www.madmaxmovies.com

The pitch was about and Old Max, who went crazy from all the years in the Wasteland and was on the brink of suicide (Traveling to the Plains of Silence). He then meets Furiosa and the girls, falls in love with Furiosa goes to live with her in the Citadel.

Yeah, but that, it’s the spark idea. The first idea like Mad Max 1 screenplay. There are so many things that never went to the screen and could change everything. It's like, ok, in MM1 screenplay, they were supposed to be 14. But finally, they're not. For trivial reasons. They didn't find the right actors.

That's the thing about Miller, he asks everyone around him to figure things out in extreme detail including himself, and when the movie comes out he blurs out the details so that the movies appear like 'myths'.

But backstories are tools for the actors to understand their characters, for the art direction... it's not the "real story" of those characters.
Bruce Spence think that the Gyrocaptain could be a caresaleman, or a real estate guy... who cares, we understand the nature of the character. If you want to write backstories, there's no need to debate about "the gyrocap was he selling cars ? Or houses ?"
Like Vernon Wells saying that his character is a Vietnam veteran. Because he used his own history to build the character. But, come on, how can you put "vietnam veteran" in the timelines ?! good luck with that ah ah.
And there’s two things, back stories and side stories. Like there is also a slight difference between the backstories of Nux or Furiosa, the story of what happened to Max JUST before Fury Road and the 4 pages of "re-creation" of the trilogy to make it fit Fury Road.
The 4 pages of recreation is nice, but it’s a desperate tentative to make everything match. But, come on. How the character on screen could be THE same than in Mad Max 1. That make no sense.
Because…

Same thing minus Mel Gibson and the ending

Exactly, and that's, like, a BIG deal. If it was Mel Gibson, for everybody it would be Mad Max 4, end of story. And there would be other questions of continuity. Like there are with Thunderdome for exemple, which talks about the bomb, when it's not a question in MM2...
BUT, in FR we have a young actor. Too young. Younger than Max in Thunderdome. Max is in his forties in Thunderdome, Max looks younger in Fury Road. So end of story, we can’t think at Fury Road like if it was a Fury Road with Mel Gibson and at the end he follow Furiosa.This would be a very different movie, EVEN if all the action would be the same.
...the ending is not build like a conclusion of the saga. It's not "this is how this character'story will finish". This is just one more episode of his adventures, arriving from nowhere, going back to nowhere.
It's exactly the same theme in MM2, and MM3. It creates a new trilogy based on this very theme : The better world we search. It's a variation about that. "Where must we go, we who wander this wasteland, in search of our better selves?"
Of course Fury Road was supposed to be a sequel in 1999, it's the fourth Mad Max movie with Mel Gibson, nobody would think that it was like Indiana Jones with a come back in time for the second episode.
Everybody would think, ok, that's what happened after Thunderdome.

But it's not.

All the work they've done, all the ideas... what's not on the screen disappeared. To know the preprod can help to understand the movie. But you can only judge what you see.

Literally I'm talking about this amount of detail that Miller creates or asks to create, then uses it to create the movies and when it ends on screen it's all blurred vision, a myth, nobody remembers anything, some mighty warrior tribes, reasons long forgotten ... my ass.

Because that preamble is not what they wanted to do “on screen”. It’s just research material. They made research, they think at backstories, but that's only preproduction work.
The main reason we switch from the actual facts, to the speech we have is simple : it's the same story told by a kid who didn't know about that. "Iran" or "Germany" doesn't make any sense for the Feral Kid.

And the way it does make sense is because he traces it all back. From 40 years into the future to now. That's why those movies don't have crazy stuff in them that's just 'invented' but they do appear crazy. If those movies didn't have to make sense so much then what would stop Miller from putting crazy things in them for the hell of it? Sure why not, make Mad Max take place in 2458, give him lasers and robots and let's roll with that!
It's a 'myth' after all, right? .

Nope, because the Max world has its own rules… The stories make sense, but not in that way. They talk about stuff, they develop themes, schemes, movements. But it’s not a diary of the apocalypse.

in order to create this 'mythical' craziness he had to create a very realistic timeline for everything first. And then he goes "Let's not tell them any of this, give as little details as possible. The world is there and it works. Let their imagination do the work now".

Yes, because we don’t give a shit of the “world”, the movie doesn’t tell the story of the world, it tells a hero’s story. I think it’s not like “let their imagination do the work”, it’s let’s do a western, and forget about explaining when Christophe Colombus arrived, how the west was won, how the states were built and the political situation of the 1870’s world. It’s more : “we have two gunslinger in town, they want to fight”. Who give a shit to organize a proper timeline with the dollar trilogy ?! Nobody, the movies are not about that.

And THAT APPROACH works. Well... most of the time. Remember how people were angry with Tom's accent in Fury Road? I think maybe Miller shoud've said that Max was so long out in the Wasteland that he literally forgot how to utter words.
Because that's where Max's 'funny accent' came from. Not because Hardy couldn't pull off the Australian accent. But again, they had it all written down, never revealed it! And in this case it backfired.

Ah ah yes, but… mmmh, if it doesn’t really works, it’s because it was not very well done. The idea of Max grunting words, and, slowly, come back to langage is a very good idea. Brilliant ! But if you want to work that idea, you can’t have your character saying at the very beginning : “They got my blood, now it's my car!”
I think, without this kind of mistake, people would understand the idea way better. We have a wild Max, big hairs, eating living lizards and grunting. Everything make sense.

I bet he even told his writers not to reveal the details of the story and it took a lot of arm twisting to get some admission from Mark Sexton. Even he told me "hey man don't worry about those things it's just a movie". No you asshole, you have the whole detailed world built for this and now you're hiding it from us all haha (no offense to Mark if he's reading it, we're solid:). You went in so far as to write backstories for props for the movie and you're telling me there's no reason why Max has the Interceptor in the movie? Because that's the 'archetype'? They know why he has it, they know what happened between MMBT and Fury Road and I'll find out if it's the last thing I do

Simple : if they make The Wasteland, we’ll have the story. If we don’t have The Wasteland, we’ll never know. And we don’t care because Tom Hardy’s Max cannot be Mel Gibson’s one. End of story. Tom Hardy has his Interceptor for the same reason he’s an ex-cop. The Fury Road from 2002 would be, only with slight difference, a very different film.

And Miller saying he didn't work out the timeline himself - I call bullshit on that. So much time spent on figuring the tiniest details and not a word on why the world looks like that? Why Max has his car back? Why Max is so insane?

The answers are in "Furiosa" and in "The Wasteland". Miller told me "we'll understand why he's like a beast in the begining of Fury Road in the Wasteland that happens a year before the events of FR"
But, if there will be no prequel, we'll never know why the car or we'll never have more infos about the Citadel...

Enough!!!

Under these drastic circumstances there's no choice for me:

I have to call George and ask him about the TRUTH!
Happy weekend, folks!

seriz wrote:The pitch was about and Old Max, who went crazy from all the years in the Wasteland and was on the brink of suicide (Traveling to the Plains of Silence). He then meets Furiosa and the girls, falls in love with Furiosa goes to live with her in the Citadel.

Yeah, but that, it’s the spark idea. The first idea like Mad Max 1 screenplay. There are so many things that never went to the screen and could change everything.

Except they actually wrote it in the movie. It's in the storyboards. It wasn't a spark idea that flew in a different direction, that was the movie that was just weeks from being shot in 2003.

seriz wrote:That's the thing about Miller, he asks everyone around him to figure things out in extreme detail including himself, and when the movie comes out he blurs out the details so that the movies appear like 'myths'.

But backstories are tools for the actors to understand their characters, for the art direction... it's not the "real story" of those characters.

When they ask actors to come up with their own backstories I don't necessarily take it seriously because those stories are always refined by Miller. But I don't agree that the backstories are just a direction that's meant to be discarded.
The things in the preamble actually ended up being represented in the intro to Mad Max 2! Even if the narrator doesn't give us any details, just read what it says in that document and look at the footage - it matches.

seriz wrote:So end of story, we can’t think at Fury Road like if it was a Fury Road with Mel Gibson and at the end he follow Furiosa.This would be a very different movie, EVEN if all the action would be the same.

I'm not neglecting that Fury Road now is a reboot and it's a different hing. However it still mostly is that sequel at its core. Yes, it would've been different with Mel, in fact McCarthy said that Fury Road with Mel would have more focus on Max because Mel's legacy as Max would carry with him, the character of Max would've been more substantial. He would've tried to throw all of the girls out of the War Rig most of the time and go his own way. But the way it went with Tom Hardy the character of Max got sidelined and became equal to Furiosa to the point folks say it's not even Max's movie anymore. So the balance now is different.

Again, I see your point that what we see on the screen is what we get. But we can't forget about how this movie came about, what it was because it's what made it. Seriously, to the point where you can throw in Mel in it and it'd magically turn into a sequel to MMBT, not by default because Mel is in it but because all the pieces fall into place as they should've. The way it turned out - it's a reboot, but I'm pointing out that we need to keep in mind what's under this 'reboot' paintjob.

seriz wrote:Because that preamble is not what they wanted to do “on screen”. It’s just research material.

Read it and watch the intro. The imagery that's only present in the preamble (and not in the script!) is in that intro. It literally ended up on screen:)

seriz wrote:The answers are in "Furiosa" and in "The Wasteland". Miller told me "we'll understand why he's like a beast in the begining of Fury Road in the Wasteland that happens a year before the events of FR"
But, if there will be no prequel, we'll never know why the car or we'll never have more infos about the Citadel...

The thing is, I'm afraid we already know those things, because they're in the comic books and WB were dumb enough to use Miller's materials without his permission on the video game. I don't know why comic books get so much shit from people, they're actual backstories written long time ago only materialized by the artists. I really hope though that for The Wasteland they don't repeat what we've seen in the comic books (and the game) because that would be a travesty.

Anyway, I think this whole conversation is the most hardcore nerdy shit I've ever seen on here, so good job everyone:) I think we need to tone it down a little maybe.

The biggest problem for me with the timeline is that Thunderdome is the odd one out, Max and the world isn't like the Road Warrior's, its not just the PG rating and kids, its the whole story and characters, that Max would never have rebuilt his interceptor or gone feral tormented by his failures, with the horrors Max has seen Bartertown was a Eutopia of trade and order in the Wasteland, a symbol that was rebuilding a functional and safe society but he sees it as a bad place and is ultimately responsible for destroying it and bringing chaos back to the region. I find it a very un-Mad Max film for many reasons like this.

However Fury Road's Max is a more logical progression of the character after the Tanker chase. In the end many people still died, most notably the Warrior Woman and Papagallo the leader, Max also killed a lot of people in that chase which took place a day after he lost his Interceptor and Dog. In the end he sees them to safety and chooses not to join them, instead going back out in the wasteland with he burden of his actions. Its not a happy ending for Max, he's lost everything again, that would drive a person insane. To me this easily leads up to the wild animal running away from the Warboys with his rebuilt interceptor. Just fit in several more years wondering the waste failing to protect and save people, society continuing to collapse, nuclear war, water wars, rebuilding the interceptor, Hope and Glory story, losing his mind and then being captured by the Warboys. Thuderdome just doesn't fit into Max's story IMO and I see that as a common reason for people not liking the change to Max's character in Fury Road.

Originally there were ideas to have Mel's Max as a prisoner deep in the citadel who gets freed by Nux as a tracker, that could work after Thunderdome but not if the character had gone feral.

The film Wasteland could be the prequel to really explain the changes in Fury Road or it could mix things up even further with a back story that ads more inconsistencies. A third telling of the Hope & Glory story would be a bit messy though.

seriz wrote:

If you say that then you cannot logically blame Uncle Entity for claiming whatever he wants. Miller is responsible for this inconsistencies that could have been easily avoid if he didn't pick a younger actor (yet the script remains basically unchanged)

Uncle Entity can claims what he wants. I mean, nobody tried to stop fans to create any theories they want !

Well, what you see on-screen is what you REALLY get, just put the good or bad intentions of the creators aside. Occam's razor.

And so, even if "Fury Road" is a spiritual sequel to Thunderdome, and "the" Max of FR is a spiritual counterpart to the original trilogy Max (Max Prime), "Fury Road" is also a totally new alternate dimension where things went differently. And so this is what you get, no matter what you want LOL!

This is very useful.