By Travis Johnson
Acclaimed Australian film director George Miller held forth on the breadth of his entire career at a special In Conversation event at NIDA last Thursday, covering not only the Mad Max franchise, but his endeavours in the realm of family films, Babe and Happy Feet.
Still, it was the Mad Max movies that attracted the most questions from the floor, and Miller detailed his struggles as an inexperienced filmmaker trying to mount the classic 1979 first installment.
“Someone said to me the great thing about being young is that you don’t know what you don’t know,” he said. “It took a year to write. It took 18 months to raise money from all of our friends and family and took 10 weeks to shoot. The first editor quit after 10 days, and I spent a year cutting it in a flat in North Melbourne. Somehow I knew there was something in there to massage out of it. And then Village Roadshow agreed to release it and it became a huge success in Australia, Japan and around the world.
“I realised that there was something else happening for its success, it was not a coincidence that in Japan they saw it as a samurai movie, in Scandinavia they saw it as a Viking movie, and the French picked it up as a western on wheels. I had tapped into the notion of a mythological character which is the lone warrior which you see over and again, in all cinema and folklore.”
He also expounded on the philosophy that drives him as an artist, saying, “What has kept me going was a deep and innate sense of inquiry about everything. I am always asking questions. Fundamental questions. If you do the preparation and apply intense rigor to everything that you do, then ultimately that earns your intuition the right to play. There is a direct interplay between the intellect and the intuition. And the more fuel that the intellect loads up for the intuition, the better.
“A lot of people get by on bluster and swagger and self-confidence. But I have found that the best directors and writers and actors have an innate humility that keeps them learning, that they never ever think that they know it all. There is never a sense of mastery. They are still searching and are still curious.”
Speaking about his experiences making the animated Happy Feet, he said, “While animation is not live, you can have the advantage of moving the camera around to different angles. But it’s the same as live movies, in that it is driven by performance. Working with Robin Williams was amazing in that way.”
He also cautioned the audience that it is hard graft and not innate gifts that win the day. “No matter how talented you are and how big your innate genius is, if you don’t drill down and work and really get all the skills under your belt, there is no way you can go out onto a stage or basketball court or football field and define the best of yourself. You might get lucky for a while. But you earn that moment. That’s what I learnt from actors Jack Nicholson and John Hargreaves and also writer Nick Enright, who I was also lucky enough to work with. He had that incredible discipline. He was a great teacher and understood the difference between preparation and execution.”
“NIDA was excited to welcome an artist who has changed the landscape of film, and is a major figure in the Australian industry,” NIDA Director/CEO Kate Cherry enthused. “George is a phenomenal powerhouse and as a co-founder of the production houses Kennedy Miller Mitchell and Dr. D Studios is heavily involved in creating the movies of the future.”
