This is a Bergen Film Club podcast.
Hello, welcome to The Real Thing.
Hi, I'm your host, Joe Lawrence, and this is episode one of season four of The Real
Thing.
How freaking exciting is that?
It has been a good long hot minute since I recorded this podcast, but I'm back.
Summer, summered, spring, sprang, and now it is very rainy in Bergen and it is time
for autumn, which means, really, that is time for Bergen Film Club's fall semester.
Let's go.
We have a brilliant collection of films this autumn and it's going to be great.
We're going to talk about a lot of them on the podcast and as always some special episodes
and I'm very excited.
It seems very promising.
Season four seems so adult.
I think I can confidently say that the podcast has grown up now.
It's over a year old.
I am a year older than I was when I started this now.
Recently had my birthday.
Happy birthday me.
And yeah, but what is this podcast?
So Bergen Film Club is an independent cinema in Bergen, Norway that aims to show films
that deserve to be shown, that need a light shone upon them, whether that's directly seeking
out films that need to be shown, like female directors, non-binary directors trying to
give a voice to those who need it and just bring brilliant film, a great curated program
to the masses of Bergen and beyond.
The podcast, the real thing, essentially functions as a extension of the program.
So I'm going to talk about the films that are included in the program, which you can
go check out on bergenfilmclub.no.
And yeah, we're going to be doing that, but welcome to the podcast.
If it's your first time listening, I hope that this is going to be a good introduction
to the podcast and I hope that you enjoy it and that you go back and listen to some of
our older episodes because they're all great.
There is a whole like 36 episodes to listen to or something.
But right now we are starting off with a bang and a crash and a skrrr and some Australians.
Bergen Film Club had its premiere opening last week for the autumn semester, for the
autumn program with the movie Mad Max Fury Road, which is the film that we're going
to be talking about today.
I had not seen this film because it just completely passed me by.
I was what, 2015?
I was 17 and just this was before I was like into movies, I think.
And Mad Max just, I was like, that's a boy film and I'm not interested because it has
cars in it.
But how wrong I was at the time.
It turns out I love cars in this movie, particularly.
It was a very exciting film, great premiere for the film club and yeah, exciting things
to come.
Yeah, not much to say otherwise apart from that we should just get into the freaking
episode.
So we're starting off talking on the whole new season of The Real Thing, Mad Max Fury
Road from 2015, directed by George Miller.
Mad Max Fury Road, or as it has been called, a western on wheels, is a 2015 Australian
post-apocalyptic action film co-written, co-produced and directed by George Miller, who collaborated
with Brendan McCarthy, who is a well-recognized and known comic writer, TV writer and concept
production designer on shows and films such as SNL, Coneheads, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,
the film and the movie of the Borrowers, and Nicola Thuris, who is an Australian actor and
writer, TV writer and features actually in the original Mad Max movie in 1979.
This is indeed the fourth installment in the Mad Max franchise.
The film was nominated for 10 awards at the 88th Academy Awards, winning six and received
numerous other accolades including Best Film from the National Board Review and was also
named one of the top 10 films of 2015 by the American Film Institute.
Retrospectively, it has been called one of the greatest action films of all time and
one of the best films of the 2010s.
The film series follows the character, Max, who starts the series as a police officer
in a near future Australia that sits on the edge of collapse due to war, critical resource
shortage and ecocide.
As society devolves, gangsters brutally murder Max's family.
He then becomes a vagabond, drifting through the wasteland alone, periodically encountering
remnants of civilization who often rope him into their own machinations and problems.
His desire for apathy and a life alone is often challenged by his need to help others,
with him often intervening just in time to save the day before leaving once again.
After some time he becomes folklore alongside the character Imperator, Furiosa, who we'll
talk about later.
George Miller redefined the post-apocalyptic genre with his Mad Max series.
Yet, after making three sequentially larger films following a lukewarm reception of the
trilogy's concluding film, Beyond the Thunderdome, in 1985, Miller put the brakes on his franchise
for some years, stating quote, Whenever the idea of another came up, I thought there wasn't
much more I could do with it, end quote.
However, in 1988, when crossing the road in Los Angeles, the idea of a film centering
around one constant chase could work came to mind.
The yet to be made Fury Road spent years of production hell for several reasons, namely
scheduling issues, insurance, money, the weather, 9-11, the Iraq War, and babe the pig, pig
in the city.
Just before we get into the main part of the episode, I just want to say the main sources
that I used in this episode, of course, Wikipedia, the Mad Max Fury Road Wikipedia page.
Heavily cited from this New York Times article by Kyle Buchanan called Mad Max Fury Road
the oral history of a modern action classic in which he interviewed the whole cast and
everything and got insights into the filmmaking process.
There's also the book Blood, Sweat and Chrome, The Wild and True Story of Mad Max by Kyle
Buchanan also.
A Guardian article by Peter Bradshaw, which also heavily cited the New York Times article
and many more, which you can read in the show notes.
Okay, so let's get into the production or namely the pre-production of Mad Max Fury
Road.
Mad Max Fury Road was stuck in what is often referred to as production hell, a term mentioned
pretty often on the podcast, especially with a lot of the bigger films that we talk about.
We spoke about it on the Dune episode, for example.
Following Beyond Thunderdome, Miller got the idea for a film containing a singular chase
which focuses only violent characters fighting not over oil, but this time over human beings.
From the Collider article, Miller discussed the difficulty in writing a movie like this
in a traditional way since he opted to outline in storyboards which were almost comic-like.
He said that the obvious way to have done this was with pictures as it was easier to
get all of the ideas out and put it into words later.
Working with five storyboard artists, they ended up with around 3500 panels, which is
actually almost equivalent to the number of shots in the film.
Latorreis and McCarthy, who I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, helped coalesce
the storyboards into a script and these two also designed many of the characters and the
vehicles included in the film.
The previous three films had featured the then relatively unknown Mel Gibson as the
eponymous Max.
The film, back around 2000 or 2001, was slated for pre-production with 20th Century Fox.
In this time, Gibson was still very really interested in reprising his role in this new
movie, and Gibson was around 45 at the time with filming set to begin in the Australian
outback, the location of the previous three installments of Mad Max.
However, the film met its first major hurdle around this time also.
The studios were already getting cold feet about George Miller following the lukewarm
reception of his 1990s film Babe, Pig in the City.
However, the first real issue to come was 9-11.
Miller says this is when quote, everything changed in the hopeful new project.
It was impossible to ensure or transport the vehicles to be included in the film.
The fallout of the attacks, despite the obvious, led to the collapse of the American dollar
against the Australian dollar, which caused the budget of the film to quote balloon.
In the New York Times article, production designer Colin Gibson said quote, I was in
Namibia in 2003 when I got the call to stop spending money.
I don't know whether the studio decided to reroute the money back to the Iraq war, or
if it was the email I got from Mel Gibson's wife asking me how many Muslims there may
or may not be in Namibia and therefore how interested she may or may not be in the whole
family coming to visit.
End quote.
Before they'd had the chance to reconvene and set plans in action, Miller and his team
had already committed to the new Happy Feet movie.
They spent the next four years working hard on the Happy Feet, a movie that's themes
are not so widely different from that of Mad Max.
But following the success of Happy Feet and convincing the studio to reinvest in Fury
Road, Miller returned to pre-production without Mel Gibson, however.
It's not really worth touching on Mel Gibson's quote, turbulence, as George Miller very dotingly
puts it, because we all know that he is racist, anti-Semitic and a bad guy.
In Time Out magazine, Miller kind of skirted the issue when asked about it rather reasoning
Gibson's absence from the movie to be due to his age, that this wasn't quote, the movie
unforgiven.
In the New York Times article, producer Doug Mitchell says quote, Miller pivoted to directing
the animated film Happy Feet and when it proved to be a box office success for Warner Bros.
He was able to, like I said, convince the studio to take on Fury Road.
Still his longtime leading man Mel Gibson was now in the 80s 50s and considered a Hollywood
pariah.
Miller and Mitchell decided to search for a new Max, end quote.
And thus begun their hunt for a new leading man.
Many not so well known at the time actors, but well known now were considered such as
the very unknown Armie Hammer, Jeremy Renner, Michael Fassbender, Joel Kinnaman, Heath Ledger,
Eric Banner and Eminem, who said that he wouldn't be a part of the film unless they could film
it in the US.
So that didn't work out.
So casting was so far along at this point, so now we're kind of getting it through the
2000s on the timeline that Zoe Kravitz, who plays one of the five wives in Fury Road,
said that she had done chemistry test readings with Jeremy Renner, which was around 2009.
With the intention of someone to play Max in the same way that James Bond is replaced.
This is how George Miller kind of went about reframing the character of Max.
This seemed to retroactively fit very well into the Mad Max lore, as Max is known as
an everyman, a wanderer, folklore hero, predating quote local history.
Miller was drawn to Tom Hardy.
And I should say that this is a pre inception Tom Hardy, as Max claiming him to be quote
the most evident of all suggested, drawing a parallel between Hardy and Gibson upon their
first meeting with the director.
So now equipped with a new leading man, it came to cast the leading female role, which
was a slightly less convoluted story than the recasting of Max.
An original pitch in the role of Furiosa was Sigourney Weaver, who was indeed suggested
by Gibson himself, Mel Gibson, around 2000.
So following all that happened with Gibson and everything else that happened, like the
Iraq war, this idea was dropped.
But despite this, George Miller claims that he'd always been intent on casting Charlize
Theron.
Around that time, names such as Uma Thurman weren't considered, but Miller was even considering
her around the first period of pre-production.
And at the time, Theron's agent had claimed that Charlize wasn't interested, to which
she responded over a decade later in the New York Times article, quote, no one ever told
me.
When she was asked about the casting of the film, she said, quote, I grew up on 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 want to be in Mad Max movies.
Are you kidding me?
End quote.
Furiosa is heralded as one of Theron's most definitive roles, which is a huge claim because
she has so many.
The original pitch for Furiosa's design was something more ethereal and something more
something Theron claimed worried her at the time and that the character was coming off
a little Barbarella-y.
She had this like beautiful long hair and it was kind of like Aboriginal Australian kind
of like markings on her face.
The original character had been designed by someone else, but along with Charlize, costume
designer Jenny Beavan, I should say Jenny Beavan, OBE, who is a multiple award winner
and nominee for her work on films such as Cruella in 2021, Fury Road, obviously, and
many more.
She and Charlize pitched changes to Miller and Charlize said, quote, I don't know how
she's getting by in the mechanics room with all this hair.
I think we need to shave my head and she needs to be more androgynous and more grounded character.
You know, he trusted me with so much that it kind of makes me emotional.
In that sense, I feel like I let him down.
End quote.
But I think kind of updating and kind of like getting a more realistic idea of what Furious's
character looks like.
That made a lot of sense.
I don't think it would have made sense to have her look like one of the wives in the
film.
She needed to look distinct because she is a distinct character.
So in 2009 slash 2010, production was relatively ready to go.
Miller had been a consideration to make the film an animated feature at some point, but
Miller ultimately had decided to shoot a live action film since many of the previous sets
and various vehicles were already available from the previous failed filming in the early
2000s.
Miller additionally announced his intention to make a second film straight after Fury
Road, Mad Max Furiosa.
Equipped with his mostly brand new cast and team, Miller was hopeful for Fury Road again.
The sets were built, 200 vehicles ready, all stunts rehearsed, fake roads built, Australian
shooting was set to begin.
And then the rains came in an unprecedented matter.
During the final stages of pre-production, the weather pattern in Australia, Queensland,
shifted dramatically in a quote once in a century and quote type of changed.
The barren desert slowly became a beautiful smattering of wildflowers, which is not exactly
post-apocalyptic chic.
Many of the cast worried that this would be the end of all of their endeavors along with
some of the crew, but Miller was determined to continue.
They waited a year to see if it would dry up and if the flowers would die back, but
they didn't.
But Fury Road was a movie that was always going to be made.
It insisted on it.
The whole operation then moved to Namibia, where it really never rains.
This move changed the perspective of many of the cast now that they were really in it,
far removed from society, practically living and breathing the post-apocalyptic world.
In July 2012, over a year since the first rain drops in Australia, filming finally began.
Some really interesting stuff to read about the filming experience of the actors.
I really suggest that you go and have a look through the Mad Max Fury Road Oral History
of a Modern Action Classic by Kyle Buchanan, that New York Times article.
Also check out his book.
It has some very dishy details.
Well, dishy is the wrong word.
It's like onset tensions basically, because everyone was just kind of stuck in Namibia
whilst filming it.
It was said by a lot of the actors that they couldn't even imagine that this film was ever
going to be what it became to be, because it just felt so...
I don't know if you could say that the film is grassroots because it has an enormous budget,
but nonetheless, that's how they felt.
The idea of it eventually becoming this huge conglomerate of awards and the whole industry
that it became was hard to imagine when they were just all stuck together in Namibia, making
this film isolated all alone.
Coming to the post-production, the film was edited by Margaret Sixel, who won the Academy
Award for the best film editing and a BAFTA for editing too.
She is a frequent collaborator of George Miller, who is also her husband.
Sixel had never worked on an action movie, yet this is exactly the reason, Miller claims,
that she was chosen.
That if the film was edited by a normal guy, quote, it would look like every other action
movie, end quote.
Sixel had around 480 hours of footage to edit, which alone took her three months to watch.
And that was just to stress the belaboring point, that that's even before she edited
the movie.
She had to watch 480 hours of footage, which took months and months and months.
Cinematographer John Seale, who Miller kind of pulled back out of retirement for this
film, stated that 50 to about 60% of the film runs below the traditional frame rate of a
film of 24 frames per second.
And that this is due to Miller slowing down scenes, so what was happening could be better
understood.
And that also this was done in the opposite, that if there were scenes that he felt like
needed to kind of like be hurried along, he sped it up.
And that that made the film kind of incredible in this way, because almost every shot has
been kind of like manually manipulated.
The sound designer Mark Mancini stated that he viewed the war rig that Furiosa and Max
are driving across the wasteland together.
He viewed this as kind of an allegory for Moby Dick, where the Morton Joe, the baddie
in the film, playing the role of Captain Ahab, and as such the mechanical truck sounds of
the rig were layered with whale calls to provide a more animal-like quality.
And when the tankers pierced with harpoons, milk sprays out and the sounds of whales breathing
from their blowholes were incorporated into this.
And for the final design of the war rig, the only sounds used were slowed down bag rolls
to symbolise the death of a truck as a living creature.
So this film is so layered with so much thought and intent and in a way it feels like a comic
book come to life the way that everything is set up.
So awesome.
I'm gonna just talk quickly about kind of what I thought about the film, because this
is my podcast and I can do what I want.
I really liked it.
It was awesome.
I... it was interesting talking to some people about hearing that initially at the time the
people were surprised at like Max's role is like relatively small in the film, kind of
like he's the character that we follow into the film obviously, but then Furiosa is the
character that is kind of leading the... well, you know, she's driving.
She's driving the film literally.
But at least Darren is incredible.
Sometimes I feel like with big action films, nuance doesn't always come very naturally
because maybe it doesn't feel like it's always needed.
In a lot of action films that I've seen, I guess nuances, what I feel like is lacking.
It's just kind of like, like blam, blam, blam, the end, which is fine.
That's nice sometimes.
But it was great to see in this film that there's a lot of emotion and a lot of thought
and a lot of care into the characters put in.
And yeah, I really enjoyed it.
It was so exciting.
Like what an exciting movie.
Seeing it in the cinema was so great.
I'm so glad that the first time I got to see it was in a cinema because I was on the edge
of my seat the whole movie for real.
I've heard like, I've like generally known the movie, but not like deeply, just known
like the What a Lovely Day thing by Nicholas Holt and The Witness Me.
But The Witness Me had a much bigger role than I was expecting.
And I kind of enjoyed it.
I thought that it was kind of dumb when it first started, but I thought like that kind
of like dedication to one guy through like brainwashing.
I liked seeing that kind of like unravel over time.
And that the themes of a lot of George Miller's films, it's strange to kind of compare all
of the Mad Max films to Babe and Happy Feet, for example.
But the core of all of his films, I think you could say are these, like, no matter what
the situation is, connection and family and kind of like love and care, despite the odds,
is like what drives every person through a bad situation and kind of like realizing and
understanding that interpersonal connection is the only thing that like makes us real
and can get us through the day and win the day.
And that happens in Happy Feet and that happens in Mad Max.
It's nice that he has these kind of like recurring themes of hopefulness in extremely horrible
situations.
And yeah, and like that he is bringing a lot of environmentalism and a lot of climate centered
kind of rubric into his films so consistently, which is kind of just what I wanted to touch
out at the end of the episode, because we're coming to the end now.
I like to try and touch on kind of like a topic that's included in the film that can
be expanded on a little bit and kind of tie stuff together.
And I think there's something nice to talk about here is this notion, this genre of climate
fiction, which is something that as many may not know, I have studied science, biology
and conservation my entire academic career and it's something that I work on.
And I think about all the time.
So seeing it in, seeing it fictionalized is very interesting.
So I just wanted to talk a little bit about climate fiction.
Yeah, there's often abbreviated as CLIFI.
And it's this genre that's exploring impact of climate change and environmental crises
through speculative and imaginative narratives.
So it's basically taking this kind of like post-apocalyptic narrative and framing it
through environmentalism and climate change.
These stories set in dystopian futures, alternative realities depict profound effects of global
warming, natural disasters and ecological collapse on humanity and the planet exactly
like in Mad Max.
By weaving together science, often real science, politics and personal experiences, CLIFI
challenges the reader to confront the potential or the reader.
I say reader because a lot of the research I was doing for it was a lot very book based,
but anyone like the consumer to confront the potential consequences of mankind's current
environmental trajectory.
I say that it serves both as like a cautionary tale and as like a call to action, that's
inspiring you to reflect on the urgent need for sustainable solutions to our rapidly changing
world.
It is a topic that I would love to get into more maybe in a future episode is something
that I can touch on again or only focus on.
But I think this idea of climate fiction is something that isn't necessarily so new because
I think that a lot of the post-apocalyptic stuff has its kind of like basis in like what
if climate change did get really bad like the day after tomorrow for example for a huge
Hollywood film that basically is talking about climate change.
I think climate change often because we don't experience it real time, well we do experience
it real time but not the huge, huge effects that will eventually happen if we don't make
any changes.
It kind of affronts us with this image of what could happen.
So say in Man Max this they live in a desert these horrible arid regions where water is
such a scarcity and oil is a scarcity and then human life becomes this commodity that
can be used and sold and bought it but that is a society that is a product of the society
that we live in now.
We live in a society bro that the way that we're living now could in fact create this
kind of situation.
So something that Man Max briefly touches on actually in its intro with a couple of
the like news article things clipped over the intro is talking about these water wars
and that there were these water wars in the 20th century in America, in California and
these other places as well that like this scarcity of water and scarcity of materials
will, you know, society can't effectively exist without the stuff that it exists on
now.
Margaret Atwood has a really great essay that she wrote called It's Not Climate Change,
It's Everything Changed where she presents three different options for how the world
will exist without oil that we have the choice to find alternative we run out or a third
terrible option and they're all pretty bad but there are these like very notable works
like Margaret Atwood's entire bookography, filmography, what's a bookography?
There's something like that like her all her work and you know like J.G. Ballard wrote
The Drowned World books like that, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Orox and Crake, Margaret
Atwood, Annihilation by Jeff Van Damier, The History of Bees by Maya Lund and of course
Dune couldn't go without mentioning Dune by Frank Herbert who was a huge environmentalist
and that the origin of the story of Dune is in Oregon I think that Frank Herbert was observing
that to stop the shifting sand dunes in Portland they planted all this grass and he observed
it from like a helicopter and wanted to publish about it but then that's how Dune came to
be and that in fact on the first ever Earth Day Frank Herbert spoke to over 30,000 people
in Philadelphia telling them quote I don't want to be in the position of telling my grandchildren
quote I'm sorry there's no more Earth left for you we've used it all up end quote like
saying that in the 1970s is like so you know like this notion of environmentalism of climate
change has always been real always since back then and resource scarcity and not preserving
the world but creating a world that is able to exist for future generations but that's
where I think climate fiction is like it shows us how awful it could be and that it like
I said is presenting us with how we need to change but in works like Oryx and Crake by
Margaret Atwood and like Mad Max it does show the kind of like the tenacity of the human
spirit that like through connection and through understanding each other is like really how
we survive and there's so much to get into climate fiction and I've been I was thinking
today especially about like there's some music even that like Wise Blood's most recent albums
Titanic Rising and and In the Darkness Hearts Aglow she is a Natalie Merring is a huge
proponent of environmentalism and especially like marine life protection which is something
that a lot of people can kind of attest to she's singing about these kind of like notions
about like what is our world now and what is it to be human and basically destroy the
home that we live in there's a very great poem by Margaret Atwood called The Moment
which I won't read but I recommend that you do read but I will leave the whole thing I'll
just kind of sum up what I just spoke about but it's very good quote by Margaret Atwood
from The Handmaid's Tale nothing changes instantaneously in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled
to death before you knew it end quote.
So forgive me my little environmental tangent at the end of that the reality is and it's
that's I really have to stress that essay that Margaret Atwood wrote it's not climate
change it's everything change because it really you know we are one missing commodity away
from Mad Max and environmentalism and climate change and conservation is a scary depressing
thing to think about and as someone who did a four-year bachelor in conservation and just
got increasingly more depressed at the notion that there is no hope there is hope because
we have research and we have science and we have each other and we have to believe in
our community to make a change and we can do it and make Mad Max stay fiction that is
I'm asking you episode one season four of the podcast please do not make Mad Max real
I am very very car sick and I wouldn't like it.
Well thank you very much for listening it's been so fun oh my god I love podcasting we
have some great episodes coming and go follow the Instagram at the real thing pod go follow
the Bergen Film Club Instagram as well at Bergen Film Club come to the film club if
you're in Bergen be a volunteer come say hi thank you so much for listening I've been
Joe Lawrence this has been the real thing goodbye.