NPR had a great interview with the writer-director George Miller on his making of Furiosa. Two bits really stood out to me. The first was such a great description of the creative process. The question itself, “balancing chaos with legibility,” was brilliant and helped set up the thoughtful response by Miller:
SHAPIRO: You know, the actress Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays Furiosa, described the way you direct as painting. She told Variety that everything we see on screen is basically hand-painted by you. Every frame is so full of detail. And so how do you think about balancing chaos with legibility, like guiding your audience’s eye to the right place?
MILLER: Oh, that – there’s a long answer to that.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter).
MILLER: But essentially, you have to – I guess the best analogy is music. In the same way that someone composing a piece of music, whether it be, you know, a symphony or even a song, there has to be precision. In music, it’s all almost mathematical. There has to be a causal relationship between one note and the next or one chord and the next, and so it is with film. You have to prepare in a way that allows the actors and all the human intervention into the process. If it’s highly prepared, then in the shooting, in the moment of performance, everyone is free to rely on their instincts.
The second, which immediately followed, was a great meditation on the medium of film:
SHAPIRO: And I’m just thinking, for so much of this movie, Furiosa, your main character, does not speak, so you can’t rely on the script. You’re really dependent on what audiences are seeing and hearing.
MILLER: Yes, yes. And I’ve also been intrigued by the way that silent cinema was able to get across so many powerful stories without words, without sound indeed. One thing I’ve found is that when you’re doing any movie at all is that they should play a silent movie, so that the kind of syntax of pure cinema manages to tell a lot of the story. I remember when I started making movies. I would often turn off the sound and watch my favorite movies, just to understand how those pieces of footage fitted together…
SHAPIRO: Wow.
MILLER: …In a kind of visual music. I think that’s really key. Then when, of course, you add sound, that’s a whole other thing going on.
I used to teach a course on “The Language of Film” which I described as everything but the dialogue – a sort of busman’s holiday for a language teacher. We’d watch and analyze a bunch of scenes for the visual language of film and then the first full movie we’d watch was The Artist, a silent movie with all the modern movie-editing conventions. So Miller’s words here really resonated with me.
Ramblings 