"Making a Murderer" continues to spark debate about the intersection between art, journalism, public reaction and the law; the Directors Guild Award nominees are announced; "Star Wars" opens in China, but the world's second largest movie market is a challenge for the franchise.
'Mad Max' dir. George Miller hints at two sequels 'If the planets align'
The "Mad Max" movies have always inspired a lot of love from its cult fanbase, ever since the original release in 1979. But for this one fans are even getting Fury Road tattoos!
Since the release of the latest installment, "Fury Road," critics and awards organizations have been jumping onto the "Mad Max" bandwagon. The nominations for the Directors Guild of America awards are usually an accurate indication of the Academy Award contenders in the same category, and this morning the DGA announced "Fury Road" director George Miller's nomination.
Miller is the guest on the most recent episode of The Frame's weekly podcast, "The Awards Show Show." When he met with co-hosts John Horn and Kyle Buchanan, Miller began by explaining that he had no idea what the world's reaction would be when he was making "Mad Max."
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
You’re working on [the movie] in a very granular fashion. You’re not really sure if you pulled off the things you intended to do. Then, suddenly, you start to get reviews and that’s a really good kind of feedback. You really don’t know what you have until people tell you what you have. And then people start stopping you in the street occasionally and saying, Hey, do you want to see my tattoo? I’ve got a "Fury Road" tattoo. And you think, Oh, wow. This film means something to them. And that’s always a surprise.
And then, critic awards and so on. And now the guilds. And having been in awards seasons, which were never as long and intense as [they are now], I realize that the big thing to do is to be very careful with your expectations. But it’s a very enjoyable party.
It’s like a primary election without all the malevolence and stuff.
John Horn: Without Donald Trump.
Without Donald Trump and people doing negative ads and all the craziness!
Horn: There is always a tension in most creative endeavors, and certainly in Hollywood, between the stories that filmmakers want to tell, and the stories that the people who are financing those films want them to tell. When a movie like "Mad Max" succeeds the way that it does, does it allow you to be more aligned with what you want to do, and what the studio wants to do?
It has to in some way. I don’t make many films and I’m usually drawn to a story. It almost takes control of me. I think studios basically understand that you can’t be doing the same thing all the time. Stories have to be uniquely familiar. There’s gotta be something that is still accessible. At the same time, it’s gotta feel like something you’ve never quite seen before. If you get that balance right, then you might have a film that impinges on an audience and also feels that it’s doing something interesting.
Horn: For people who want more "Mad Max" movies, what are the odds and, if so, when?
If I get to do a smaller, quicker movie, that’ll be next. But there are definitely two ["Mad Max"] stories that we have.
Horn: For two different movies?
Yes. We’ll see if the planets align to get those made.
Kyle Buchanan: And is it true that Furiosa would only be minimally included in those stories, or would you be willing to make a big Furiosa movie?
If I say anything, I’ll get myself in knots, and I’ll give away spoilers. I’ve found the best thing is not to say anything!
Every filmmaker, after they finish a particularly big film, wants to do — in terms of “My Dinner With Andre” — a little personal film which you can shoot very quickly ... to do something that’s intimate and relatively quick, without big expensive stunts, and a long time in the cutting room with masses of footage.
Buchanan: John mentioned that you have to convince the executives of your product. But I wonder about convincing the stars. Obviously you did it in order to get them to sign on. But I was struck at the Cannes press conference that Tom [Hardy] and Charlize [Theron] both seemed almost apologetic, because it seemed they did not understand the scope of your vision until they actually saw the film.
Well, look. This is a very difficult film for actors. Because there’s nothing for them to get their teeth into for an extended period. There’s no extended scene. And if you’re an actor like Tom who’s spent a lot of time in theater, and Charlize who from the beginning was a dancer, who’d do continuous performances — it’s very difficult. You’re calling Action! and five, ten seconds later, you’re calling Cut. That’s kind of weird! Often, it might be a look or a few words. And there are very few words spoken. And they knew where the principal cameras were, but you don’t know what the end result will be. And I think what they were saying, and they appreciated it, was they did realize that when all the pieces of the mosaic came together, the tune played well.
Why it took 10 years to get 'Making A Murderer' to audiences
The Netflix true crime docuseries "Making A Murderer" hit viewers' streaming devices just at the right time.
Only a week after the second season of the break-out hit podcast "Serial" hit iTunes and Pandora, and last year's "The Jinx" on HBO whet pop culture's appetite for long-form documentary storytelling. But when the filmmakers behind "Making a Murder" began production they had no such audience to court.
It was 2005 when Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, fresh out of graduate film school at Columbia, read an article about Steven Avery in the New York Times. Avery, who had been released in 2003 from a wrongful, 18-year-long imprisonment, was facing a new charge: murder.
But there was a twist. The county that brought the charges was the same that Avery was suing for exoneration — to the tune of $36 million.
As Demos and Ricciardi told The Frame, they were "overwhelmed with questions," so they "went to Wisconsin trying to find some answers." They would spend the next 10 years documenting Avery's travails.
In many ways, Demos and Ricciardi were immensely lucky it took them that long to finalize their project. Not only are audiences primed for true crime storytelling, but the show now has the optimal form of distribution: Netflix.
In 2005, documentaries were largely released as two-hour features, to say nothing of the phenomenon of online streaming. Now, as television has become more cutting-edge, and binge-watching series has become something of a cultural norm, Netflix has led the field in producing the type of high-quality, episodic filmmaking that "Making a Murderer" required.
The series has since become a huge hit, as many people binged the show over the holidays. More than 130,000 people signed a White House petition asking for the president to pardon Avery (which the White House declined to do).
Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi discussed the origin of their project, their influences, and the struggles they encountered while making the series when they met in studio with The Frame's John Horn.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
At what point do you realize this is not going to be a film, but a series? How did that change your process?
Laura Ricciardi: A few months into our production, there was a major development. What had been, from the state’s perspective, a very strong circumstantial evidence case — they now thought they had compelling evidence to bring him to trial and get a conviction. So we knew we were going to be in it for the long haul . . . It already was an epic story. It started in the mid-1980's, and here we were in the beginning of our production in 2005. So we were going to document the first 20 years and then shoot vérité-style for whatever was to come.
In the last two years, two things have happened. “Serial” has come out and been a huge hit, and “The Jinx” has been on HBO, another series about the guilt or innocence in a crime. As you’re watching these shows come out, does it change the way in which you see your own material, and do you think it benefits the investment of time you’ve made?
Demos: It’s an interesting question. We sometimes joke, it was a good thing it took us this long to lock picture. It does seem like a great time for “Making a Murderer” to be reaching an audience. But that said, the things that inspired us to make this, and the things that influenced our style of filmmaking go back so much further. To “Paradise Lost,” to “The Staircase,” to “The Thin Blue Line.” Or even outside of this genre, to Barbara Kopple’s “American Dream.” The intimacy that they offered and the way they captured a moment and real-life characters in such a compelling way really inspired us to take this on.
Over the course of your work on this series, something else changed in documentaries. And that is the means of distribution evolved dramatically. Two questions: what does that evolution in distribution mean to you and your film, and how did you come to be on Netflix?
Demos: I mean, we owe everything to that evolution. In 2006, we discovered that this was more than a feature. And in 2006, where were we going to bring something that was more than a feature? We went to film markets thinking, Well, I’ll just squeeze it into a feature. Maybe they’ll be interested.
But that was one of our greatest challenges, when we think back over the struggles of the past decade. Staying true to the knowledge that this story, in order to be told properly, needed a long format. And we needed to not go for the two-hour time slot, or the four-part series. That we really needed to tell this story right. Because one of the things that kept us going was, when we were out there filming, we were seeing not just a lot of the story being missed by the news, but we were even seeing history being rewritten, as they would talk about the past.
We started to feel that if we did not get this story out that it would be lost. So, it was two years ago that we connected with Netflix. By that point, you know, as two young filmmakers that don’t have a long list of credits, we knew that we had to demonstrate what this could be and that we could pull this off. So we actually had three episodes cut. And we had the outline of the whole series. So by the time we brought it to them, they could see what it really could be.
The entire 10-part series, "Making a Murderer" premieres on Netflix December 18th.