George Miller names “one of the most complete” movies he’s ever seen: “I know every shot”
The career of George Miller has evolved into quite the fascinating thing, with the filmmaker repeatedly reaffirming his credentials as a maverick auteur while hardly following the conventional path to achieving it.
Since debuting in spectacular style with the most profitable movie ever made at the time, the Mad Max architect has only directed 11 features since 1979. It’s the way he’s curated his filmography that makes him stand out, though, because it hasn’t exactly been the most straightforward trajectory.
Of those 11 films, four of them take place in the Mad Max universe, with Furiosa serving as the franchise’s first story independent of its iconic protagonist. Two of them are about animated penguins, and one of them was Babe: Pig in the City, with Miller deciding to helm the follow-up to the Academy Award-nominated family fable he wrote.
40,000 Years of Dreaming was a documentary that he also hosted, and the fascination with millennia carried through to Three Thousand Years of Longing, which remains the only live-action non-Mad Max flick he’s wielded the megaphone on in the last quarter of a century. The man does what he wants, and based on recent form, what he wants is to blow things up in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Having directed Mel Gibson to international superstardom, melted hearts with a talking pig, and overseen the adventures of anthropomorphised birds, it would be fair to say Miller’s tastes behind the camera have been eclectic. When he’s sitting in the audience, though, he hews much closer to the side of traditionalism.
Like many before and after him, the filmmaker was left enthralled by Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II, which dealt with the pressure of following up one of the greatest movies of all time by itself becoming one of the greatest movies of all time, a feat that’s exponentially more difficult to accomplish than it sounds, and it sounds very hard.
“When I saw that film, it felt like it was one of the most complete films I’ve seen,” Miller explained to Rotten Tomatoes, before digging into what makes it so “rich” and “sprawling.” In his estimation, The Godfather Part II doesn’t contain so much as a millisecond of footage that doesn’t need to be there.
“Not one dissonant frame,” he marvelled. “That’s a film I’ve seen many times, simply because if it happens to be on somewhere, I just go back to it. So I know every shot, every frame.” Everyone has their go-to movie they can’t help but be drawn towards whenever they see it playing anywhere, and for Miller, Coppola’s masterpiece is that picture. It’s a hard one to argue with, even though encyclopaedic knowledge of The Godfather Part II‘s entire running time isn’t obligatory.
