With Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga out this month, we asked director George Miller to pick one favorite shot from each of his movies, as well as one from any other film (he couldn't resist and picked two there!). The man behind not just Mad Max but also Babe, Happy Feet, and more breaks down each shot for us with some fascinating behind-the-scenes details on how they were achieved.
This was fun!
Mad Max (1979)
"The first Mad Max, I think there's shots where the camera is mounted low on the road and it's moving, and you see a lot of road blur. There were some lenses ... which were dumped in Australia because Sam Peckinpah had shot The Getaway with Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw, and he'd shot with these non-spherical anamorphic lenses. But basically the whole package, there are only two lenses that work, the 35mm lens and the 75mm lens. The hiring house said you could almost have them for nothing because no one is ever going to use them.
"We ended up shooting most of Mad Max I on the 35mm lens. And because I realized that in that film, unlike something like that chase in French Connection, which was shot on that highline underneath where the city was blurring past all the time, which gave a sense of speed, the only thing we had was the road blur. So the camera had to be really low on the ground on a wide-angle lens. The camera always had to be moving. So those shots ultimately were at the heart of the kinetics of that film. Again, that was not inadvertent, but it was certainly what gave its special flavor."
Babe (1995)
"This is going to sound strange. The shots that really stuck in my mind on Babe were the chapter headings.
"There was a test screening in Seattle, and the test screening was in the afternoon, and there were mothers and fathers, and in many cases, little kids. The thing I noticed immediately in the test screening is the moment a caption came up, the mothers or fathers would turn and read the caption to the little kids. We had the little mice, the three little mice at the bottom of frame, saying, 'Pork is very sweet meat' in their little mouse voices. That, to me, those captions were really what glued the film together and made it much more cohesive. That was a big moment in the life of that film. The captions owned up, leant into the problem of [the film] being episodic and basically made a virtue of it. Those captions were probably very, very key, particularly that one, 'Pork is a very sweet meat.'"
Happy Feet (2006)
"There were shots in Happy Feet that I'd like to talk about. There was one where you see the little penguin dancing by himself when he's little. I didn't know how to make the film, and then a wonderful cinematographer, Andrew Lesnie, who shot the Babe movies, went and shot Lord of the Rings, and ... showed me the first motion capture of Gollum. I'd never heard of motion capture before, but the moment he showed it to me, I said, 'Ah, that's how we can tell Happy Feet.'
"Not only were we able to get great tap dancers, but we were able to get the greatest living tap dancer, Savion Glover, who basically inherited that tradition of tap dancing from all the great African-American tap dancers, from Sammy Davis Jr., but from all those that go back earlier. We were able to motion capture Savion Glover. That little penguin dancing was a big moment, a big moment for me."
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
"Well, it's not character based, but the first one that comes to mind, I still enjoy seeing it, is that shot where they finally get on the road to chase Furiosa and Max's part of it. Then we push past these guys on the back of the Doof Wagon and the guys drumming. We come right around the front to see the speakers and the Doof Warrior with his guitar, and at the right moment, he fires off this big plume of flames, and we see all the vehicles at the back, and there's a great army that's giving chase to the War Rig. I still enjoy seeing that shot."
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)
"Well, there's one shot in Furiosa, the stowaway sequence, where she's stowing away on the newly built War Rig. The opening shot, which pulls back on a roadway, and then you see someone's painted the Immortan's logo on the road and you see the black horns of the Octoboss somehow claiming the territory of the Immortan, and then the horizon having almost a Lawrence of Arabia heat haze. And something's way off in that mirage, and then the bike ... turns 180 degrees and rides off, and we're left with the image coming forward. That had all those references to Lawrence of Arabia and the beginning [of Furiosa], leading up to the sequence where she has to have a crash course into being basically a road warrior."
The Godfather (1972)
"There are two shots I've got from other films. One scene I can't forget in terms of its function in the story, and it's from one of my top three favorite films of all time, Godfather. There's that shot where Michael Corleone goes to the place where his father comes from. He meets the girl. There's a shot, and I'm sure you remember it, where he's walking along some sort of track. The camera stays back and you see them walking off and they're talking, and then they're followed by the chaperones, which I think are three or four women, all women, all chatting amongst themselves, and they're walking along. Before the shot ends, there's two guys with shotguns.
"That shot is perfect storytelling in one shot. It tells you everything about the culture, everything about that specific people in that story."
The Fabelmans (2022)
"The other favorite shot of all the cinema that I've seen in recent years [is] the one that I keep going back to with a great deal of joy and it makes me smile every time, and it's just a shot that exists by itself. At the end of The Fabelmans, that very last shot, where having spoken to John Ford, the young Steven Spielberg, he talks about the horizons. And he's got that last shot, which he just, very abruptly at the end, there's a little comment. It's just a wonderful, wonderful shot."
For more directors picking some favorite shots from their movies, check out Ridley Scott and David Leitch's picks!
