I’m about to do something I warn my students against — replace an interesting mystery with a boring solution.
But it’s a slow news day — and I don’t have much time — working on three video essays and soon it’ll be marking time at the Art College.
In Projections issue 1, George Miller is interviewed, and says —
“I saw Lawrence of Arabia the other day. On tape — God forgive me. There’s a stunt where a steam train rolls onto its side as it comes to a halt across the sand, with the smoke pouring out of the stack filling the screen. Now, if you watch the wide shot, it’s flat desert. There’s no evidence whatsoever of a second camera close to where the train finally comes to rest. I wound back two or three times and I could not see the second camera and I cannot imagine that it was done twice. So how they did it I don’t know, but whoever put that camera in the second spot put it in the perfect place.”
Miller is a great believer in the idea that there’s only ever one perfect spot for the camera. He’s staged several stunts that seem to draw inspiration from David Lean’s locomotive, notable the spectacular car roll in scene one of FURY ROAD.
On to the mystery. I had the advantage of watching not on tape, but Blu-ray, God forgive me. I can only frame-grab from the DVD though.
And there it is: just ahead of the engine, the second camera position, hidden behind a mound of sand. Miller couldn’t see it on VHS because the definition of that format is so poor. And audiences at the cinema don’t register it because it doesn’t look like anything, just a slight variation in the hue of the desert, and by the time the cut reveals we have a second camera there, the steam train is hurtling at us and like those mythic Lumiere patrons we’re a bit startled.
The second camera’s mostly buried, the lens at exact ground level, so John Box or Eddie Fowlie or whoever’s wrangling the sand doesn’t need to build it up very high to conceal the thing. The only crafty thing worth noting is that it looks like they haven’t just built a mound, but a gentle slope, so that there’s very little for the eye to go by.
(On Blu-ray, however, the mound is more noticable.)
The other thing that rewards re-viewing of this spectacle is that, an instant after the moment of detonation, the number one camera gives a one-frame shudder — everything blurs — as if an actual earth tremor were felt in the soft sand or the hot air, or as if the operator got momentarily overexcited by Lean wrecking the second steam train of his career (putting him even with Buster Keaton, who dumps locomotives into rives in OUR HOSPITALITY and THE GENERAL).
Blood, Sweat and Chrome is a terrific read — an oral history of MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, its long gestation, its making, and its near unmaking. No mention of the 3D version or the black & chrome version, oddly enough — though we do get a brief history of the abortive attempts by Kennedy-Miller to create their own 3D camera that could survive the heat and dust of desert filming, something that doubtless added a few bucks to the eventual cost (reckoned at “over $250 million” here, described as “$500 million!!!” by industry scuttlebutt that came to my ears).
Author Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter who puts together a great story. I wish he’d had more of the nerdy camera stuff — before the film appeared, cinematographer John Seale and his second unit man David Burr did a fabulously indiscrete talk which appeared online and hinted at the troubles, the craziness and the extraordinary approach director George Miller took to his material.
Miller’s approach was, appropriately enough, mad. I love the movie — a two-hour anxiety attack — and so, in a sense, one can’t fault his methods. But, in another sense, one can. It was nuts.
Apart from the opening and closing scenes in the Citadel, Miller shot in sequence. This is rarely done even in small movies because it’s not practical. On a big movie, it’s crazy. On a HUGE movie, it’s suicidal. It was basically a way of making the easy bits of a mostly insanely difficult movie become also difficult. Need two shots of a character at the steering wheel, one for scene ten and one for scene twenty? Don’t film them together, film them weeks apart, necessitating two set-ups where one would have done you. Then multiply that by hundreds. Actors like filming in sequence, when they can, because it allows a clearer sense of the emotional throughline. But both Miller’s stars confessed themselves hopelessly confused.
Tom Hardy, confused while wearing a garden fork on his face.
Miller worked from a storyboard, not a script. Everybody says there WAS no script, though I also read interviews where Miller’s collaborators claimed they had to produce a script to satisfy Warner Bros, which seems plausible. But then they never referred to it and apparently didn’t show it to the actors. This was all supposed to HELP. A more detailed, granular plan, which shows exactly what has to be shot. A more useful, visual document for a movie that’s literally almost all action.
Storyboards are great for specifics but a trifle unwieldy — MM:FR’s boards papered a large room — it can be hard to get an overview of the story because of all the detail — Miller or a collaborator would have to talk interested parties through the boards, because storyboards can be hard to interpret if you’re used to scripts. They tend not to be as intuitively clear as comic strips. One of the “writers” claims that reading action scenes is “fucking boring” so storyboards were the only way to go. Read a James Cameron action scene sometime. Or read a book. It’s true that most screenwriters suck at describing things, just as most directors suck at filming them. But the exceptional ones prove it can be done.
Miller’s mania was, at every level of the production, to focus on details, and attempt to make the perfect film by assembling a series of perfect details. Crazily, it kind of worked. You can’t say he wasn’t seeing the big picture, because he obviously very much had a vision. But he didn’t always succeed in conveying its essentials to his actors. (In that talk above, Seale says he didn’t have a clue what the film was going to look like, since digital cinematography is so utterly, dizzyingly flexible.)
Miller also largely eschewed master shots, shooting little tiny pieces, like Hitchcock. The stars would beg him for a bit of run-up, so they weren’t just acting in five-second bursts. “No, I don’t need that,” he would say.
Now, coverage is not in itself a wicked thing. And Miller had final cut, so he had no need to fear it. USUALLY if you’re shooting five seconds of vital material it does no harm to surround it with ten or twenty seconds on either side, which will give you cutting choices. Miller was working on the theory that there’s only ever one correct camera position, while Seale was shooting multicamera because he suspected this was an approach that could easily land one in difficulties. And some of the B and C camera stuff did make it into the movie, so he was right.
We’re told that an assembly of early scenes was created (Margaret Sixel, Miller’s wife, is also his editor, and they obviously have a beautiful relationship and understanding) but this, apparently, was not shown to the actors. It would have been INCREDIBLY useful, I would have thought. Hitchcock did this to Sylvia Sidney on SABOTAGE — confused her by shooting piecemeal then wowed her with an assemblage. Psychologically a masterstroke: you disorient your star, make them worried that you don’t know what you’re doing, then dazzle them with your brilliance, and they have no choice but to trust you from then on. I mean, I wouldn’t do it: I’d prefer to keep people onside throughout. But, in the wild, cult-like atmosphere of Miller’s film, this seems like a workable scheme.
Miller also believed in fine-tuning every sequence in the cut before moving on to the next one. Which is also batshit. I always tell my students to assemble the outline of the film quickly — you don’t make shonky cuts you know aren’t acceptable, but you work fast and aim to get, as quickly as possible, an overview, all the scenes in order. That way, you learn as quickly as possible how much trouble you’re in. You get to the most depressing part as quick as possible, and then everything after that is about making it better.
To some extent, that may have been impossible for Miller due to his “goddamn jigsaw cutting,” as Selznick referred to Hitch’s approach. But if everything’s following a storyboard and there’s no fat, it’s not that hard to cut off the clapperboards and string the shots in their intended sequence, even if the timing is initially rough. Slightly harder when you have 480 hours of footage, I know…
George Miller is clearly a more successful (and better) filmmaker than I am, as a comparison of LORENZO’S OIL and episode 13 of Intergalactic Kitchen will demonstrate. But I learned about shooting masters, putting things in a clearly formatted script, communicating with my actors and aiming for a rough cut as fast as possible relatively early in my career. It maybe took ten years. Miller turned 70 while making FURY ROAD, and he’s a very smart guy (a doctor!). He clearly handled his crew brilliantly, his supporting cast were happy (working with a dramaturge), and his struggles with the studio all worked out in the film’s favour (the diciest moment was when the head of Warners ordered him not to shoot the opening and closing of the film, a ruinous decision which had to be reversed later, at great expense, when it turned out that a film without an introduction and a climax tended to be rather incoherent).
So it’s a mystery — maybe George never made the early mistakes I struggled with, and so he was able to discover them at an advanced age? Or maybe he’s right and I’m wrong.
Wrote this last year after enjoying MAD MAX: FURY ROAD — we watched all the previous MAXES, I wrote this, and then forgot to publish it. Now I’m thoroughly sick of staring at it in my Drafts section, I’ll finally punt it out there.
***
So, we finally watched all the MAD MAX films, in the wrong order. Fiona hadn’t seen any, and I had seen MAD MAX II: THE ROAD WARRIOR on VHS and the first film at my school film society when I was 17. FURY ROAD got us all pumped up and fuel-injected and we thought it was time to catch up. Oddly enough, my teenage self hadn’t been all that taken with the first film, so we left it to last. But in the interests of clarity, I’ll take them in order here.
MAD MAX — first seen at my school film society — has all the strengths and weaknesses in position already. The action is hairy and scary and impressive and the ruthlessness is total. The movie menaces a child in the first reel and kills one to motivate the last-act carnage. Max’s wife isn’t killed, just horribly wounded, and then allowed to completely disappear from the movie, and the series. Maybe he likes Charlize Theron in the latest film because she reminds him of his wife’s missing arm?
Throughout the action the movie contrasts Max’s heteronormative family values with the rampaging psychopathic polyamorous biker gang led by Toecutter (Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall Keays-Byrne) who are equal-opportunities rapists. “A woman! My favourite!” remarks one. Director/doctor George Miller takes a bully’s gloating delight in their depravity and laughs along with their jokes, which I think is what I disliked about the film first time.
Max and his sex-sax-playing wife actually play at Tarzan-and-Jane, and like that previous screen couple, they have an unimaginative way with baby names: their’s is called Sprog.
I don’t remember the cartoonish eyeball-bulge moment, played twice in the film. Either it was censored from our UK print or it went by so fast I convinced myself it never happened. Or I suppressed the memory and Miller should start paying my therapist bills.
The second film is an exponential leap in budgetary terms, and also in bringing in the self-consciously mythic aspect of the series. The ending is particularly fine in this respect, unearned by the preceding action — the Gyro Captain’s going to make a terrible tribal leader, obviously. The weird lack of continuity between films — no series save THE PINK PANTHER has survived so much surreal garbling — already creeps in, but is less overt. Miller’s skill with actors seems to have actually regressed, with this movie brimming with lousy supporting players cast for their appearance. Emil Minty as the Feral Kid is good though.
Isn’t he YOUNG? Mel Gibson is actually too boyish in the first film, struggling to appear bad-ass enough or convincingly tormented until his descent into nemesis mode at the end. He has just enough gravitas by the time of the second.
Once more, though, the film is far more in love with its bad guys, and can’t quite bring itself to give the hero much to do or say — only at the climax is there a clear imperative to get his arse in gear.
The third film is probably the most dated, since its budget now allowed Miller and his co-George to really indulge themselves, so we get more sex-sax, Tina Turner, some dubious hair for Max, and a bit of a Frankie Goes To Hollywood vibe. Everything at Thunderdome is a bit confused, with baddies who aren’t bad enough, fighting other baddies, and Max stuck in between without a clear role. Once we get to the “Jesus in leather” part, the high concept that made the film worth making to Miller, with Max as messiah leading a tribe of semi-feral children from the wilderness, things pick up. The Riddley Walker devolved dialect of the kids is inspired, and it’s only when you start picking at it that you realize the whole thing makes no sense at all — how long have these kids been here?
So the third film is the least satisfying and most naff, but also has a lot of the best bits of the series, with the epic, mythic ending of film 2 extrapolated out so as to occupy considerable screen time. In the first film it’s a really cool grace note at the end of a silly, nasty romp. Here, it’s almost substantial. The post-apocalyptic poetic is a major thing in literary sci-fi, but rarely gets a look-in at the movies. Surprising that the most brutal, comic-book and nonsensical post-apoc flicks should also approach the sublime most nearly.
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