Trust your audience, and you’ll be rewarded

Even for those of us who don’t generally find the crazy, post-apocalyptic, freakshow genre of filmmaking appealing, Mad Max is a masterclass in visual storytelling.

Whether it is fiction writing, moviemaking, copywriting, marketing, or branding, one of the biggest mistakes often made by writers and creatives is the need to include absolutely everything they want their audience to know in their final draft.

Mark Twain got it quite right when he argued that what is left out of a story often matters more than what is left in.

(Sure, Twain’s comments feel slightly ironic to anyone who has read Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. After all, Twain was often paid by the word, and as a result he didn’t always leave a lot out.)

However, whittling a story down to its bare bones — whether it’s copy for an advert or a masterpiece of fiction — is far more daunting than it sounds because it requires something of the author that doesn’t come easily to most writers: Trust.

So often when we try to tell a story, we focus incessantly on vomiting every piece of information we can think of onto the page. Ayn Rand, for example, filled pages upon pages of Atlas Shrugged with 1000+ word soliloquies. Moviemakers routinely rely on voiceovers and dialogue-heavy scenes to impart critical plot knowledge. Even branding “experts” feel they need to fill every square inch of a 3240x2160 pixel screen with a detailed account of their clients’ “story” to convert visitors into paying customers.

It's not merely a desire to outpour our ideas to (what we imagine to be) a willing audience — it’s that most writers simply don’t trust their audience to embrace the passion, nuance and consideration of their vision without first bludgeoning it with a barrage of details we consider critical to the story.

However, trusting an audience can be far more powerful than ensuring they have every piece of background information at their disposal — especially if your story is something worth hearing in the first place.

I was reminded of this truth recently when a small clip of Mad Max: Fury Road interrupted my usual doomscrolling on Instagram the other day.

Now, to be clear: I’m not a big fan of George Miller, the man responsible for all four Mad Max movies. He’s not a terribly exceptional writer; and the “old” Mad Max movies are certainly not something I would consider “my thing.”

In fact, the first time I saw the original 1979 Mad Max was in my early teenage years when I was staying home sick from school, and it just happened to come on network television. Being too lazy to bother with rewinding my VHS cassette of Ghostbusters, I sat through a bizarre movie about a near-future Australia on the precipice of apocalypse. (Mel Gibson’s unique brand of crazy definitely made the movie, by the way.)

And, aside from a brief rewatching much later in life, that had been my only real exposure to the world of Mad Max — something I was completely fine perpetuating ad infinitum.

Then, Miller’s new Mad Max epic was released in 2015 — and talk of Tom Hardy’s performance was pretty much everywhere. And so, I eventually relented and decided to give this strange and decidedly unattractive movie a shot despite my full expectations that I wouldn’t enjoy a two-hour freakshow dressed up as a post-apocalyptic adventure.

After my first viewing, I felt as if I had witnessed some natural disaster of epic proportions. I was fairly certain I didn’t like it, but it stuck with me in a way that I couldn’t quite shake. The world Miller created in his 2 hour masterpiece — the characters, the struggle and the immersive “reality” of it all — simply clung to my mind.

And so, I watched it again. And then again. And again.

With each viewing, it grew into something other than some random action movie. It pierced into my consciousness and clung there in a way that some pokey little dystopian steampunk flick has absolutely no right to do.

Eventually, I was forced to admit that it is, actually, a damn good movie. And, apparently, I wasn’t alone in thinking so. The film was nominated for a stunning ten Oscars, winning six. Apparently, even the pretentious highbrow blowhards who so often dominate the Academy couldn’t escape the allure of what Miller had created. Somehow, an “action” movie about Viking-inspired petrolheads running amok in an (Australian?) wasteland somehow stole the awards ceremony…