Gadgetory

Mad Max fury road might be one big car chase but there's method to the madness in Australia for the graphic festival at Sydney's Opera House director George Miller spoke to CNET about how a graphic novel approach brought depth to the destruction george miller thank you for speaking with CNN thank you it seems with this film you kind of threw out the idea of scripting in the early stages and instead chose to do three and a half thousand storyboards to create the idea of the film kind of in a graphic novel style does this mean it heart you're just a really big comic book nerd I was always a comic book kid I mean when I grew up in the country in Queensland I never require listen comics you couldn't take them to school your parents thought you somehow something was wrong with you if you really comics rather than reading books and so I always loved comics and this movie itself the original idea was for it to be an extended chase and in many ways a silent movie with sound we're trying to tell as much story as possible purely with vision so the obvious way to approach it was to do storyboards and I worked with three storyboard artists and the King one and designer was Brendan McCarthy and he was a graphic novelist and a very very fine artist and we worked ultimately Nicola therus who's a dramaturgy an actor came it came along and we dug down deep into the subjects but essentially its first iteration was an extended storyboard which is the perfect way to get information across on an action movie because people can see see exactly what's happening at any moment and it's just a blueprint it's it's not the final thing okay so if you if you're painting a comic like spider-man you might not have any limitations were there any limitations when you're creating these from that kind of graphic novel style base when you have to put it onto film was there anything you couldn't do well we couldn't defy the laws of physics this is not a superhero moving there flying man no spaceships or anything like that so it basically told us how to make the movie we had to do we went old-school there were real vehicles and real people and real crashes in a real desert and that the essential image the first image that we captured was always real there was no CG there but everything else was a augmented by CG and then we were able to use the technology that we normally couldn't in the past and erase it in CG so it had elaborate rigs on actors and stunt people so when there were the vehicles were hurtling through the desert people could be kept safe that was Tom Hardy upside down between the big wheels of the big Waring you kind of mechanized mechanized the human characters in it and the machines have a life of their own how do you create a human story under such a thriller high-octane explosive it could have just been a bullets and guns and explosions film but it's clearly not what involved in the story helped to build that up well you try to create as much iceberg under the tip a coma for instance even though he appears only briefly throughout the movie I know who his mother was I know how he survived the apocalypse I know how a man who's blind and mute and really can only play the guitar how he actually survived and got to be where he was is the equivalent of the drummer the bugler the bagpipe player you know the music of war but it had to be upgraded to account for all the noise that happens with all the vehicles so that happen with everything and not only with you know like Max's mask which is a garden hoe or taking that guitar it's it's a hospital bed pan at the base of the basement every vehicle every every steering wheel was kind of in a sensor or most a religious artifact and we had to understand it's basically found objects repurposed the one thing I will say about a movie like this it's basically visual music so the vision has primacy you try to tell the story almost like a silent movie with sound and that's why we said about it and that's that's a point of difference in the movie the trick was to see whether or not that all that subtext could be read by the audience it's something that moves so fast from storyboard to cinema on the fury road george miller will appear at the sydney opera house on october 11