If I'm going to die, I'm going to die historic
on the Fury Road.
Mad Max-- Fury Road released in 2015,
and since then, it's left a bit of an impression
on the action film industry.
Acting as both the technical fourth installment
in the overarching Mad Max franchise,
and as more of a hard reboot of the series,
Fury Road has a deceptively simple concept.
What if we made a movie that was just one continuous car chase?
Now it's easy to say we're going to do a two-hour car chase
sequence.
But to actually do that is a Herculean task,
one which they successfully accomplished
through careful planning, and a careful and deliberate
solution.
That element that makes all of this work
so well happens to take place before the movie even
starts shooting.
It's important to look back, first, at George Miller's
previous Mad Max films.
The original film in the franchise
was produced independently in '79
by George Miller and his producing partner, Byron
Kennedy.
And it jump-started the genre of wasteland wanderers starring
in post-apocalyptic stories.
For nearly two decades, It was the most profitable film
ever created, being produced on a budget of $350,000,
and pulling in close to $100 million
over the course of its life.
This model is what entire horror movie studios are now
attempting to replicate-- extreme low cost, high yield.
This original movie quickly spawned Mad Max 2--
The Road Warrior, a standalone sequel released in '81.
And that movie propelled Mel Gibson to superstar status,
and cemented Miller as an out-of-the-box thinker in film,
a visualist, first and foremost, and a director worthy
of attention.
Finally, four years later, Beyond Thunderdome
was released, and, well, that one received
mixed reviews, marred by production issues,
some of which were, unfortunately,
due to Byron Kennedy's passing, all of which
combined to lead Miller to walk away from the film halfway
through production, and George Ogilvie
to take over as director.
This whole ordeal left a bad taste in Miller's mouth,
and moved him to other projects, and professed
that he did not have any desire to revisit the Mad Max
universe again.
But as we know, that's not quite how it went down.
In the late 1990s, Miller met a man named Brendan McCarthy.
McCarthy was a Mad Max megafan who
first rose to prominence in the comic book
world due to Freakwave!
A Mad Max-esque story crossed with a surfing comic,
and Strange Days, a quirky spin on superheroism
with writer Peter Milligan.
During the '90s, McCarthy began working
in animation, where he was employed on the early CGI
animated show ReBoot.
But where he becomes important to this piece
is a single episode McCarthy wrote and storyboarded
for that show, a Mad Max parody.
He sent it to Miller on a VHS tape
with a note fixed to the top of the tape, which read, "Whatever
Happened to Mad Max?"
In perhaps a moment of randomness,
Miller actually watched the tape.
Thinking the parody really got to the heart of what
made Max tick, he asked for a meeting with McCarthy.
The two hit it off, and Miller hatched a plan
to produce a new Max story in a way
completely unlike anything else that had ever been produced.
Now as some of you might already know,
Fury Road does not have a screenplay
like a traditional film would.
Miller and McCarthy generated the whole film visually.
They decided to draw the film, beat by beat, in storyboard
in order to fully communicate the scope and grandeur
of the piece without being constrained
to the typical realities of a screenplay.
Miller and McCarthy went to Australia
to begin their project.
Initially, McCarthy thought that he
would be asked to do some of the visual development of the film,
design some costumes, come up with some vehicles,
or potentially draw some environments.
However, McCarthy's skills as a writer and an illustrator
proved to be invaluable to Miller.
And the two quickly developed a completely unique way
of working.
They would meet together at Miller's offices, where
they would write and draw thumbnails of sequences
on large whiteboards.
This would continue for months, as Miller and McCarthy wrote
and drew the story as they went.
Unlike a traditional writing process,
which for films, typically, is much more personal,
and revolves around repeated drafts,
the Fury Road script was simply a sentence--
"There's a female Warrior who is attempting
to transport women who have been kidnapped to safety.
Max gets sucked up into this mission,
and eventually ends up bonding with these characters."
That's it.
That's the foundation of this, quote unquote, "screenplay."
And it was what Miller wanted it to be, as he stated repeatedly,
a mostly non-verbal film.
I mean, people obviously speak in the movie,
but they speak only when it's necessary.
During the nearly year and a half long writing process,
that wasn't so much writing at all,
Miller worked closely with McCarthy,
and, eventually, storyboard artist Mark Sexton,
to visualize every single beat of the film.
In some scripts, scene description,
or the non-dialogue action description
takes up a large portion of the screenplay.
A Mad Max script would have basically
been nothing but action lines.
And those would not have been great in this instance
at communicating what would eventually be filmed, and put
to screen with Fury Road.
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Everyone here did.
Now the finished screenplay for this film
was presented with some traditional screenwriting
elements involved, but mostly storyboards
embedded in what appears to be half a script.
And there was more to this than just this
is how we want to work.
Initially, it was used as a sales tool
to get Warner Brothers brass on board
with a largely silent, predominantly action-oriented
feature film, which is something that is viewed as a risk
to a lot of studios.
But more pertinently, it allowed Miller and McCarthy
to create a rubric for consistency
in the visuals that would carry over into shooting the film,
because when you arrive to the shoot
day, well, in the case of Fury Road,
you need to know exactly what you're
shooting every single moment that the cameras are rolling.
Look at your screen right now, and look
at how much is going on, how many
vehicles are moving at one time, how many different shots you're
getting in this one sequence.
Now imagine to yourself that you're a screenwriter,
and you need to write down what is happening here.
You need to explain, in as few words as possible, exactly what
you're seeing on screen.
It is the only information that the audience
is going to be given.
So what Miller and his team accomplished here
is essentially the creation of their own comic book,
their own source material before stepping onto set.
And it's the only way Mad Max could
have been shot, because without every single one
of these frames lain out the way they are,
this movie is too expensive, which it might have already
been, and absolutely impossible to shoot,
which people assumed it would be.
And the film just doesn't happen.
The one element of art no one likes to talk about
is the months--
sometimes years-- of planning, and critical thinking
required to create something worthwhile.
If Mad Max-- Fury Road is anything,
it is an example of what it means to truly know
what you want to make before you begin the process of painting
that picture, a stark, bloody lesson in taking your time,
and having a vision before you try to articulate it to anybody
else.
It's a good lesson to learn.
[PAPER TEARS]
Well, guys, that's it for today's episode.
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Hopefully, I'll see you guys in the next one.
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