Here's the clown that got temporarily verified as George Miller by Twitter a couple years ago (the original thread appears to have been deleted).
http://thestudioexec.com/i-am-not-george-miller/
Miller is giving an interview in LA today.
http://www.laloyolan.com/arts_and_enter ... =hootsuite
Apparently Babe 2: Pig In the City will be screened on Feb. 8 in L.A. as well. No word on whether Miller will be present at the screening or not, but since he's in L.A. right now, he might.
https://twitter.com/DrewAtHitFix/status ... 4175863808
Speaking of Miller, he seems to be spending a lot of time in L.A. of late and I'm wondering if it's the awards stuff or if he's in negotiations with WB for his next movie.
FURY ROAD's Oscar chances? 10 OSCAR NOMINATIONS!!
Re: FURY ROAD's Oscar chances? 10 OSCAR NOMINATIONS!!
Correction. NOT Babe: Pig In The City. On Feb 8, the Aero Theater in Santa Monica will be playing both Mad Max 2 AND Fury Road. George Miller will be in attendance and Drew McWeeny will once again be moderating. Now THAT would be awesome to attend.
https://twitter.com/DrewAtHitFix/status ... 6766879744
Interview with VFX Supervisor Andrew Jackson.
https://twitter.com/DrewAtHitFix/status ... 6766879744
Interview with VFX Supervisor Andrew Jackson.
http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononho ... x-20160120How They Made the Oscar-Nominated 'Mad Max: Fury Road' VFX
By Bill Desowitz | Thompson on Hollywood
January 20, 2016 at 10:33AM
The VFX Oscar nom for "Mad Max: Fury Road" is a testament to the continuing power of George Miller's post-apocalyptic storytelling, only more polished and immersive. It's essentially one long desert chase in the War Rig, with 75 vehicles, captured mostly in camera, utilizing the invaluable Edge camera rig.
But VFX touched everything, from the spectacular stunts, to the Citadel extension and crowd work, to the CG Toxic Storm, to the removal of Charlize Theron's arm, to the stylized look of the DI.
"When I first talked to George about the film, he was very clear about wanting the randomness of the real world to play out," recalled Andrew Jackson ("300"), the production VFX supervisor based in Sydney, Australia. "That's exactly what I like to do because my background is in special effects and model making. And my first thought is always how much of it can we shoot in live-action. So it was wonderful working with George right from the start because we're both fans of that idea."
Naturally, there was a lot of hand-held action shot inside the War Rig (courtesy of Oscar-nominated cinematographer John Seale). But the vehicle with the Edge crane was so effective that they used it for both static and moving shots.
It all comes together in the scene where Furiosa (Theron) bears down on a flame throwing VW, chased by gang members who have emerged from a burning fuel truck on the end of 20-foot pendulum poles attached to moving vehicles.
"One of my jobs on set was always to remind people to keep everything moving because as soon as the vehicle stops, everything dies," Jackson explained. So it was important for the vehicle that the camera is mounted on to be rocked by the grips. And in post that was one of the big lessons. Whenever one of the vehicles and the cameras weren't moving, they were some of the hardest visual effects shots to make convincing."
One of the most important decisions, however, was the creation of a postvis department, which provided basic tracking and roto and helped define the edit. "You have a watchable version of the film early on and can help it be much tighter before you turn it over to visual effects," Jackson continued. "Because of the style of this film, a lot of the shots are less than one second long, so it's really good to know what they are. You don't want to be adding 12-frame handles to a 10-frame shot."
The most prominent use of CG was the otherworldly looking Toxic Storm (a particle sim done in Houdini), created by Australian-based Iloura."It took a lot of work to make that look convincing and we referenced the biggest tornadoes that we could find that split up into multiple twisters," Jackson said. "But it's unlike any storm you've ever seen. We never did specify what the gasses were but whatever it was made of, this was not a good place to be."
The three-tower Citadel provided Iloura with another VFX task."We shot all of the action on the ground near the base of the towers in Sydney, but the rock walls themselves were a CG environment," Jackson suggested. "We built them from a ridge just west of Sydney called The Blue Mountain. And there are huge cliffs there about 600 feet tall. We went out in a helicopter and flew very close and photographed high-resolution textures, and then using photogrammetry software we built 3D sections from those cliffs and then wrapped them into the shapes of the towers."
Finally, the postvis team did a major section in a canyon where the War Rig pulls off. "A lot of the extension work in that part of the film we called Fury Effects in the end," Jackson revealed. "Although we went to an amazing canyon location, we still had to do a lot of work and there are a couple of shots where they blow up the side of the wall and dropped a lot of rocks to block the passage."
Re: FURY ROAD's Oscar chances? 10 OSCAR NOMINATIONS!!
Margaret Sixel won the ACE Eddie award for Best Edited Drama Feature. This puts her as the favorite to win the Oscar. Next up is the Director's Guild award ceremony on Feb 6.
Re: FURY ROAD's Oscar chances? 10 OSCAR NOMINATIONS!!
"The three-tower Citadel"
I count 4 towers….
I count 4 towers….
Re: FURY ROAD's Oscar chances? 10 OSCAR NOMINATIONS!!
Colin Gibson won the Art Directors Guild award in the fantasy feature category.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/behind ... max-860931
Guy Norris interview. He and the stunt crew just won the SAG award for Best Stunt Ensemble and he'll also be attending the Oscars too.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/behind ... max-860931
Guy Norris interview. He and the stunt crew just won the SAG award for Best Stunt Ensemble and he'll also be attending the Oscars too.
http://if.com.au/2016/02/01/article/Fur ... IHPCD.htmlFury Road stunt coordinator Guy Norris on SAG win and Furiosa sequels
[Mon 01/02/2016 3:59 PM]
By Harry Windsor
Fury Road's action unit director and stunt coordinator Guy Norris is riding high.
His team, tallying over 150 performers, took out the SAG Stunt Awards in Los Angeles yesterday, a result which should have suprised precisely no-one.
Norris is currently in Wellington, prepping Paramount/Dreamworks' Ghost in the Shell, which begins filming in less than two weeks.
Norris was told of his win by his son, who saw it on social media. The award is a nice capper to a career that began with Mad Max 2 in 1981.
Norris was 21 at the time, and already a stunt veteran.
"I started doing stunt work in Evel Knievel-like live shows when I was 18", he said.
"I did that with an older stuntman called Frank Lennon. He was one of the last stuntmen going around doing thrill shows. You'd crash cars, you'd run around on fire, you'd jump motorcycles".
"Over the course of those shows I met Max Aspin, and he became the stunt coordinator for The Road Warrior. George Miller wanted to pick the stunt-team, and so a few of us went in and interviewed for the job with George. I had a bunch of press clippings of old thrill shows around the country. And that was the start of the relationship".
"I ended up doing Mel's driving and doubled Wez (Vernon Wells). It was a great start for me, and became a fantastic career, all because of that film. Then 33 years later, George and I were standing in the Namibian desert doing Fury Road. For him to get such accolades now is fantastic".
Norris describes the difference between those shoots as akin to that between an ant and an elephant.
"If you look at The Road Warrior now, the credits go for about fifteen seconds (laughs). These days it's just a completely different scale of filmmaking. Even though at the time Mad Max 2 was one of the biggest budgeted films in Australia. $4 million or something. But Fury Road had over 2,000 people working on it".
According to Norris, the nature of stuntwork has changed utterly as well.
"When we were doing The Road Warrior, we were just adapting things we'd done in live shows. It was all about what you were game enough to do and how that fit into the sequence you were doing. Over the course of thirty years it's become much more scientific and planned".
"It wasn't until Babe: Pig in the City with George that I was on a show from the very beginning to the very end as a stunt coordinator. Before that, you were just brought on and off. You'd do a stunt, then leave. Now you're one of the department heads".
The practical effects showcased in Fury Road have endeared it to critics, but Norris is quick to point out how much the advent of CGI has made his life easier.
"We did over 300 stunts on Fury Road. We still had to do them all physically, but the great thing about Andrew Jackson and his VFX team was that we didn't have to be as concerned about safety cables as we used to be. They could remove all of those for us, so we had so much more freedom running and leaping from vehicle to vehicle. Of course nobody wanted to fall, but if you overstepped you're on a safety line and you'd be pulled up before you hit the ground".
VFX maestro Jackson has since been recruited by Christopher Nolan for his upcoming WW2 epic Dunkirk.
"There are simple things, too", continues Norris. "You can remove all the rubber tracks on the tarmac from previous takes, which I always pick up in almost all films. Fury Road for me was so successful because it was a great combination of physical stuntwork, physical effects and visual effects. Everybody really hit it".
The stunt veteran is effusive in his praise for his director, and hopes to saddle up alongside him soon.
"George has honed his skills to a very high level. He's a much more rounded, polished filmmaker, and he's still got a couple of fantastic stories to tell in the Mad Max world. During the course of Fury Road he was writing backstories and he has written a terrific Furiosa origin story. It's a fantastic script that deserves to be made. I think everyone has their fingers crossed".
Norris will be attending the Oscars alongside his crewmates, and is gratified by the film's reception.
"The Road Warrior had an effect on everybody when it was released. I think Fury Road has had the same effect. I've had some very nice calls and emails from studio heads, but the most satisfying thing for me is when you walk onto a set and the grip or camera operator comes up and says: good work. Because they see everything".
"It's the comments from people who go out every single day making films. They know what it was like to be doing this in the desert for nine months. That makes me feel good".
Re: FURY ROAD's Oscar chances? 10 OSCAR NOMINATIONS!!
I thought Norris had retired? Didn't he say on the Fury Road extras that Fury Road was his swansong and he was retiring after, with the truck roll being his final stunt? It mentions he's prepping Ghost in the Shell.
Unless he meant he will carry on as a stunt coordinator, just not doing any stunts himself.
Unless he meant he will carry on as a stunt coordinator, just not doing any stunts himself.
Re: FURY ROAD's Oscar chances? 10 OSCAR NOMINATIONS!!
Miller will be president of the Cannes Film Festival jury this year.
https://fr.news.yahoo.com/george-miller ... 00868.html
https://fr.news.yahoo.com/george-miller ... 00868.html
- Immortan Joecutter
- Posts: 374
- Joined: Mon Apr 27, 2015 10:45 am
Re: FURY ROAD's Oscar chances? 10 OSCAR NOMINATIONS!!
Cool.biolumen wrote:Miller will be president of the Cannes Film Festival jury this year.
Re: FURY ROAD's Oscar chances? 10 OSCAR NOMINATIONS!!
http://www.vulture.com/2016/02/george-m ... rview.htmlMad Max: Fury Road Director George Miller on His Unlikely Oscar Contender and Even Unlikelier Career
By Adam Sternbergh
At age 70, George Miller accomplished something extremely improbable: He revived a 30-year-old action franchise with a new installment that is far and away the best one yet and, by the way, won the AFI award for Movie of the Year and earned ten Oscar nominations, including Best Director and Best Picture. Oddly, Mad Max: Fury Road isn’t his most unlikely Oscar-nominated film: That might be Babe, up for Best Picture in 1996, which Miller co-wrote. (And he won an Oscar for Best Animated Film in 2007 for Happy Feet.) We spoke to Miller about his debt to silent films, his mid-career detour from postapocalyptic wastelands to dancing animated penguins, and where exactly the Doof Warrior gets the electricity to power his flame-spouting double-neck-guitar solos.
I’m sure it’s quite a busy time of year for you with all the awards attention.
Yeah. The last time I was invited to these things, I don’t remember there being … so much of it. It seems to be getting bigger all the time, with so many events and so many different awards. But it’s really good fun, so long as you don’t inhale, as they say.
Fury Road is not necessarily the kind of film people think of when they think Oscar movie. Were you surprised to get ten nominations?
Oh, yes. I was definitely surprised. It’s an atypical film, and it came out in the first half of last year, so the fact that it’s still around and people are still engaged with it is very gratifying, honestly. The critical response was extraordinary, and what particularly I enjoyed was realizing how people dug deep into the film.
It’s not as if this is your first atypical film to get Oscar attention. Babe [which Miller co-wrote] was a Best Picture nominee — and you might say a talking-pig movie is even a longer shot of getting an Oscar nomination than a film like Mad Max.
It didn’t occur to me, but yes — there’s a certain déjà vu about the whole experience, but in a different way.
There’s always been a divide between so-called genre films and films that people take Seriously with a capital S and people are inclined to give awards to. Do you feel like those boundaries are starting to break down a little bit?
I’d like to think so. I think that virtually every film is a genre film. What you try achieve in work, I guess, is something that is uniquely familiar. In one way or another, a film builds on what’s come before. I mean, all cultural evolution is based on that.
Do you have a different approach toward awards and recognition at this stage in your career than you had at the beginning?
When I first started, I thought awards were … I was very careful to not take awards too seriously. Because I thought, if you’ve done the work and it meant something to people, that’s the big thing. So I was a little bit — what’s the word — skeptical of awards, and particularly of my own response to them. And then Jack Nicholson — who for me is a great sage — said to me, "Don’t ever make the mistake of not celebrating success, or good work, because it doesn’t come along very often." As time went on, I started to see things a little bit more accurately. Which means being very, very grateful to be invited to the party, and to enjoy it for that very reason — that it doesn’t come along very often. And the great thing about these awards is that you get to actually engage with other filmmakers. There’s a kind of collegial presence going on. For instance, I was at the American Film Institute and I had a lovely lunch and I saw Vince Gilligan. I went over and had a chat and we ended up talking for a long time, and it was just … it’s one of the great benefits of being at these events.
Speaking of Vince Gilligan, what kinds of TV shows are you drawn to watch?
I don’t get to watch as many movies as I would like, and of course I don’t get to watch as much TV. I usually wait, like all of us, for recommendations from people whose opinions I really listen to. So when I watched Breaking Bad, the first thing to say about it is, this is made by people who are very, very comprehensive in their skills, and being highly influenced by cinema and particularly the history of cinema. In terms of the rest of the shows that I’m watching, I’m one of those people who spends so much time in a kind of fictional imagination that I tend to watch documentaries way more than I do anything else.
There’s obviously a moment right now where people are celebrating TV and suggesting that it’s reached a new artistic peak. Do you feel like there’s a rivalry between cinema and TV?
It’s all storytelling one way or another. I did quite a bit of television, making mini-series, back in the '80s in Australia. It was a great thing to do because as a director I got to work with a lot of other directors, producers, and actors. The great thing about television is it has to be done quickly. You have to work fast.
One of the appeals of Fury Road is that it’s so fundamentally cinematic. You can get a lot out of watching a TV show, but you’re rarely going to drop your jaw and say, “Whoa, did I just see what I think I saw?” — which is what you think roughly every five minutes watching this movie.
Well, it’s a film we decided to do in a certain way, with very little dialogue. Its basic antecedents are in silent cinema, which is something I became very interested in when I started making movies. The real [visual] language was defined during the silent cinema, which brought all the action and chase movies, the real Westerns, and particularly Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. So one of the things that drew me to Fury Road was to be able to go back into that area, and see what we can do now with all the tools that are available. That was the plan — to make it cinematic in that way.
On paper this movie would seem unpromising, in the sense that people have become jaded about sequels and reboots. But you were able to revisit this world 30 years later in a way that seemed both familiar but totally new. Did you have any sort of aesthetic or philosophical approach? Like, If I’m going to revisit this world, these are the rules I’m going to give myself?
I guess some of that was unconscious, because I definitely wasn’t interested in making another Mad Max movie. But there was some strong gravitational pull to this story, and to the exercise of this film, which was to see whether we could take one continuous chase and see how much the audience could apprehend, moment to moment, about the characters, their relationships, and the world they were invited into. And I also wanted to see if I’d learned anything about making films in the interim.
Did the studio ever say, “George, you have to have a scene where someone explains how this world works”? It seems like you were able to break so many of the current accepted rules of Hollywood storytelling.
The film was storyboarded; it wasn’t just on the written page. In a screenplay, a lot relies on the imagination of the reader, but we had storyboards, and a huge amount of concept drawings, and a so-called “bible” explaining all the detail of the world. And I think it helped that people knew I had already made Mad Max movies in the past — I guess the studio thought, Well, he must know what he’s doing by now.
Do you think there’s a pressure on modern filmmakers to be too explicit, to overexplicate things, because they’re worried people will get lost?
I guess there is. Exposition is one of the most difficult things to do because it’s not dramatic, and it’s not instinct, and often we don’t listen to it anyway. But I always think that if you walk into a new culture, or you go to a new country that you don’t know a lot about, you see behaviors, gestures, and an aesthetic that you might not understand, and yet you accept it and believe that these things have meaning. If a character sprays his mouth with gold paint — as long as the audience believes the character knows why he’s doing that, and it’s consistent within the logic of the world you’ve set up, then the audiences accepts it. You don’t need a footnote to describe exactly what it means. We just had to have everybody working on the film working with the same internal logic, otherwise there’s a risk of getting very messy. So everything had to work to the same internal logic. The people designing the double-necked guitar, for example, had to be sure it was all made of found objects, repurposed. And you had to know these are objects that would last 50 years after some apocalyptic event. So the vehicles themselves had to be old-school — they couldn’t be full of modern computer technology with microprocessors and air bags and all that.
The production design of the first three Mad Max movies was so influential — in a way, it became the visual template for how people would portray a certain kind of postapocalyptic landscape.
It was very important to me that there’s a strong aesthetic. Otherwise postapocalyptic films can be very visually noisy and junkyard-y. There’s a tendency to make it look like a junkyard and chaotic, whereas I think the opposite would be true: Given enough time, people, no matter how impoverished, will still have an eye for beauty. So a steering wheel can still be lovingly made. It becomes almost a religious artifact.
How did you feel seeing your basic visual style replicated over and over again? Did you ever look at these imitations and think, No, no, no you’re not getting what’s essentially important about this. It’s not just about people with mohawks and dune buggies. There’s more to it.
I certainly wasn’t frustrated about it. I certainly wouldn’t say, "Oh no, you’re doing it all wrong." I remember thinking, Okay, these [Mad Max] films have had some sort of resonance. That was my main feeling. But by the time we got to do Fury Road, I just wanted to make sure that we avoided what had become cliché.
For example?
The most obvious one is desaturated color. [The typical look] became all very desaturated, moody color, and as I said, that tends to look like a junkyard. That’s why we went for the saturated color. That was probably the biggest reaction to all that had happened in the last 30 years. And we worked very hard to create something authentic to all the ground rules in the world that we were creating. We have to do that as much as possible without working it too hard and overcooking it. That’s also a danger as well. To get that balance right was really tricky.
Another thing people responded very positively to in Fury Road was the fact that it had a strong lead female character. In terms of the way women are portrayed in the film, a lot of people saw it as a kind of corrective to a tradition in action films that’s very male-centric. Was that your intention?
Not consciously so. I mean, in the second Mad Max there was a character called the Warrior Woman. She appears in the movie relatively briefly, and she dies in the final battle. And I always wondered about a character like that. How does a female survive in a much more elemental world? It’s not just by aping a man. She had to be an authentic road warrior. Charlize really picked up on that early. She thought, Okay, what would I do to survive in a wasteland? One of the first things she did was she shaved her head. Then she had to have skill in driving, and with weapons, and she had to be strong, and so on. It all just arose out of the work. As it turned out, it felt like a corrective. But everything rose organically out of the story.
Given the way that your career started with the first Mad Max film, and the success of those movies, it seems like it would have been easy for you to get pigeonholed as a certain kind of storyteller. Yet you’ve had a very varied career and made all sorts of different kinds of movies, including Babe and Happy Feet. Were you conscious early in your career of not wanting to become known as one certain kind of director?
Not really at all. In fact, when I made the first Mad Max, I never even thought of a film career. I still don’t much. I’ve always intended to go back and practice medicine. But I was just attracted to the next story. It only occurred to me fairly recently that the films that they call family films — Babe and Happy Feet — came about because once you have kids, you don’t get out much anymore. You’re watching kids’ movies, which I was always drawn to. I remember my own experiences watching Disney movies like Pinocchio, and I watched them all again with my kids, and suddenly I was alert to those sorts of stories. And now my kids are grown up, and I can go to more adult subjects. So it was never a matter of, Okay, what’s the next move. It was just, What’s the next story that’s going to drag me in?
I have to ask about the character of the Doof Warrior, the guy with the flame-throwing guitar, who became, for a lot of people, an image that symbolizes a certain spirit in the movie of being delightfully outrageous and over-the-top. I’m wondering if there were any ideas or visual images that you had to throw out because you thought, That’s just too much. It’s too over-the-top.
Yes, but I can’t remember them — there were two or three images that I would have liked to have had the time to do. Always, in making a movie, at a certain point you realize, If I shoot this, there’s a reasonable chance that it won’t end up in the movie. You get to that point, so you have to make that decision. There was definitely some concept work that we did that was great to look at on the page, but it just defied physics in some way, or you couldn’t really figure out how it got from present day through all the apocalyptic events into a world 50 years hence. For example, initially, some of the early drawings of the Citadel were much more elaborate. It felt much more populated, much more epic, and it just felt like it was there because of our imaginations rather than because you could believe that it could be built. So we had to tone that down. The Doof Warrior, I always thought we could get away with him because he was just part of the Immortan’s pageantry. And there’s definitely a logic to him. There’s always been the music of war, whether it’s the bugler, the drummer, or the bagpipe player. The Doof Warrior is just the wasteland version of that.
That raises the question: Where does the electricity for the Doof’s amplified guitar coming from? I guess it’s from the car battery?
Well, obviously it comes from a car battery. They would have a big bank of batteries.