Presented by Rolex | 'Furiosa' director George Miller delves into the boundless well of inspiration fueling his 45-year journey crafting the epic Mad Max Saga. Get the inside details on what went into the craft of George's filmmaking.FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA - only in theaters May 24, Memorial Day Weekend. https://www.furiosaamadmaxsaga.com/Director: Claire BussDirector of Photography: Vivian LauEditor: Jeremy SmolikTalent: George MillerProducer: Christie Garcia; Funmi SunmonuLine Producer: Romeeka PowellAssociate Producer: Emebeit Beyene; Amy HaskourProduction Manager: Andressa PelachiProduction Coordinator: Elizabeth HymesTalent : Alison Ward Frank, Lauren Mendoza, Meredith JudkinsCamera Operator: Lucas VilicichGaffer: Shay Eberle-GunstGrip: Jon CorumSound : Justin FoxProduction Assistant: Brock Spitaels and Shenelle JonesArt Department: ZoeZoe Sheen, Erin Petersen, Andrei HillPost Production Supervisor: Christian OlguinPost Production Coordinator: Scout AlterSupervising Editor: Doug LarsenAssistant Editor: Fynn Lithgow
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Hello, I'm George Miller, and I'm the director of Furiosa, which is a Mad Max saga
00:05And I'm going to be talking about all the inspirations or many of the inspirations that led to this film and how I work
00:12For me movies are visual music
00:15They should almost be read purely with the syntax of cinema, so I'm really excited to be doing this
00:30Well, Mad Max, boy, it's a long story. Way back in the mid-seventies
00:34I became interested in film, not with any regard to any sort of career or anything like that
00:40I was a kid who grew up with my twin brother in rural Australia before there was television, before there was internet
00:47There was just play, school, and the Saturday matinee
00:51And that had a massive influence on me, of course, and the first Mad Max
00:56Which was the first feature that we worked on
00:59I really wanted it to be a film in which, as Hitchcock said, they don't have to read the subtitles in Japan
01:06But they're read purely as a bit of visual music
01:09I didn't really know what I was doing then. None of us were experienced, even Mel Gibson, who's played Mad Max
01:15He was straight out of drama school, never really worked on a movie before, but somehow
01:21Somehow it tapped into universal archetypes
01:25For instance, in Japan he was seen as a samurai
01:28In Scandinavia, some sort of lone viking
01:31And in particular, the French said, oh, these are westerns on wheels
01:35And in the way that the American western, they were allegorical
01:40A very elemental world with very simple rules
01:43Allowed you to get a lot of story into it
01:46So from the beginning, those sort of stories, figures in the landscape
01:50Undergoing some sort of fundamental conflict, which is the essence of all drama
01:55Was a kind of staple of film storytelling
01:58The Mad Max and Furiosa and these Mad Max stories are kind of a progression along that same continuum
02:07Oh, so here we are, Queensland, Australia
02:10This is very familiar
02:11This is kind of flat, loamy earth
02:15As I said, there was nothing but the Saturday matinee
02:17So in Mad Max 2, it was really interesting
02:20There was the OPEC oil crisis in the early 70s
02:23In Melbourne, where we were, a very lovely city
02:27And none of the social pressures that lead to violence and so on
02:30But it took 10 days of oil restrictions for the first shot to be fired
02:35It wasn't fired at anybody
02:37We don't have a gun culture in Australia
02:39But it was fired in the air where someone got ahead in a queue
02:42A long queue that went for blocks
02:44And I thought, if it took 10 days, what would happen in 100 days?
02:48What would happen in 1,000 days and so on?
02:50And that led to these sort of stories
02:52But that's been the story throughout history
02:54I have resources, you don't
02:56I have to protect them
02:57That's who we are
02:58The worst and the best of us in these sort of things
03:02Story always has primacy
03:04Story is all
03:05Everything is driven by story
03:07But then to play with the technology and kind of do things that you couldn't imagine doing before
03:13Is very exciting
03:14And the biggest shift in cinema after sound was the digital dispensation
03:19But I think Jurassic Park was probably the first big event in digital cinema
03:2663 shots of dinosaurs really kind of started it
03:31We were lucky enough with the first main film to be at Universal
03:34Who already knew what this technology was doing
03:37And we were able to sort of make little animals talk
03:41That was really an exciting time
03:43The cinematographer of the main movies, Andrew Lesney, went on to shoot Lord of the Rings
03:50And he came back from the very first one and showed me the first motion capture of Gollum
03:57I'd never even heard of motion capture
03:59And I thought, holy cow, we have the story of the penguins
04:02We can make these penguin stands
04:04That led to Happy Feet
04:06That was driven by the technology
04:07The story was the most important thing
04:09But the means to actually tell the story optimally was becoming available
04:14Almost at the same time I was thinking
04:16Wow, these tools, having done animation
04:18We can apply to action films or stories like Mad Max
04:22We can do things that we can never dream of doing in the past
04:27Here, what's really interesting about these pictures here
04:31Is the image of Buster Keaton's 1926 silent movie, On This Train
04:36Incredible, incredible movie
04:38Not only that he's directing it, but doing these real-life stunts
04:42Incredibly unsafe
04:43And then an image from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome in 1985
04:47And it's the same image on a track with the front of that vehicle
04:52Cinema, like all arts or all human endeavours
04:54There's a kind of cultural evolution
04:56One thing builds on another
04:58And when I see things like this I realise, okay
05:01These are the influences that basically we're all part of a continuum on
05:05Again, you've got another image here
05:07From The General and also from Furiosa
05:10Which we've done almost a hundred years later
05:15We've got an image like that
05:16And here you have pictures of once a time in the West
05:20Safety Last with Harold Lloyd
05:23And then Lawrence of Arabia with trains and so on
05:25And then we start doing the similar things in this time
05:28Again, I guess, vehicles, moving vehicles
05:32Once they were horses and trains
05:34Now they're combustion-driven engines
05:36I mean, interesting the world of Mad Max
05:3945 years after the fall of man
05:41When all the institutions have gone
05:43The power grids and everything's gone
05:45And we go to the isolated centre of a continent like Australia
05:48There are no electric cars
05:50It's impossible
05:51They can only get so far
05:53You can't charge them anymore
05:54There's nothing you can use and repurpose in those sort of engines
05:58So you end up going back to earlier technologies
06:01And that's why we have the kind of cars that we have
06:04And now I'm going to talk about the production design
06:06Which is really key
06:07On the very first Mad Max
06:09There were only 30 people in the credits
06:11On this film, this is shooting
06:14There are a thousand people
06:15How do you bring everyone together with the same sort of ideas and visions?
06:19What are the guiding ideas?
06:20So one of the most important things was to say that
06:24Everything that we see in the film
06:27Every single detail
06:28Every utterance
06:29Every bit of behaviour
06:31Had to be made of found objects repurposed
06:34That was really, really key
06:36And we had to understand where those found objects came from
06:39If you look at any of the vehicles
06:42Particularly in Fury Road and Furiosa
06:45They had to be from existing vehicles
06:47Again, cobbled together, repaired, put together in some way
06:52Just because we're in an impoverished world
06:57It doesn't mean people stop making beautiful things
07:00So if you've got stuff and you put together this kind of
07:03You know, found object art
07:05People take great pride
07:06It's in our instinct to do it really well
07:08Even the earliest times, you know
07:10Cave paintings
07:11That's something that we all do culturally
07:14You make the most of what you've got
07:15And we see that over and over again
07:17This was in the 70s
07:18We saw some footage of the 30s
07:21Where police were putting on these police pageants
07:24With bikes doing all these sort of formations and so on
07:27And there was a chariot race
07:28Where people had two bikes and a chariot
07:31And it was based on the first Ben-Hur movie
07:34The silent version
07:35In the late 50s
07:37There was that big one with Charlton Heston
07:39That amazing chariot race in big widescreen
07:43And when we saw that footage
07:44We said, well, of course, Dementors
07:47The Chris Hemsworth character
07:49Sees himself as some sort of glorified
07:51I don't know, Roman classical figure
07:54And so he rides across the wasteland
07:56With his massive horde of bikers
07:58In a chariot bike
08:00Here we see it here
08:01So we have the police in the 70s
08:03We saw it from the 30s in Australia
08:05Ben-Hur, 1959
08:07And here he is doing a similar thing here
08:11One of the things I noticed
08:12After I thought we'd let go of all the Mad Max world
08:15You know, back in the 80s
08:17There were a lot of dystopian stories
08:19And films and particularly games
08:22And the basic instinct was to desaturate everything
08:25To make it very, almost more monochrome
08:28And I thought if we keep doing what's been done
08:31It'll feel very too familiar
08:34It's almost become a trope to make things look desaturated
08:38So that was a big influence on the look of Fury Road
08:43And now Furiosa
08:45The other thing we picked up was, as I said
08:48When the French said that these films are westerns on wheels
08:52If you looked at all the classic westerns
08:55They always shot day for night
08:57The main reason they shot day for night
08:59Is because horses don't have headlights
09:02So it's only when you have headlights
09:04That you need to shoot night for night
09:06In order to see them
09:08Now, in the wasteland
09:10It's definitely not conducive to your survival
09:12If you keep your headlights on
09:14Because people can see you from miles away
09:16So you don't want to draw attention to yourself
09:18So if you're travelling at night
09:20If they were in Fury Road
09:22Escaping in the warring across the wasteland
09:25The last thing you want to do is put your headlights on
09:27So we shot day for night
09:29When I went to Japan
09:31They said, oh, Max is a samurai
09:33You must have seen a lot of Kurosawa movies
09:35To my shame, I said, who's Kurosawa?
09:39Which is terrible
09:40When they told me, I made it my job
09:42To immediately go and see all the Kurosawa movies
09:45Of course, what was so amazing about him
09:48He took, basically, Hollywood cinema
09:51And reinterpreted it
09:52I'm following in that sort of
09:54Going down that path
09:55Because, again, he was someone
09:57Who's able to take cinema
09:59And make it his own
10:00And master all this stuff
10:02And it's so great that you've got these images
10:04He liked this, it's fantastic
10:07So characters
10:09How do we approach characters?
10:10Characters absolutely drive the narrative
10:14If you go back to the earliest times
10:15Let's go back to the Greeks and so on
10:17It's all about what characters want
10:20And how those wants bring them into conflict with others
10:24So we were lucky enough in Fury Road
10:26To have Charlize
10:28Who's someone who has that kind of stature
10:31Just intrinsically as a person
10:33You know, it's purely an intuitive thing
10:36When you actually cast someone
10:37You can't really articulate exactly
10:40Why someone feels right
10:42So she was this character in the story
10:45Almost a decade goes by
10:46And we have to shoot Furiosa
10:49And I was really looking to see
10:51Whether we could use de-aging
10:54And all these sort of techniques
10:55And I realized that wasn't working very well
10:58Some great filmmakers tried it
11:00And all you're looking at is the technology
11:03You're not suspending disbelief
11:05And watching the story
11:07And believing in the character
11:09So we had to cast somebody
11:12Who could fill Charlize's shoes
11:15And when I saw Anya and her work
11:18I realized, oh, there's something going on here
11:20There's something intense
11:22Kind of almost regal about her
11:25Timeless
11:26And I knew that she was someone
11:29Who was very rigorous in her work
11:31Like Charlize
11:32I mean, both of those actors started ballet
11:36When they're very young
11:37Fine dancers
11:38Having worked with dancers on Happy Feet
11:40I realized they have a great precision
11:44I mean, it's amazing what they can do
11:46The timing is just amazing
11:50And if you're able to internalize all of that
11:53Then you have a really fine actor
11:56The thing that defines the hero
11:58Is that they come to a moment
12:01Where they have to relinquish their own self-interest
12:04To a greater good
12:05That's the fundamental gesture or behavior of the hero
12:09Now, Max does that but in a reluctant way
12:12He doesn't want to be involved with other human beings
12:15Whenever he gets involved with other human beings
12:17Somehow it's always too painful
12:20So he's a kind of a good man running away from himself
12:24That happened in Mel Gibson's version
12:27And it also happens in the Tom Hardy version
12:31And that's interesting
12:32Quite different from the Furiosa character
12:35Who basically is driven by some sort of obligation
12:39To promise to a mother to find her way home
12:42Despite all her herculean efforts
12:45Can't do it and become something else
12:48And then decides redemption's not for her
12:51But it's for others
12:52As she says, less corrupted
12:54And that's the wives
12:56They're very interesting characters to me
12:58Because they're very, very sort of classic characters
13:01That are timeless in a way
13:03And I mean, these stories are allegories
13:05And that's one of the big attractions for me
13:08To work on those films
13:09I mean, I'm surprised by some of the stuff I've seen in here
13:13You know, it makes me want to keep sort of doing it
13:16Stimulated by the very conversation we've had here
13:19I'm still doing it
13:20And people say, why are you still doing it?
13:22And I say, well, I'm still really curious about it
13:26It's changing
13:28I'm surprised how everything is changing
13:31And how you're engaged in something that is ongoing
13:34I mean, you can be making films for a thousand years
13:37And never master it
13:38There's too much to understand
13:40So anyway, thanks so much for this
13:42It's a great experience
13:44Thank you