FURIOSA director George Miller explains how his epic action scenes are like music

George Miller he always produced incredible action in his Mad Max movie and, judging by what we’ve seen Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga So far, the action sequences will be some of the most epic yet!

During a recent interview with io9, Miller was asked what his philosophy was in creating these huge action scenes, and he went on to compare his action sequences to music.

Miller said: “Well, I think the best analogy is music. It’s a kind of visual music. What it has in common with music is that it is based on time and therefore rhythm. There’s a unfolding to it.

“So, in the same way, music, the more I understand it, has an almost mathematical structure. There must be a causal relationship between one note and the next, between one chord and another. Otherwise there is no progression or flow towards it.

“With cinema it’s exactly the same thing. There has to be a causal relationship between a piece of choreography, a take, and the next thing. So they make up, if you will, a whole passage, a complete sentence.

This makes a lot of sense and the way he creates these large scale action set pieces obviously works. He does something that many directors wouldn’t be able to pull off.

The director went on to talk about working with composers throughout his career and one in particular who stood out to him.

He said: “I’ve been lucky enough to deal with some really great composers and one of the things they’re doing is capturing a kind of cadence in performance, in verbal performance and in rhythm in the way they dance between what is being filmed and the camera.

“All of that has an inherent rhythm and there are certain rhythms that pick up very quickly in order to write the music.”

He went on to talk about working with John Willaims in the ’80s, saying, “A long time ago, in the ’80s, I made a film The Witches of Eastwick that John Williams scored. Back then it was celluloid on one plane. Now you can see all the music digitally… but he was just picking it up sitting there listening to it.

“And he said, ‘Oh, you know I see the beats and everything’ real quick. And now I realize that’s just it [composers] they are doing it all the time. So there’s definitely a rhythm that’s very, very important in how you put it together.”

As for one of the most crucial things about the action scenes he creates: “Above all, with action, I would say that the scenes are really driven by the story, which is driven by the characters and their desires and intentions and how they they come into conflict with each other and the conflict must be increasing.

“So an action scene is all about character. It’s another way the characters interact. And unless you have that, then it becomes sort of empty calories, watching all this movement and noise just to pass the time, rather than somehow attaching deeper meaning to it.

As any smart filmmaker knows… story drives everything! It seems that many directors these days lack this knowledge. But there’s a reason George Miller continues to make great, successful films.