In Focus
November 2006
This article reprinted by permission of the
National Association of Theatre Owners, © 2006.
Penguin Pop
The filmmaker behind the 'Mad Max' and 'Babe' franchises turns his attention to musical fowl
by Mike Russell
Miller says he first started thinking about the wastelands of Antarctica while he was playing in the wastelands inhabited by leather-clad apocalypse survivor Max Rockatansky.
“Back when I was directing ‘The Road Warrior’ — over 20 years ago, now — I was in the Australian desert,” Miller recalls. “And there was this grizzled old cameraman called Billy Grimmond who was on second unit. We were sitting in this bar, having a milkshake, and he looked across at me and said, ‘Antarctica.’
“He’d shot a documentary there. He said, ‘You’ve got to make a film in Antarctica. It’s just like out here, in the wasteland. It’s spectacular.’ And that always stuck in my head.”
In fact, 1998’s “Babe: Pig in the City” was, until this year, Miller’s last foray behind the camera.
“One of the reasons this movie took so long is because we spent almost two years developing the [computer-animation data] pipeline,” Miller said. “And then we spent three-and-a-half years working on the movie.” The film tells the story of a young Emperor penguin living in a massive community of birds who find their mates by singing their own individual pop songs.
“So we have Nicole Kidman singing a Prince song, ‘Kiss,’ and we have Hugh Jackman singing an Elvis song, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ — and each penguin finds their soul mate by blending their songs together,” Miller explains. “But one penguin, played by Elijah Wood, can’t sing. He goes to a remedial teacher, and she invites him to bring out his deepest feelings — and it comes out as tap-dancing. That doesn’t seem like a particularly great way to attract a mate, so that starts him on his way.”
In Focus caught up with Miller Sept. 15 as he was working on “Happy Feet’s” final mix. The director told us about penguin life, the logistical contortions of animation, pop song mashups, Prince, Australian pride, and, yes, what really happened with “Mad Max 4.” An edited transcript follows.
You told USA Today that “Happy Feet” “was a chance to look at how individuals in a community can’t survive without depending on one another.” Antarctica and the “Mad Max” wasteland are sort of similar environments, aren’t they? Do you see any parallels between the two? Am I being silly?
[laughs] I make that connection, but very, very few people do.
About 15 years ago, some great documentaries started to come out of there — particularly “Life in the Freezer.” I’d had no idea what extraordinary creatures penguins were — particularly the way they worked as a community.
Despite the headlines, humans are actually pretty remarkable in the way we’re able to work in communities. We do fray around the edges sometimes … And I think the Emperor penguin, in particular, provides an extraordinary analogy to that.
Yeah, that’s certainly of a piece with your other movies. Your “Mad Max” movies are all about communities that make their own rules.
And about how the individual relates to the community. I mean, “Happy Feet” is the story of an outsider who struggles with that. How do you maintain your individuality and still be part of a whole?
I knew, way back during the first “Babe,” that the story wouldn’t lend itself to flamboyant character animation — so we waited until the technology allowed us to make it with CGI. We learned from “Babe” not to push too far from what nature provided.
And I come from live action. So many CG films come from a spirit of cel animation; I’m approaching it from the other end. So we kind of took the hard road — and pushed photoreality to an extent I don’t think it’s been pushed to before in an animated film.
Don’t cartoons exaggerate characters and environments to make the extreme less threatening?
Yeah, I can see that. Though, to the penguins, the extreme is their wonderland. It’s a harsh environment, but for anyone who’s been there, it’s utterly beautiful. There’s a scene in the movie where the young penguins go to the ocean for the first time and dive in — and they swim to the Beach Boys’ “Let’s Do It Again.” To them, it’s Spring Break.
The movie starts out mirroring the natural history of penguins. The cooperation is huge. The female hatches the egg, and it’s passed on to the male, who bulks up and incubates it during the winter. She spends a whole six months of winter out at sea, fishing. He huddles with the other male penguins and their eggs that whole winter. If they didn’t, they’d perish as individuals.
When the sun returns, the female returns full of fish and milk, and the fathers hand over the chicks, like they’re on the night shift, and they fish. They take turns feeding the chicks…
Now, all that detail is not necessarily in the film. But we mirror it for the first part of “Happy Feet.” And then we meet our main character.
The things that are surprising me at this late stage are that I never thought it would be a musical and I never thought it would be so epic. A lot happens to that main character. It’s kind of “Lord of the Rings.”
The pop songs in the movie are eclectic — everything from a Spanish version of “My Way” to Chicago to Queen to Stevie Wonder to Grandmaster Flash to The Beatles to Prince.
It took a while to get the mixture of songs. I realized there are massive gaps in my pop-musical knowledge; I think I must have been asleep during whole eras of music. But I had lots of people around me who were encyclopedic in their knowledge of songs, so we ended up finding the right mix.
I don’t know if you know John Powell, our composer —
Sure. He did the “Bourne” films.
He did the “Bourne” films, the “Shrek” films, “Chicken Run”…. He calls himself a “musical slut.” We did everything in this from liturgical music to the Beach Boys — and he seems to be able to handle all of it.
That came out of nature, too. The Emperor penguins live in colonies of up to 20,000, and they all look the same — it’s almost impossible to tell a male from a female. So they identify themselves through individual songs. Somehow, they’re able to pick out their mates in the massive crowd.
Well … The truth is, I don’t know how it’s done. A lot of the dancing was choreographed to account for the shape of a penguin. We designed it that way. But on the motion-capture stage, I’m watching Savion Glover in his little spacesuit with the receptors on — and on the computer in front of me, I’m watching a penguin, live, dancing in Antarctica.
We interviewed Barry Sonnenfeld once, and he said getting good performances out of special-effects artists is like “trying to get actors out of guys who are really good in math.”
[laughs] Well, obviously we had great dancers and a wonderful choreographer. But I must say I don’t agree with Barry on that. We finished all our animation and were having a party last night, and I said to the animators, “Look, working with you is exactly like working with an actor. It’s just all in slow-motion.” [laughs]
So did that Beatles song cost like half the movie’s budget?
It cost a lot. [laughs] I don’t remember the exact figure — but when I was told, I thought, “Holy cow. Michael Jackson or whoever owns it is making a lot of money.”
I know you went through a little bit of a thing with Prince …
We wanted to use the song “Kiss” by Prince, but we wanted to change two words. We wanted to change the word “sign” into “song” and, because it was sung by Nicole Kidman, we wanted to change the word “girl” into “pearl.”
But Prince said, “No — I don’t want my songs changed.” So we showed him a fairly mature cut of the movie, and he kept watching scenes over and over — and almost as the last song was playing, he picked up his guitar and said, “I know what to do. I know what to do. Give me a week.”
I said, “What are you doing?” And he said, “Oh, you can change whatever you like. And I’m gonna write a song for it.” He got really carried away with the movie, which was great — he was one of our first audiences. He’s written a wonderful song for the end credits.
We spent three-and-a-half years working on the movie, and the tools we had at the end were significantly advanced over what we started with. I mean, the main character has 6 million feathers, and there’s all that landscape, and sometimes there’s a massive number of penguins in a scene — there’s a huge amount of surfacing and rendering and so on. We were pushing our computers to limits that weren’t even possible three years ago.
If these tools had been available to you in the ’90s, would you have gone completely digital on the “Babe” films?
That’s a good question. No. I don’t think so. The thing about “Happy Feet” is that you can’t shoot it the way we shot “Babe”: You can’t go to Antarctica, and you can’t get penguins to dance.
I reckon in another 10 years, we’ll get that level of photoreality where you could make a “Babe” film. That final threshold is how well we can create human actors; I don’t think we’re there yet, despite some very valiant efforts. It’s a mystery, the human face and the eyes.
You’ve talked elsewhere about your concern that Australia tends to export talent instead of stories. Is Peter Jackson’s renaissance in New Zealand lighting a fire under Aussies in any way?
It’s lit a fire under me. The cameraman I work with, Andrew Lesnie, shot the “Babe” films and shot earlier stuff for us in television, and he went off to do “Lord of the Rings.” A lot of crew were exchanged back and forth between “King Kong” and “Lord of the Rings” and this film … That sort of technological renaissance is definitely happening down here. We’ve got a lot of New Zealanders here.
But in terms of exporting our stories: That’s a big, big subject. I have a pretty jaundiced view about the ability of Australian culture to differentiate itself. We’ve had 10 years of conservative government that hasn’t decided to export Australian stories. The Australian culture itself … With the death of Steve Irwin, who was a genuine Australian, there aren’t many left. Except for the indigenous Australian stories, we don’t have a lot that distinguishes us from other cultures. So I think we have to move into fantasies.
We’ve got a lot of Australian actors doing voices in this film, and not many of them are doing Australian accents. Steve Irwin did a voice on this film [he plays Kev the leopard seal], and he used his Australian accent. But Hugo Weaving’s doing Scottish, Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman are doing American … But part of that’s because this story is meant to be about the whole world; there’s a whole range of nationalities, just as there’s a whole range of songs.
I’d love to ask you some questions about “Mad Max 4: Fury Road.” First of all: Is there going to be a “Mad Max 4”?
Well, there almost was. That’s why it took so long for me to make a film.
We would need probably about 10 weeks of shooting; we were in Namibia, Africa, and we were about to start shooting — and that’s when the war started. And at that point, the American dollar, against the currencies we were working with — the Australian dollar and the South African rand — crashed 20 percent, and we lost a lot of our budget. And besides, we couldn’t get insurance, and we couldn’t get our vehicles transported on the container ships.
“Mad Max 4” is so prepared, there seems to be a lot of momentum for it to get done. Right now, I’ve got another, smaller film to do, and then we’ll gear up and do “Mad Max” again. In what form and so on, I don’t know. But it hasn’t gotten stale in the meantime, and I’m very very keen to do it. It seems like there’s the appetite out there.
That’s about all I can say at the moment. I’m finishing “Happy Feet” and preparing to do the next script while we gear up for that. I think the short answer is: If we have fair weather, we should get there. But being two films away, I just hate to put down that anything will happen. But there’s a decent probability it will happen.
The “blood for oil” aspects of “The Road Warrior” have achieved a certain … potency in the past decade and change. Is the world catching up with your pessimistic vision?
I must say, it feels like it. There have been a number of documentaries that have referred to “Road Warrior” and the oil wars — apocalyptic visions and stuff. I’d rather see it up on a screen as a fantasy rather than the reality we’re seeing right now. It’s a little soul-destroying, isn’t it?
“The Road Warrior,” at least, ends in hope — not necessarily for that one individual, but for the community. That’s the only reason to keep going — the hope that things can improve. And then it’s a question about what we can do, individually, to make that happen.
Yeah. Yeah, they are.
This article reprinted by permission of the National Association of Theatre Owners, © 2006.
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