''Mad Max, Fury Road', Cinematographer, John Seale

0:00John SealeFury Road being the first film that I worked on as a digital film. We had other problems. When I came on board, there was something like 24 cameras had been built. One of them was that, you know, 3D uses two lenses. It's a time-wasting process. Be… on set could take an hour. I got very frustrated that even though we had our story board camera up exactly where the storyboard required it, there were other cutaways the editor might like to have or might need. Prior to 3000 Years, I d… I did say to George, "I'm really sorry, but I've got an eye problem. I've got macular disintegration, so I'm gonna, you know, lose, my eyesight, eventually. Don't know when, but, eventually. And now I wanted as much time with my family, my wife, Australia, traveling, doing what we want to do when we want to do it."

1:08Jawad MirGood afternoon, everyone. Welcome back to yet another episode of Kingdom of Dreams podcast, The Making of Stories. I'm your host, Jawad Mir. I have today, yet again, cinematographer, legendary cinematographer, John Seale, who I've had the pleasure of having on this podcast countless times. He has been on to talk about Dead Poets Society, The English Patient, and many other films. Lorenzo's Oil. And today he's here to talk about his first digital film that he shot, Mad Max: Fury Road. John talked about some challenges, personal challenges, cinematic challenges, filming on location, and it was a wonderful conversation as always. I really enjoy talking to him and, picking his brain from all the knowledge that he has gained over his long, career. So without further ado, here's my conversation with cinematographer John Seale. Fury Road, which I had seen several years ago, I think 29… when it came out, maybe 2016, 2017. And then I just saw it this morning again. And I went to see, Furiosa, I think it came out last year, when I was in Miami.

2:14Jawad MirAnd, again, you know, just re… watching this after Furiosa and connecting the dots and obviously the visual element of it and everything, and y… your relationship with George. A wonderful film. And I wanted to ask, did you know or did George tell you that he's gonna make a prequel eventually or did that sort of come later on without having any conversations with you at early stage of Fury Road?

2:43John SealeYes, no, it did come up. I knew on Fury Road that George had a prequel and a sequel, of, Fury Road, which I was, I was interested in for a number of reasons. But, one of them being why would you shoot Fury Road before the before the prequel?

3:06Jawad MirYeah.

3:07John SealeA lot of people seem to do that. There were obviously reasons. I think Fury Road, was developed all y… you know... Well, I know it was in pre-production for 10 years prior to us shooting it. And actually got going and stopped because of, the Middle East war, I believe. Made it very difficult for them to con… or to think they could continue. And so in that 10 years, I'm sure that even prior to that, the script, was being developed because it was a very... Although interestingly, there was no script, at all. There was not a written script, which shatters a lot of people, that a film of that magnitude cannot have a script. But no, it didn't have a script. And when I arrived by virtue of the fact that the great Dean Semler was going to shoot it as he always had shot f… Max movies, Mad Max movies…

4:16John SealeBut I was asked to pick it up because Dean had to leave for, personal reasons. And I asked for a script and they went, "There isn't one." And I said, "Well, you know, can you give me, can you give me 10 minutes and tell me what the movie's about?" You know. And they... A… anyway, I went up to the Fury Road conference room and there was, I think it was 3,500 storyboard pics that had been carefully worked out over that 10 years by George, along with his storyboard artists. And they'd spent a lot of time, and they actually created and wrote the movie in storyboard pictures. So the way you went to look at how the film was laid out was by storyboards because there's virtually minimal dialogue in the film.

5:21Jawad MirYeah.

5:21John SealeSo it seemed to me to be... I didn't mind. I thought that's great, but I had a bit of trouble working out the storyline from the pictures because you do need to have a visual flow and I d… and you don't get that, so when you're looking at pictures. So I was still a little bit behind the eight ball, but I knew George from, Lorenzo's Oil and I knew, what I'd heard on the grapevine that it was all going, very well story-wise. And I really did feel it was going to be a very iconic movie. So when I got the phone call, much that I was anticipating maybe, and… Changing my lifestyle, i.e. Retirement out of film, but not life. I jumped at it. I mean, I loved working with George on Lorenzo's Oil.

6:22John SealeI knew it would be an iconic film. It was in the desert. It was out in the open. It was an action movie, and I knew that it would be... I had a... I knew it would be good, so I jumped at it.

6:38Jawad MirAnd it's… I'm glad that you talked about, you know, you were kind of retired and, you know, you went back and I'm pretty sure had it been some other film which something that you have similarly shot before, you probably would have turned it down. But because this was such one of those challenging films and iconic and every frame is like a painting, right? And, what's amazing to me is that, again, when I was watching it, you know, you'll see... Just to give an example, I mean, there's so many wonderful action sequences. You'll see this sequence, I don't know which one it was, but in the wide shot, you know, you have this person flying out of the car because it exploded, and it cuts to a sort of a, I would say maybe 85 millimeter, 100 millimeter, where you see Charlize Theron, Furiosa, in the truck, and this person literally just kind of goes right in front of the camera and falls down from that cut. So those little details that you see, it's, it was just mind-boggling because you can see that in any dramatic film, but in that kind of a large action scale, I mean, it didn't, it didn't have to be shown in that 85 to 100 millimeter or whatever that lens focal length was, but it was, and I appreciated that very much.

7:57John SealeThe thing is that over the years a lot of films have been storyboarded. Basically they were always a guide, to the film, but it didn't… it depended on how gospel they were, when you actually got on the set with actors and the actual situation. So when I was in the pre-production for Fury Road, I ha… I said to George, "How gospel are the storyboards?" And he said, "Very." w… with a reserve, but very gospel. So I knew that the work that had gone into those storyboards we were to follow pretty closely, which we did. In the shooting I was well into multiple cameras, for a… any action films, dialogue films, any film at all I was going to put in multiple cameras. I just think that they work very well, and your challenge to lighting for those multiple cameras is the challenge that I was ready to accept.

9:06John SealeSo I found it a little difficult to go into, a one-camera film. And we had the cameras there. We had the crew and the cameras to do three and four cameras, because it was an action film pretty well all the way through. So it was very difficult to suddenly say, "Oh no, we're only gonna use one camera."

9:31Jawad MirYeah.

9:32John SealeAnd be, and follow the storyboards very closely. We did... It went for about six weeks of the shoot. It was a very long shoot, so the first six weeks, I got very frustrated because I felt that even though we had our storyboard camera up exactly where the storyboard required it, there were other cutaways that I felt the editor might like to have or might need, which is always the case in a lot of, fast-cutting action movies.

10:15Jawad MirSure.

10:15John SealeAnd the more m… more material you've got the b… is the better. But every time we got out of the car on the location I'd say to George, "I'll set those other cameras up today, George. See if we can get some nice stuff." "Oh, I don't think we need them, you know. We'll be, we'll be using our main camera." And, "Oh, okay." But after six weeks I got, I got very angst about it bec… I just felt we were losing the opportunity for a lot of coverage.

10:48John SealeSo I, when I got out of the car I think my tone must have changed a little…... And I must have said, "George, I'm setting the cameras up today." And, he looked at me and he said, "Well, okay, Johnny, if you think that, we can get something there." "Oh, yep. Yep." And away we went. Well, I think George enjoyed it like most directors when they see, three and four cameras pop up on their monitors. And they can see, I felt the angle changes were broad enough to satisfy, I hoped, an editor, like Margie. That they weren't similar shots, which is a waste of time and money. That they're always a good, a good cutaway, material, piece of material. So I worked hard on that and got it going, and there were some funny moments with the multiple cameras.

11:50John SealeBut, George came round to it in the end. It, was like osmosis. It quietly worked on him and he could look across and see, you know, a nice little shot of the girls there, one of the girls there reacting to what was going on. And I felt that we worked hard to get good material. And he was very lovely, at the end when he, when he said to a big group of cinematographers as guest speaker about the film that, it was lovely that second unit and first unit did put in multiple cameras. They never had to do a pickup shot, in post. Did not have to shoot. They always found what they wanted hanging somewhere in that, in that bank of pixels that they had. They always found what they wanted to make the scene work.

12:51John SealeSo I was very pleased with that.

12:54Jawad MirThat's amazing. It's, I, you know, you mentioned I think it's the difference how you say it, not just you, me, or anybody else. You know, when you, when you tell somebody something, it sound, seems like, when you ask somebody something, it's like more like a permission thing, right? And then…

13:09John SealeOh

13:09Jawad Mir... When you say, "You know what? This is what I'm gonna do," and they're like, "Oh, this person is serious. Now I better listen to him." So it's the author… authority versus ask, and I think he probably noticed. And obviously he's worked with you, so he f… you know, took you seriously, and I think that's something that we all sort of strive to do, that authority versus, you know, ask. And sometimes you have to put your foot down, which I'm glad you did because it shows. And I kid you not, you know, talking, you were talking about editing. Not for one second I noticed a cut. Not for one second. Because the choreograph… the choreograph of the entire film on camera and the movements are so dynamic that you can't tell when it's cutting, and there's just so much action from wa… super wide to super tight. Everything is in there.

13:57John SealeThat's what I loved about working with George, and I knew that after Lorenzo's Oil, which was, quite a markedly different kind of film, and therefore pictorially different as well, that, but what George brought to that was a visualization that I'd never experienced with a director before. And I really liked it because it was different. And it worked. And that's what I loved about it. And I think that, when I did get to study the storyboards for Fury Road very closely to try and anticipate every problem I might have, of every, technical problem I might need to cope with, it showed how carefully they had actually worked, in making that storyboard flow. And I, and I'm a great believer in that, flow of editing that camera people can s… can give to an editor to be able to cut into a, into a flow that doesn't jar.

15:12John SealeSo that way you're actually helping to pick the audience up and take them into that, world of ours through that sort of w… virtual window of a screen and get them into the story. Not watching it, but in it. And I think that Fury Road in the end result, I have to agree too that with the, you know, the music and the editing, the flow, it g… does grab the audience, because of that. And it, and there's not, I don't think, too many jarring moments that might send them scurrying back to their seats and eating popcorn and waiting for the next, action piece to happen. It, George was gonna make sure that editorially the speed would help to keep the audience in the film, actually part of the film, and I think that's an essential piece…

16:22Jawad MirOf course

16:22John Seale... Of filmmaking too, that you really do need to do, need to follow as best you can, I think.

16:30Jawad Mir200%, I totally agree. You know, you had worked on English Patient, with Anthony Minghella bit, way back in the '90s, and it's a similar film in terms of location, like deserts, right? But this is way more intense. And even at that time when you worked with him and I spoke to you talked about the shoots of t… the challenges of shooting in the desert, and there would sometimes deserts, you know, sandstorms and all that. But here you have pretty much every single thing from beginning to end in the mountains, in the desert. And, you know, there's, even in the shots you see a lot of dust naturally because everything is moving at rapid speed. Was that challenging, not just for the camera but also for the crew? Because it's not the most healthiest thing to be able to deal with that for that long period of time, right?

17:17John SealeIt is, but, any desert experience, gives you the experience to go into the next one… ... With a, with a lovely crew that, are battle-ready. Battle-ready to go into a desert and battle dust. Dust is the enemy. Generally on photochemical shoots with film, dust in the gate, a bit of sand in the, can wreck a entire reel.

17:50Jawad MirSure.

17:50John SealeAnd you don't, you might not know about it until it's processed in London four days later. And that becomes a real drama. But I did find that Fury Road being the first film that I, worked on as a digital film…

18:09Jawad MirOkay

18:09John Seale... We had other problems. Overheating problems… You know, we had these great big boxes that we had to carry with the cameras on rigs of platforms that were mounted around the wall rig to do all the close-ups inside while we were doing. And it was... The crew were fantastic. I must say, Dean Semler put together the crew, basically grips and electrics and most of the ca… camera. I added, some on-camera, which was fantastic, and they went and found... We had 27 people on our camera crew.

18:55Jawad MirWow.

18:55John SealeIt's a lot of people. And they he… they found them all over the world. They were English, American, South African, Australian, New Zealanders. We found them all over the world and put them together for that film, and they were fantastic. They all chipped in and, got on with it. And we tried to anticipate any problems, obviously, with the digital cameras, and the team did a great job on that. So we were, we were pretty ready. We were also lucky enough to get the, M, cameras from, I think it was, the J… Bond film with Roger Deakins…

19:42Jawad MirOkay

19:42John Seale... That they'd developed for that, and they were great. They were about this big. They were still about four times bigger than the cameras are now.

19:51Jawad MirRight.

19:51John SealeBut we thought they were, we thought they were so fantastic because they were so small, and we were able to handhold them behind the seat, and the other camera seeing whoever was in that seat couldn't see the camera behind the seat filming the girls at the same time, which was the beauty of the multiple cameras and the beauty of these new small ones. So we were all pretty excited about that. And once we got into this routine of throwing cameras in, it, I think it gave Margie the editor, Siskel, Margie Siskel nightmares. As she said, I think she had over 400 hours of material to cut down.

20:37Jawad MirThat's something that documentary does, 500 hour, 400 hours.

20:41John SealeExactly. And she had to cut that down to two hours. So it gave her nightmares, but I think the end result, it was…

20:50Jawad MirYeah

20:50John Seale... It was there of course. So all of that, the challenge of the desert was there's a lot of, preexisting experience in there to combat that. I found that the digital cameras because they weren't film were fantastic 'cause you could seal them up and the chip would last for an hour. Whereas on film you're reloading after every four minutes or 10 minutes…

21:17Jawad MirYeah

21:17John Seale... Whatever magazine you had on board. It would've been a nightmare. I think we'd still be there shooting it 15, 20 years later. So it was a really good exercise in that.

21:30Jawad MirIt makes so much sense now because again, we're talking about the invisible editing and I was wondering about, you know, if there's some big action sequences, I think when one of the vehicle blows up and you see it from a close-up and you see it from super wide and you get a medium, and I was thinking in that shot that they must have only exploded it once because why would they spend so much money on multiple explosions of a similar eq… truck vehicle. So that explains it, that there was probably a camera on a vehicle next to it that got that m… medium shot, and because all these vehicles are so rigged up, it just blends in perfectly.

22:10John SealeThe whole h… whole thing about the stunts on that movie was so incredible after the 10 years of pre-production. Guy Norris' very, active mind in how to create incredibly dangerous looking stunts safely. And a lot of the time people find it fairly hard to believe, the truck's not moving at all. It's being rocked on giant airbags. The whole truck was lifted up on airbags, and those airbags then could rock the truck in a, in different modes. That created what George and Dean found on earlier Mad Maxes, the liberty to be able to shoot anything that didn't show a lot of action around it, they could do it when the truck was standing still.

23:11John SealeSo everybody was perfectly safe, and we could use normal 30-foot cranes, normal, steady cam, handholding, normal cameras. And all it was the truck was rocking to give so the actors had a bit of movement and it was in unison with the people in the back. That was all fantastically worked out long before I got there.

23:37Jawad MirWow.

23:37John SealeAnd all of this was Guy Norris' fertile mind. The other thing is when the truck did smash into something, neither one of them wasn't moving, and it generally was the little one that was going to get hit. That would be set up as a static car, and the truck would come roaring down and hit it. And that then made it so much safer for everybody that the stunt wasn't a rolling stunt. And all of this was Guy Norris' very fertile mind as the stunt coordinator in putting together a movie that could very well have had some bad accidents but never looked like it. He had it all C… totally controlled and all his boys were really well rehearsed. And it gets back to the storyboard, the g… the gospel storyboard. They knew it wouldn't change. There would never be a what if, what if we did it this way?

24:40John SealeNo, you couldn't do that. It was all worked out so safely. And then George was able to visualize it with his storyboard artists, and then with Guy Norris, lots of meetings they had, obviously, to coordinate all of this creative thinking, to be able to put that action movie together very safely. And never did we feel... I remember once I thought I was gonna fall off the truck because it was rocking…

25:16John Seale... And I was doing a handheld, kind of semi-running shot down the full length of the trailer into, Max's face, and the truck was rocking really badly, and I'm 70 years old and I thought, "I'm gonna fall off this truck." But I had a safety on, which would've stopped me about a meter down. So I wouldn't have got hurt. And being, having been a sailor on yachts at sea where the motion is not dissimilar…

25:51Jawad MirYeah

25:51John Seale... I found that I was able to control that. But I lost the image in the camera because I couldn't hold it to my eye. It was too, all too rough. I was looking at the monitor, but the sun blew the monitor out. So in the end, I was pointing the camera where I thought it should be pointed, and it was there. So all of it wor… I didn't fall off the truck and I got the shot. I couldn't believe it.

26:17Jawad MirThat's incredible.

26:19John SealeIt was good.

26:19Jawad MirThat's incredible. And you…

26:20John SealeThere was never…

26:21Jawad MirSorry, go on

26:21John Seale... Never a what if, you know, never a what if. It was always that's the stunt, nothing changes. A… and, so we w… had to be very disciplined on that.

26:33Jawad MirThat's incredible. And you're talking about stunts, you know, I think I may h… I don't know, you tell me if, because you shot the film, my guess is there maybe were one or two sequences, not sequences, shots I would say, that looks like there was a little bit of green screen, but I wasn't sure, but everything else seemed pretty much practical to me. Was it all 100% practical?

26:56John SealeOh, exactly right. No, there was, there was a pro… a proportion of green screen, that had to be done i… and even out in the desert. I mean, one of the funniest things you could ever see is the wall rig in the middle of the desert surrounded by green screens. And we're already there.

27:15Jawad MirYeah.

27:15John SealeIt was quite... But it technically we had s… we had some brilliant, visual effects people and post-production visual people there handling all of that. Absolutely brilliant they were. And it, they would call the shots on that, and just say, "Look, we're gonna have to go green screen…

27:39John Seale... For this particular thing." So yes, there is a combination, of really everything at our disposal to make that film.

27:49Jawad MirAmazing. Let me talk about the look of the film. So pretty much the entire film, I would say a good 80% of the film is daytime, and there's some night shots, the blue, you know, filter or tint or whatever you wanna call it. So let's start with the day one. You know, you... The desert, the great thing about this film is that visually, yes, there's all these great com… compositions, but the color, right? You have the desert and then you have the human skin is like, you know, there's so much contrast, there's so much texture to all of that, yet you see the skies being as normal as they are. You know, there's no sort of highlights issue or hue issue. How, what was that daylight part like in terms of getting the look right? And the nighttime sequences, were they actually in night or were they more like in the dawn, or was it shot during early morning and done in post? If you can break that down one by one.

28:50John SealeJoel, it's all of that, all of what you've just said we had to do.

28:53Jawad MirOkay. Okay.

28:54John SealeWe were on the... We were in Namibia in Africa on the coast, and it was very like LA in that, the water, the ocean was very cold. And so we'd get a fog would come in, and often we'd be shooting in fog, and second unit with David Burr as cinematographer doing a great job with his boys on most of the big stunts. He'd be 30 or 40 kilometers inland, and it'd be acid blue skies and no fog, and lovely sunny, situation. And w… and I would be shooting, to match the same scene, I'd be shooting on the coast in fog with a white sky and a softening of the mist. And I said to George at one stage, I said, "George, this is not gonna match. I've just talked to David up in, up in the desert, 30 kilometers inland.

29:58John SealeHe's got, you know, bright blue skies and sunny." And I said, "We're in the middle of fog." And George put his hand on my shoulder and he said, "Don't worry, Johnny, we'll fix it in post." And they did. I can tell it easily, because I know when it happened and I can look for it. But the boys in post, Eric Witt, from Canada or an Australian in Canada, is, George's number one colorist. And… He did an amazing job of matching non-matching shots. And it's something that, yes, the post now is very capable of doing. It can also change a lot of what you do. So in fact, because the stunts were so complicated, we'd often only do three shots a day. But there were…

30:58Jawad MirReally?

30:59John SealeOh, yeah. Regularly three shots. In fact, if we did three we were working hard. Sometimes it was only two because if you can imagine how long it took to put all the trucks into position, get them going…

31:11Jawad MirYeah

31:12John Seale... To run your rehearsals, run them all back, it took hours. And to get it all exactly as George wanted it and the storyboard had it. So we might get a shot in at 11:00 o'clock in the morning that should be dawn, but it's no… nowhere near dawn. And I didn't have to worry about because the modern technology of post meant that Eric could quite easily, change the skies, the contrast. He could change the density, color densities, and turn it into dawn. As simple as that. So post was relied on heavily to keep our continuity of light going, and also to even create and maintain our time of day continuity.

32:08Jawad MirThat's crazy. I mean, this was 10 years ago, and so much has evolved even since then, even especially in the last year or two that, you know, you can probably do way more, than, you know, the colorist, I think you mentioned Eric was able to do. And, yeah, no, hats off. I mean, it's one heck of an engaging film, and, the contrast and the colors are just so vibrant even though they're not... And I've even found, you know, the costumes. They're, they're just... Everything about that film without production design and costumes and vehicle, you know, development, what, if that's part of production design. Nothing against your cinematography and editing, I mean, they're fabulous, but the film literally stands on those few things because that's what makes the film so visual on camera.

33:02John SealeIt does. It's a, it's my first digital film, and it came at a time when the, post-production facilities and capabilities were becoming amazing. And George grabs that. He grabs hold of any technology, cameras, people. I mean, he was building his own, 3D cameras to shoot that film…

33:32John Seale... When I came on board. And it was an, a, an amazing exercise i… to build a camera, 3D camera that could go through the window of the truck. Most of them…

33:49Jawad MirWow

33:49John Seale... Up till then were half the size of a Volkswagen, and you, yeah, we couldn't have made the film at all with any of them. And George knew that, so years before, we, he started building his own 3D cameras in Australia. So when I came on board there was something like 24 cameras had been built, and a lot of lovely technical things were created for that. One of them was that, you know, 3D uses two lenses, and you have to synchronize those two lenses…

34:30John Seale... And align them perfectly. But it's a time pro… it's a time-wasting process. Be… on set could take an hour. And somebody must have said to George, "You know, this will t… take a long time to align the lenses. Do you wanna watch your dailies in 3D or 2D?" And I think George must have said something like, "Well, what are you getting at?" And they said, "Well, if you w… only wanna watch them in 2D, i.e. From one lens, well, we don't have to align them then. We can align those lenses up in post using algorithms." So he said, "I'll watch it in 2D." So that meant that we didn't have to align the two lenses. And that's w… George's thinking, which I find so incredibly creative in itself in that the technical difficulties of making a film for George are there, but they're problematical and can be solved.

35:39John SealeAnd George's way of doing it is to keep the pace of the film going. He wasn't gonna waste an hour realigning. The other thing was changing a lens. From a 50 mil to a…

35:51Jawad MirYeah

35:51John Seale... 75 mil meant a lot of time. Changing, taking them out, putting new ones in, realigning those. And you could go and have your lunch every time.

36:05Jawad MirThat's true.

36:06John SealeSo what happened, George, they ended up building a camera body for every lens. So you didn't change the lenses, you just changed the camera so that, you know, if y… that's the 75 mil camera and this is the 50 mil camera.

36:22Jawad MirYeah.

36:22John SealeThat's the 25, mil. So you changed the whole camera. So you, hopefully you had technicians lining the lenses up… And they're waiting ready, and you just carefully put the camera on the dolly, tripod, crane, whatever it was, and it's lined up, and away you go and shoot. And I thought, "This is crazy. Amazing." Amazingly good technical thinking if you've got the money. So I was enamored in all of that, thinking, and, loved that fact. But in pre-production, and only a couple of months before we started shooting, we had a meeting on the Monday morning and George came in and said, "I've got some news." And he said, stood up and he said, "We're not going 3D. I'm gonna shoot it all 2D." And he turned to me and said, "So Johnny, what cameras are you gonna use?" Well, I'd never done a digital film. So I sat there and my mouth was moving but nothing coming out.

37:26John SealeAnd I went, "well George, I'm a Panavision man. Have always been a Panavision man. I'll, I'll give them a ring and see what they've got and away we go." And the, and the first assistant director leaned over and he, and he said, "Alexas." And I said, "Probably Alexas, George. Something like that. They've got those, in stock. We'll have a look at it." "Good, Johnny, go for it, but it's 2D." Well that, my gosh, that made such big changes to the actual way we could, shoot that film. It meant we could use Canon 5Ds for crash cameras, and we'd have a dozen Canons still cameras on board that could shoot, as crash cameras. Of course, they're very small.

38:15Jawad MirYeah.

38:15John SealeWe're able to stick them all over the trucks. And when we got to doing a stunt, once the main cameras were in, there'd be a rush, and the grips had a case full of little clamps and clips and gaffer tape, and we would just race around the truck and I'd say, "See if you can put one in there. Put one there, put one there, one there, one..." And we'd keep going until the first AD would say, "Everybody out, we're rolling." So we might only get nine cameras in, and we had a dozen that we could have put up. And we lost a couple every day.

38:50Jawad MirOf course.

38:50John SealeBut a Canon 5D on a budget like that was pretty cheap…

38:54Jawad MirYeah

38:54John Seale... For a crash camera, so…

38:56Jawad MirYeah

38:56John Seale... We'd just go and buy another three or four cameras and, blew them up. So it enabled us to come off 3D to 2D. It enabled us to saturate, really, the film with cameras and be able to then give Margie in the edit, pretty good coverage.

39:17Jawad MirThat's amazing. And you know, you talked about George's, what's the word I'm looking for? His knack. His knack for technology. I mean, if you look at films like Babe, you know, that came out in the mid…'90s, talking pig. And then not just talking pig, talking ducks, talking everything, talking sheep. And it was done so seamlessly that, you know, now you can probably say that it's being done seamlessly by other people. And the same thing with Happy Feet, you know, another breakthrough in technology. And I mean, if you look at fil… filmography, right, you know, Mad Max, Babe, Lorenzo's Oil, Happy Feet, and so many other films, it's just all over the map. And…

40:05John SealeYeah

40:05Jawad Mir... And I, and I really appre… I probably didn't appreciate his work probably until maybe 15 years ago, and I mean, I think he's definitely one of the most underrated directors, out there because he's visually very spot on about how to tell a story.

40:26John SealeI agree totally. I think his film mind is, an amazingly fertile place. He's a very studied man. He reads everything he can about film. He watches everything he can, and he's analyzing all the time I don't think necessarily what makes a good film. It's more how can I entertain the audience. He denies it, but I swear he said it, that he wanted people to walk into Fury Road with their big bucket of popcorn, settle themselves into the seat, and get ready for an action movie and start eating their popcorn. The credits go through, the movie starts, and within two minutes he's got them. And for two hours he's still got them and they haven't eaten their popcorn, because they've been enthralled and they're in the movie.

41:31John SealeAnd that's where our years of thinking about how we make movies, how we can make films that really make people become part of the film, not just watching it. And I think that's what George does. He, you know, his sense in editing and sitting there watching him in an edit saying, "Run that..." Because I forget the numbers, but 80% of Fury Road is not running at 24 frames a second. It's running slower, which is speeding it up. And so he'd be saying, "Show me that at 12 frames. Run that at, run that shot at 12 frames." And we'd watch it, and then he'd say, "13. Try 13 frames." And we'd watch it. And you can tell the difference. It's quite interesting what the brain can perceive. Then he'd say, "Run it at 10."

42:34John SealeAnd so we'd watch it at 10, and he'd say, "Thir… run on 13 again." And 13, okay, go 13. And that made it fit in because he in the edit would have the few times that I got into there to watch and listen, if a s… if a shot was, two and a half seconds long, which was the average length of every shot in the movie…

43:00John Seale... And an audience preview might have written, I didn't understand what that shot was. What did that shot... I couldn't understand what visually that shot said. So he would slow it down, but he wouldn't lengthen it. I found that interesting. He wouldn't lengthen it, but he'd slow it down until you did understand visually what that shot was saying. He never let any shot go into the movie unless it helped progress the story.

43:31Jawad MirYeah.

43:32John SealeAnd I love that he used the speed of the, projection, to do it, not the length of the cut. And that is, I think, a very interesting way of getting the audience and keeping the audience l… l… locked into the flow of the film. He's using every aspect rather than tried and proven editing, just do it in the edit. No, it doesn't happen. There's other things you can do, you know? So he does them, and he searches them out, and you've gotta love that.

44:15Jawad MirAbsolutely. And one of the things I wish, nothing to take away from Tom Cruise and Mission Impossible films, I mean, they're fantastic. Tom Cruise being in 60 years or 61 years old, still doing the stunts, and there's a big publicity about it all the time. You know, there's the making of. I don't know if you've seen the most recent one. They always have these little featurettes about how they did it. It's really, it… when I was watching this film, it really saddened me that it was probably not to the, definitely not to that intensity because, you know, Charlize Theron is a big actress, so is Tom Hardy, but that element of pushing, and sh… telling people how this was done, I think that makes people appreciate the film more. Not that it wasn't appreciated, but just, you know, you wanna see how it was done. At least I do. I'm very curious, maybe because I'm in the industry. And you have to educate the audience that this was not just like some shot in front of green screen from beginning to end. There was a lot of practical stuff in there.

45:16John SealeOh, exactly. And I think that, you know, it's lovely, to be honest, doing a podcast such as this so that, the students of film of whatever age they are, doesn't matter, can get an understanding of the thinking of, filmmakers, that can make a film like Fury Road such a, such an incredible visual experience. And even with Tom's stuff with his Mission Impossible, is the same, and m… and in most of them, actually. And I think that, I think that, the lovely thing I think about Fury Road in particular that I liked was that the realism was never lost either.

46:11John SealeThis could be happening. It's not so unheard of action-wise or, impact-wise by using a s… stunts that might never be able to happen. The only one, of course, is in Fury Road, which I feel borders on that is the storm sequence.

46:37Jawad MirI was gonna talk about that, yeah

46:40John Seale... Which obviously is one heck of a lot of, post and, background post, painting. But it was all part of, the message to say, you know, the world is changing, the, you know, the temperature's increasing and storms are getting far more violent, and they have to get through one of them. And so fair enough. Just a little, in my mind, a little over the top maybe…

47:10Jawad MirYeah

47:10John Seale... But, it seemed to fit in general. It didn't h… didn't hang on it too long. It just did it and got on with the story, which was good. But basically, I think, everything else that happens in Fury Road could happen.

47:29Jawad MirI agree.

47:29John SealeAnd I think that's a big point with audiences, that there's no sense of a disbelief of what's happening. It's like, oh my gosh, I could have been there. I could, that could happen to me.

47:46Jawad MirYeah.

47:46John SealeAnd I think that's what's really lovely. You're putting the audience into that film to the point where they think, "Oh my gosh, I would like to be there," you know? But not so amazingly out there that…

48:02Jawad MirYeah

48:02John Seale... They know it could never happen. I like that about George's realities.

48:09Jawad MirTrue. And just to wrap things up, when you finished Fury Road and he had talked to you about Furiosa the prequel, was there ever a conversation to bring you on board, or was it a schedule thing, or was it like you were like, "I'm done. This is it"? W… how did that, did that ever come up to just shoot the p… prequel?

48:33John SealeOh, yes. No, it did. A very lovely too from George, a invitation. Because I did, I did enjoy Fury Road and working with George so much that when he offered Three Thousand Years of Longing, I jumped at that. I thought it's a s… it's a smaller film

48:56John Seale... Reasonably. It was in Sydney, in Australia, so, I'd be home, which is good. And during that, and in fact prior to, Three Thousand Years of Longing, while we were in Istanbul on surveys, George, very lovely asked me, invited me to do Furiosa. But I had committed to changing my life and I'd almost done it before Fury Road, so I was going into a bit of overtime…... By doing, Three Thousand Years of Longing. And so prior to Three Thousand Years, I did say to George, "I'm really sorry, but, you know, I've got a, I've got an eye problem. I've got macular disintegration, so I'm gonna, you know, lose, my eyesight, eventually.

49:59John SealeDon't know when, but, eventually. And now I wanted as much time with my family, my wife, Australia, traveling, doing what we want to do when we want to do it." Those films, they're very long. They're eight months, nine months of your life, and, I just felt after Fury Road that, no, it was definitely time for me to stop, and find a n… an… our new life, which I've done. So it was a very lovely, invitation, but one I passed on and, continued to do Three Thousand Years. Thoroughly enjoyed that. Working on that with George, totally different film completely. But loved the challenge of shooting that, and making it what George wanted, and that was good enough for me. I thought, "Yeah, no, I'm out of it." I'd... Another action movie,... You know, I thought in a way I've been there and done that, and I'm really happy with what I helped to make. And this little one of George's, Three Thousand Years of Longing, was a lovely little love story that, again, was so different and with lots of challenges in the shooting of it, and I thought that was, good enough for me.

51:27John SealeI wrapped it up and Furiosa was done by a younger man, and rightly so, and did a beautiful job.

51:35Jawad MirYeah. I haven't, I didn't know, that you did Three Years, Three Thousand Years of Longing, and I haven't even seen it, so I gotta check that out. But first of all, sorry to hear about, you know, your eyesight. And you were talking about, you know, you want to live your life as it is in terms of checking out all the stuff that you can before anything, happens. I highly recommend there is this film if you get a chance. It's literally similar to the story that you're going through. It's a documentary called Blink. Have you heard of it?

52:09John SealeI have. I've heard of it.

52:11Jawad MirYeah.

52:12John SealeYes.

52:12Jawad MirIt's, it's, it's on Disney+ by National Geographic. It's about a Canadian couple who have four kids, and two or three of them had this rare disease at birth, which is, like, one in a million, that they were gonna lose their eyesight by a certain age. They're gonna go blind. And so the parents actually dropped everything. They quit their jobs and they traveled the world to show their kids the world before two of them or three of them lose their eyesight. And it's a very great film, family film, but I thought of that when you mentioned that how you have to see the world, you know, before things go down south.

52:53John SealeAnd that's exactly what we're doing. I mean, it, what I've got is hereditary. They can't change it. I…

52:59Jawad MirYeah

52:59John Seale... I have, I'm, I'm seeing good people, doing my best to prolong, the shutdown. But, it's gonna happen and I've, I'm, I'm living with it. I, you know. But I just, very sadly feel that, I couldn't spend the time away, working still w… when I would love to be traveling or having a look at a lot of things around the world or in Australia or whatever, before it does shut down. So, that decision was made and I've held onto that and moving on and enjoying it thoroughly actually. I'm as busy as all get out.

53:43Jawad MirThat's amazing. And if you don't mind me asking, did the doctors give you any timeline or it just gonna happen out of nowhere?

53:49John SealeNo. It's started. There's a little indication of it, that's how they found it. But, it could be years. It could be 10 years. It could be eight, five. I very nicely have a neighbor who is a pill maker…... And he has a pill out that, is supposed to help delay the process. So I'm taking some of his pills obviously.

54:18Jawad MirYou got nothing to lose.

54:19John SealeNothing to lose at all. They're energy. They're only, they're only, supplement lead, diet…

54:26Jawad MirYeah

54:26John Seale... Energy pills, to, boost the, system a little bit and hope to hold it back. So, doing that, but, otherwise, no. It's, it's gonna happen. That's okay. But at the moment, still going well.

54:41Jawad MirWell, I hope it doesn't happen anytime soon, or it never happens. And, I pray for that. And, you know, again, you and I have talked so many times and I've said this before, but I'll say it again, thank you for all the masterful work. I'm, I don't like to compare anybody, because everybody's unique, but if there is few cinematographers whose work I've really enjoyed, you know, Roger Deakins, yourself…

55:11John SealeRight

55:11Jawad Mir... Janusz Kaminski, yeah, I mean, I can, I can just go on and on about it. I… it's just phenomenal. So thank you for all the work you've done and the stories that you've chosen to told us, tell us. They're marvelous.

55:26John SealeOh, Joe, thank you so much. That's most kind. Most kind.