www.madmaxmovies.com

DetritusMaximus wrote:You mean like this?

scag66 wrote:

DetritusMaximus wrote:You mean like this?

Awesome, what`s the background on this?

GEORGE MILLER ISN'T OPPOSED TO MAD MAX SPIN-OFFS
6 OCT 2015

BY DANIEL KRUPA Mad Max director and creator George Miller isn't adverse to the idea of other directors telling stories set within his Wasteland universe.

When IGN put the idea to the Australian director, comparing it to what Disney has planned for the Star Wars spin-offs, he said:

"No, depending on who the director is. It would be wonderful if it was someone like Guillermo [del Toro] or someone like that it would be fantastic."

But in addition to del Toro, it seems like Miller has some pretty specific choices in mind based on their skills as directors.

“There are several. I would say there are three, but I won’t say who they are. I keep talking about this being visual music, you need someone very, very strong on film language and syntax. It’s not just lumping a whole lot of action together without any coherence. Those directors who do that are the ones I always just want to see their movies regardless. I always want to see their movies. Like some composers or song writers, you just want to listen to their songs.”

Mad Max: Fury Road's current worldwide box office stands at $374,736,354. And while Miller has discussed the potential for future movies – he's written two Max scripts, one of which became Fury Road – he's not yet being drawn on specifics:

"About the only thing I should say at this moment in time because I don’t like jinxing things. I’m really one of those people.

“I’m one of those people who believe in what John Lennon said, ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans’. But all I’ll say is we’re definitely talking about other movies."

'Mad Max: Fury Road' Director George Miller On Making 2015's Most Thought-Provoking Action Film

BY NICK LEVINE
6TH OCTOBER 2015

When Mad Max: Fury Road sped into cinemas in May, NME called it "the most exhilarating film of 2015 so far". Since then, director George Miller's high-octane chase movie has grossed $375 million at the global box office and become one of the most analysed blockbusters in recent memory. Everything from its punky aesthetic to its supposed feminist agenda to its freaky flamethrower guitarist has prompted a breathless internet thinkpiece. With Fury Road now being released on DVD and Blu-ray, NME sat down with Miller to find out his take on the theories surrounding the film.

NME: Mad Max: Fury Road has been hailed as one of the best films of 2015. Were you expecting such a positive response?

No. I've never made a movie that's been so positively reviewed. The big danger with a film like this is people could just read the surface and think of it as a simple chase movie. Because of the pace, there's no time for exposition and you have to pick up everything in passing: story, character, interaction of characters, the world itself. But we tried to put a lot of iceberg under the tip and what's so gratifying is that people are digging down into the subtext in a way that I never imagined. They're bringing up stuff that I was barely conscious of. They're reading it as a very dense film even though it looks very simple.

Did you expect it to be read as such a feminist story?

No, though I was aware it had a very powerful female character. There were a couple of reasons behind that. One, I was always fascinated by a character who appeared in the second Mad Max film, a warrior woman who's only there very briefly and dies in the final chase. Second, the basic idea was that everyone in this movie is a commodity: there are five wives, the breeders, who are fleeing the warlord and they need a road warrior. That couldn't be a male character because it would make for a very different story, so it had to be a female. And then you cast someone like Charlize [Theron] who I see more as Furiosa than Charlize. The Charlize we see in the Dior ads is a fraud to me! The real Charlize is Furiosa! And the rest followed from that. Unconsciously though, I’m definitely aware of female power because I have a daughter, a wife and a mother who are all very strong, wonderful women. But there was never an agenda, it arose purely out of the mechanics of the story.

What did you think when certain "men's rights" groups in the US spoke out against the film?

Well, the story is allegorical and therefore it's in the eye of the beholder – it’s open to everyone's interpretation. Obviously you're going to get fringe opinions and that was just one of them. I don't think it had any particular weight; it was noisy for a while and then it died down. It's a little bit like song lyrics: they can mean different things to different people. My favourite story is to do with 'Bohemian Rhapsody'. This person was convinced he had a really good idea of what the song was about, and he presented his theory to Freddie Mercury. After hearing the theory, Freddie Mercury just said, "If you see it, dear, it’s there." And I think it’s the same with the movie.

Furiosa's prosthetic arm has also caused a lot of debate online. It's been widely hailed as a powerful and forward-thinking depiction of disability because Furiosa doesn't let her missing limb hold her back, and she never seeks to explain it. Was this something you were conscious of when you created the character?

It's just part of the character. She’s a warrior, a survivor, and this is a wasteland. In our backstory [that we created for the film], we know how she lost her arm, but there’s no time in the three days in which this movie is set to have a recreational talk about how she lost her arm or how Max got shot in the knee. It's just part of who she is. But let me just say something really interesting about this. What I didn’t realise was that in some cultures, the left arm is the female arm and that's the arm Furiosa has lost. My reason for making it the left arm was to to save money on CGI: she's driving on the left-hand side, so that's the arm that's seen less. It was a purely practical thing but in some cultures it has this extra symbolism. See what I mean about the eye of the beholder?

A lot of critics have called the film "punk". Do you like that description?

I like it a lot. The reason I love these hard-action movies is they’re virtually silent movies with sound. There's very, very little dialogue and in a way it’s visual music. You could almost call it a visual rock opera. So I love that description. And there's also no question that the Mad Max films are westerns on wheels. The French said that about the second Mad Max film very early on, and they're definitely right.

What was the thinking behind the Doof Warrior character – the flamethrower guitarist on top of the truck?

Well, even before amplified sound there was always the music of war – to stir people up and signal different phases of the battle, there would be drums, bugles, bagpipes. Because all the vehicles in this movie are so noisy, we needed something that puts out a lot of noise, so that’s where the guitar with the amplifier comes in. Everything in this movie has to have a dual purpose and be made from found objects repurposed. So if you look at it carefully, the guitar has a hospital bedpan in the middle, and obviously it's also a weapon, a flame-thrower.

Is it true you already have screenplays for two sequels?

What happened was the film was green lit three times over a decade. And things kept on getting in the way. So in the process, we wrote a lot of backstory and two of those stories have become screenplays already. And we didn't even set out to write screenplays, we were just telling the stories. It's a very fully realised world. You could point to any object in this film and I could tell you its backstory. And I could do the same with the characters. I know who the Doof Warrior's mother was, and I know how this blind, mute man who could only play the guitar has been able to survive the wasteland.

Have you thought about when you'll make the next film?

Right now I don't want to go back into the wasteland. They're very tough movies to make, mainly because of the stunts. If you're doing stunts for 138 days, there's always that dread in the pit of your stomach that you could really hurt someone badly. We had a fantastic crew and incredible stunt riggers and there was a big, big emphasis on safety. But even so, fatigue sets in and you're in a remote location with all the heat and the dust, so there's always a risk. I've got to whip myself up to do that again, I've got to psych myself up.

roadwarriormfp wrote:

scag66 wrote:

DetritusMaximus wrote:You mean like this?

Awesome, what`s the background on this?

The hardtop was used in a remix of "addicted to base" about 10yrs ago. A sorta MM tribute.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmwGGLrDvfE

How George Miller dreamed up Mad Max: Fury Road and two planned sequels

October 8, 2015 - 5:34PM

Director George Miller has good news and bad news for fans of Mad Max: Fury Road.

Yes, he still wants to shoot the two sequels that were written during the 12 years it took to get that movie to the screen. But it is still too early to say when or even which new installment – one centering on Tom Hardy's Max, the other on Charlize Theron's​ Furiosa – he will film next.

"We're certainly talking about them but exactly the timing of that, I don't know," Miller said. "We're still working all that out."

The sequels, which would be shot in Australia after extended rain at Broken Hill forced a shift to the Namibian desert for Fury Road, have been a hot topic since the movie became a rare box office hit, taking $US375 million worldwide, that was almost universally acclaimed by critics.

The fourth Mad Max movie started with an idea that flashed into Miller's head as he crossed a street in Los Angeles in 1998. Then two years later, the former doctor had what he calls a waking dream – with the movie playing out in his head – on a flight from from Los Angeles to Sydney.

Ahead of a talk on creating Fury Road at the Graphic Festival on Sunday, Miller said it grew out of his "strong sense of inquiry".

"One of the things that drew me to this film was the notion of an extended chase and seeing what [viewers] could pick up on the run as it were," he said. "We were trying to put as much iceberg as possible underneath the tip.

"So you read it on the surface as a kind of visual poem but underneath you're trying to pick up as much subtext as possible."

As well as being one of the country's great storytellers – an Oscar winner whose celebrated directing career includes four Mad Max movies, two Happy Feets, Lorenzo's Oil, The Witches of Eastwick and the mini-series The Dismissal – Miller has long been a deep thinker about how stories work and why they matter, drawing on the theories of American mythologist Joseph Campbell.

"One of the major attractions of working in this wasteland world with Mad Max and all his cohorts is that you're going forward to the past," he said. "You're going back to a much more elemental world, which allows you to basically work in allegory.

"So you're drawing on history. You're drawing on present-day events. You're drawing on speculations as to the future we may be heading towards. You're conflating all of those and putting them into the mix and being rigorous about the design criteria that you're working with ... so that even though the movie plays at a helter-skelter pace, [viewers] are picking up enough on the run to make it believable. You hope they're drawn up into the world of the screen without questioning it."

Miller, 70, said "dreaming" a movie was far from rare in his life.

"It probably means I'm crazy but I do it all the time. Ever since I was a little kid, I've been living this imaginative life.

"The more you do something, the more your neurology adjusts to it and I'm pretty well hard-wired for story. Out of habit now, stories are playing in my head all the time."

Every movie Miller has written has come from a similar experience.

"They're not sleeping dreams," he said. "They're what I call hypnagogic dreams or daydreaming – that place between sleep and wakefulness. That unguarded moment when you're in a kind of dissociated state ... It's always in those sort of moments: on a long flight or in the shower.

"I remember having a conversation with George Lucas once and he said just about every great idea he's ever had has come in the shower because you can't be on the internet, you can't be on the phone, you're not watching TV.

"You're just there in that kind of state and the ideas come to your mind."

Miller said it necessarily changed the storytelling in Fury Road when Hardy took over from Mel Gibson as Max in the action series.

"The essential architecture of the story is always going to be there. But the actual tones and colour are going to vary depending on what the actor brings.

"You have something in your mind as you've written or devised it but when it's captured in the camera, that becomes the new reality. That's what you've got to work with.

"It's impossible to know exactly how different it would be but it must be different and pretty soon you've forgotten what you had in your imagination."

After that waking dream one night over the Pacific, Miller and co-writers Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris​ developed Fury Road in an inventive way. Instead of a script, they created 3500 storyboard panels – effectively comic book scenes – that outlined what happened in the movie shot by shot.

"The task was to see how much story or experience or felt life you could create for an audience during a very fast action piece," he said. "I'm always interested as to how film language is evolving.

"It's an acquired language. It basically laid down its syntax in the silent era. In many ways Mad Max is a silent movie with sound."