Re: Mad Max: Fury Road

I'm not sure, at this late date, when I first saw *Mad Max*. It was
definitely the dubbed version, but it was in the 1980s- may well have been
on VHS. I was mesmerized. Somehow that low rent production assumed
Wagnerian epic proportions in my mind. And then the *Road Warrior*
completely blew me away. My wife and I can still quote bits from that movie
to each other. *Thunderdome*....not quite in the same league, or perhaps a
slightly different league. All three were definitely far beyond the
American made biker-gang movies.

American movies... *Escape from New York *came out in 1981, two years after
Max. I can't help but think that somehow John Carpenter had seen Miller's
film. Pure speculation on my part.

charley

On Fri, May 15, 2015 at 5:59 AM, Dennis Fischer <[email protected]>
wrote:

> “Nostalgic for the apocalypse”: George Miller’s long, strange trip to “Mad
> Max: Fury Road”  The maker of the "Citizen Kane of cheap,
> post-apocalyptic biker movies" returns with a roaring fourth installment Allen
> Barra <http://www.salon.com/writer/allen_barra/>
> [image: "Nostalgic for the apocalypse": George Miller's long, strange trip
> to "Mad Max: Fury Road"]
> <http://media.salon.com/2015/05/mad_max_fury_road.jpg>Charlize Theron and
> Tom Hardy in "Mad Max: Fury Road" (Credit: Warner Bros. Entertainment
> Inc.)
> It all began with a shot of a vulture perched on a highway sign that read
> “Anarchy Road,”  apparently the main highway by which Australia’s rapidly
> diminishing oil supply is transported.  All we’re told is that what we’re
> about to see happens “A few years from now.”
> American audiences must have been puzzled as to what country George
> Miller’s first feature film, “Mad Max,” was taking place in.  In the kind
> of nonsensical move common to Hollywood studios, when the film was released
> in the U.S. in 1979, American voices were dubbed over those of Aussie
> actors with the intent that viewers would think it set in the Western U.S.
> Not until 1995, when “Mad Max” and “Mad Max II” (or “The Road Warrior,” as
> American filmgoers knew it) were  shown at the Museum of Modern Art did we
> get to hear Mel Gibson’s real voice in the role that made him an
> international star as Max Rockatanski (his last name is spoken just once in
> three films — at the beginning of “Mad Max” over a police radio.)
> For the first few years after the release of “Mad Max” the overwhelming
> number of statesiders never had a chance to see it at all. From 1979 to
> 1984, in New York, “the Citizen Kane of cheap, post-apocalyptic biker
> movies,” as the East Village Eye’s Sebastian Dangerfield called it,  could
> only be seen at one theater, a tawdry little 24-hour movie house on
> 42nd Street.
> Lacking even the minimal technical resources of the low-budget American
> International Pictures motorcycle flicks that had inspired him, George
> Miller, the director, a medical school graduate who got into films by way
> of a university competition, couldn’t afford to film a single extended
> chase sequence.  “Every chase in ‘Mad Max’ is an illusion,” said Miller by
> phone from Australia before kicking off the publicity tour for the fourth
> Mad Max film and the first in 30 years, “Fury Road.”
> “The actions are illusions created by editing. I’m not sure where more of
> the movie was created — on the highway or in the editing room.”
> “Mad Max” is so spare that  it never even takes time to explain its own
> premise.  It wasn’t until the prologue to “The Road Warrior” that audiences
> learned that the events of the previous film occurred as World War III,
> caused by oil shortages, is about to break out. Shot on a budget of about
> $490,000 just a few miles outside Melbourne, Miller recalls that there
> wasn’t even time for rehearsals.
>  “When I look at the film now,” he says, “I realize that this scene or
> that scene had made it into the final cut after just one take. “I think in
> retrospect that helped.  There was a rawness and immediacy to  much of the
> footage that might not have been there if we’d had a bigger budget. Mel
> used to kid me that if I had had twice as much money the movie would only
> have been half as good.”
> He received encouragement from actors and filmmakers who appreciated his
> wildly innovative approach to action films.  One early fan was Kurt
> Russell, whom Miller met at an Australian film festival. “I asked him if he
> would come back to my studio and critique some of the rushes with me.
> After about 45 minutes he shook his head and said, ‘Man, compared to what
> you’re doing, Hollywood action movies look like TV sitcoms. You  had me
> ducking in my seat and covering my head.’”
> Riding the crest of the Australian New Wave that was peaking in the late
> 1970s with films by Peter Weir, Gillian Armstrong, Bruce Beresford and Fred
> Schepisi, “Mad Max” went on to shock the Australian film industry, earning
> more than $100 million around the world and becoming the biggest-drawing
> export to that time.  Though it received scant critical attention in the
> English-speaking world – even Australian film critics pretty much ignored
> it – “Mad Max” was, to Miller’s surprise, lauded by critics and other
> filmmakers in other parts of the world.
> “Every week or so we’d get a review or newspaper story from somewhere in
> the world and see that a Japanese film historian thought that Max and his
> highway cops were like Samurai warriors, or that someone in Norway thought
> that they reminded him of a band of old Vikings.
> “I didn’t know what to make of it. I had made what I regarded as a
> crash-and-burn movie, a classy one, but no  more than that, and then people
> in countries where I never even thought ‘Mad Max’ would play were
> responding to it as if it touched some primal nerve. It was thrilling but a
> little baffling.”
> “The Road Warrior,” the movie that would change the entire concept of
> action movies, started to come together in 1980 when Miller attended film
> study courses at UCLA while reading Jung and Joseph Campbell’s “Hero With a
> Thousand Faces” while watching movies every night.  What he was not doing
> was what some later reported: namely, experimenting with mind-altering
> substances. “I’m kind of a square in that respect,” says Miller with a
> laugh. I was amused and a little flattered  that people thought I had
> attained some kind of psychedelic quality as a filmmaker. But I didn’t need
> drugs.  My mind was being blown by what I was reading, seeing and studying.”
> He had started out wanting nothing more from his action films than “to
> make people feel exhausted when they leave the theater, like they’d been on
> a really great roller coaster ride.”  But he began to feel that he had
> tapped a vein richer than even he understood. “I really began to feel that
> we had struck some mythological chord with ‘Mad Max,’ that those of us who
> had put the film together were the unwitting servants of a collective
> unconscious.  I don’t know how much of that I believe now, but it was
> pretty invigorating stuff in 1980.”
> The film that resulted from the confluence of these influences  wasn’t
> quite like anything anyone had ever seen.  There were elements of so many
> different films reflected in “The Road Warrior” that film writers were
> tripping over themselves trying to point them out.
> Most agreed that  it was a form of updated western; there’s a bit of the
> John Wayne “adult” western “Hondo,” about a bitter loner with only a
> mongrel dog for a companion wandering through a lawless Arizona territory
> in the 1870s. The Feral Kid, Emile Minty, who talks only in grunts and
> carries a deadly metal boomerang, first sees Max approaching in a long shot
> reminiscent of when the boy played by Brandon DeWilde first sees Alan Ladd
> in “Shane.” And the final spectacular chase of Max’s oil tanker by the
> outlaw gang the Marauders through the wasteland  seemed like the chase in
> “Stagecoach” on PEDs.  Many were also quick to connect Miller’s wasteland
> with that of the 1975 cult classic by L.Q. Jones, “A Boy and His Dog.”
>  (For the record, Miller says he did not see that film till nearly 20 years
> later.)
> Despite the film’s original title, though, “The Road Warrior” is not a
> sequel but a rethinking of an entire genre.  It was filmed in the winter in
> the clear, natural light of the Outback – you’ll see none of the characters
> are really sweating.  “We use high-speed lenses that captured that eerie,
> pink-orange sky that you can only find in an Australian afternoon.”
> “The Road Warrior” seems like a window into nightmare dreamed in broad
> daylight  Although the film looks like it was made on a wider scale than
> Mad Max, the budget was only marginally higher. In many ways it proceeds as
> if Hollywood action movies didn’t even exist.
> One gamble that paid off was an ominous, Twilight-of-the-Gods  full
> orchestral score by Australian composer Brian May that would eventually
> become a bestseller on  record, then CD.  “Everyone said, ‘You’ve got to
> have a heavy metal score,’” says Miller. “I thought that ‘Mad Max’ was rock
> ‘n’ roll enough. In ‘Mad Max II’ I wanted something with more resonance.”
> (The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael wrote, “If there was such a thing as a
> Jungian film score, this would be it, unless Carl Orff staked an earlier
> claim.”)
> Though “The Road Warrior” did not open to big box office, the look and
> sound of the film made a huge impression on pop culture in the 1980s.
> Texaco ran a series of “Road Worrier” commercials in which the Mad Max-like
> character worries that he won’t be able to make it to the next Texaco
> station, and Phil Collins played Max in a MTV video for one of his singles.
> Hollywood tried again and again to tap in to Miller’s vision, first in
> B-movie imitations such as “Warriors of the Wasteland” and then in huge
> bloated post-apocalyptic films like Kevin Costner’s flops, “Water World”
> and “The Postman.” Vernon Wells, the stuntman who played  Wez, the most
> ferocious  of the Marauder gang, even reprised the role in a comedy, “Weird
> Science.”
> Aficionados even accused Miller of Hollywood-izing Max in his third
> installment, “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,” by far the most successful of
> the three at the box office, which Miller co-directed with George Ogilvie.
> “Thunderdome” definitely had its strong points, particularly a nasty and
> witty performance by Tina Turner as the Master of Bartertown. But it erred
> in taking Max out of the Wasteland, whose starkness had given “The Road
> Warrior” so much of its power.
> “Fury Road” will please fans of “The Road Warrior” – it’s much more like
> the second film than it is like “Mad Max” or “Thunderdome” – while taking
> Max’s story in new directions.  After all of that wandering around alone in
> the Outback, he could use a companion like Charlize Theron’s Furiosa, even
> if the blond head is shaved and she’s missing half of one arm. Tom Hardy is
> a sturdy and serviceable Max, nearly as laconic as Gibson (who had exactly
> 14 lines of dialogue in “The Road Warrior”).
> I wish Miller had not given in to the temptation to use guns; the lack of
> firearms in “The Road Warrior” necessitated more ingenious forms of
> weaponry such as crossbow gauntlets and metal boomerangs. But  even though
> Max has been away for 30 years, he seems to get younger as Miller, who just
> hit 70, gets older, and there’s the definite possibility for another couple
> of sequels down that Anarchy Road.
> Is Miller up for such a possibility?  “Well,” he replies, “I don’t see
> myself adapting Oscar Wilde for the screen, so why not?  Who’d have thought
> back in the ‘70s that people would one day be nostalgic for the apocalypse?”
>
>


-- 
Charley
Desert Sailor