George Miller on the destructive and healing powers of language and storytelling.
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Words and stories have always been profoundly important in George Millers films.
It feels, frankly, like a statement film.
But then again, theyre all statement films.
However, this also happens to be an unusually busy time for him.
You are currently in the midst of production onFuriosa, but youre also promotingThree Thousand Years of Longing.
As you notice, Steven always seems to have two films on the go.
And they say that one is a holiday from the other.
Its kind of a palate cleanser from one film.
Because your mind is suddenly on something else, you come back rather refreshed each time.
And it makes a lot of sense to me.
And you have yourself noted thatThree Thousand Years of Longingis, in your words, the antiFury Road.Yes.
This one happens over 3,000 years.
That film was outside, very few interiors.
This is virtually all set in interiors.
There are very few words spoken inFury Road.
This is a lot of words, and so on.
I dont make many films.
That applies to each individual, and I think that applies to us as audiences.
Were looking for something new.
Theres always a cultural evolution, and its moving very quickly.
Much more quickly than any of us can really grasp, in every way.
So there has to be something fresh in you.
This project actually originated in the late 1990s, when you first read A.S. Byatts story.
Do you ever think about how it might have been different if youd made it earlier?
The understanding was that we would make it when it was ready to make.
As you evolve the screenplay, it stays in your mind.
Its survival of the fittest.
Those projects that seem to have more resonance with you individually are the ones that tend to get made.
And this one wouldnt go away.
For instance, we intended to shoot in Turkey.
And as you may have noticed, theres some wonderful Turkish actors in the film.
We spent quite a bit of time in Istanbul.
We had all the locations, and all the permission, with really fine production people.
Then COVID came, and the film was delayed eight months, and we found that travel was impossible.
Nowadays, you’re able to go anywhere digitally, as it were.
We had to make Istanbul and London in Sydney.
There is a scene in the film where Gulten, the slave, looks over a fence.
And there, in the garden of Topkapi Palace, is Prince Mustafa, riding a horse.
That would have been much more expensive and difficult to do back in the early 2000s.
But beyond that, as I said, things are always changing.
The way we consume moving-image stories, it varies, with lots and lots more platforms.
We speed-read films now, so you have to be aware of it.
Weve seen so much more story in the 20 years since we acquired the rights of the film.
Tropes are more established, until they become more cliche, and so on.
Youre always trying to somehow take that into account.
There werent flying vehicles or flying humans, or laser guns, or whatever.
In fact, it was very grounded.
It was all stuff repurposed, and really old technology.
However, there was not one shot in that movie that wasnt CGI in one way or another.
We shot over months, but [the story] was compressed in time over three days.
Which meant the skies had to remain consistent, so every shot virtually had a changed sky.
If youre driving vehicles across the desert, youre doing take after take, youre doing track after track.
You had to erase all but the necessary tracks.
You were doing stunts with stuntmen, wild stunts, and actors.
All of those, you had to erase.
Youve had a number of difficult productions over the years including a couple of films that didnt get made.
I just didnt think I was cut out for it.
I found it a bewildering process.
All sorts of crazy things went wrong.
The weather was not right, so we lost three locations.
I remember talking to Peter Weir, whod already done two feature films.
He said, George, its always like that.
Its no different, every single film.
Youve got to think of it as if youre on patrol in Vietnam.
And you need that agility.
The moment he said that, it really resonated, and I went on to do other films.
Even today, the same thing applies.
Its like that for everybody.
I dont think it ever goes smoothly.
Fury Roadwas a completed screenplay.
We were about to shoot in 2001, just before 9/11.
And we didnt get to shoot it until over a decade later.
And theres a really striking example.
So those behavior patterns are consistent, I find, in humankind.
Because we all have the same neurological template with which we address the world.
Nick was a playwright, and hed written for television.
We always wanted to write together again.
I said to Nick, What do you think of this?
Would you like to write on it?
We were both in the middle of other things, and we made plans to do that.
But in the meantime, he developed a malignant melanoma, which ultimately took his life.
But he also happened to be Gussies godfather.
And he said to me, You know who should write this?
And it occurred to me that she has all the qualifications.
She went to the National Drama School, number one.
That was one thing.
And Gussie was also far more literate than me.
It was an opportunity for us to get to know the other parts of ourselves through work.
Also, knowing that it would take as long as it needed to.
So, wed both be doing other things and come back to it.
Theres something that Ive noticed in all your films.
When your characters speak, youre not afraid to have them talk in an almost poetic, mythical style.
It feels like something out of Melville or Shakespeare.
This is true even inFury Road, even though Max barely says a word.
In theMad Maxworld, everything that existed was made from found objects.
You cant use modern colloquialisms.
You had to avoid all that in the Mad Max world.
That was deliberate in the writing.
So it is with a film like this.
You have a discourse between a djinn, whos been around, who speaks several languages.
He learns languages very quickly.
And hes talking with somebody who is a scholar of stories across time.
So naturally, they would converse in that kind of language.
They both speak Aramaic, ancient Greek, he speaks Ottoman Turkish.
But it seems like something youre specifically drawn to.
EvenLorenzos Oilhas that very heightened, almost operatic quality of language.
We were very scrupulous about that.
It happened that the real events of that story tended to follow the template of the hero myth.
From two different cultures, they came together.
But for both the Odones, Michaela and Augusto, thats who they were in real life.
Some of its verbatim the way they spoke.
Youre the first to ever mention it.
They also have destructive power.
Ive often thought that stories should often come with that sign they put on radiation, Hazardous Material.
Stephen King points out that horror stories and horror movies are basically what he calls dress rehearsals for termination.
Theres something useful in that.
Its like a roller-coaster ride.
Or thats the hope.
But you at least get that experience.
Its one of the essential functions of stories.
We are hardwired for that, right through our evolution.
Go back to our fairy stories that we tell each other as children, in whatever culture.
They always have something that helps you process something that youre confronted with.
An ineffective, weak father and a hostile stepmother basically attempt to get rid of Hansel and Gretel.
I think thats the function of story.
Youve got to have a sense of that as a storyteller.
And you cant often tell what the story means to people.
No story should be a closed narrative, or tell you what to feel or what to think.
You take it from the experience of the story.
A.S. Byatt is not only an important literary figure, shes also a great scholar.
And shes a big champion for narrative.
Whats the best music, whats the best architecture?
She was asked to write on literature, and she wrote a piece called Narrate or Die.
Before television, or the internet, before wholesale literacy, people got their stories basically orally.
Those stories evolved and changed across those trade routes over many centuries.
They would say, Come back tomorrow night, and Ill tell you.
And thats how those stories evolve.
Its a little bit like when we binge-watch.
You have to watch the next.
Its the skill of the storyteller to keep the audience coming back.
And theres lots and lots of techniques.
[Byatt] pointed that out, and you see it.
And she said [theThousand and One Nightscontained] the first ironic jokes.
They were the first dirty jokes.
There was one about the worlds loudest fart.
Its quite an old-fashioned idea in some senses.
Did you ever worry about that?Thats who we are as human beings.
My background is Greek.
My mother was born in Izmir, just short of a century ago.
She passed away two years ago; she was lucky enough to see her hundredth year.
And she left there when she was 2.
They talked about a certain person, or a priest, who was so vivid in the collective memory.
I didnt go back to where my parents came from until I was well into adulthood.
But I was also lucky enough to grow up in remote Australia.
And I got to know a lot of the Indigenous cultures in the areas where I was.
And some of it is still existing.
They call it songlines, particularly desert Australians.
They had fashioned a story which explained it all, almost like a GPS map.
And not only that, it had pedagogic learning in it.
The time I spent there was with an old man, who told us the story through a translator.
One of his daughters was there with his grandchildren.
That process is continuous.
Its what we do to each other, one way or another.
Its how we engage and share meaning.
Hes the most wonderful raconteur.
And most of his stories are about patients or families he knew.
Its what we do, whoever we are.
Thats why Im here at my age, still trying to figure out what that process is.
Its a kind of a glue that we cant do without.
