‘Mad Max: Fury Road’: The Oral History of a Modern Action Classic

May 12, 2020 4:34 PM

Everything you see is really happening, there’s no green screen.

I grew up on all the “Mad Max” movies — they’re very popular in South Africa. I remember being 12 and my dad letting me watch it with him. So I was like, “Oh yeah, I wanna be in a ‘Mad Max’ movie. Are you kidding me?”

posted by kirkaracha (50 comments total)

Can I get this without having to either have a NYT account or create one?
posted by jadepearl at 4:47 PM on May 12, 2020 [3 favorites]

I mean I can go to a private window. But I'd love to just read the article. No disrespect intended.
posted by Splunge at 4:59 PM on May 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

Ab outfit named Sploid posted a few scenes of the filming without the post-production effects: it's still completely amazing.


posted by softjeans at 5:13 PM on May 12, 2020 [6 favorites]

The NYT paywall javascript only loads after the article itself has loaded. In theory, you could just hit Stop after the article is finished displaying, but before the javascript has the time to kick in, and read to your heart's content. And in theory, that would be particularly easy to accomplish with a large article that takes time to fully load.

I certainly wouldn't recommend it, of course.
posted by ZaphodB at 5:16 PM on May 12, 2020 [11 favorites]

that shit works.
posted by valkane at 5:19 PM on May 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

Here's a non-paywalled link.
posted by signsofrain at 5:37 PM on May 12, 2020 [2 favorites]

Or you could help ensure that the only media companies that can keep the lights are aren't just the ones owned by either Sinclair or Murdoch.
posted by sideshow at 5:39 PM on May 12, 2020 [6 favorites]

Mod note: Folks, I know the weird greyzone of paywall stuff is frustrating but let's aim to keep extended discussion of it more to MetaTalk than to any thread where it happens to come up.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:12 PM on May 12, 2020 [19 favorites]

My favorite movie of the past decade. This is a great read!
posted by brundlefly at 6:42 PM on May 12, 2020

Great film; maybe the best of the 2010s but the idea that there's no green screen or CGI in it is silly. There's a ton of digital special effects in it.
posted by octothorpe at 7:00 PM on May 12, 2020 [7 favorites]

Indeed. MetaTalk exists for a reason. Thank you for posting this article, kirkaracha!
posted by Ahmad Khani at 7:08 PM on May 12, 2020

I should re-watch this. I remember it being a very forward-propelled piece, but not much else about it. I think it's sitting on my DVR, even.
posted by hippybear at 7:08 PM on May 12, 2020

Fury Road feels like a film that is aging well. I didn't actually like it that much the first time I saw it; the frenetic pace, fast editing and color grading really threw me off but now I've seen it three more times on video and it gets better each time. It's almost like 2001: A Space Odyssey where the film language is so different than what you're used to that it's hard to wrap your head around it the first time you see it.
posted by octothorpe at 7:14 PM on May 12, 2020 [10 favorites]

Witness me!
posted by Fizz at 7:50 PM on May 12, 2020 [4 favorites]

I remember watching it in the theater and being blown away by the opening scene. When the title card showed up on the screen, I turned to my friend and said "If this ended now, I'd have gotten my money's worth." I didn't expect it to go as far as it did from that opening point, or to have the depth and power it had.

The incredibly spare script manages to build a world so perfectly well. There's slang and reference we don't know, but it never feels out of place, cheesy, or artificial like they can in lesser films. Everything feels, for lack of a better word in a film so centered on collapse and desolation, totally organic. These are the things people would say in this world. This is the mythos that would spring up in a time like this. Even (maybe especially) the woven fingers representing the V-8 engine, or the gentle catching a name of someone gone out of the air and drawing it to your chest, even the gestures are perfect.

An ongoing flight of fancy of mine would be to do a supercut of moments of anguish captured on film, moments where the film portrays the absolute picture of despair. Furiosa falling to her knees and screaming at the realization that the green place is gone is one of those perfect moments for me, and moreso that the incredible action scenes is the image in my mind when I think of the film.
posted by Ghidorah at 8:02 PM on May 12, 2020 [21 favorites]

I think I need to see this in a theater sometime, it just did nothing at all for me. A bunch of unlikable post apocalyptic people in wild costumes go on a chase for a mcguffin that they discover doesn't exist, turn around and race back, end. Huge effects but, meh. So I'll keep an eye out post-actual-covid-apocalyptic-times for a midnight showing.
posted by sammyo at 8:35 PM on May 12, 2020 [2 favorites]

“I just watched Mad Max: Fury Road again last week, and I tell you I couldn’t direct 30 seconds of that. I’d put a gun in my mouth. I don’t understand how [George Miller] does that, I really don’t, and it’s my job to understand it. I don’t understand two things: I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.”

- Steven Soderbergh
posted by the duck by the oboe at 8:39 PM on May 12, 2020 [65 favorites]

I was sort of on the Road Warrior bandwagon from the beginning and most of the films are "you do out after a thing but the thing isn't really the thing and the next thing isn't clear", if memory serves me correctly.

Maybe I should do the whole series again sometime. I haven't seen Thunderdome in many decades.
posted by hippybear at 8:42 PM on May 12, 2020 [2 favorites]

Great article, thanks for posting!

This is one of those movies that are best seen in a good theater, like Laurence of Arabia. Even a nice big screen TV doesn't cut it; you need the immersion of a giant screen and a great sound system. It's one of the few movies I've seen where I never had a clue what was about to happen. The sandstorm in the theater was awe inspiring.

Watching it later on TV didn't grab me like it did in the theater though. Maybe part of it was knowing what was going to happen.

It's fantastically well done in any case. It one-ups the earlier Mad Max films (the second of which was my favorite) without coming off as just being done just for the one-up (unlike the Matrix films). It's beautiful and crazy and silly over the top in a way that works somehow. If you're going to war in a post apocalyptic desert, you're going to need a sound track, so why not build a high speed off-road truck with giant speaker stacks and an electric guitarist? But that's not good enough, let's make the guitar a flame thrower just because it looks fantastic. Love it.

Makes me want to go watch it again actually.
posted by DrumsIntheDeep at 9:07 PM on May 12, 2020 [6 favorites]

I liked the earlier Mad Max installments well enough, but Fury Road blew them all away. I think that it says something about it that, when Rick and Morty did their postapocalyptic hellscape episode, it was funny and accurate enough in its satire, but the best part of it was the Fury Road part, and it was really just Fury Road, pretty straight. Also, even though Nicholas Hoult and Josh Helman did a couple of X-Men movies together, they're so much better in this.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:13 PM on May 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

Honestly, it may be the most impressive movie ever made. The most impressive production, that is. The acting is solid, the script is solid enough to allow you to suspend your disbelief throughout, and the photography is top notch. Anyway, I could gush about most every aspect of this film. The article implies there's no CGI, but there's a ton of it, in almost every shot, from color correction to any manner of additions and subtractions. But the CGI is an enhancement of the in-camera action, not a substitute done by green screen. Why more directors don't get this is kind of amazing, but then again it's probably a matter of money; Miller had the clout to get it done his way. He really is a genius filmmaker. Too bad he's been fighting about boring contractual stuff with the studio about sequels, which is why they haven't done any, and may not ever. I don't think any other director on the planet could deliver a sequel on the same level, but Miller could match it and maybe even top it.

I saw it once the theater, once at home, and every time I see it referenced I want to watch it again, like right now. But I don't want to wear it out and allow it to become commonplace. When my now-10 year old is old enough to watch it in a few years, that'll be a good time. By then I'll hopefully splurged on a 4K TV and can really enjoy it.
posted by zardoz at 9:26 PM on May 12, 2020 [13 favorites]

But the CGI is an enhancement of the in-camera action, not a substitute done by green screen.

Much of Titanic was made magnificent through this method, and it was totally cutting edge and very static at that point. Things have... evolved by this movie.
posted by hippybear at 9:54 PM on May 12, 2020

So, Mad Max... 1981, I was 13.

You have 3 years to get a great home system.
posted by hippybear at 9:55 PM on May 12, 2020

(To be fair, my parents didn't know about most of my movie habits in my middle school and high school years, so I saw many things which I parents would never watch and would certainly never watch with me. Your kid is way ahead of me at his age.)
posted by hippybear at 10:12 PM on May 12, 2020

Mad Max: Fury Road is the only film in the past fifteen years to hit me the way something would when I was a child or a teenager. I saw it three times in the theater, got the score, the Blu-ray, The Art of Mad Max: Fury Road, and saw it twice more (standard and Black & Chrome) for a local theater's "Happy Third Birthday Mad Max!" event in 2018. The only negative thing I can say about it is that you have to see the name Steve Mnuchin in the credits (he was a producer).

In addition to what Ghidorah said about the fully-realized nature of the worldbuilding (for instance, in that opening bit, when one of the War Boys falls to his death from the Citadel in the attempt to recapture Max, he screams "Witness!" on his way down, but there's no context for it on an initial viewing), unlike other series where I'd have niggling questions such as how Max has his interceptor after the events of the previous films, Mad Max 2/The Road Warrior, Beyond Thunderdome, and Fury Road all avoid this by being framed as stories respectively told by the Feral Kid, the tribe that left, and (less explicitly) The First History Man, so Max is a Moses figure who saves a group from the wasteland, but doesn't/can't leave with them and there's no need to try to reconcile them with each other as a singular canon.

When my now-10 year old is old enough to watch it in a few years, that'll be a good time.

I don't know where in Tokyo you live, but Cinema City in Tachikawa (the abovementioned "local theater") has shown Fury Road fairly regularly (I want to say yearly) since its initial run.
posted by Strutter Cane - United Planets Stilt Patrol at 10:33 PM on May 12, 2020 [8 favorites]

OMG, I was amazed by this film, and I did not agree with the contention put forth at the time that this film would be even better in Black & white with the incidental music music removed. I mean, it's an action film, it's practically an immutable law that it has to have super saturated colors and almost constant music. Then I watched Black & Chrome And was proven wrong. I believe they've put it on the blue ray and you should watch it. It takes a brilliant film and pushes into masterpiece territory.
posted by evilDoug at 11:00 PM on May 12, 2020 [3 favorites]

One of the first essays I wrote for my film site was about FURY ROAD. About the use of liquid imagery alone. There is so much to unpack in that movie.
posted by brundlefly at 12:08 AM on May 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

The original pirate Black and Chrome version doesn't remove the music, but does remove the dialogue - it was illegally available for a day or so and I managed to snaffle it - a black and white "silent" movie, with music and effects. It would need about five to seven intertitles to make it comprehensible to the casual viewer.

What's remarkable about the film is that it's like a fractal zoom - you can focus in on one element and there's a fully realised movie there, then move to a different area and that's completely satisfying. Fury Road is as simple as you need - zoom out and there's a perfectly serviceable kinetic demonstration going on - or as complex as you want - zoom in to one character's facial expression and their whole life is there, the conditions that brought them to this point.

(At this point I do my frustrating thing of mentioning I spent a while reading the film largely in terms of alchemy - I'm really not capable of writing it up, as this comment will probably stretch the limits of what I can coherently write - but, for example, Max is the philosopher's stone (or Universal Panacea); Furiosa is the androgyne, the fusing of male and female principles; I took chrome to represent silver for a while; so on and so forth - it's probably not Miller's master plan, but the way in which the film was made makes such a reading possible. The important part of a reading isn't the text, it's the reader, but a powerful text is one that allows a diversity of readers to created a diversity of readings while still remaining coherent.)

One thing I do stamp my quite-big-actually foot over is that Mad Max doesn't represent the character per se, but it's a reference to the world: Mad Max === Completely Insane. The series as a whole is Mad Max, and it annoys me a bit when the chapters are referred to by the series title, though I realise that's a sign I should take a bit of a breath and step back.

I rewatched Beyond Thunderdome a while back (might do it again), and for me it was a film that benefited from having seen Fury Road - the stuff with the kids, the non-action stuff, was seen as a disappointment at the time, when people just wanted the action, but looking at the films as being about the world - and Max the character drifting through that world - it's fantastic, and in some ways before its time, however 80s-tastic Tina Turner's shoulder pads might be. The only thing missing from Fury Road IMHO is a Bruce Spence cameo.

Anyway, the caffeine is running down and I'm all typed out. Let's just say that Fury Road, in all its permutations, is my favourite film of all time. Just between you and me, I get quite emotional thinking about it, sometimes.
posted by Grangousier at 12:43 AM on May 13, 2020 [17 favorites]

The incredibly spare script manages to build a world so perfectly well.

Absolutely. There's not one word of unnecessary exposition in the movie. You get all the important stuff from context, and anything you might not get isn't needed to understand the story. I love it when a movie trusts its audience to figure out its world. (By way of contrast, see Dark City, where the studio forced the director to add an introductory voice-over that explained almost everything.)

While I'm here, one of the other things I love about Fury Road (and which Mrs. Example is tired of hearing me bring up every time it's on) is that all the action is shot so incredibly well. You can always tell where everyone in a scene is in relation to each other and what they're doing. I wish more films would do that instead of trying to create action with shakycam and cuts every half-second.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 2:24 AM on May 13, 2020 [8 favorites]

I had no real interest in seeing this film -- the only Mad Max movie I'd seen before it was Beyond Thunderdome when it came out, and I'd thought it wasn't bad but nothing I'd camp out to see or anything -- but then the Usual Idiots started pitching a hissy fit about Fury Road. The Usual Idiots have about a 95% track record of hating stuff that is amazingly good, in my experience, so I went to see it. And it was amazingly good. We were talking about it for days afterwards. Every now and then we still do.

So ... thanks, Usual Idiots. As C. Northcote Parkinson once famously pointed out, a person who is aways wrong is as valuable a predictive tool as a person who is always right. I just wish you weren't, you know, killing the world.
posted by kyrademon at 2:44 AM on May 13, 2020 [12 favorites]

I saw this three times in the theater when it came out. Even convinced a feminist friend who is totally not into big loud action smash-ups to come with me because this was such a rare gem... she loved it. I showed it to my 12yo son recently and he loved it (one of these days he's going to trust me immediately rather than resisting everything I recommend... my track record is pretty good so far).

I love the way it subverts expectations at most points, usually in subtle ways undercutting Hollywood film language tropes. I think of the scene where one of the Vulvalini's has her throat cut. There's a brief pause where most films would go into something graphic (lots of blood or the head tipping back) and, in the pause, the scene seems to wink and say "yes, we could do that but we're going to do something else instead." And that something else turns out to be so much more powerful in its restraint.

Sixel's editing is brilliant. Many many good interviews out there with her. This is just one.
posted by kokaku at 3:02 AM on May 13, 2020 [5 favorites]

I like Innuendo Studios’ Bringing Back What’s Stolen, an 8-part video essay trying to unpack the standard ways women are presented in action films using the subversions of those tropes by Fury Road as a frame.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:16 AM on May 13, 2020 [8 favorites]

Previously, on FanFare. I really like the parallels to (and deliberate subversion of) greek legends in the movie. The plot is truly epic (brief and beside the point).
posted by anthill at 5:34 AM on May 13, 2020 [3 favorites]

You can always tell where everyone in a scene is in relation to each other and what they're doing. I wish more films would do that instead of trying to create action with shakycam and cuts every half-second.

Soderbergh's commentary (quoted further up the thread) really gets to this. George Miller is just head-and-shoulders above every other working director when it comes to staging.

I'm with you in your wish, but it comes down to many, many directors just don't have the talent to do this, so they have to use quick cuts and a shaky camera to disorient the audience because they are just as disoriented. They haven't a fucking clue!
posted by rocketman at 7:24 AM on May 13, 2020 [3 favorites]

I went into the theater expecting silliness and came out quite impressed. It was really refreshing to see someone actually shooting for the big screen. Every still from that movie could be blown up and framed, and nearly every single one would contain a story in itself. The plot is largely irrelevant, the whole thing is affect. Only snippets of that translate on e.g. a laptop.
posted by aspersioncast at 8:49 AM on May 13, 2020

Fury Road was also a digital effects innovator, using aerial scans of real-world rock formations to digitally construct the Citadel.

I believe it was the first movie to use a structure-from-motion scan to make integrated real-world/digital sets.

The whole production was blisteringly high-tech. It is so impressive because the workflow was orthogonal to the rest of Hollywood and yet fully formed.
posted by head full of air at 9:13 AM on May 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

If anyone is interested in the filmography of George Miller, the podcast Blank Check is currently going through his. The Fury Road episode is scheduled for a few weeks from now, and I'm very excited.
posted by lizjohn at 11:01 AM on May 13, 2020 [5 favorites]

Looking back through my old FB posts:

Jul 27, 2014 [trailer released] Pleeease let this not suck.

May 17, 2015: Please god may the new Star Wars make me feel as young again as the new Mad Max just did. Holy hell.


At least one of these came true
posted by gottabefunky at 12:04 PM on May 13, 2020 [6 favorites]

It's always interesting to me when people complain that the editing in Fury Road is frenetic or hard to follow. For me it's pretty much the opposite of the incomprehensible (and sometimes literally nausea-inducing) shakycam that gets used when directors don't know how to film action or actors don't have the physical chops to do their own fights scenes.

An article linked from one of the earlier threads about the movie touches on why it works: A graphic tale: the visual effects of Mad Max: Fury Road.

“George pays an enormous amount of attention to the audience’s point of view,” says Jackson. “He calls it ‘eye scan’ – you have to be very aware which part of the frame the audience’s eyes are focused on in terms of the last frame of one shot and the first frame of the next shot. He’ll make sure that the relevant piece of the frame that you should be looking at is in the same place, so that you don’t use the first three or four frames to find where you’re supposed to be looking at. You’re already in the right spot. We did a lot of blowing up and racking and re-positioning within the frame to make that work. It’s absolute testament to that technique that those very fast sequences are easy to watch, and you don’t get lost. You do have a sense of wow that was crazy but I know what’s going on.”

posted by Lexica at 12:22 PM on May 13, 2020 [14 favorites]

I can only speak for myself but I did have a lot of problems trying to follow the action the first time I saw it. As I remember we were sitting fairly close in the theater so that may have make it harder but it was an issue for me.
posted by octothorpe at 2:41 PM on May 13, 2020

I had heard that Fury Road was moviemaking in ALL CAPS and so when I rented it I expected a popcorn muncher of an over the top generic action movie. I got one of the things I expected - the “moviemaking in ALL CAPS” part is definitely true. But it was more than an action movie. It is straight up a damn good film.
posted by azpenguin at 10:22 PM on May 13, 2020

Yeah I also didn't experience the legibility and continuity people talk about. Maybe I was too busy gawping at the spectacle, or too unused to action movies, or I'm just slow.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:37 PM on May 13, 2020

My Facebook memories today turned up this quote from the Village Voice:
"You know the charge that Furious 7 feels like what you would get if you asked a Hot Wheel-loving ten-year-old to work out the beats of a screenplay? Fury Road is what the kid might dream up at fourteen, stoned at the motocross, keyed up on Mountain Dew and old Conan comics, except instead of writing a script he's lighting those Hot Wheels on fire and chucking them at your face. He's also, touchingly, a feminist and eager for you to know it. Plus he's tireless, touched with some genius, and you would not believe just how many of those cars he has to throw."
posted by dnash at 7:30 AM on May 14, 2020 [2 favorites]

I thought Fury Road was much easier to watch (legible) than many Marvel superhero movies. Half the time I can only focus on bits and pieces, and just have to let the rest of it go by. I believe this is an editorial decision where somebody said, "well, we don't have the budget for that piece of CGI, so we'll just keep it out of focus or get you focused on the main character's gun collection". Or maybe, "Guys, we need some more shiny tech in that scene - let's get on it!" The alternative would be to blame Michael Bay and get it over with.
posted by sneebler at 10:05 AM on May 14, 2020

the filmography of George Miller

This would be quite a diverse film festival.
posted by ZeusHumms at 12:03 PM on May 14, 2020 [2 favorites]

I’ll never forget the feeling of seeing my war rig for the first time and realizing holy shit, George is not f*cking around.
posted by MrBadExample at 3:43 PM on May 14, 2020 [5 favorites]

I thought Fury Road was much easier to watch (legible) than many Marvel superhero movies.

I actually watched Fury Road on the same day I saw Age of Ultron - it was a day off after a rather full fortnight, so I went to see the Avengers movie in the morning at Clapham Picturehouse, then a pint in the pub round the corner, then Fury Road. Although the beer probably had some hand in it, the direct comparison didn't flatter Mr Whedon's vision, I have to say. If it had been the other way round I suspect I'd have felt a bit short-changed and wondered why I hadn't just gone to see Fury Road again.
posted by Grangousier at 2:29 AM on May 15, 2020 [1 favorite]

It really stands up on re-viewings, to other films detriment. I can't tell you how many times I've been watching something where the world skews apocalyptic and/or the action frenetic, and found myself wishing I was just rewatching Fury Road instead.
posted by grandiloquiet at 8:44 AM on May 15, 2020 [3 favorites]

Following on from others' comments above about the film not being cluttered up with explanatory prattle, it made me think of that old idea about good writing: "Don't tell. Show." Let me figure it out. Gimme something to chew on. Fury Road was a 7 course meal.
posted by ephemerae at 4:40 AM on May 16, 2020

If you want to talk about great staging, some friends and I watched the Laurence Olivier Hamlet last weekend. The direction is beautiful; Olivier really uses depth in a way I don't think most directors do. There is rarely a two-shot of two people standing at the same distance from the viewer talking to each other, and the way that they are staged, and the way the camera moves, adds meaning to the scenes. It's obviously not wide-screen, but it uses the entire screen in a way that is very noticeable.

I was also reminded to mention it by some talk up-thread about explanatory voice-overs. At the beginning of the movie, there's a voice-over that says, "This is a story about man who could not make up his mind," and it feels unnecessary, it feels like it diminishes the text, it condescends to the viewer, and it doesn't actually help in making sense of the film.
posted by Orlop at 12:24 PM on May 16, 2020