over the world, the United States. They aired it there, but the cast was smaller, and they dubbed all the voices with an American accent. . . Even Mel Gibson spoke out, despite being an American who spoke with an Australian accent. All of this unfolded in a poorly expressed Southern accent.
But the film was a strangely gigantic success. I felt a bit fraudulent, but I was smart enough not to get caught up in the artist’s vanity. I realized: Wait a minute, there’s something else going on here. In Japan, they said Mad Max was a lonely and rebellious samurai. A ronin. They said, “Obviously you’ve seen a lot of Kurosawa movies. And I said, “Who is Kurosawa?” I probably shouldn’t say that. And immediately, I saw everything he was doing and, of course, they were done. at that time “Mad Max”. In Scandinavia they said, “He’s like a lonely Viking!And the French said that “Mad Max” was like a western on wheels. That convinced me.
When I did “The Road Warrior” [in 1982], I was a little more talented. I knew a little more about theatre and writing. It was an opportunity to do the things I was looking to do in the first one and make them more aware. We were very interested in Joseph Campbell [the writer of “The Power of Myth”]. And I began to sense that we had discovered an archetype: that Max was an atypical edition of the period hero. A delight that touches the whole body. You feel it in your guts, in your emotions, in your brain. But we also delight anthropologically, in the way we spiritually arrive at cinema – that ineffable thing that hides under a film. and mythologically, which in the end is one of the most important. That’s what I realized; You have to tick all the boxes.
Campbell had a glorious definition of mythology: “The faith of others. “And it’s true. Humans need to make sense of a possible chaotic existence, so they find stories that help them in some way. That’s why other people tell them. They have no idea that the Earth revolves around the sun in an ellipse and on an axis, so they invent gods to explain the seasons. We all have stories, and the biggest, most difficult ones become beliefs. Once you perceive the seasons, those gods, those stories evaporate and are replaced by others that are more useful.
“Furiosa” is the first “Mad Max” movie to take a step back and depict the politics of this post-apocalyptic world. There are empires and nomadic hordes, industrial negotiations, and royal marriages. The desert is governed through 3 fortresses, which control an indispensable resource (food, gasoline, bullets) that others want and inevitably fight for.
Although the “Mad Max” videos are set in the future, they date back to a neo-medieval era. All behaviors tend to be very fundamental and, in a sense, universal. The MacGuffin will have to be human. What other people strive for what they strive for is being human. And the film takes on a kind of authenticity, because we feel that it’s like that through time. You have a hierarchy of dominance with the hardliners sitting on the most sensitive of all resources, looking to prevent the other people below from progressing. We see this happen over and over again.
I don’t forget to go to the Citadel of Salzburg [the Hohensalzburg Fortress], and it’s amazing how much it resembles the citadels you’ll see all over India. The architecture of the force is the same. The giant castle is usually located on a hill. The trail narrows to the top, where it’s almost more unlikely that anyone will pass. In a fort in India, the passage was so narrow that only one user could pass at a time. time. Its height and breadth were such that one could not tend a sword or draw a bow. The same is true in the villages where we live. We have gated communities, and the higher you live in a tall building, the tougher you are. These constants are there and we are looking for new tactics to express them.
When you made “Fury Road,” you hadn’t done a “Mad Max” movie in thirty years. What convinced you to dive back into it?
Every time he finished a “Mad Max” movie, he would say, “I’ll never do another one again. There will have to be an explanation as to why I should go back to it. Something that really makes me down. In the case of “Fury Road,” a question came to mind: What story could you tell if the film was constantly in motion?If you’re making a long chase movie, what could you convey?How much subtext could there be? For a story to have any value, it has to involve more than what you see, there has to be a lot of iceberg under the tip.
There is a kind of anthropological authenticity that is very difficult for us to achieve. Everything on the screen, not just the character, but each and every piece of the costume, each and every prop, each and every prop. And every piece of language has to have a story. About the guy who plays guitar, I can tell you who his mother was, how he survived the apocalypse, and how he came to work in the service of Immortan Joe. where your guitar comes from; It is made from a hospital bed sink. And in order to survive, each and every element has to be versatile. The guitar is also a flamethrower.
There’s going to have to be a story for this, and it’s not just frivolous. This is the only way to maintain consistency. All the designers, everyone they painted in the movie, whether it was cars or costume masks, all the way through. For virtual people, they had to paint with similar strategies. You’ll realize that cars themselves are trendy cars, as they rely heavily on computer technology; they sink under the impact. The ones we have are much older, from the 60s to the 80s. Their bodies are much more inflexible and have a much better chance of surviving technology; They were made much fairer and with very fundamental mechanics.
Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays Furiosa in the new film, didn’t have a driver’s license at the start of filming, but they had to learn how to drive a car like a race car driver. He later said that making the film made him more compatible than the year of physical education he had taken to prepare. She and the other characters do common things in the film, but they’re never superhuman.
Even fantasy stories have to have some underlying authenticity. You want to possess an established skill in this world, in which there is no real rule of law. When you meet another person, you ask yourself: Is it conducive to my survival to kill them and take what I can from them, or is it helpful to work together for our mutual survival?If any of the characters had done something like fly through the air or throw an outrageous flying kick in the middle of a fight, it would have taken the audience off the case. If you identify it, in something like “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” or “The Matrix,” the audience can enjoy it. But those videos can’t do that. If your car is falling into the dust, you’d better do it as realistically as possible.
“Fury Road” and “Furiosa” were storyboarded before filming, looking more like graphic novels than classic scripts. How did you come to paint this way?
When I was working on “Fury Road” with [artist and writer] Brendan McCarthy, we sat down, mapped out the story, and wrote a quick, rushed version, with no discussion, or just snippets. But then I said to myself: if we need to make a silent film that doesn’t rely on discussion to get it across, let’s do it in its right form. Thus, the real first draft came in the form of boards. We were designing and writing the film at the same time. We had two very clever artists, Peter Pound and Mark Sexton, and we would sit in the living room together and draw. Everything was done visually. We had a pretty big room and the boards were piled up everywhere. We ended up with 3,500 panels. They were very substantial; We may limit ourselves to the entire movie series. A taleboard is a much more effective production document. A designer, a videographer, an actor, they can take a look at it and they can see who’s in the shot, what angles they’re in, and where they’re all in relation to each other.
In “Fury Road,” we had a big table where we played the blueprints before a trick. Each had a toy to fill their role. If you were on a bike, you’d have a little toy bike, or a cameraman I have a toy camera car. And they all say, ‘I’m going in this direction. ‘” I’m coming this way. “”The camera descends to this aspect and the moment the camera comes in from there. “An exercise in war.
You do everything you can to complete the story. What you can’t add is time. You can’t give an idea of how it plays out rhythmically. Then, in “Furiosa,” Guy Norris, second unit director and stunt coordinator, and his son Harrison developed a proxy engine (near-fast storyboard animation) to get things done much faster. You can capture the movement of the occasions that are located on the screen and set up [virtual] cameras to create a series with a degree of accuracy. We call it Toybox.
I don’t forget to go back to Hitchcock, who was writing his films. I would say that when you start shooting, all the paintings are finished. Everything else is execution. You try to get to that point, but of course it never happens. After all, when you’re shooting, you’re facing reality, and then when you get to the editing room, it’s even more brutal. to face your failures. But you deserve to go into the shoot thinking you’ve solved almost every problem.
From Ingmar Bergman’s cinema to the structure of a cathedral: an immense collaboration of artists, staff and master builders, most of them anonymous, committed to an art that is not unusual. The analogy is greater than Bergman’s work: two hundred and forty days of shooting, ten trucks with cameras, some two hundred specialists, eighty-seven wigs, thirty-five sets. False teeth, fifty thousand five hundred sheets of tattoo paper. Probably endless credits include an earthworks manager, salvage artists, corpse designers, a bird fighter, a dog fighter, a sidecar maker, a didgeridoo interpreter, and a touch lens technician.
Still, “Fury Road” was an even more confusing production. It was shot in Africa, not Australia like the other “Mad Max” movies, and is the first one edited by his wife.
On “Fury Road,” we had a difficult relationship with the studio, and the two [lead] actors, Tom [Hardy] and Charlize [Theron], didn’t get along. Margaret was in Sydney and I was halfway across the southern hemisphere, in Namibia. We didn’t shoot as many scenes as in “Furiosa,” but we had cameras in every single one of them. Some were just small 2K cameras we bought at the airport, but each and every vehicle had one somewhere. So there was a ridiculous amount of footage and Margaret had to go through it all. She would send voice notes and in some cases make very rough edits while recording, just to give a guide. Margaret made rough edits and filled in the gaps with the journals as they accumulated. Most of the images contained the sound of engines or other people shouting orders (there were very, very loud cars or wind turbines), so we had a discussion about the impermanence that we knew she would want to be replaced. If anything was confusing, Margaret knew we would wait until I arrived in Australia. But for the most part, she was running alone and she was just looking to put the film together, without carefully editing it.
I actually thought we’d done a lot of things storyboard-wise, but then you have this huge amount of footage and you have to make a movie out of it. And it’s a Herculean task. What some editors do is just put everything in and end up with a five-hour movie, and then it gets tricky to edit it. All the colleagues, each one has an opinion, a technique and their favorite moments from the film. say, “Why did you cut this? It was my favorite photo! We must have forgotten all the noise. I’m pretty smart about that, but Margaret is fantastic. It has a very, very low threshold for boredom. I’m going to sit down and watch a movie with me and I’m going to watch her restlessly and I’m going to ask her what’s going on, and she’ll say, “Oh my God, we already know that!We’ve been there before. ” She was the only one who could tell me that, because I accept it as true completely. And I have to tell you, I think that’s what made the movie.
How did you know Margaret would be able to take on such an incredibly complex film?
I watched her film “Happy Feet” and noticed that she had an inherently astute understanding of the fact that cinematic narratives have a kind of musicality. They take position in time, at the rhythm. And I also had the granular competence to be able to do microcuts. Margaret has anything. There is something about her way of thinking that I am still seeking to understand. I think I’m meticulous, but I get lost in the weeds where I can’t watch [a movie] like it’s the first time, or see the movie. opportunities where many disorders can be resolved with a single gesture. Where everything fits together and is obvious. She is one of the other people who can do it.
Margaret will read the script once. But I probably wouldn’t look at the storyboards or read the script [after that] because the movie is in front of her. If you allow yourself to get stuck in the intention, you don’t see it without passion. And that ended up being a very vital component of the process.
A very clever example is when we made the movie “Babe. “We had just combined and she didn’t appear in the movie at all. So I showed it to her and thought, Oh, she’ll be thrilled with this. . She sat down and watched the movie, and I turned to her and said, “What do you think?And she was silent. He said, “You’re not going to post it like that, are you?And I said, “What’s wrong? And she said, “George, there’s no dramatic tension and it’s very episodic. This after you have locked the glass. And I found out that he must have been right. “
It’s one thing to diagnose a challenge. We can all do it; it’s too slow, etc. It’s very, very complicated to delineate the cause of the problem; It’s too slow because of that. But what is by far the rarest thing is being able to locate the cure that fixes the problem. the challenge. And he did. After about twenty minutes of discussion, he said, “Why don’t they use bankruptcy titles?Just admit it’s episodic. And that was the remedy. “
There is a long culture of female film editors: others like Anne Coates, who edited “Lawrence of Arabia”; Dede Allen, who edited “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Dog Day Afternoon”; and Thelma Schoonmaker, who edited “Raging Bull” and “GoodFellas. “In Michael Ondaatje’s e-book “The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film,” Murch, who worked on “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now,” among other older films, says editing was once considered a woman’s craft: “You put the pieces of the film together. How is Margaret compatible with this culture?
Margaret herself says it’s not a gender issue. I think it’s intrinsic to their way of seeing the world. It turns out to be a very giant planter, at any scale, whether it’s a giant farm or a small garden. And it’s good: everything is taken into account. I think that’s where the same competencies overlap. To make a wonderful garden, you have to perceive to a ridiculous degree all those hidden processes and dimensions: soil, geology, sun, light, time. I want to know the plant and when to put the seed or seedling in it. But here’s the thing: somehow, in this process, you have to anticipate what’s going to happen in a year or five, and how all those variables will be fulfilled. It will have compatibility in an elegant whole. I knew that was how she approached gardens; I have noticed gardens that she has designed that date back twenty-five years. And I knew that’s how she approached editing.
What have you and Margaret disagreed on about a reduction?
When something works and there is a sublime solution to a problem, there is no doubt about it. It’s often the problematic scenes that give rise to debates. In the past, I was the one who had to worry and solve those problems. I regularly see the most productive solution available, but I’m excited that an editor can see something I haven’t seen. With Margaret, this happened often. It’s like someone showed you a magic trick and then showed you how they did it. And I’m like, “Oh my God, it’s so obvious now. ” Why couldn’t I see that?
We didn’t leave many scenes in “Fury Road,” because each and every one of them was hard-earned, but each and every one of them had to be interrogated. It’s very Darwinian: it will only do so if it earns its place. At this point, he knows quite well each and every frame of the film. You can know whether you want to cut one picture, two pictures, or 3 pictures; When you act, you have a strong feeling about it. It’s good, granular work, and I find that it takes a special kind of neurology to do it: going back and forth between holistic, bird’s-eye view, and detailed, microgranular view, because fatigue comes into play. You want someone who has wonderful artistic stamina to do this.
You do all kinds of things. In the past, painters would look at screens in a mirror. I do that. It drives other people crazy. I’m going to rotate the screen a hundred and 80 degrees. And it’s interesting. When you play a piece of music, you know which notes are going to follow: once you’ve heard it, your brain is in a position waiting for the next moment. Well, it’s exactly the same visually and dramatically one position to see the following information, and you don’t see it because it’s upside down. It’s a pretty competitive attack.
What you’re looking to do is get the audience interested in the film, so you can be there. But as the scenes progress, you can’t repeat the same shot. There has to be something new for there to be a progression, a crescendo and a decrescendo. The moment a repetition or redundancy occurs, it’s a signal to the audience that Well, you can back off. I call it falling off the wave. I used to surf and live in Sydney, so I know if you stay on the wave, it will take you all the way to the beach. You say, “I got here from here to there and I don’t know what it was like. “it happened. “
It is not only in the formal progression of the shots but also in the content, which is the most sophisticated. One wonders: how does this action say to the character we are invested in?How does this shed light on what we’ve seen?before? It cannot simply be an empty action of noise and movement without any replacement in dynamics. It can fill the area and be very entertaining and engaging, but it doesn’t leave you out of the theater. And for me, the measure of a film is how long it stays outside the theater.
Michael Ondaatje writes that when he saw Walter Murch level “The English Patient,” he knew “that it was the level of cinema closest to the art of writing. “Murch goes on to tell Ondaatje some of his tricks of the trade: lingering on a character’s face after saying a line, to show the audience that he’s lying. A reaction photo of an actor forgetting his lines was added, to convey embarrassed and vulnerable honesty to a scene. Cut right after a character blinks, as this signals the end of a thought.
The big moments are important, but it’s the precursor shots that really have a dramatic impact. This is where a movie can be made or lost, and there’s a bigger movie than you think. It’s actually a cumulative effect. We call this referred pain. If something is wrong with your diaphragm, you may feel it in your shoulder. It’s the same in the movies. The scene may seem slow, but it’s not the scene itself, it’s what came before. A serious scene may seem boring, but that’s often because you provided that information earlier.
People tend to base their haircut patterns on already established tropes. They shoot action sequences with immediate editing, where the scene is updated every two seconds without causal dating between one shot and the next. Margaret probably wouldn’t tolerate this. Rhythm deserves to be grounded in narrative. It has to be character-based. It’s not just about fixing the scene for the sake of it. The latest edition of “Fury Road” has more than 2,800 cuts, but note that there’s a huge effort to tie one shot to the next. As in music, there is an almost mathematical dating between a chord and a progression. That’s why we delight in it as music and not as noise. If you replace your beat in the middle of a song for no intelligent reason, it’s the same thing. Once you’ve cut the first few scenes and developed a rhythm, it’s really appealing how a perfectly clever scene can become temporarily boring if it doesn’t stick to that rhythm, or if it doesn’t build on it or embellish it. No.
I’ll give you an example. At the beginning of “Fury Road”, all the wretches living under the citadel, in this hierarchy of domination led by Immortan Joe, run towards the platform that rises in the citadel. There was a scene I had to cut, where a woman holds her bathrough in her arms and says, “Take my bathrough!It has the center of a warrior! And one of the masked henchmen, the caretaker, looks at the bathrough and says, “He was beaten. It probably doesn’t last even a year. And he refuses the bathroom. Then she hands the toilet to someone next to her and says, “Take me, I’m a milker!and exposes her nursing breasts. And he says, “Yes, you are, little mother!”.
It’s a very cynical scene, but useful, because it says that humans are a commodity and that breast milk is important. Now, the challenge is that we also have a scene where we see nursing mothers, and we’ll refer to that later. If we add this scene, the other scenes became a bit redundant. Plus, you’ve just met Max; You met Furiosa briefly. You can’t avoid possible characters or moments. You need to get along with the main characters. The scene itself is well done, but it devalues what was done afterwards. That tells you a lot of things, but it doesn’t move forward.
“Furiosa” was filmed in Australia and not Namibia. Eliot Knapman is credited as editor, rather than Margaret.
We had bought a farm in a valley on the outskirts of Sydney and Margaret had suffered severe flooding. This prevented him from attending the shoot. I won’t forget Tilda Swinton showing me a picture of Bong Joon-ho [the director of “Parasite”] running with his editor on set. They edited the film on the spot. I thought, okay, Eliot was Margaret’s assistant on “Fury Road” and “Three Thousand Years of Longing. “So, during filming, he set up the movie, and then Margaret came along and did her part. It was much more efficient.
Halfway through “Furiosa,” there’s a pivotal scene in which Furiosa forges the War Rig, a monster truck filled with “two thousand breasts of breast milk,” only to be attacked by a gang of kidnappers. The series has one hundred and ninety-seven takes and took seventy-eight days to film, but perhaps the most unexpected moment is when it ends, and Furiosa is ejected from the truck. The din of war drums and gunfire suddenly stops, and she stands up and looks at the empty horizon in general silence. She still escaped, but now what?The world is still a desert. ” Where did you think you were going?””Furiosa” features a series of moments like this, where the speed slows down and the silence is more dramatic than any music. an unexpected replacement for the headlong run of “Fury Road”.
We can say that “Fury Road” is necessarily a quick move. “Furiosa” still has some moments of adagio.
How did you do the sound design for those films?
Too often, other people silence action sequences primarily to trump visual impairments. Very often, we can see things with our ears. With the right banging sound, we think someone is hitting someone. But if you don’t want the sound, someone hits someone. , you’d better make sure the punch sounds real. When we were making “The Road Warrior,” the theory was to make the film a silent film. If you play silently, you’ll play with sound. But at that time I had less confidence in myself as a director. So, when the score began, it was the full orchestra.
On “Fury Road”, the initial concept is to have only practical music. In many cases, the music comes imperceptibly from the ambient sounds you hear in the movie: the music of cars and all the music of other people fighting. So it’s much more integrated. That’s why we had the drummers in the back of the truck and the guitarist. And then, once a little bit of humanity crept into the story, when Max was back to his best, we were able to introduce orchestral music. If you use music in some cases, it does something very important. This allows the audience to take the express truth of what they see on the screen and position it in a larger context. This allows them to settle for it being allegorical. It’s not just about this event. . It represents all those events. It’s moving from the specific to the general.
I don’t forget that at a relatively early screening of “Fury Road,” the guitarist didn’t get it right. Every time we saw him he played the same guitar riff all the time. People thought it was boring. Why was he here?The temptation was to exclude him from the story as much as possible. But that wasn’t the challenge. The challenge was the repetition of the music, in a film that did not tolerate repetition. Again, it was a kind of referred pain. Now Margaret and I knew that the music had not yet been orchestrated. It was transitional music. So I kept saying, “Everything will be fine, everything will be fine. “”And of course, when we did the final screening, it scored incredibly high. In fact, he is one of the iconic characters. If I had had less experience, maybe I would have panicked. Oh, it’s not painting, let’s get rid of it. This usually doesn’t explain why we can solve it. But it’s unexpected how other people throw the baby out along with the bathwater.
The “Mad Max” movies not only give a glimpse of the evolution of cinema and special effects, but also the evolution of our ability to watch movies and get more and more information.
When Warner Bros. remastered an edition of “The Road Warrior” [a few years ago], it was glorious to see it again, like we were going back in time. I was surprised to see how much cinema was still being screened after all this time. and how much cinema had replaced: the agility of the camera and the plasticity of images. You can replace colors, replace framing, and upload so many things digitally. But the most important thing is how the audience can read the videos. We’re really quick read videos compared to the ones we’ve seen in the past. “The Road Warrior” did 1,200 takes in ninety-six minutes. “Fury Road” was 120 minutes long, but it had two and a part of the number of takes. I think the average take in “The Road Warrior” lasted 4 seconds or more. The average shot on “Fury Road” was two seconds.
How do you know how long you can stay in a shot?In “Fury Road”, there’s a quick photo of a tattoo on Max’s back that reads “O-Negative”. Universal Donor. ” It’s an important piece of information: it explains why it’s like to be used as a blood donor through her captors and why she can later save Furiosa’s life through a transfusion, but it comes in an instant.
This photo of the tattoo on the storyboard and all this data designed to be on it. But if I kept this shot much longer and gave the audience fifteen seconds to read it, it would be terrible. Check to invite them to In a moment they relate to the character. I hope the maximum of the audience can read the tattoo, and then it will be a little bit more reinforced in two scenes, but you can’t help but do it.
When you watch a movie like “Fury Road,” it rushes and you can only catch something as it passes. How do things inform you on the go? This is very important. Storytelling is the retention of well-orchestrated information. It all comes down to the question: what does the public want to know and when do they want to know it?Time moves forward sixty seconds per minute, and most of us will see the movie in a single pass. You’re tyrannized by time. You want to orchestrate the information as you go through it. This is one of the most important responsibilities of a film like this.
Is there a limit to the amount of data a viewer can process?
This is something Margaret I constantly discusses in the editing room. Deep down, you don’t know. You want to make your guess more productive. You think about the audience all the time and you have to accept it as true with your own instincts. How do you make a series of very, very quick, very short shortcuts while making them spatially coherent in relation?Do you spend a lot of time talking about “eye scanning,” which is precisely where 90% of the audience will be looking on a big screen?a shot, or polish a screen component, so that the scan in the cut is smooth. That’s something Margaret is really smart at. If you put a lot of effort into it, so that from one shot to the next you don’t bump into the eye, you can make it quite creamy.
Do you think the speed of movie editing will continue to accelerate?
I don’t think this naturally leads to faster and faster movies. But you have to be aware, when making the film, that the audience is capable of perceiving things that they couldn’t perceive in the past. I don’t forget a quote: “Individually, an audience may be made up of idiots, but collectively they are never wrong. I think that’s true. People come to the movies loaded to the bone with all this learning of a relatively new language. They watch movies and get back into the groove. They are visually literate. They possess narrative and dramatic knowledge, but not necessarily in a way they can articulate. And, on the whole, it’s pretty amazing.
From very early on, it was an honor for me to see movies in the cinema when there were a lot of people. A movie that had a lot of influence on “Mad Max” was “What’s Up, Doctor?” Every Saturday night in Melbourne. , I would stop by to see the movie, because I enjoyed the laughter of the audience and I knew exactly where those laughter were. Then I went to Hong Kong, to a crowded cinema with state rooms in the hallways, and the laughter was on par with Melbourne. There is a collective reaction from the audience that constantly plays on your mind. You just have to accept it as true.
You need to be offered a film from this first impact. But that doesn’t mean that if you come back, you can’t possibly receive more information. If a movie is rich enough, multiple views will be rewarded. Every time I put on “The Godfather: Part II,” which is my favorite movie, I can’t stop watching it. I know exactly what’s going to happen, but it’s like listening to a smart song or a smart symphony. There’s a laugh in everyone, every time. Why is that?It’s normal that it doesn’t decrease in any way. ♦
Dean Baquet on his tenure as editor of the Times and the state of journalism.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the “show” in Congress and she on how to replace it.
Min Jin reads about his arrival in the United States and why he reads the writings of the Bible.
David Hockney presents a new series of paintings and talks about the paintings he has to make.
Stevie Nicks talks about style, wit, and how to write one of her songs.
Patricia Lockwood talks about her “atrocious” early writings and how COVID reprogrammed her brain.
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