What It's Like to Write a Screenplay with George Miller

An interview with Gary Eck, co-writer and co-director of Happy Feet 2.

Nov 26, 2024

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Gary Eck was in a bit of an awkward situation. The standup comedian had been invited to a cast and crew screening of the first Happy Feet movie, and had gone to the gym before the showing. When he’d finished his workout, he realized he hadn’t brought a change of clothes and didn’t have time to run home before the screening.
He decided he was going to wait until right before the movie started and then sneak in and sit at the back. What he hadn’t considered was that this was exactly what the “big names” were going to do as well. Right before the movie was about to start, Gary, wearing a tank top and shorts, looked over to see none other than Happy Feet (and Mad Max) director George Miller sitting down in the seat next to him.
George had only just landed back in Sydney after spending time in Los Angeles and on his flight over had watched a short film he quite enjoyed called “Final Call” which just so happened to be written and directed by Gary Eck. George mentioned this to Gary and also said he enjoyed the comedy album “The Hollywood Motel” which Gary had co-written.
After speaking for a bit, George asked Gary if he’d be interested in working on Happy Feet 2 if they ever decided to make it… a few months later Gary found himself in George’s office at Kings Cross to meet about working on the film. After a successful meeting he was brought on as a writer and eventually found himself co-directing the film as well.
To this day, George has never asked why Gary was wearing exercise gear to a screening of Happy Feet.

The below is from an interview that I did with Gary about his work on Happy Feet 2. If you’d like to listen to the full, 110 minute interview where he shares behind the scenes stories of Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, and Robin Williams, you can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

*The below has been edited for pacing and clarity.

Can you tell me about the writing process for Happy Feet 2?

I came on as a co-writer and there was also Warren Coleman who had worked on the first one. We sort of teamed up in a sense, and then [Paul Livingston] worked remotely on a lot of the krill scenes. There were four of us, but it was always Warren and I working together, then we would meet with George. We would go through the scenes that we'd written starting at page one. It was always start at the beginning and go through it, that was George's process. You could tell he would be thinking things the night before and he'd come in and go, 'I think this is what happens'. And you're just going off on wild tangents that don't end up in the film, but it's part of that exploration.

Were the bare bones of the story there when you joined or was it a complete blank slate?

What happened was we had a big writers room — a big workshop for a week. The Warner Brothers people came out, and other people from different departments — they weren't necessarily writers, some of them were just like the sound person, but everyone could contribute. Everyone was invited to pitch their story ideas, whether it was just an idea or complete stories. I think at the time, George knew what the story was in his head. What he's really good at doing and part of his skill, is like he's panning for gold. He's got the story, but what he's looking for are the nuggets that he can take from everyone else's contribution and enhance the story that way. So everyone pitched — there must've been about 20-25 people — but I actually thought, what is the whole film for Happy Feet 2? Having no input from anyone else, I just thought, what's the beginning, middle, and the end? And I pitched that. I think George took a lot of the premise of what I was saying, he goes, 'ah, yeah, great. I love that'. He'll just twist it. For instance, in Happy Feet 2 there's a character called Sven, which is a puffin bird masquerading as a penguin. In my story it was a visiting emperor penguin that sort of captures the heart of Mumble's son, because he's much more brave. George took that and went, 'you know what? I love that, but we'll turn it into a puffin'. The story sort of evolved like that.

You spent a year working on the story?

Yeah, it's very slow. George does take his time, he doesn't smash out scripts. I quite like to smash out a script because I just want to get it out there and then look at it from a distance and then go, do I rewrite this or do I keep this chunk? I think this comes from my standup of just wanting to ad-lib and chat and seeing where it goes. When I'm writing, when you get on a roll, you just want to go, I don't know where it's going to go, but I just want to keep going with it, you know? Whereas George is much more methodical, even though he's probably thought it all in his head, he'll spend much more time writing it.

With George, is it like, we need to make sure these 10 pages are perfect before we move on to the next 10 pages?

That's his approach, but he's also thought out the whole film in his head. That's what he's done the thinking on, he's worked out what's going to happen. I think by the time he comes down to writing, because he's thought out the whole film, he takes a very methodical approach to making sure all the pages work before moving on to the next. But then you might go back and rework that again until you get that section really sweet. But I think he does that because in his head, the whole film is worked out.

How do you write dialogue for a movie like Happy Feet 2 where so much of it ends up being ad-libbed?

Well it is ad-libbed and it's not ad-libbed. I'm a big believer that an actor can really only ad-lib off material that's really well written. If it's really well written they can extrapolate off that and make it funny and add little bits that you may not expect. I mean, Robin Williams was someone that would just give you every variation and do heaps of ad-libbing. But ultimately when it came down to cutting it, even though lots of his ad-libs got in there, the bones of the storytelling, the actual dialogue that you want, it remained the same to what was on the page because that's what's driving the narrative. You can have wild ad-libs, but if they're not on story, then they just become a distraction and you end up cutting them even though they're really funny. What you want are the ad-libs that stay on story... that enhance what was there before.

It becomes the box they can play within. If anything doesn't fit within that box, it doesn't make it into the film.

Pretty much, yeah. They're the kind of parameters in a sense. I mean, Robin Williams just had so much stuff and it was all so funny. You're just going, 'oh wow, it'd be great if we could keep that'. That's part of good storytelling, knowing what has to stay and what has to go, even though you're letting go of some really good stuff. The rhythm, the pace, and everything's got to fit. Any actor loves a great line, if it's well written, they don't want to change it.

Another thing that George said when making Happy Feet 2 was 'uniquely familiar'.

He loved that catchphrase, he still uses it today. I think it originates from a UCLA screenwriter teacher, Richard Walter. I think he said it in one of his lectures and George had heard that and he loved it. Seth Godin wrote a book called Purple Cow and George would often reference it, 'your film has to be a purple cow, it has to stand out amongst all the other cows'. It has to be unique, there has to be something that feels like the purple cow, the audience hasn't seen before, it's different. But it also has to be familiar, it's something the audience can relate to. Whether it's a genre like sci-fi or romantic comedy or action, they go, 'oh yeah, it's an action film, but it's a different action film'. 'It's a rom-com, but gosh, this is a really unique rom-com'. These are the two elements that I think George would always say 'uniquely familiar'. It's something I think about as well, it's like, what is it about this film that's different to all the other films?

How does that thought process show up in the writing process?

Well, Happy Feet 2 was playing off an existing film, it's a sequel. So the familiarity was there obviously. The hard part was making it unique in the sense that a film like Happy Feet has limitations that it's set. Penguins are penguins, they act like penguins. You're limited in that sense so your uniqueness starts to lessen a little bit because how do you make it truly unique versus the first film? You can't have them suddenly fly a plane or talk on walkie-talkies, and you're also bound by the Antarctic – the environment is set. So creating the uniqueness, that was the challenge for Happy Feet 2.

What does a day look like as a director on an animated feature?

I mean, you always deliver what's on the page. Then you say something like, 'Well, actually what's happening in the scene is that you're running and you're desperate. So maybe add a bit more desperation in that'. Sometimes you're much more familiar with what the characters come from, or what they've just done, so you might go, 'what if...? What if the character did this? What if the character wasn't running?' And then you might get that performance as well. You get a lot of variations on the same idea because it's always very handy to have in the edit room when you go, 'ah, it'd be great if we had that performance' and then you go, 'you know what? We do have that performance. We did do that'. It's so easy to have that as your bank, just an audio file. You wouldn't have that luxury shooting it [on film], that's for a certain.

Were you involved in the editing process as well?

I edited a lot of sound. To this day, I think I am a good editor of sound because of that process. George would be very particular and very precise with these edits. He'd say, 'Okay, so take the "the" from take one and put that on take four, and then combine that with take six. How does that sound?' And he'd listen to it and he’d go, 'Wow, it's brilliant'. That became the process, and it's slow. It's a very slow process. I don't know if anyone else does it like that. I don't know if Pixar is that precise with the editing of sound, but we certainly were.

I've even heard he's like that now with his live action. He'll take moments from take one for one actor and moments from take three with the other actor and he'll combine them together in one frame. He's even manipulating the images of his live action films.

He's one of the greatest action directors of all time, but his philosophy is pretty simple. It's always down the line. His action is always down the line because he knows it's easy to follow. If you watch Mad Max: Fury Road, it's all down the line. All the shots are always down the line because it's easy to know where you are. He uses that as his template, and then he knows he never repeats a shot. Each shot builds on the next and can never be the same. If I cut to a closeup of you, I can't use that same closeup again. It has to be a different shot that's building on the previous shot. That repetition, not repeating shots [is important] because the audience doesn't know it, but they feel it. Action is very much a build and rising [of] conflict, it's not just random shots of action. You often see that in action films and they don't make any sense. They're just cuts, there's nothing cohesive about it. George loves that cohesion. He loves that sense of one shot causing the next causing the next. Cause and effect is his mantra.

Is there anything else you took away from that experience that you still either think about today or still utilize today?

Just little film techniques and things. I would write them down because I'd go, 'Oh, that's a good bit to remember'. George would say, 'Start every scene the opposite way it ends'. So for instance, if two guys go into a bar and have a fight, you don't start the scene with those two guys angry at each other, go into the bar and have a fight. You need to start it the opposite way. You start them really friendly, best mates. 'You know what, I'm gonna buy you a drink, I owe you so much, you're the best guy in the world'. And by the end of it, they're having a fight. The scene has built in an unexpected way. That is something I really think about. You'd be surprised how often you read a script and that doesn't happen. It falls flat because it had nowhere to go. You've already peaked by them arguing in the beginning. You need them to be somewhere else so that you can get them to a place of fighting. A lot of filmmakers do it anyway, but to be aware of it is another thing. I think that's what I got out of working on Happy Feet 2 is being able to use these as tools — being aware of it. Sometimes you do this stuff organically anyway, but you're not thinking why you're doing it. Sometimes it's good to actually know why you're doing it because when you do have a problem, you go, 'Ah, I think this is the problem'. So there were things like that. ‘Don't introduce things until they're dramatically relevant’ was another one he would say. Rather than just showing something because it's interesting, it needs to have a relevance to the film. What is its dramatic relevance? Why is the audience going to remember this? Often they don't remember it unless it's relevant to the story. You see that in films where they just want to set something up because they want to pay it off later, but because it's not dramatically relevant or has no context in that moment, the audience doesn't register it. They don't even remember it. And then later on that character returns, the filmmaker's thinking, 'everyone's going to put the connection together', but they don't because it wasn't dramatically relevant at the time. So that's another little tool that I took from working on Happy Feet 2. There's a whole bunch of other things that I can't even remember.

This is a very vague question, but I'm curious what an initial idea looks like for you?

To me, and this is true to stand up, and to screenwriting, and to any writing is, you apply a 'what if?'. To use standup as the example, I might have an idea where I say, 'Oh, that's kind of funny that happened, but what if this happened'? You start to maybe embellish the story. It's funny, but what if this happened? It kind of makes it funnier. With filmmaking you start to go, okay, well, this is the idea. What if this happened? Then what if this happened? Then what if that happened? And then you start to build an unexpected story. If the idea feels strong, I suddenly go, I think this is a really fun, strong idea. You don't necessarily know where it's going to go but you have the basis of the idea.

But no matter what, whenever you have an idea getting to that finished product, that final version takes a long time and it's not an easy thing to do. My last question is what does it mean to you to do art well?

It's very satisfying. It's a real satisfying result when something works. If you do something well, it's got every chance of succeeding and when you see the response and you see where it's gone, it's very satisfying. Sometimes you don't think about it too much at the time because at the time of you making it, you're in your head thinking this is going to do well. And when it does, it's rewarding in that regard. Even when I look at, say, the kids show [I co-created] Ginger and the Vegesaurs, we're doing season four and five now, there's some books out, there's some merch sold around the world, they're doing a big immersive experience around it. And you go, wow, that didn't exist a few years ago. None of that existed. All these people didn't have jobs who are now working on it, whose life is suddenly dedicated to making this show. I find that rewarding as well. If this show didn't exist, if this idea never happened, none of these people would be working their butt off to make it continue. None of this world would exist. The fact that there is a book or a T-shirt would never have happened. It's kind of bizarre how it works, but I think that to me is what is doing art well.

Thanks for reading! If you haven’t already, make sure you subscribe to the newsletter for more interviews like this and if you want to learn more about George Miller, you’ll like Season 4 of the Artwell podcast where I studied his career and interviewed his collaborators to find lessons that are relevant for modern creatives.