George Miller explains how silent cinema inspired ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’
There’s no doubt that with the dawn of CGI, action filmmaking, in particular, has become a little lazy, especially with franchises like Marvel and DC pumping their movies with as much digitally created content as possible. Yet, in 2015, director George Miller returned to the silver screen to deliver an action masterpiece straight from the shiny gates of Valhalla, delivering Mad Max: Fury Road to the masses, a frenetic and eccentric ode to practical effects.
Set in a post-apocalyptic future where people fight for survival in a land dominated by thugs, warlords and petrolheads, Mad Max: Fury Road was the fourth instalment in Miller’s self-made franchise and the first since 1985. Replacing Mel Gibson in the starring role with Tom Hardy, the British actor was joined by an eclectic supporting cast that included Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and Zoë Kravitz.
The result was a mystifying action movie phenomenon that hit like a syringe of adrenaline into modern Hollywood, forcing others to up their game, with Miller filling Fury Road with so much personality that it overflowed with life, from the eccentric villain Immortan Joe, who was hooked up to a nondescript gas canister, to The Coma-Doof Warrior, the official name for the blind guitar-wielding master of ceremonies.
Yet, despite the manic pace of Fury Road, Miller looked to silent cinema to inspire the movie and his entire filmmaking ethos, for that matter.
“Kevin Brownlow’s book The Parade’s Gone By wielded a big influence on me when I first started asking myself what film is,” the Australian director started, “He said this new language, this new syntax, is basically defined pre-sound by the silent filmmakers, the closeup, the chase, the montage, cutting it together. The masters Buster Keaton and the Russians put pieces of film and fitted them together, all pre-sound”.
Continuing, he explained: “These were really the prime movers of the first Mad Max. I wanted to make a movie, as Hitchcock said, ‘where you didn’t have to read the subtitles in Japan.’ You could read it as a silent movie and still get most of what you needed in terms of the story. I really took that seriously. I remember living near a drive-in in Melbourne on top of a hill; I’d drive past it outside and watch the movie purely silently. I got into the habit of turning off the sound on my favorite movies if they come up on television, and realized how the film had to read first as a silent movie before the advantage of information came to you sonically”.
This certainly makes sense, considering the monochrome ‘Black and Chrome Edition’ of the film that was later released on Blu-Ray for fans to enjoy, with Miller having wanted to release Fury Road in black and white before its wide release, only for the studio to block the request. Considering that silent cinema breathed in black and white, this desire to shoot in monochrome goes back to Miller’s love for Keaton and Chaplin.
Finalising his thoughts, Miller concluded: “We did the same thing did with Fury Road. We insisted on not putting the temp music and sound effects in as we watched the movie. Margaret was with me on this: If it plays as a silent movie, if you can read it and it’s clear and smooth and creamy, you know it will play with sound and the music”.
