The Inspirations Behind 45 Years of 'Mad Max,' Explained by Furiosa's George Miller | Vanity Fair

Hi, I'm George Miller and I'm the director of Furiosa, which is a Mad Max saga, and I'm going to talk about all the

inspirations

or many of the

inspirations

that led to this movie and how it works for me. visual music, they should almost be read purely with the syntax of film, so I'm very excited to do this, yeah, well, crazy, boy, it's a long story back in the mid 70s, uh, I got interested in film, no absolutely. to any kind of career or something, I was a kid growing up with my twin brother in rural Australia, before there was television, before there was the Internet, there was only one play school and Saturday night tomorrow and that had a big influence on I, of course, and the first Mad Max, which was the first movie we worked on, I really wanted it to be a movie where, as Hitchcock said, you didn't have to read the subtitles in Japan, but read purely as a bit of visual music.

I didn't really know what I was doing so none of us had any experience, even Mill Gibson, who played Mad Max, he was just out of drama school, he'd never worked in a film before, but it somehow took advantage of Universal archetypes, for example in Japan he was seen as a samurai, in Scandinavia, a kind of lone Viking and, in particular, the French said "oh, these are westerns on wheels" and, in the same way that American westerns were allegorical, a very elemental world with very simple rules, they allowed you to include a lot of history, so from the beginning those types of stories figure in the landscape experiencing some type of fundamental conflict that is the essence of all drama, it was kind of a staple of the cinematic storytelling of Mad Max and the Furies in these Mad Max.

The stories are kind of a progression along the same Continuum oh so here we are Queensland Australia this is very familiar it's kind of a flat Earth like I said there's nothing but Saturday B so in Madmax 2 was really interesting, there's OPEC oil. crisis in the early 70s in Melbourne, where we were a very lovely city and without any of the social pressures that lead to violence etc, but it took 10 days of oil restrictions for the first shot to be fired, it was not well Someone, we don't have a gun culture in Australia, but he was shot in the air, someone walked ahead in a queue, a long queue that spanned blocks, and I thought, if it took 10 days, what would happen in 100 days, what would happen? it happens in a thousand days and so on and that led to these types of stories, but that has been the story throughout history.

I have resources, you don't, I have to protect them, that's what we are, the worst and the best of us in these in these. The kind of thing that the story always has The story of Primacy is Everything is driven by the story, but then playing with technology and doing things that you couldn't imagine doing before is very exciting and the biggest change in film after sound was digital dispensing. but I think Jurassic Park was probably the first big thing in digital cinema. 63 dinosaur shots really started. We were lucky that the first baby movie was at Universal, who already knew what this technology was doing and we were able to. to make the little animals talk, it was a really exciting moment, the director of photography for the bab films, Andrew Lesny, filmed The Lord of the Rings and he came back from the first one and showed me the first motion capture of Gollum i.

I had never heard of motion capture and I thought, Oh my God, we had the penguin story. We can make these penguins dance, which led to Happy Faith. It was driven by technology. The story was the most important thing, but the means to tell the story. Optimally, it was available at almost the same time. I was thinking, "These tools, having done animation, we could apply them to action movies or stories like Mad Max. We can do things we would never have dreamed of doing in the past. Here's what's really interesting about this. pictures here's the image from Buster Keaton's 1926 silent film on this train incredible movie not only that he directs it but he does these incredibly unsafe real-life stunts and then a picture of Mad Max beyond the Thunderdome in '85 and there the same image in a Follow with the front of that vehicle Cinema, like all arts or all human endeavors, there is a kind of cultural evolution, one thing is based on another and when I see things like this I realize that it is okay , these are the influences that we are basically all part of a Continuum again, you have another image here of the general and also of furious that we made almost 100

years

later, we have an image like that and here you have photos of Once a time in the West, the security last time with Harold Lloyd and then Lawrence of Arabia with trains etc., and then we started doing similar things around this time again.

I guess vehicles move. Vehicles that were once horses and trains are now combustion engines. I mean interesting the world of Mad Max 45

years

after the fall of Man, when all institutions have disappeared from the electrical grids and everything has disappeared and we go to the isolated center of a continent like Australia, there are no electric cars, it is impossible , they could just get it. until now you can't charge them anymore, there's nothing you can use and reuse in those types of engines, so you end up going back to previous technologies and that's why we have the type of cars that we have and now I'm going to talk about the design of production, which is really key in the first Mad Max, there are only 30 people in the credits of this movie, this is, this is the shoot, there are a thousand people, how do you bring everyone together with the same kind of ideas and visions, what?

What are the guiding ideas? So one of the most important things was to say that everything we see in the film, every detail, every expression, every behavior, had to be made from found, repurposed objects, that was really key and we had to understand where those came from. found objects if you look at any of the vehicles, particularly in Fury Road and Furiosa, they had to be from existing vehicles again improvised, repaired, put together in some way just because we are in an impoverished world, no That doesn't mean people stop doing things beautiful, so if you have things and you put together this kind of found object art, people take a lot of pride, it's in our instinct to do it very well, even in the early days, you know, cave paintings are something special. which we all do culturally, you make the most of what you have and we see that time and time again this was in the '70s, we saw some images from the '30s where the police organized these police parades with bicycles doing all these types of formations and so on, and there was a car race where people had two bikes and a car and it was based on Ben's first movie, The Silent, from the late '50s, there was a big one with Charon Hison, that incredible big car race. wide screen and when we saw that footage we said well of course, Dementus, Chris Hemsworth's character sees himself as some sort of glorified classical Roman figure, I don't know, and so he rides through the Wasteland with his huge horde of bikers on a car.

Here we see it here, so we have the police in the '70s, we saw it in the '30s in Australia in 1959 and here he is doing something similar. Here's one of the things I noticed after I thought we'd let go of the entire Mad Max world. You know, in the '80s there were a lot of dystopian stories and movies and particularly games and the Basic Instinct was to desaturate everything to make it almost more monochromatic and I thought if we kept doing what's been done it would feel really good too. familiar, it's almost become a trope to make things look desaturated, so it was a big influence on the look of Fury Road and now Furiosa, the other thing we learned was what I said when the French said these movies They are from the west on wheels.

If you look at all the classic westerns, they always filmed day for night, the main reason they filmed day for night is because horses don't have headlights, so only when you have headlights do you need to film night for night to be able to see. The now in Wasteland is definitely not conducive to your survival if you keep the lights on because people can see you from miles away so you don't want to attract attention so if you are traveling at night if they were on Fury Road escaping on the platform of war through the Wasteland, the last thing you want to do is turn on the headlights, so we filmed day for night when I went to Japan, they said oh, Max is a samurai, you must have seen a lot of Kurasawa. movies and to my shame I said who is Kurasawa, which is terrible when they told me that I made it a point to immediately go see all of Kurasawa's films, of course, what was so surprising about that?

He basically took Hollywood cinema and reinterpreted it. I follow it. on that kind of path because again, he was someone who was able to take cinema and make it his own and master all these things and it's great that you have these images here like this, it's fantastic, characters, how can we? get closer to the characters, the characters absolutely drive the narrative, if we go back to the early days, go back to the Greeks, etc., it's all about what the characters want and how those desires put them in conflict with others, so We were lucky to have Fury Road.

Char Le, who is someone who has that kind of stature intrinsically as a person, you know it's a purely intuitive thing, when you choose someone, you can't articulate exactly why someone feels good, so she was this character in the story, almost a Decade goes by and we have to film furiously and I was really looking to see if we could use uh daging and all these kinds of techniques and I realized that it wasn't working very well, some great filmmakers tried it and all of you Watching is the technology, you're not suspending disbelief and watching, watching the story and believing in the character, so we had to cast someone who could fill Charlie's shoes and when I saw Anyna and her work I realized there's something.

There's something intense, almost real, going on here about Timeless about her and I knew that she was someone who was very rigorous in her work as Char Le. I mean, both actors started ballet when they were very young. I meet dancers. Having worked with dancers at Happy Feet, I find that I have excellent PR precision. I mean, it's amazing what they can do, the moment is just incredible and if you want to be able to internalize all that, then you have a really good actor, what defines the hero is that there comes a moment when he has to give up his self-interest for a greater good, that is the fundamental gesture or behavior of the hero.

Now Max does that, but not reluctantly. He doesn't want to get involved with other human beings every time he gets involved with other human beings in some way it's always too painful so he's kind of a good man running away from himself, that happened in the Mel Gibson version and it also happens in the Tom Hardy version. uh, and that's a quite different interest from the Furiosa character who is basically driven by some kind of obligation to promise her mother that she will find her way home despite all her efforts when they can't do it and become something else and then decides that redemption is not for her but it is for others, as she says, less corrupt and those are the wives, they are very interesting characters for me because they are very, very, very classic characters that are timeless in a way and I want to say that these stories are allegories and that is One of the great attractions for me is working on those films.

I mean, I'm surprised by some of the things I've seen here. You know, it makes me want to keep doing it, stimulated by the same conversation we've had. I had here I'm still doing it and people say why are you still doing it and I say well I'm still very curious about this, it's changing. It amazes me how everything is changing and how you are involved in something that is ongoing. I mean, you can be making movies for a thousand years and never master them. There's a lot to understand so anyway thank you very much for this it's a great experience thank you.