Half the Picture's first guest is Brendan McCarthy, Mad Max: Fury Road's co-writer and designer! Brendan joined us to discuss his experiences working with George Miller on one of the greatest action films of all time and broke down Fury Road's original ending, Splendid's original (and much more hardcore) death scene that was cut from the film and even teased the upcoming and eagerly anticipated 'Furiosa!'
*Note: This episode was recorded before Furiosa's release.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Hello, I'm Billy with me here as Armadali and joining us is Brendan McCarthy, distinguished
(00:06):
comic book artist and co-writer and designer of Man Max Fury Road.
Hello Brendan.
Hello there Chaps, how are you?
Not too shabby, thank you.
Oh well, thank you very much.
Yeah, pleasure to talk to you.
We thought we'd start with asking you, so going right back to the beginning of this
film, you know, all the way back to 1982 I suppose, 1981.
So you had sort of, in your career at that point, you had been a comic book illustrator,
(00:29):
you'd been working with Peter Milligan for quite some time and then working on 2008.
I believe you were starting to build your career as a comic book artist and then I want to
say you found yourself in Australia in a screening of Man Max 2 Road Warrior and I think it's
fair to say that that kind of blew your head off of it.
Is that fair to say?
(00:50):
Yeah, there's a whole generation of us from that period in my age group who, if you like,
what Fury Road is for you guys, Road Warrior was for us.
It was the one that we all staggered out of the cinema with smoke coming out of our head
thinking what on earth have I just seen, this is amazing.
(01:11):
In my case I turned around, bought another ticket and went straight back into the movie
and saw it twice that evening.
Yeah, it was a big influence and it had a big cultural impact as well.
You saw it in pop culture, Durand Durand videos, books like Ridley Walker.
The post-apocalyptic nuclear threat was quite big at the time with Thatcher and Reagan and
(01:37):
the feeling was that the apocalypse was imminent, kind of similar to now really.
So it had a big influence on me.
I also had, doing what you call now called a gap year and being in Australia.
I was very interested in surfing.
In those days it hadn't really reached the UK.
(01:59):
And I used to go out and watch surfers all the time and gradually thought about fusing
Mad Max and surfers together in a drowned world, post-apocalyptic thing, which I eventually
turned into a comic called Freak Wave, which preceded the film Waterworld.
So you kind of headed the curve when it came to Hollywood and Hollywood projects being
made decades on.
(02:21):
Then I suppose what happened next in terms of youths coming on board into the Mad Max,
into the universe and actually helping to make the next film was, in the fourth film,
Fear Road, was you contacted George Miller, I believe, and with a letter that wasn't
the opening line simply whatever happened to Mad Max.
That was the pitch.
No, that's true.
(02:42):
But what it was is that by this stage I was the production designer of the computer animated
TV series called Reboot, which was a big phenomenon at the time.
And we did an episode which was a pastiche of the Mad Max world, particularly Road Warrior.
And so I sent a VHS as it was back then, before the days of the internet, to George with that
(03:11):
little post-it note on it saying whatever happened to Mad Max.
And the episode of Reboot, which was the Mad Max pastiche.
And then a few, about a few months later, I got a call from his producer, Doug Mitchell,
to say, you know, what is this?
This is really interesting.
We're going to be in Hollywood, like, you know, in a couple of weeks.
Any chance we could meet you and talk about this?
(03:32):
We've got a project we'd like to talk to you about.
So I went up to Hollywood and met them both and, you know, explained about CGI.
Because back then CGI was completely unknown.
It was a brand new technology.
And Pixar's Toy Story had come out by then.
(03:55):
And there was a lot of interest in CGI because each CGI film was hitting really big.
Because the novelty of CGI was big.
So you were getting Toy Story ants.
It was brand new and everybody was sort of thinking what the hell is this?
And also noticing the box office on it.
So George Miller had been approached by Warner Brothers to develop a Mad Max TV series along
(04:16):
the lines of Xena or Hercules.
Before streaming, you had cable TV.
And the cable networks were a bit more open to violence or whatever.
So George was thinking about doing this TV series and wanted to know instead of doing
matte paintings, could we substitute CGI so he could move the camera?
So, you know, when you do a matte painting, the camera's locked.
(04:39):
So, you know, I was talking a bit about that.
But the conversation quickly spilled into Mad Max and the, you know, and what about
that bit in the film?
You know, that shot, did you?
So I was being a road warrior nut.
I knew all about it.
I'd seen all the films hundreds of times.
So the conversation, you know, and then I sort of, I suppose foolishly in a meeting
(05:02):
where you're pitching for a gig, I said, I don't think you should do a TV series.
I think you should do a movie.
It's the same amount of work.
And a movie's far more exciting.
If you were to do an amazing Mad Max film, I think it would just blow everybody away.
You know, just get that spirit of road warrior rather than thunder down into a new Mad Max
film, blah, blah, blah.
And you know, we were sort of doing and throwing on that.
(05:25):
And he was a bit more, I don't know about film.
The thing about film is that with a TV series, you could go, yeah, I'm looking forward to
a Mad Max TV series.
But for me, I was more excited by a new movie.
To me, Mad Max was a cinematic experience.
And so anyway, I said to him, look, if you ever think about doing a movie, I mean, I'll
never make a Mad Max film, but you might.
(05:47):
Here's some ideas and, you know, you can have them.
I'll never make a film.
So, you know, and so he let me pitch him this idea from Mad Max film, which involved a guy
breeding a girl to produce offspring.
In that case, I was thinking about, you know, the extinction event of the human race, a
bit like the dinosaurs, it's our turn.
(06:09):
And this guy sort of trying to create a human being that was viable, that would live because
so many by now I was saying the world must be so toxic that most of everybody's dying
off for they don't last long.
So some of the older generation are lasting like Max, etc.
And this kind of warlord character.
(06:30):
Anyway, that was, there were other things as well in it, some quite ridiculously silly
sci-fi stuff.
But I feel what happened is that it kicked him off thinking about it.
And then about four months later, I got a call out of the blue saying, do you want to come
to Sydney and knock some ideas about, you know, I'm thinking about doing the Mad Max
(06:50):
film.
And I thought, whoa.
So I finished up a TV series I was doing called Weirdos, where I was designing it.
It happened to be an animation TV series based on hot rod toys from the 1960s, a bit like
the Big Daddy Roth stuff, if you know what that is.
(07:11):
And so I had sort of hot rods rolled in my head.
By the time I got to Sydney, the first thing I did was say, right, you've got to have hot
rods in a Mad Max film.
This is crazy.
So out with the dune buggies and came the hot rods.
So that was almost the first input into the film.
And if you've got hot rods, you then got, well, who's driving these young kids?
Who are these young kids?
(07:31):
At first they were called Necro boys.
And then George, when I left the project, eventually he eventually changed the name
to War Boys.
And we started growing it from core ideas, who's this guy who's breeding women.
But George told me his idea then.
And it was kind of the core of Fury Road.
(07:52):
What he had was there's a big Citadel castle kind of thing.
And there's a guy, he's got these wives rather than one girl.
He's now got five of them.
And he's breeding them to try and create a viable human.
At that stage, the warlord still had a kind of motive of trying to keep the human race
going, but that got lost really in the final film you saw long after I left.
(08:19):
He became more of a sort of an evil patriarch who's just trying to keep his dynasty going.
So for me, that lacked a bit of moral complexity because if the girls were, if you like, the
future of the human race and they were wanting to get run away from a safe environment, it
(08:41):
made it a bit more morally complex.
But that's in the end, I'm not the director and it's George's baby.
We're in the George Miller show here, not my show.
So for the first year, we just basically, it's just me and George in a room with another
(09:02):
guy who was a really good artist called Peter Pound, who also happened to be Australia's
kind of like main underground comic artists.
Underground comics are pretty perverted, you know, like those 60s underground comics like
Robert Kram and people like that.
I mean, I think it's quite interesting that George wrote Fury Road with two comic book
(09:26):
guys.
You know, I'm essentially a comics guy, although I then went into pop videos, animation and
feature films, just because I'd got bored doing comics.
But you know, my roots are in comics and Peter's roots are in comics.
And so there was George with two, you know, nutcase comic book guys, putting in all the
(09:46):
craziness because we were all super fans of Mad Max 2 Road Warrior.
And although I was the, you know, me and George basically knotted it out, Peter Pound would
be there sort of sketching things.
You know, I'd be doing it too, one of the benefits of being a comic book guy is that
when you're writing, you're also, I would be designing the things as we went along
(10:09):
and the design of certain things would then feed back into the story.
So you know, that's, that was sort of how the process, so basically it was just me and
George locked in a room for a year.
By the end of that year, we had the whole story worked out and then we'd written a loose
script and then the second year was the storyboarding year and we brought in another guy after that,
(10:32):
funnily enough, another comic book guy, Mark Sexton.
And so what was interesting for me was the influence of comic book people on Fury Road,
you know, the craziness and the far-outness and the risk-taking in the design and the
understanding of how, how do we give the experience that we had from Mad Max 2 25 years ago to
(10:56):
a new generation like you guys, where you're coming out, if you can cast your mind back
to when you first saw Fury Road, you know, you went to the cinema, you maybe had heard
it was good, you've seen a few trailers and then you sit down, you know, that great feeling
when the curtains open and the cinema and the lights go down and we think, okay, let's,
let's go on the journey.
(11:17):
And you know, I got a lot of feedback from people saying, man, you know, like it's been
so long since I saw a movie that was just amazing and I was in it, I was completely
wrapped in it.
And by the time I come out the end of the film, I was gobsmacked and didn't have anything
to say, you know, that, and that was the feeling we were trying to get.
If you're going to do a new Mad Max film, it has to be amazing or don't even bother to
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do it.
I mean, that's definitely, I'll, I'll, I'll agree with like when I saw it, I'd, I'd,
I'd actually watched that weekend before Mad Max 1, Mad Max 2.
I didn't get around to Thunderdome by the time the film came out.
And it felt very much like these are, these are two great movies, two more so than one
(12:00):
in my opinion, but two great movies.
And then it felt like I was watching a comic book splash page.
Almost every scene was, was a variant cover.
And one of the, I mean, one of the questions that Billy and I were sort of thinking to
ask you was how did coming from that background, how did it, how did you sort of feel like
(12:22):
playing in somebody else's toy box?
Because you could have gone away and sort of created a Mad Max ish story.
So when you have that opportunity, did you feel like you had a good sense of idea of
where you want to go with the character or was it a lot more dialogue, a lot more, this
is like you said, George Miller's baby.
(12:44):
And I'm just here to sort of help that, that dream come along.
George obviously devolved his power down so that we could just be equally great.
You know, we could just, because it was a very casual thing.
We weren't sitting around worshiping George every day.
It was, you know, we would have disagreements and that's Bully, what you're talking about.
(13:05):
You know, it was a very robust, I've said before, it was more like a band making a record
than it was, you know, two writers sitting in a room typing away.
It wasn't that experience at all.
It was, we were basically standing on our feet all the time.
It was, we did everything on electra board, on these whiteboards where you could write
(13:26):
and draw on the whiteboards, we'd write dialogue, I'd do drawings next to the dialogue.
You know, it's the whole thing.
Then we'd print out what we'd done that day and there was a giant file of printed out
sheets from these whiteboards.
And that was the first six months where we then sort of had the feel of the whole movie
down.
And then we spent another six months writing a first draft script from these electra board
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drawings.
We'd pull one out and go, okay, today is to, let's turn this into text.
We needed a script and we had the designs because when you're going to storyboard it,
everything has to look the same.
You can't have five different designs drawn by different storyboard artists for a truck.
It has to look the same.
So a lot of that design work was loosely locked in.
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But also then the second year of storyboarding refined the, it was basically a very detailed
second pass on the script.
And so by the end of the second year, we'd done two thirds of the film up to when the
third big chase happens.
(14:34):
By then I was getting a bit burnt out and also George had was developing happy feet,
the animated film, because he'd got very interested in the computer animation.
I was giving him, you know, lots of tips on CGI because I'd been working in that field
for about four or five years.
So he was developing happy feet.
He started to get into that.
(14:56):
And at the same time, he was looking for another CGI project to sort of have on the runway
after happy feet.
And he saw one of my projects and said, I'd like to buy that off you and develop it.
And so I then, as I say, getting a bit burnt out from Mad Max, I moved off, I took some
time off from it, came back and did this new project called third brigade, which was going
(15:19):
to be the follow up film to happy feet.
What happened there was happy feet came out, went to number one at the box office the week
it came out, Warner Brothers phoned him up that weekend and said, we want a sequel to
happy feet and your greenlit.
So he now is doing a sequel to happy feet.
So my thing gets punted back after that takes about four years to make an animated feature.
(15:45):
So once, you know, I had by this stage, you know, we had a full script with loads of images
and pictures through the whole script of third brigade, and it was ready to go.
And you know, there was nothing for me to do.
I didn't want to hang around.
So I just I sort of moved on and started doing some other stuff.
(16:06):
And sadly, what happened with happy feet to he kind of took his eye off the ball a bit
and started getting back into the Mad Max project.
And happy feet didn't really have the attention of the first one and it came out and it completely
tanked.
And he just said, all right, screw this.
(16:26):
And then fury road gets greenlit.
So he says, I'm getting out of animation.
I'm going to do Mad Max fury road live action.
I'm returning to my roots, etc.
And so for Brigade got lost in the and it sits on a shelf somewhere in George's office
somewhere gathering dust, which is a real heartbreaker because it's an amazing animated
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feature film.
You know, it's kind of if you can imagine something like Toy Story, but with the George
Miller energy through it, you know, that really it's a really boisterous boys film.
It's not, you know, girly princesses and all that stuff.
It's, you know, it's, I wouldn't say hardcore, but it's for boys, you know, age about 12
(17:08):
or something up, you know, you know, adults would love it too.
But so I don't know what happened to that.
I mean, I suppose it's so long ago, I've got to probably accept that it will never see
the light of day.
But at the same time, knowing that there's amazing movie sitting there on the shelf,
which I created, I sort of feel like tempted to try and kind of get some interest from a
(17:34):
studio and then buy it off George, something like that.
I don't know.
We'll see what happens.
But that's the state of play with all that stuff.
But I think I kind of answered your question on men off an attention.
Sorry.
100%.
Thank you, sir.
No, that's great.
I mean, sort of follow up, Brendan.
(17:55):
I mean, just going back to what you were saying about how the script, it was a script.
And then, you know, for the first six months to a year, and then it was a storyboard and
you sort of boarding it.
And I was thinking when I was watching the film again, the thinking about how it was
scripted, the number of sort of great sort of kind of punk lines in the film, there are
so many sort of wonderful bits of dialogue, even though it's a film that does not rely
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on dialogue per se, it's not driven by dialogue.
There are still so many great little bits like I've written a few down here on my screen.
I've got the terminal freak out point.
We have become half life, these kinds of things, these sort of great sort of sci-fi things.
And I know that it's quite a while ago now, but when you, if you cast your mind back,
when you and George were actually putting, you know, pen to paper and getting stuff down,
(18:38):
do you remember sort of coming up with lines kind of like that and sort of having fun doing
the actual scripting?
Yeah, I mean, what we would stand next to each other and act out scenes, and we would
say loads of dialogue about Vyrabhish.
And now then we'd hit on a good line and we'd write it up on the board.
And it was done, as I say, it was very, it was more, as I say, the spirit of how we wrote
(19:05):
the film was more like a bunch of, you know, rock and roll people putting together an album
than it was, you know, two screenwriters typing away.
It wasn't that at all.
And I feel that, you know, George was very adamant about saying that the energy at this
point that we put in, he's going to set the tone of the whole movie right to this, to
(19:29):
directing, shooting, editing.
So he was very aware that, you know, look, we had a kind of deal in me and George, if
after a year, he doesn't, he's done three Mad Max films, remember?
And if he doesn't feel like this is going to blow everybody away, just flush it, you
know, I mean, I was very strongly like a Mad Max film has to be amazing.
(19:53):
It can't be, yeah, not bad.
Yeah, it was all right.
Yeah, you know what happened with all the alien franchise, you know what happened with the
Terminator franchise.
So is this going to be another one of them just a half bait sequel that you go, yeah,
nice cinematography, you know, or something like that.
We don't want that.
It's either going to blow you out of your socks or go home and don't bother to do it.
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So that was, I mean, we were playing for keeps and it has to be amazing.
And I can assure you that if I'm doing a Mad Max film, I'm not going to let it be crap.
And you know, I think George appreciated that I wasn't a little kiss ass.
And yes, George, that's amazing.
You know, I was really holding his feet to the fire saying, my thing was to, I had to
(20:36):
read George as a person and make sure I could get him back to that younger cockier guy who
made Road Warrior.
Because when George Miller plugs in his guitar and does those Mad Max riffs, something transcendent
happens, something amazing happens.
He's probably, to me, the finest action director on the planet.
Those old guys, those guys from that era, Cameron Miller, you know, Spielberg with Raiders,
(21:01):
there's an understanding of film and action stuff that that generation has that I'm not
seeing in, you know, mainly I'm not seeing in newer directors.
But for example, when you look at, say, a director like Ridley Scott, who is obviously
fantastic, you know, he's a genius and the first alien is probably one of the greatest
films ever made.
(21:23):
Ridley shoots action by coverage.
He sets the action up in the actors, and then he has tons of cameras around and covers everything.
And he edits together through coverage.
So it's action through coverage.
What we did, we wrote the action.
We actually would storyboard and lay out the action.
And George would shoot the action that we storyboarded.
(21:44):
And then he'd have extra cameras on the fly just to catch stories, to give him some extra
editing options.
But we scripted all our action.
Whereas, you know, a director like, as I say, I'm just picking Ridley Scott as an example,
who directs action through coverage.
He puts his action together in the editing room more than actually when he's shooting
(22:06):
it.
I mean, he does it to a degree, of course.
I think CGI has made a big difference as well, because you're seeing the films like The
Fast and the Furious, those types of movies.
You're saying the level of fantasy they're allowing in their film, you know, in CGI,
you can drop a car out of an airplane, and it'll land perfectly on the freeway.
You know, so the laws of gravity are not being observed.
(22:29):
It's more, there's a fantasy element in it, which I think is probably the influence of
Asian cinema.
But with Mad Max, you know, one of the things we established very early on was that we've
got to do this stuff as real practical stunts as often as possible, because bone-meeting
metal, which is what you've got in Road Rory, gave you that visceral, holy, crikey, that
(22:53):
really happened.
You know, like, you really felt it.
Whereas with CGI, there's a softness.
You don't really feel it.
You know, it's a trick.
And so there was a lot of CGI in Fury Road, but it was, in a way, it was the CGI of the
mission rather than commission.
Other than the big scene with the Storm whirlwinds, most of the CGI was removing elements like
(23:19):
cables and safety harnesses and all that stuff.
Look, if you're doing an action movie, you've probably got the greatest action director
in the world, George Miller.
So what we had to do, obviously, the challenge is to make each action seem discreet unto itself
and slightly different to the one.
So you don't get what we used to call car sick.
(23:41):
There's a monotony to action after a while, where you start to get bored with it.
And so we had to make sure that the audience didn't get bored, because they'd seen it,
like, 10 minutes before another sequence.
So if you notice that the action, the first main action sequence is those spiky buzzard
cars attacking like, we looked at wildlife footage, you know, when you get a big water
(24:03):
buffalo, then you get loads of hyenas circling it.
What they do is nip the legs to try and take the buffalo down, because it's a bigger beast,
then they can pick it off.
So if you notice that the buzzard attack is these small little light vehicles coming in
with their buzzsaws trying to take the wheels out so that they can slow the vehicle down
and then stop it, and then they can pick it off.
(24:24):
So if you like, there was a rationale to the action.
And then what George has is the idea of canon the action.
To canon it is to take it up to another level.
So you've done your buzzard scene, and then we canon up with the incoming storm.
And then you go into a different scene where you even raise the stakes up even higher,
(24:45):
because in the previous scene, you've established spraying your mouth means suicide with a bomb.
So when you go into the storm, once Nuck starts spraying his mouth, you know what it means.
So that is if you like a two-part action scene.
So then you get quietness, you've got a fight scene with Furiosa, and then they travel into
(25:08):
the canyon, and then you've got a different scene where you've got people bouncing around
like mountain goats on bicycles up in a canyon, totally different to what you've seen before.
There's a period then when they go into the swamp, and there's a bit of a quiet scene
where they're underneath all the stars wondering what to do.
And then they turn around and go back.
Now when we go into that scene, at first you feel like, hang on a minute, I've seen all
(25:32):
this already, but then there's an amazing shot where in come those guys on the poles.
And so we knew we had that up our sleeves as the new thing that you hadn't seen before.
And then that changed the dynamic of that final scene.
Once you have those guys on the poles, suddenly the whole film comes alive again.
So if you see that there's three discrete action sequences, each one totally different
(25:54):
to the next, to keep you interested.
And what's amazing about that structure is that the fact that it allows the audience
to breathe, whereas like a lot of action films, they think it has to be at one level constantly.
And I think maybe some people when Fiora had come out were like, oh, it's only at one level.
And it's like, when you watch it, you realise it's not.
It's got these, the pacing is so well constructed in terms of it knows when to hit you and when
(26:16):
to let you breathe and take stock.
Yeah, I mean, honestly, I stopped doing interviews.
This is the first one I've done in a while.
Because all everybody wanted to talk about was, yeah, you know, overthrow the patriarchy
and all that stuff.
And I'm thinking, well, what about the actual roller coaster ride that you went on when
you saw the movie for the first time, when you were your knuckles were gripping the side
(26:40):
of the cinema seat, and you were going, you know, what about that?
That apparently is not relevant.
Let's talk about overthrowing the patriarchy.
And I just thought you're missing.
We put as much work into that roller coaster ride and the structure of it, as you were
saying earlier, to make sure that, you know, when we crank you up and then you go on a
giant action sequence, we follow up with a bit of calm all the time developing the story
(27:04):
and the characters, you know.
And what we also did was made sure that we had character development inside the action
sequences, rather than just, here's some characters, now let's do an action sequence.
Here's some characters, let's do an action.
So the thing, the characters are always moving through the action.
I mean, this is all stuff.
Listen, I'd never written a giant Hollywood feature film before.
(27:27):
And I learned I was watching George Miller and listening to him like a hawk because I
was being mentored and getting the information from one of the world's masters.
Now he's getting on a bit and when he kicks the bucket, you're going to lose all that
generation of filmmakers, I'm saying, you know, all those 80s action guys, Cameron
and Spielberg and George, et cetera.
(27:49):
That's a huge sort of massive level of talent that will disappear.
And you know, there are good new directors, of course, but I'm not, I do go now and check
out action films just to see what are they doing well and what are they doing badly.
And I do find, for example, with Marvel films, I'm, I mean, I am so bored by the, so, but
(28:14):
halfway through it, I'm thinking, how long more of a God, oh my God, there's an hour
and a half to go of the stand thing.
You know, that sort of stuff.
You know, now and then there's a good Marvel film, but generally I feel that these people
don't understand the internal dynamics of, of engagement, rest.
I like, for example, I saw that new Doctor Strange movie and it was just a mess of CGI
(28:37):
and it was like, oh God, you know, I mean, there were some good bits in it.
Sam Raimi's a good director, but you know, you've got death by a thousand executives
when you do these films.
Everybody's modifying it and putting that in and it's got referred to that TV series
from, you know, all that crap.
(28:58):
I feel Marvel films are getting bogged down by their own mythology now.
I haven't seen the new Thor one.
I mean, I think the director is quite fun, you know, the New Zealand guy, but possibly
might be too, he might be too playful and undermines the drama.
So you don't kind of care that much if you're winking at the audience all the time.
(29:19):
Do you know what I mean?
There's a payoff with that stuff.
You have to be careful of there's a line.
Cool.
So I think the next thing I wanted to bring up, Brendan, which I'm fascinated by is, so
what was it like visiting the set in Africa actually going and seeing, you know, the designs
that you'd worked on for years and sort of talked about with George and seeing the characters,
(29:41):
you know, brought to life?
Or was it like seeing the world you'd worked on in The Flesh at last?
It was interesting and you got to remember it took, I finished working on Fury Road about
2000.
So and it took 12 years to get it made.
(30:06):
Remember I wrote, it was originally the one I wrote, which is about say 85 to 90% the
film you saw.
That's called Fury Road now.
It was always called Fury Road, but I wrote the fourth installment of the Mel Gibson
Mad Max is what it was.
And then once Mel Gibson had a meltdown, you know, and then coincidentally the film fell
(30:30):
apart due to some financing issues, they had to recast it.
And Heath Ledger was going to play Mad Max and then he died.
So that screws the whole thing up.
And Brad Pitt turns it down, which was, I think, very bad decision by him.
And in the end, you know, you looked around, you thought, well, as George said, in the
(30:55):
end, it was Tom Hardy, you know, to get somebody with a bit of that raw, masculine kind of
quality that, you know, Tom Hardy has that wild quality about.
So eventually once they locked in Tom Hardy, they could get going again.
But that, I mean, you know, it's a great testimony to George Miller's assistance that
(31:15):
after all the incredible, you know, it was set up and ready to go twice.
And then on the third go, they finally got it made.
And originally it was going to be shot in Australia, but they were forced over to Namibia
in Africa, which is largely the desert country.
And so it was interesting to go out.
It was great going down to Africa.
I've never been to Africa before, and it was just, you know, when you go into a place,
(31:40):
you pick the vibe up of a, you know, the feeling of Africa was amazing.
Really was interesting.
And yeah, I was only there for about, you know, just about the best part of a week.
And you know, I wondered about looked at staff, watched how George was shooting everything
and met a few of the cast and, you know, just hung around really.
(32:02):
Once I wrote and designed it with George, you know, something like that started 15 years
previously, you know, the designs had evolved, but they were still the same designs.
There were still hot rods, there were still Polk hats, there were still buzzards, there
were still, but the, he then he offered me production design, but I didn't want to do,
(32:23):
you know, I just, I really wasn't interested in production designing.
I'm more up the front end of the film.
I'm more like coming up with the ideas, the designs, the story, the characters, all that
stuff.
That's what interests me.
I had worked in Hollywood for 10 years previously.
So actually shooting films is quite boring because it's 9% of the time is hanging about
(32:45):
and then with a bit of, you know, three minutes of shooting and then another 10 hours of hanging
about.
So after a while, he actually got quite boring.
So it was nice to see it all, you know, I was, you know, it was, I was very happy that
they'd like me out to see it all.
And, you know, but in the end to me, it was, the fun was creating it, inventing characters.
(33:07):
I mean, one of the things that was shocking to me, I hadn't realized is that you can be
sitting around in the, in George Miller's studio in Sydney going, wouldn't it be great
if he had a character who looked like this and he had blah, blah, blah.
And we're all laughing just saying, saying, that's really crazy.
And the next thing, you know, an hour later, it's actually in the movie.
And I said, Cranky, it's that casual, you know, you can just throw something out just
(33:30):
to try and make George laugh or something.
And it ends up in the film, you know, and he's like, wow.
So that was a rule.
That was one of the biggest educations to me was, you know, don't hold back, go as far,
go as far out as you can and even further.
I mean, there was stuff that we came up with that was so over the top that we couldn't do.
(33:51):
And it's kind of a bit of a complaint about some of it.
So we took it out.
But this was staff.
This was internally at George's studio and people don't know, come on, that's too much.
But now I'm actually thinking, I wish we'd kept it, you know, because why did why did
we listen to that person?
We should have kept it in there.
(34:11):
You know, I'm curious to ask now what kind of stuff was left out.
That was one example.
One example is there's a piece of the film Fury Road that to me didn't quite, as comedians
say, the joke didn't land, meaning it didn't click, it didn't pay off in the movie, which
(34:32):
was when the blonde-haired girl whose pregnant splendid or a ranker or her name is, she hangs
off the door and the door falls and she goes under the thing and she gets killed.
(34:52):
And I didn't really, I didn't feel anything.
I didn't care.
I didn't, it didn't impact.
It didn't make me go, oh no.
I just went, hmm, why isn't, and I thought, why isn't that worked?
You know, why didn't that land that she got killed?
We all, we should have gone and that's, that's all.
When things don't work, it interests me and I have to roll it over in my head for years
(35:14):
thinking, what about it?
The original idea we had was she's in the car, does her thing to block a shot at Max,
because he, you know, the warlord won't shoot her because she's carrying his offspring.
And she goes back inside the truck, but one of the idiot war boys takes a shot and shoots
(35:35):
her in the head in the back of the truck and she faces dead and all the girls are just
pumping blood all over the girls going, all the girls are freaking out.
And Furiosa has to do a caesarean on her in the middle of the truck while those guys are
(35:56):
going over on the motorbikes in the canyon, you know, and rescue the baby.
Otherwise the baby will die with her.
And I felt that that was a really exciting scene.
You know, shocking.
But it was too shocking for some of the people that were working in the studio and basically
(36:17):
they were girls, women who said, oh, no, that's just, you know, it was too much.
And we sort of rethought, hang on, maybe this is too much and we're not being, you know,
it made sense to me that they would have the baby and he's after them because that's what
he's after, it's the baby.
(36:38):
And, you know, and the means of producing more babies with the other girls.
And so, you know, it changed the story when we changed that, and then you had to see where
they pull the baby out and it's dead and all the rest of it.
I wonder, were we better off sticking to the original idea, you know, so it's hard, you
know, it's hard, you don't know, but I do know that for me, and I've spoken to our friends
(37:01):
who've seen Furiosa, did that work for you when she died?
And they said, well, it wasn't a big moment, but yeah, it's okay.
And I thought, yeah, it should have been a big moment.
And you know, so I'm just throwing you out, you know, the things that I think, you know,
I mean, you look from the film from the outside in, I'm looking at it from the inside out,
you know, you know, when I see it, I think, right, what worked here and what didn't.
(37:24):
And some, there's other things we had in the film that we didn't put in, which I think,
yeah, maybe we should have been a bit more ballsy about sticking with our, you know,
guns, but you know, you have to just, at the time you make decisions and you're not sure,
sometimes you don't, are we getting too far out here or are we getting too, are we being
(37:46):
too safe?
You know, the main thing is don't be saying, you know, that was the last thing we wanted.
Yeah, I mean, anyway, that's an example of something where it could have gone one way,
and then, you know, you've got the film, the film's the film in the end.
Of course.
I mean, I suppose that's really interesting because following on from that, I know in
the first few drafts of the script, there were a lot of differences, like, you know,
(38:10):
the whole Ferdat Act at one point with the Vuvulani, the female warriors, it wasn't a
chase, it wasn't a chase back to the Citadel, it was originally a sort of airborne attack,
I want to say, it was the Ferdat Act.
Yes, I mean, George didn't want us to have an ending.
When we were writing, you know, like, for example, I met Ridley Scott once to pitch him
(38:31):
a film, and he said, the main thing is, is know your ending, you know, before we start
writing.
And that was 180 degree opposite to George Miller, who said, I don't want to know the
ending, I want the characters to take us there.
So that was the thing where he, but what we did is we sort of blocked out an ending just
(38:52):
as a rough, so we kind of knew that there was an ending there, if we were stuck, or
it just as a security blanket, really.
And we didn't use it.
The ending that we had was that the fury road led to was a dead end.
It just led to a sheer cliff face.
And so you've got Furiosa driving the truck towards, by now they jettisoned the tanker,
(39:15):
and they're only in the front part, the rear part of the truck.
And they're hurtling towards high speed down this track towards a sheer cliff edge.
And he's got what's left of the Armada still pursuing them.
And there's a mist covering this escarpment, which is a sort of circular escarpment with
(39:37):
a sheer drop.
And as she hurtles towards the edge of the cliff, you think they're just going to drive
over the edge.
She flips the truck, she pulls the steering wheel, and the truck starts sliding sideways,
and then she pulls the gears and revs it up again.
And just as it slides to the edge of the cliff, what comes into view is a slip road that goes
down the cliff.
(39:59):
And they drove, they started driving down the cliff, wheels coming off the edge and super
tense and all the rest of it.
But meanwhile, lots of the Armada just can't stop and go right over the edge because they
don't know that there's a slip road down there.
And from this cloud cover came up these, a bit like the gyro captain in Mad Max 2.
(40:19):
There was an airborne quality of these women in kind of these helicopter contractions who
came up out of the thing like harpies, you know, in the Greek mythology, the avenging
female.
Interesting enough in the title of the new one called Furiosa.
Furiosa is derived from furis, which is the other name for the harpies in Greek mythology,
(40:40):
and the fury is an avenging woman.
And so what we wanted to do is one giant fuck off fight between men and women and right,
who's going to win?
And in the end, they're both devastating each other and Immortan Joe gets killed.
The main leader of the the Vovolini is killed as well.
(41:01):
And there's a truce.
And they basically, what they work out is that look, the men have got the oil and the
armaments and a small green place.
But they blow the cloud cover have a damp climber and have got all this food growing.
And so they're going to basically work together and come together and try and, you know, they
(41:24):
can provide this, they can provide that and work, work it out together, which, you know,
in the end is what has happened.
But in the end, we didn't go with that.
I just remember vividly George walking in one morning and saying, they go back.
It's the only green place.
And so suddenly the whole movie sort of pivoted.
(41:45):
So we'd taken it right up to the bit where they're looking up at the stars and stars
and seeing satellites and, you know, that sequence out in the plains of silence.
And we then turned it around and realized, oh, actually, they're going to head back now
and they're going to have to go through the entire armada to get to the only green place
that we've seen as the audience in the film is on the top of that citadel.
(42:06):
So that's how that went.
I mean, I mean, although, you know, I've got plenty of fight on things I didn't agree
with, ultimately George had the executive, ultimately it's his film, you know, but, you
know, he psychologically, he was robust enough to, you know, assume the role of not being
(42:33):
the boss and the powerful guy and just being like Lenin McCartney or something, you know,
just equal so that we could create equally to each other and not, you know, he'd say,
you know, that's complete nonsense.
You can't do that because of that.
Or he'd come up and say, yeah, but that won't work because of that, you know, and you go,
yeah, right, you know, or whatever.
You know, so, you know, it was an equal relationship because he devolved power down.
(42:56):
So he, you know, there wouldn't be that power imbalance.
But when it came down to it in the bottom, you know, the bottom line is it's his move.
It's a bit like I'm on a, you know, an album with somebody who's a big name and I'm writing
all the songs with them and putting everything in, but in the end it's their album.
So they get to make the final decisions.
(43:16):
So that's fair enough.
I mean, I knew that, but in order for it to work between us, correct, on a creative level,
we had to be equal, even though it was a role play by George.
One of the, one of the sort of things that you touched on there was the idea of like
Furiosa and this, and this sort of the mythology that you guys were thinking about when you
(43:37):
were creating that.
Is that the way that you work where are you, do you do a lot of sort of backstory of each
character just so you can understand where they're going, who they are or where you guys
are brilliant.
And I was going to say, you know, sort of to add to that is, did you guys have any other
sort of ideas about sort of what a potential prequel, because I know there is a prequel
(44:01):
coming down the pipe.
Was that something that you and George had discussed for that particular character?
No, we totally focused on this film.
There wasn't, you know, prequels, sequels or, you know, extra trilogy or anything like
that, because, you know, you don't know, it's the film could come out and tank.
But no, I think it's a bit of a mistake to think of trilogies when you're doing the
(44:22):
first one, because it's going to diffuse your commitment to that film.
So we just focus totally on this film has to be a masterpiece.
It has to be amazing that we talked about everything.
I mean, I would have conversations with George about why can't genre films get nominated
for Oscars?
We have to make this Mad Max film.
(44:44):
I remember saying, George, suppose in this film was called Mad Max Apocalypse Now.
You know, now Apocalypse Now won loads of Oscars.
It was a serious film about serious stuff.
I said, why can't our film, a Mad Max film, which is considered genre, be as substantive
and meaty as if you like mainstream films?
And so that was always our aim, was to create a film that, although purportedly genre, is
(45:08):
also going to, you know, deal with issues that are substantive.
Once you have a group of women that are breeders, basically sex slaves, you then got the whole
politics of that, and that's how that started to develop.
Now there was less of that in the version I wrote, and George amplified it for, you know,
(45:32):
as you know, he worked on the film for another decade after I left it.
So no, it would accrue different weights and shift tones here and there and stuff like
that.
As I say, it's essentially, I recognize the film that I wrote, 90% of it is the one I
wrote with George.
But the extra 10% was pushing it, adding, say, the feminist element to it.
(45:57):
There were, you know, for example, we didn't have the name Furiosa for Charlize Theron's
character ever when I was writing it.
She was called Warrior Woman, the Praetorian.
She was reverted that way.
And that, to call her Furiosa was like right in front of our faces, because originally
the word Furiosa was the name of the land around the Fury Road.
(46:22):
The traveling through the Furiosa.
So this word was around, but we'd never connected it to Charlize Theron.
So that came later, I think, because what happened after I left, a few years later George
took on another writer.
I was in LA at that time, and he took on an Australian writer, and obviously then amplified
elements of the film, and around that time is when the obvious name Furiosa got attached
(46:48):
to Charlize Theron.
The sequel Furiosa is a prequel, and the story derived from the backstory we had on Furiosa.
I mean, we knew she had been abducted and taken to the Citadel, and had come from a
green place of many mothers.
Right, we knew that sort of stuff, and a bit more stuff about it.
(47:08):
But George then developed the backstory a bit more than, you know, in the ten years
of inning before he got into Fury Road.
A lot of it doesn't appear in the Fury Road film, but he got so interested in it, and
because Charlize Theron was such a strong character, you know, if you like the female
Mad Max, that, you know, he obviously became interested enough to want to do a film about
(47:36):
Furiosa and so on.
So I mean, I have, he did ask me to read the script, which I did read just to give him
some notes as we call them, you know, just to say, what did I think of it?
And I said, well, okay, very good, you know, really rocks along.
I think this bit's a bit boring, this bit's weak, you need to think about that scene,
(47:57):
blah, blah, blah, you know, you do all that stuff.
And I just gave him a, you know, just what we call notes, just, you could, I think you
could improve it if you did this.
So how much of that he takes on board?
I have no idea.
I'm not involved in it in the slightest.
I'm very happy to film Fury Road.
It's the Brenda McCarthy Mad Max, and I'm very happy about that.
(48:18):
I've done one.
I fulfilled a giant tick off my bucket list, so I'm happy with it.
But that's two years of my life I've put into Mad Max, I think that's enough.
Were you going to ask something, Armes?
Yeah.
I was going to ask the, that 12 years it took to make the film, how much of that was, touching
(48:41):
on this notion of too much CGI, how much of that was convincing the executives, convincing
the studio that actually this film needed to be almost practical, almost like a throwback
to the first three, and that sort of punk style, 70s, early 80s sort of filmmaking, that
in today's sort of scene has become a lot more digital, has become a lot more put people
(49:06):
in front of a green screen, save money that way.
Well even though I'm bitching about CGI and the bad use of it, you do have to look at
the box office of Endgame and Batman films and all the rest of it.
And they're all sort of, the executives are happy as long as the films make gazillions.
(49:28):
So I mean, Mad Max Fury Road made about I think 400 plus or something at the box office.
So compared to a billion for, you know, it's a Marvel film or whatever it is, you know,
Mad Max probably, if it wasn't so prestigious and so well loved by people, it's happened,
(49:53):
you know, the Mad Max Fury Road is at a great afterlife on people watching it and streaming
and look at you guys interviewing me now, seven years later, you know.
So, you know, I mean, they can roll the dice on Fury Road or Furiosa, they'd probably like
another one, maybe get a trilogy before George is getting on a bit now.
(50:15):
So hopefully you'll get three new ones done and they'll all be great, you know.
It's all about money.
Does it make money?
How much does it cost?
Or do we get loads of Oscars and do we get prestige?
Everything's about money, prestige and power.
(50:37):
That's what Hollywood runs on.
I mean, I suppose we've got a trivial question, but it's a question that I've sort of had
in the back of my head to ask this whole time, but you know, to give, you know, the trip,
but like, you know, so just go back to the stuff that you designed on the movie, the
vehicles and the war boys and stuff.
I've got to ask, and I'm sure you've probably been asked this before, but the doof warrior,
the guy with the flaming guitar, was that one of those ideas where you and George are
(51:01):
in the room and you're thinking, OK, how far can we run of this?
Can we get a guy with a flaming guitar?
Was that you guys spitballing that?
Or was that something like that?
Yeah, no, that was, I didn't have a lot to do with that specific character.
That was George came up with him as a, you know, as he said, like, you know, a guy plays
the bugle in the cab, cavalry, let's have a guy playing the guitar as the sort of cavalry
(51:24):
bugle, if there's such a word.
And then Peter Pound developed the actual look of the character, but his look sort of
developed a bit more after I left.
So in the case of the guy with the guitar that shoots flames, I didn't have a lot to
do with that particular one.
(51:45):
So, you know, just to be honest about what I did, no point taking credit, but I would
say Peter Pound, Peter Pound was the big influence on that.
And then you had the production designer, who I think added the flamethrower at the
end.
I think that was how it went.
So you had the idea for it.
You had it developed by Peter Pound, the comic book guy.
(52:07):
And then when they hired the production designer, who came in, and then, you know, obviously
had all the designs on a plate by me, he could then develop bits, extra bits and add bits
to them and all that sort of stuff.
I was going to say sort of like, to sort of touch on that and sort of how come, how come
(52:30):
you guys sort of moved away from the SNM-ish side of costume designs that was going on
in the earlier movies?
Well, speaking as a man who clearly loves SNM, Armadale.
Sorry, he doesn't.
The SNM stuff was related to, first of all, the costume designer, Norma Morcio, was like,
(52:57):
she put all that stuff in with all the big American shoulder pads, which at the time,
that look in the 80s was big shoulders, was, you know, kind of that look.
And it was sort of, she was then developing it into an absurd degree.
Also there was a convergence of style with 2000 AD, Judge Dredd and that stuff, with
(53:19):
the big shoulder pads as well.
So that kind of look was more in the air.
And because the group, there was a, the gang that were terrorizing the, you know, the sort
of the white clad liberals, if you like, inside the compound, then you've got the kind of
wild boys, you know, the William Burroughs, wild boys types of gangs outside.
(53:43):
What a subset of the gang was called the Gay Boy Berserkers.
So there was, they had a couple of other, there were a couple of other ones.
It's sort of, there was some thing worked out in Mad Max 2, where you had one big gang,
but among, in them you had the Gay Boy Berserkers, which Wes, the character with the thing in
the Asseless Chaps, was a part of.
(54:06):
So that made sense for that gang to have that kind of gear.
In this one, we were dealing with the gang, basically a bunch of, if you like, mind controlled
war boys for Remalton Joe.
And you know, we went through different costume looks.
I did come up with a white look, you know, the one kind of which they went for in the
(54:29):
end.
That wasn't, you know, to do with me.
And also I developed another look, which was more Mad Max 2, big shoulder pad kind of look.
There were a couple of others, you know, we sort of messed around with them.
But there was a lot of information there for whoever actually came on as the costume designer,
apartment rename, she took the white look and removed, and you know, if you look a lot
(54:56):
of gangs now, MS-13 gangs in America, those Latino gangs, they're bare from the waist up.
There was an element of where they were in black gloves and stuff, which I wasn't too
keen on because there was a sense of satirizing toxic male behavior into, you know, they looked
(55:17):
like demented Chippendales, you know, I mean, at least you didn't put cuffs on them, but
the black gloves, you know, thankfully didn't have bow ties.
But there was a bit of that, and there was also the day of the dead, if you look at the
skull motif, which I personally, it was starting to get used a bit by then, the day of the
dead stuff.
(55:37):
And I was thinking, we've seen that, see, my thing is not, if it's been in another movie,
we don't do it.
So the actual final costume designs were, you know, years after me.
But there was, what I developed was, in terms of the white look, white skin look, I developed
(56:01):
bullet hole tattoos.
So all of them had a bullet hole at the center of their face with, you know, when you shoot
into glass, you get all those cracks around the bullet hole.
And they're these cracks, and they would join up to another bullet hole, and the cracks
lead to another one.
And the idea is that for each kill, they got a bullet hole stamped on them, and their
faces were covered, and then the bodies would have this spider web of bullet hole tattoos.
(56:26):
Now they drop that, and then put on engine parts, scarification.
It doesn't really, it's hard to, you see it in the film, but it's a sort of deeper detail,
you'll catch it, but it doesn't, it's not really that avert.
To get back to your question, like, the gay boy berserkers of number two went into SM
gear, and then the war boys, formerly called the Necro boys, the war boys, were, you know,
(56:52):
more like a brainwashed youth cult.
And it was more driving from current gang wear, like, you know, where they're naked
from, and they wear baggy, baggy trousers and things like that.
That's how that came.
And the simplicity of where they put half, you know, the top part of the head, they just
rub engine grease on it, and you saw Furiosa do it at one point.
(57:15):
So that, you know, there were nice things like that.
Cool.
Well, that's amazing, Brennan.
Well, thank you so much for talking to us.
I mean, this has been a real, you know, delight and pleasure just listening to you talk about
the film.
I mean, just very quickly in the two minutes that we've got, like, when you saw, obviously,
you know how we felt when we saw the film, but when you finally got to watch it in the
cinema, did you feel like you'd achieved what you and George are set out to do, like
(57:36):
Road Warrior 2.0?
I'll tell you a really nice story.
Bear in mind that probably my favourite ever movie is Mad Max 2.0, Road Warrior, and, you
know, Mel Gibson, George Miller, you know, whatever.
Right?
So I saw Mad Max Furiosa, sorry, Furiosa Road at the premiere in Hollywood.
(57:58):
And I guess George must have manipulated this, but I was sitting, you know, in the premiere
at Man's Chinese Theatre up on the balcony and directly behind me on that seat is George
Miller and that seat is Mel Gibson.
And we both all watched it together.
And at the end of it, George put his hand on me and said, thanks, mate.
And I went like that.
(58:18):
And Mel Gibson went like that and thinking, well, you know, what a weird turnaround when
you're a 20-year-old kid watching a road warrior and then 20 odd years later, you get to see
the one that you co-wrote and designed with George Miller.
And there's the original Mad Max and the director both going like that to you.
(58:41):
You think, wow, that was quite an experience.
So that's how I saw it with those two guys sitting behind me, which was pretty freaky.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's amazing.
We got a result.
We got a result.
We put out a great Mad Max for all we didn't disappoint everybody.
And I wish in George the best with the new one.
I hope it comes out well.
(59:03):
Wonderful.
Well, thank you again so much for talking to us, Brendan.
That's a lovely note to end on.
I mean, yeah, full circle, you know, totally.
And yeah, I mean, thanks once again, Armand.
You want to quickly say?
No, that was it.
Thank you so much again, Brendan.
That was eye-opened.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much.
Hello, I'm Billy with me here as Armadali and joining us is Brendan McCarthy, distinguished
(00:06):
comic book artist and co-writer and designer of Man Max Fury Road.
Hello Brendan.
Hello there Chaps, how are you?
Not too shabby, thank you.
Oh well, thank you very much.
Yeah, pleasure to talk to you.
We thought we'd start with asking you, so going right back to the beginning of this
film, you know, all the way back to 1982 I suppose, 1981.
So you had sort of, in your career at that point, you had been a comic book illustrator,
(00:29):
you'd been working with Peter Milligan for quite some time and then working on 2008.
I believe you were starting to build your career as a comic book artist and then I want to
say you found yourself in Australia in a screening of Man Max 2 Road Warrior and I think it's
fair to say that that kind of blew your head off of it.
Is that fair to say?
(00:50):
Yeah, there's a whole generation of us from that period in my age group who, if you like,
what Fury Road is for you guys, Road Warrior was for us.
It was the one that we all staggered out of the cinema with smoke coming out of our head
thinking what on earth have I just seen, this is amazing.
(01:11):
In my case I turned around, bought another ticket and went straight back into the movie
and saw it twice that evening.
Yeah, it was a big influence and it had a big cultural impact as well.
You saw it in pop culture, Durand Durand videos, books like Ridley Walker.
The post-apocalyptic nuclear threat was quite big at the time with Thatcher and Reagan and
(01:37):
the feeling was that the apocalypse was imminent, kind of similar to now really.
So it had a big influence on me.
I also had, doing what you call now called a gap year and being in Australia.
I was very interested in surfing.
In those days it hadn't really reached the UK.
(01:59):
And I used to go out and watch surfers all the time and gradually thought about fusing
Mad Max and surfers together in a drowned world, post-apocalyptic thing, which I eventually
turned into a comic called Freak Wave, which preceded the film Waterworld.
So you kind of headed the curve when it came to Hollywood and Hollywood projects being
made decades on.
(02:21):
Then I suppose what happened next in terms of youths coming on board into the Mad Max,
into the universe and actually helping to make the next film was, in the fourth film,
Fear Road, was you contacted George Miller, I believe, and with a letter that wasn't
the opening line simply whatever happened to Mad Max.
That was the pitch.
No, that's true.
(02:42):
But what it was is that by this stage I was the production designer of the computer animated
TV series called Reboot, which was a big phenomenon at the time.
And we did an episode which was a pastiche of the Mad Max world, particularly Road Warrior.
And so I sent a VHS as it was back then, before the days of the internet, to George with that
(03:11):
little post-it note on it saying whatever happened to Mad Max.
And the episode of Reboot, which was the Mad Max pastiche.
And then a few, about a few months later, I got a call from his producer, Doug Mitchell,
to say, you know, what is this?
This is really interesting.
We're going to be in Hollywood, like, you know, in a couple of weeks.
Any chance we could meet you and talk about this?
(03:32):
We've got a project we'd like to talk to you about.
So I went up to Hollywood and met them both and, you know, explained about CGI.
Because back then CGI was completely unknown.
It was a brand new technology.
And Pixar's Toy Story had come out by then.
(03:55):
And there was a lot of interest in CGI because each CGI film was hitting really big.
Because the novelty of CGI was big.
So you were getting Toy Story ants.
It was brand new and everybody was sort of thinking what the hell is this?
And also noticing the box office on it.
So George Miller had been approached by Warner Brothers to develop a Mad Max TV series along
(04:16):
the lines of Xena or Hercules.
Before streaming, you had cable TV.
And the cable networks were a bit more open to violence or whatever.
So George was thinking about doing this TV series and wanted to know instead of doing
matte paintings, could we substitute CGI so he could move the camera?
So, you know, when you do a matte painting, the camera's locked.
(04:39):
So, you know, I was talking a bit about that.
But the conversation quickly spilled into Mad Max and the, you know, and what about
that bit in the film?
You know, that shot, did you?
So I was being a road warrior nut.
I knew all about it.
I'd seen all the films hundreds of times.
So the conversation, you know, and then I sort of, I suppose foolishly in a meeting
(05:02):
where you're pitching for a gig, I said, I don't think you should do a TV series.
I think you should do a movie.
It's the same amount of work.
And a movie's far more exciting.
If you were to do an amazing Mad Max film, I think it would just blow everybody away.
You know, just get that spirit of road warrior rather than thunder down into a new Mad Max
film, blah, blah, blah.
And you know, we were sort of doing and throwing on that.
(05:25):
And he was a bit more, I don't know about film.
The thing about film is that with a TV series, you could go, yeah, I'm looking forward to
a Mad Max TV series.
But for me, I was more excited by a new movie.
To me, Mad Max was a cinematic experience.
And so anyway, I said to him, look, if you ever think about doing a movie, I mean, I'll
never make a Mad Max film, but you might.
(05:47):
Here's some ideas and, you know, you can have them.
I'll never make a film.
So, you know, and so he let me pitch him this idea from Mad Max film, which involved a guy
breeding a girl to produce offspring.
In that case, I was thinking about, you know, the extinction event of the human race, a
bit like the dinosaurs, it's our turn.
(06:09):
And this guy sort of trying to create a human being that was viable, that would live because
so many by now I was saying the world must be so toxic that most of everybody's dying
off for they don't last long.
So some of the older generation are lasting like Max, etc.
And this kind of warlord character.
(06:30):
Anyway, that was, there were other things as well in it, some quite ridiculously silly
sci-fi stuff.
But I feel what happened is that it kicked him off thinking about it.
And then about four months later, I got a call out of the blue saying, do you want to come
to Sydney and knock some ideas about, you know, I'm thinking about doing the Mad Max
(06:50):
film.
And I thought, whoa.
So I finished up a TV series I was doing called Weirdos, where I was designing it.
It happened to be an animation TV series based on hot rod toys from the 1960s, a bit like
the Big Daddy Roth stuff, if you know what that is.
(07:11):
And so I had sort of hot rods rolled in my head.
By the time I got to Sydney, the first thing I did was say, right, you've got to have hot
rods in a Mad Max film.
This is crazy.
So out with the dune buggies and came the hot rods.
So that was almost the first input into the film.
And if you've got hot rods, you then got, well, who's driving these young kids?
Who are these young kids?
(07:31):
At first they were called Necro boys.
And then George, when I left the project, eventually he eventually changed the name
to War Boys.
And we started growing it from core ideas, who's this guy who's breeding women.
But George told me his idea then.
And it was kind of the core of Fury Road.
(07:52):
What he had was there's a big Citadel castle kind of thing.
And there's a guy, he's got these wives rather than one girl.
He's now got five of them.
And he's breeding them to try and create a viable human.
At that stage, the warlord still had a kind of motive of trying to keep the human race
going, but that got lost really in the final film you saw long after I left.
(08:19):
He became more of a sort of an evil patriarch who's just trying to keep his dynasty going.
So for me, that lacked a bit of moral complexity because if the girls were, if you like, the
future of the human race and they were wanting to get run away from a safe environment, it
(08:41):
made it a bit more morally complex.
But that's in the end, I'm not the director and it's George's baby.
We're in the George Miller show here, not my show.
So for the first year, we just basically, it's just me and George in a room with another
(09:02):
guy who was a really good artist called Peter Pound, who also happened to be Australia's
kind of like main underground comic artists.
Underground comics are pretty perverted, you know, like those 60s underground comics like
Robert Kram and people like that.
I mean, I think it's quite interesting that George wrote Fury Road with two comic book
(09:26):
guys.
You know, I'm essentially a comics guy, although I then went into pop videos, animation and
feature films, just because I'd got bored doing comics.
But you know, my roots are in comics and Peter's roots are in comics.
And so there was George with two, you know, nutcase comic book guys, putting in all the
(09:46):
craziness because we were all super fans of Mad Max 2 Road Warrior.
And although I was the, you know, me and George basically knotted it out, Peter Pound would
be there sort of sketching things.
You know, I'd be doing it too, one of the benefits of being a comic book guy is that
when you're writing, you're also, I would be designing the things as we went along
(10:09):
and the design of certain things would then feed back into the story.
So you know, that's, that was sort of how the process, so basically it was just me and
George locked in a room for a year.
By the end of that year, we had the whole story worked out and then we'd written a loose
script and then the second year was the storyboarding year and we brought in another guy after that,
(10:32):
funnily enough, another comic book guy, Mark Sexton.
And so what was interesting for me was the influence of comic book people on Fury Road,
you know, the craziness and the far-outness and the risk-taking in the design and the
understanding of how, how do we give the experience that we had from Mad Max 2 25 years ago to
(10:56):
a new generation like you guys, where you're coming out, if you can cast your mind back
to when you first saw Fury Road, you know, you went to the cinema, you maybe had heard
it was good, you've seen a few trailers and then you sit down, you know, that great feeling
when the curtains open and the cinema and the lights go down and we think, okay, let's,
let's go on the journey.
(11:17):
And you know, I got a lot of feedback from people saying, man, you know, like it's been
so long since I saw a movie that was just amazing and I was in it, I was completely
wrapped in it.
And by the time I come out the end of the film, I was gobsmacked and didn't have anything
to say, you know, that, and that was the feeling we were trying to get.
If you're going to do a new Mad Max film, it has to be amazing or don't even bother to
(11:39):
do it.
I mean, that's definitely, I'll, I'll, I'll agree with like when I saw it, I'd, I'd,
I'd actually watched that weekend before Mad Max 1, Mad Max 2.
I didn't get around to Thunderdome by the time the film came out.
And it felt very much like these are, these are two great movies, two more so than one
(12:00):
in my opinion, but two great movies.
And then it felt like I was watching a comic book splash page.
Almost every scene was, was a variant cover.
And one of the, I mean, one of the questions that Billy and I were sort of thinking to
ask you was how did coming from that background, how did it, how did you sort of feel like
(12:22):
playing in somebody else's toy box?
Because you could have gone away and sort of created a Mad Max ish story.
So when you have that opportunity, did you feel like you had a good sense of idea of
where you want to go with the character or was it a lot more dialogue, a lot more, this
is like you said, George Miller's baby.
(12:44):
And I'm just here to sort of help that, that dream come along.
George obviously devolved his power down so that we could just be equally great.
You know, we could just, because it was a very casual thing.
We weren't sitting around worshiping George every day.
It was, you know, we would have disagreements and that's Bully, what you're talking about.
(13:05):
You know, it was a very robust, I've said before, it was more like a band making a record
than it was, you know, two writers sitting in a room typing away.
It wasn't that experience at all.
It was, we were basically standing on our feet all the time.
It was, we did everything on electra board, on these whiteboards where you could write
(13:26):
and draw on the whiteboards, we'd write dialogue, I'd do drawings next to the dialogue.
You know, it's the whole thing.
Then we'd print out what we'd done that day and there was a giant file of printed out
sheets from these whiteboards.
And that was the first six months where we then sort of had the feel of the whole movie
down.
And then we spent another six months writing a first draft script from these electra board
(13:50):
drawings.
We'd pull one out and go, okay, today is to, let's turn this into text.
We needed a script and we had the designs because when you're going to storyboard it,
everything has to look the same.
You can't have five different designs drawn by different storyboard artists for a truck.
It has to look the same.
So a lot of that design work was loosely locked in.
(14:13):
But also then the second year of storyboarding refined the, it was basically a very detailed
second pass on the script.
And so by the end of the second year, we'd done two thirds of the film up to when the
third big chase happens.
(14:34):
By then I was getting a bit burnt out and also George had was developing happy feet,
the animated film, because he'd got very interested in the computer animation.
I was giving him, you know, lots of tips on CGI because I'd been working in that field
for about four or five years.
So he was developing happy feet.
He started to get into that.
(14:56):
And at the same time, he was looking for another CGI project to sort of have on the runway
after happy feet.
And he saw one of my projects and said, I'd like to buy that off you and develop it.
And so I then, as I say, getting a bit burnt out from Mad Max, I moved off, I took some
time off from it, came back and did this new project called third brigade, which was going
(15:19):
to be the follow up film to happy feet.
What happened there was happy feet came out, went to number one at the box office the week
it came out, Warner Brothers phoned him up that weekend and said, we want a sequel to
happy feet and your greenlit.
So he now is doing a sequel to happy feet.
So my thing gets punted back after that takes about four years to make an animated feature.
(15:45):
So once, you know, I had by this stage, you know, we had a full script with loads of images
and pictures through the whole script of third brigade, and it was ready to go.
And you know, there was nothing for me to do.
I didn't want to hang around.
So I just I sort of moved on and started doing some other stuff.
(16:06):
And sadly, what happened with happy feet to he kind of took his eye off the ball a bit
and started getting back into the Mad Max project.
And happy feet didn't really have the attention of the first one and it came out and it completely
tanked.
And he just said, all right, screw this.
(16:26):
And then fury road gets greenlit.
So he says, I'm getting out of animation.
I'm going to do Mad Max fury road live action.
I'm returning to my roots, etc.
And so for Brigade got lost in the and it sits on a shelf somewhere in George's office
somewhere gathering dust, which is a real heartbreaker because it's an amazing animated
(16:48):
feature film.
You know, it's kind of if you can imagine something like Toy Story, but with the George
Miller energy through it, you know, that really it's a really boisterous boys film.
It's not, you know, girly princesses and all that stuff.
It's, you know, it's, I wouldn't say hardcore, but it's for boys, you know, age about 12
(17:08):
or something up, you know, you know, adults would love it too.
But so I don't know what happened to that.
I mean, I suppose it's so long ago, I've got to probably accept that it will never see
the light of day.
But at the same time, knowing that there's amazing movie sitting there on the shelf,
which I created, I sort of feel like tempted to try and kind of get some interest from a
(17:34):
studio and then buy it off George, something like that.
I don't know.
We'll see what happens.
But that's the state of play with all that stuff.
But I think I kind of answered your question on men off an attention.
Sorry.
100%.
Thank you, sir.
No, that's great.
I mean, sort of follow up, Brendan.
(17:55):
I mean, just going back to what you were saying about how the script, it was a script.
And then, you know, for the first six months to a year, and then it was a storyboard and
you sort of boarding it.
And I was thinking when I was watching the film again, the thinking about how it was
scripted, the number of sort of great sort of kind of punk lines in the film, there are
so many sort of wonderful bits of dialogue, even though it's a film that does not rely
(18:17):
on dialogue per se, it's not driven by dialogue.
There are still so many great little bits like I've written a few down here on my screen.
I've got the terminal freak out point.
We have become half life, these kinds of things, these sort of great sort of sci-fi things.
And I know that it's quite a while ago now, but when you, if you cast your mind back,
when you and George were actually putting, you know, pen to paper and getting stuff down,
(18:38):
do you remember sort of coming up with lines kind of like that and sort of having fun doing
the actual scripting?
Yeah, I mean, what we would stand next to each other and act out scenes, and we would
say loads of dialogue about Vyrabhish.
And now then we'd hit on a good line and we'd write it up on the board.
And it was done, as I say, it was very, it was more, as I say, the spirit of how we wrote
(19:05):
the film was more like a bunch of, you know, rock and roll people putting together an album
than it was, you know, two screenwriters typing away.
It wasn't that at all.
And I feel that, you know, George was very adamant about saying that the energy at this
point that we put in, he's going to set the tone of the whole movie right to this, to
(19:29):
directing, shooting, editing.
So he was very aware that, you know, look, we had a kind of deal in me and George, if
after a year, he doesn't, he's done three Mad Max films, remember?
And if he doesn't feel like this is going to blow everybody away, just flush it, you
know, I mean, I was very strongly like a Mad Max film has to be amazing.
(19:53):
It can't be, yeah, not bad.
Yeah, it was all right.
Yeah, you know what happened with all the alien franchise, you know what happened with the
Terminator franchise.
So is this going to be another one of them just a half bait sequel that you go, yeah,
nice cinematography, you know, or something like that.
We don't want that.
It's either going to blow you out of your socks or go home and don't bother to do it.
(20:14):
So that was, I mean, we were playing for keeps and it has to be amazing.
And I can assure you that if I'm doing a Mad Max film, I'm not going to let it be crap.
And you know, I think George appreciated that I wasn't a little kiss ass.
And yes, George, that's amazing.
You know, I was really holding his feet to the fire saying, my thing was to, I had to
(20:36):
read George as a person and make sure I could get him back to that younger cockier guy who
made Road Warrior.
Because when George Miller plugs in his guitar and does those Mad Max riffs, something transcendent
happens, something amazing happens.
He's probably, to me, the finest action director on the planet.
Those old guys, those guys from that era, Cameron Miller, you know, Spielberg with Raiders,
(21:01):
there's an understanding of film and action stuff that that generation has that I'm not
seeing in, you know, mainly I'm not seeing in newer directors.
But for example, when you look at, say, a director like Ridley Scott, who is obviously
fantastic, you know, he's a genius and the first alien is probably one of the greatest
films ever made.
(21:23):
Ridley shoots action by coverage.
He sets the action up in the actors, and then he has tons of cameras around and covers everything.
And he edits together through coverage.
So it's action through coverage.
What we did, we wrote the action.
We actually would storyboard and lay out the action.
And George would shoot the action that we storyboarded.
(21:44):
And then he'd have extra cameras on the fly just to catch stories, to give him some extra
editing options.
But we scripted all our action.
Whereas, you know, a director like, as I say, I'm just picking Ridley Scott as an example,
who directs action through coverage.
He puts his action together in the editing room more than actually when he's shooting
(22:06):
it.
I mean, he does it to a degree, of course.
I think CGI has made a big difference as well, because you're seeing the films like The
Fast and the Furious, those types of movies.
You're saying the level of fantasy they're allowing in their film, you know, in CGI,
you can drop a car out of an airplane, and it'll land perfectly on the freeway.
You know, so the laws of gravity are not being observed.
(22:29):
It's more, there's a fantasy element in it, which I think is probably the influence of
Asian cinema.
But with Mad Max, you know, one of the things we established very early on was that we've
got to do this stuff as real practical stunts as often as possible, because bone-meeting
metal, which is what you've got in Road Rory, gave you that visceral, holy, crikey, that
(22:53):
really happened.
You know, like, you really felt it.
Whereas with CGI, there's a softness.
You don't really feel it.
You know, it's a trick.
And so there was a lot of CGI in Fury Road, but it was, in a way, it was the CGI of the
mission rather than commission.
Other than the big scene with the Storm whirlwinds, most of the CGI was removing elements like
(23:19):
cables and safety harnesses and all that stuff.
Look, if you're doing an action movie, you've probably got the greatest action director
in the world, George Miller.
So what we had to do, obviously, the challenge is to make each action seem discreet unto itself
and slightly different to the one.
So you don't get what we used to call car sick.
(23:41):
There's a monotony to action after a while, where you start to get bored with it.
And so we had to make sure that the audience didn't get bored, because they'd seen it,
like, 10 minutes before another sequence.
So if you notice that the action, the first main action sequence is those spiky buzzard
cars attacking like, we looked at wildlife footage, you know, when you get a big water
(24:03):
buffalo, then you get loads of hyenas circling it.
What they do is nip the legs to try and take the buffalo down, because it's a bigger beast,
then they can pick it off.
So if you notice that the buzzard attack is these small little light vehicles coming in
with their buzzsaws trying to take the wheels out so that they can slow the vehicle down
and then stop it, and then they can pick it off.
(24:24):
So if you like, there was a rationale to the action.
And then what George has is the idea of canon the action.
To canon it is to take it up to another level.
So you've done your buzzard scene, and then we canon up with the incoming storm.
And then you go into a different scene where you even raise the stakes up even higher,
(24:45):
because in the previous scene, you've established spraying your mouth means suicide with a bomb.
So when you go into the storm, once Nuck starts spraying his mouth, you know what it means.
So that is if you like a two-part action scene.
So then you get quietness, you've got a fight scene with Furiosa, and then they travel into
(25:08):
the canyon, and then you've got a different scene where you've got people bouncing around
like mountain goats on bicycles up in a canyon, totally different to what you've seen before.
There's a period then when they go into the swamp, and there's a bit of a quiet scene
where they're underneath all the stars wondering what to do.
And then they turn around and go back.
Now when we go into that scene, at first you feel like, hang on a minute, I've seen all
(25:32):
this already, but then there's an amazing shot where in come those guys on the poles.
And so we knew we had that up our sleeves as the new thing that you hadn't seen before.
And then that changed the dynamic of that final scene.
Once you have those guys on the poles, suddenly the whole film comes alive again.
So if you see that there's three discrete action sequences, each one totally different
(25:54):
to the next, to keep you interested.
And what's amazing about that structure is that the fact that it allows the audience
to breathe, whereas like a lot of action films, they think it has to be at one level constantly.
And I think maybe some people when Fiora had come out were like, oh, it's only at one level.
And it's like, when you watch it, you realise it's not.
It's got these, the pacing is so well constructed in terms of it knows when to hit you and when
(26:16):
to let you breathe and take stock.
Yeah, I mean, honestly, I stopped doing interviews.
This is the first one I've done in a while.
Because all everybody wanted to talk about was, yeah, you know, overthrow the patriarchy
and all that stuff.
And I'm thinking, well, what about the actual roller coaster ride that you went on when
you saw the movie for the first time, when you were your knuckles were gripping the side
(26:40):
of the cinema seat, and you were going, you know, what about that?
That apparently is not relevant.
Let's talk about overthrowing the patriarchy.
And I just thought you're missing.
We put as much work into that roller coaster ride and the structure of it, as you were
saying earlier, to make sure that, you know, when we crank you up and then you go on a
giant action sequence, we follow up with a bit of calm all the time developing the story
(27:04):
and the characters, you know.
And what we also did was made sure that we had character development inside the action
sequences, rather than just, here's some characters, now let's do an action sequence.
Here's some characters, let's do an action.
So the thing, the characters are always moving through the action.
I mean, this is all stuff.
Listen, I'd never written a giant Hollywood feature film before.
(27:27):
And I learned I was watching George Miller and listening to him like a hawk because I
was being mentored and getting the information from one of the world's masters.
Now he's getting on a bit and when he kicks the bucket, you're going to lose all that
generation of filmmakers, I'm saying, you know, all those 80s action guys, Cameron
and Spielberg and George, et cetera.
(27:49):
That's a huge sort of massive level of talent that will disappear.
And you know, there are good new directors, of course, but I'm not, I do go now and check
out action films just to see what are they doing well and what are they doing badly.
And I do find, for example, with Marvel films, I'm, I mean, I am so bored by the, so, but
(28:14):
halfway through it, I'm thinking, how long more of a God, oh my God, there's an hour
and a half to go of the stand thing.
You know, that sort of stuff.
You know, now and then there's a good Marvel film, but generally I feel that these people
don't understand the internal dynamics of, of engagement, rest.
I like, for example, I saw that new Doctor Strange movie and it was just a mess of CGI
(28:37):
and it was like, oh God, you know, I mean, there were some good bits in it.
Sam Raimi's a good director, but you know, you've got death by a thousand executives
when you do these films.
Everybody's modifying it and putting that in and it's got referred to that TV series
from, you know, all that crap.
(28:58):
I feel Marvel films are getting bogged down by their own mythology now.
I haven't seen the new Thor one.
I mean, I think the director is quite fun, you know, the New Zealand guy, but possibly
might be too, he might be too playful and undermines the drama.
So you don't kind of care that much if you're winking at the audience all the time.
(29:19):
Do you know what I mean?
There's a payoff with that stuff.
You have to be careful of there's a line.
Cool.
So I think the next thing I wanted to bring up, Brendan, which I'm fascinated by is, so
what was it like visiting the set in Africa actually going and seeing, you know, the designs
that you'd worked on for years and sort of talked about with George and seeing the characters,
(29:41):
you know, brought to life?
Or was it like seeing the world you'd worked on in The Flesh at last?
It was interesting and you got to remember it took, I finished working on Fury Road about
2000.
So and it took 12 years to get it made.
(30:06):
Remember I wrote, it was originally the one I wrote, which is about say 85 to 90% the
film you saw.
That's called Fury Road now.
It was always called Fury Road, but I wrote the fourth installment of the Mel Gibson
Mad Max is what it was.
And then once Mel Gibson had a meltdown, you know, and then coincidentally the film fell
(30:30):
apart due to some financing issues, they had to recast it.
And Heath Ledger was going to play Mad Max and then he died.
So that screws the whole thing up.
And Brad Pitt turns it down, which was, I think, very bad decision by him.
And in the end, you know, you looked around, you thought, well, as George said, in the
(30:55):
end, it was Tom Hardy, you know, to get somebody with a bit of that raw, masculine kind of
quality that, you know, Tom Hardy has that wild quality about.
So eventually once they locked in Tom Hardy, they could get going again.
But that, I mean, you know, it's a great testimony to George Miller's assistance that
(31:15):
after all the incredible, you know, it was set up and ready to go twice.
And then on the third go, they finally got it made.
And originally it was going to be shot in Australia, but they were forced over to Namibia
in Africa, which is largely the desert country.
And so it was interesting to go out.
It was great going down to Africa.
I've never been to Africa before, and it was just, you know, when you go into a place,
(31:40):
you pick the vibe up of a, you know, the feeling of Africa was amazing.
Really was interesting.
And yeah, I was only there for about, you know, just about the best part of a week.
And you know, I wondered about looked at staff, watched how George was shooting everything
and met a few of the cast and, you know, just hung around really.
(32:02):
Once I wrote and designed it with George, you know, something like that started 15 years
previously, you know, the designs had evolved, but they were still the same designs.
There were still hot rods, there were still Polk hats, there were still buzzards, there
were still, but the, he then he offered me production design, but I didn't want to do,
(32:23):
you know, I just, I really wasn't interested in production designing.
I'm more up the front end of the film.
I'm more like coming up with the ideas, the designs, the story, the characters, all that
stuff.
That's what interests me.
I had worked in Hollywood for 10 years previously.
So actually shooting films is quite boring because it's 9% of the time is hanging about
(32:45):
and then with a bit of, you know, three minutes of shooting and then another 10 hours of hanging
about.
So after a while, he actually got quite boring.
So it was nice to see it all, you know, I was, you know, it was, I was very happy that
they'd like me out to see it all.
And, you know, but in the end to me, it was, the fun was creating it, inventing characters.
(33:07):
I mean, one of the things that was shocking to me, I hadn't realized is that you can be
sitting around in the, in George Miller's studio in Sydney going, wouldn't it be great
if he had a character who looked like this and he had blah, blah, blah.
And we're all laughing just saying, saying, that's really crazy.
And the next thing, you know, an hour later, it's actually in the movie.
And I said, Cranky, it's that casual, you know, you can just throw something out just
(33:30):
to try and make George laugh or something.
And it ends up in the film, you know, and he's like, wow.
So that was a rule.
That was one of the biggest educations to me was, you know, don't hold back, go as far,
go as far out as you can and even further.
I mean, there was stuff that we came up with that was so over the top that we couldn't do.
(33:51):
And it's kind of a bit of a complaint about some of it.
So we took it out.
But this was staff.
This was internally at George's studio and people don't know, come on, that's too much.
But now I'm actually thinking, I wish we'd kept it, you know, because why did why did
we listen to that person?
We should have kept it in there.
(34:11):
You know, I'm curious to ask now what kind of stuff was left out.
That was one example.
One example is there's a piece of the film Fury Road that to me didn't quite, as comedians
say, the joke didn't land, meaning it didn't click, it didn't pay off in the movie, which
(34:32):
was when the blonde-haired girl whose pregnant splendid or a ranker or her name is, she hangs
off the door and the door falls and she goes under the thing and she gets killed.
(34:52):
And I didn't really, I didn't feel anything.
I didn't care.
I didn't, it didn't impact.
It didn't make me go, oh no.
I just went, hmm, why isn't, and I thought, why isn't that worked?
You know, why didn't that land that she got killed?
We all, we should have gone and that's, that's all.
When things don't work, it interests me and I have to roll it over in my head for years
(35:14):
thinking, what about it?
The original idea we had was she's in the car, does her thing to block a shot at Max,
because he, you know, the warlord won't shoot her because she's carrying his offspring.
And she goes back inside the truck, but one of the idiot war boys takes a shot and shoots
(35:35):
her in the head in the back of the truck and she faces dead and all the girls are just
pumping blood all over the girls going, all the girls are freaking out.
And Furiosa has to do a caesarean on her in the middle of the truck while those guys are
(35:56):
going over on the motorbikes in the canyon, you know, and rescue the baby.
Otherwise the baby will die with her.
And I felt that that was a really exciting scene.
You know, shocking.
But it was too shocking for some of the people that were working in the studio and basically
(36:17):
they were girls, women who said, oh, no, that's just, you know, it was too much.
And we sort of rethought, hang on, maybe this is too much and we're not being, you know,
it made sense to me that they would have the baby and he's after them because that's what
he's after, it's the baby.
(36:38):
And, you know, and the means of producing more babies with the other girls.
And so, you know, it changed the story when we changed that, and then you had to see where
they pull the baby out and it's dead and all the rest of it.
I wonder, were we better off sticking to the original idea, you know, so it's hard, you
know, it's hard, you don't know, but I do know that for me, and I've spoken to our friends
(37:01):
who've seen Furiosa, did that work for you when she died?
And they said, well, it wasn't a big moment, but yeah, it's okay.
And I thought, yeah, it should have been a big moment.
And you know, so I'm just throwing you out, you know, the things that I think, you know,
I mean, you look from the film from the outside in, I'm looking at it from the inside out,
you know, you know, when I see it, I think, right, what worked here and what didn't.
(37:24):
And some, there's other things we had in the film that we didn't put in, which I think,
yeah, maybe we should have been a bit more ballsy about sticking with our, you know,
guns, but you know, you have to just, at the time you make decisions and you're not sure,
sometimes you don't, are we getting too far out here or are we getting too, are we being
(37:46):
too safe?
You know, the main thing is don't be saying, you know, that was the last thing we wanted.
Yeah, I mean, anyway, that's an example of something where it could have gone one way,
and then, you know, you've got the film, the film's the film in the end.
Of course.
I mean, I suppose that's really interesting because following on from that, I know in
the first few drafts of the script, there were a lot of differences, like, you know,
(38:10):
the whole Ferdat Act at one point with the Vuvulani, the female warriors, it wasn't a
chase, it wasn't a chase back to the Citadel, it was originally a sort of airborne attack,
I want to say, it was the Ferdat Act.
Yes, I mean, George didn't want us to have an ending.
When we were writing, you know, like, for example, I met Ridley Scott once to pitch him
(38:31):
a film, and he said, the main thing is, is know your ending, you know, before we start
writing.
And that was 180 degree opposite to George Miller, who said, I don't want to know the
ending, I want the characters to take us there.
So that was the thing where he, but what we did is we sort of blocked out an ending just
(38:52):
as a rough, so we kind of knew that there was an ending there, if we were stuck, or
it just as a security blanket, really.
And we didn't use it.
The ending that we had was that the fury road led to was a dead end.
It just led to a sheer cliff face.
And so you've got Furiosa driving the truck towards, by now they jettisoned the tanker,
(39:15):
and they're only in the front part, the rear part of the truck.
And they're hurtling towards high speed down this track towards a sheer cliff edge.
And he's got what's left of the Armada still pursuing them.
And there's a mist covering this escarpment, which is a sort of circular escarpment with
(39:37):
a sheer drop.
And as she hurtles towards the edge of the cliff, you think they're just going to drive
over the edge.
She flips the truck, she pulls the steering wheel, and the truck starts sliding sideways,
and then she pulls the gears and revs it up again.
And just as it slides to the edge of the cliff, what comes into view is a slip road that goes
down the cliff.
(39:59):
And they drove, they started driving down the cliff, wheels coming off the edge and super
tense and all the rest of it.
But meanwhile, lots of the Armada just can't stop and go right over the edge because they
don't know that there's a slip road down there.
And from this cloud cover came up these, a bit like the gyro captain in Mad Max 2.
(40:19):
There was an airborne quality of these women in kind of these helicopter contractions who
came up out of the thing like harpies, you know, in the Greek mythology, the avenging
female.
Interesting enough in the title of the new one called Furiosa.
Furiosa is derived from furis, which is the other name for the harpies in Greek mythology,
(40:40):
and the fury is an avenging woman.
And so what we wanted to do is one giant fuck off fight between men and women and right,
who's going to win?
And in the end, they're both devastating each other and Immortan Joe gets killed.
The main leader of the the Vovolini is killed as well.
(41:01):
And there's a truce.
And they basically, what they work out is that look, the men have got the oil and the
armaments and a small green place.
But they blow the cloud cover have a damp climber and have got all this food growing.
And so they're going to basically work together and come together and try and, you know, they
(41:24):
can provide this, they can provide that and work, work it out together, which, you know,
in the end is what has happened.
But in the end, we didn't go with that.
I just remember vividly George walking in one morning and saying, they go back.
It's the only green place.
And so suddenly the whole movie sort of pivoted.
(41:45):
So we'd taken it right up to the bit where they're looking up at the stars and stars
and seeing satellites and, you know, that sequence out in the plains of silence.
And we then turned it around and realized, oh, actually, they're going to head back now
and they're going to have to go through the entire armada to get to the only green place
that we've seen as the audience in the film is on the top of that citadel.
(42:06):
So that's how that went.
I mean, I mean, although, you know, I've got plenty of fight on things I didn't agree
with, ultimately George had the executive, ultimately it's his film, you know, but, you
know, he psychologically, he was robust enough to, you know, assume the role of not being
(42:33):
the boss and the powerful guy and just being like Lenin McCartney or something, you know,
just equal so that we could create equally to each other and not, you know, he'd say,
you know, that's complete nonsense.
You can't do that because of that.
Or he'd come up and say, yeah, but that won't work because of that, you know, and you go,
yeah, right, you know, or whatever.
You know, so, you know, it was an equal relationship because he devolved power down.
(42:56):
So he, you know, there wouldn't be that power imbalance.
But when it came down to it in the bottom, you know, the bottom line is it's his move.
It's a bit like I'm on a, you know, an album with somebody who's a big name and I'm writing
all the songs with them and putting everything in, but in the end it's their album.
So they get to make the final decisions.
(43:16):
So that's fair enough.
I mean, I knew that, but in order for it to work between us, correct, on a creative level,
we had to be equal, even though it was a role play by George.
One of the, one of the sort of things that you touched on there was the idea of like
Furiosa and this, and this sort of the mythology that you guys were thinking about when you
(43:37):
were creating that.
Is that the way that you work where are you, do you do a lot of sort of backstory of each
character just so you can understand where they're going, who they are or where you guys
are brilliant.
And I was going to say, you know, sort of to add to that is, did you guys have any other
sort of ideas about sort of what a potential prequel, because I know there is a prequel
(44:01):
coming down the pipe.
Was that something that you and George had discussed for that particular character?
No, we totally focused on this film.
There wasn't, you know, prequels, sequels or, you know, extra trilogy or anything like
that, because, you know, you don't know, it's the film could come out and tank.
But no, I think it's a bit of a mistake to think of trilogies when you're doing the
(44:22):
first one, because it's going to diffuse your commitment to that film.
So we just focus totally on this film has to be a masterpiece.
It has to be amazing that we talked about everything.
I mean, I would have conversations with George about why can't genre films get nominated
for Oscars?
We have to make this Mad Max film.
(44:44):
I remember saying, George, suppose in this film was called Mad Max Apocalypse Now.
You know, now Apocalypse Now won loads of Oscars.
It was a serious film about serious stuff.
I said, why can't our film, a Mad Max film, which is considered genre, be as substantive
and meaty as if you like mainstream films?
And so that was always our aim, was to create a film that, although purportedly genre, is
(45:08):
also going to, you know, deal with issues that are substantive.
Once you have a group of women that are breeders, basically sex slaves, you then got the whole
politics of that, and that's how that started to develop.
Now there was less of that in the version I wrote, and George amplified it for, you know,
(45:32):
as you know, he worked on the film for another decade after I left it.
So no, it would accrue different weights and shift tones here and there and stuff like
that.
As I say, it's essentially, I recognize the film that I wrote, 90% of it is the one I
wrote with George.
But the extra 10% was pushing it, adding, say, the feminist element to it.
(45:57):
There were, you know, for example, we didn't have the name Furiosa for Charlize Theron's
character ever when I was writing it.
She was called Warrior Woman, the Praetorian.
She was reverted that way.
And that, to call her Furiosa was like right in front of our faces, because originally
the word Furiosa was the name of the land around the Fury Road.
(46:22):
The traveling through the Furiosa.
So this word was around, but we'd never connected it to Charlize Theron.
So that came later, I think, because what happened after I left, a few years later George
took on another writer.
I was in LA at that time, and he took on an Australian writer, and obviously then amplified
elements of the film, and around that time is when the obvious name Furiosa got attached
(46:48):
to Charlize Theron.
The sequel Furiosa is a prequel, and the story derived from the backstory we had on Furiosa.
I mean, we knew she had been abducted and taken to the Citadel, and had come from a
green place of many mothers.
Right, we knew that sort of stuff, and a bit more stuff about it.
(47:08):
But George then developed the backstory a bit more than, you know, in the ten years
of inning before he got into Fury Road.
A lot of it doesn't appear in the Fury Road film, but he got so interested in it, and
because Charlize Theron was such a strong character, you know, if you like the female
Mad Max, that, you know, he obviously became interested enough to want to do a film about
(47:36):
Furiosa and so on.
So I mean, I have, he did ask me to read the script, which I did read just to give him
some notes as we call them, you know, just to say, what did I think of it?
And I said, well, okay, very good, you know, really rocks along.
I think this bit's a bit boring, this bit's weak, you need to think about that scene,
(47:57):
blah, blah, blah, you know, you do all that stuff.
And I just gave him a, you know, just what we call notes, just, you could, I think you
could improve it if you did this.
So how much of that he takes on board?
I have no idea.
I'm not involved in it in the slightest.
I'm very happy to film Fury Road.
It's the Brenda McCarthy Mad Max, and I'm very happy about that.
(48:18):
I've done one.
I fulfilled a giant tick off my bucket list, so I'm happy with it.
But that's two years of my life I've put into Mad Max, I think that's enough.
Were you going to ask something, Armes?
Yeah.
I was going to ask the, that 12 years it took to make the film, how much of that was, touching
(48:41):
on this notion of too much CGI, how much of that was convincing the executives, convincing
the studio that actually this film needed to be almost practical, almost like a throwback
to the first three, and that sort of punk style, 70s, early 80s sort of filmmaking, that
in today's sort of scene has become a lot more digital, has become a lot more put people
(49:06):
in front of a green screen, save money that way.
Well even though I'm bitching about CGI and the bad use of it, you do have to look at
the box office of Endgame and Batman films and all the rest of it.
And they're all sort of, the executives are happy as long as the films make gazillions.
(49:28):
So I mean, Mad Max Fury Road made about I think 400 plus or something at the box office.
So compared to a billion for, you know, it's a Marvel film or whatever it is, you know,
Mad Max probably, if it wasn't so prestigious and so well loved by people, it's happened,
(49:53):
you know, the Mad Max Fury Road is at a great afterlife on people watching it and streaming
and look at you guys interviewing me now, seven years later, you know.
So, you know, I mean, they can roll the dice on Fury Road or Furiosa, they'd probably like
another one, maybe get a trilogy before George is getting on a bit now.
(50:15):
So hopefully you'll get three new ones done and they'll all be great, you know.
It's all about money.
Does it make money?
How much does it cost?
Or do we get loads of Oscars and do we get prestige?
Everything's about money, prestige and power.
(50:37):
That's what Hollywood runs on.
I mean, I suppose we've got a trivial question, but it's a question that I've sort of had
in the back of my head to ask this whole time, but you know, to give, you know, the trip,
but like, you know, so just go back to the stuff that you designed on the movie, the
vehicles and the war boys and stuff.
I've got to ask, and I'm sure you've probably been asked this before, but the doof warrior,
the guy with the flaming guitar, was that one of those ideas where you and George are
(51:01):
in the room and you're thinking, OK, how far can we run of this?
Can we get a guy with a flaming guitar?
Was that you guys spitballing that?
Or was that something like that?
Yeah, no, that was, I didn't have a lot to do with that specific character.
That was George came up with him as a, you know, as he said, like, you know, a guy plays
the bugle in the cab, cavalry, let's have a guy playing the guitar as the sort of cavalry
(51:24):
bugle, if there's such a word.
And then Peter Pound developed the actual look of the character, but his look sort of
developed a bit more after I left.
So in the case of the guy with the guitar that shoots flames, I didn't have a lot to
do with that particular one.
(51:45):
So, you know, just to be honest about what I did, no point taking credit, but I would
say Peter Pound, Peter Pound was the big influence on that.
And then you had the production designer, who I think added the flamethrower at the
end.
I think that was how it went.
So you had the idea for it.
You had it developed by Peter Pound, the comic book guy.
(52:07):
And then when they hired the production designer, who came in, and then, you know, obviously
had all the designs on a plate by me, he could then develop bits, extra bits and add bits
to them and all that sort of stuff.
I was going to say sort of like, to sort of touch on that and sort of how come, how come
(52:30):
you guys sort of moved away from the SNM-ish side of costume designs that was going on
in the earlier movies?
Well, speaking as a man who clearly loves SNM, Armadale.
Sorry, he doesn't.
The SNM stuff was related to, first of all, the costume designer, Norma Morcio, was like,
(52:57):
she put all that stuff in with all the big American shoulder pads, which at the time,
that look in the 80s was big shoulders, was, you know, kind of that look.
And it was sort of, she was then developing it into an absurd degree.
Also there was a convergence of style with 2000 AD, Judge Dredd and that stuff, with
(53:19):
the big shoulder pads as well.
So that kind of look was more in the air.
And because the group, there was a, the gang that were terrorizing the, you know, the sort
of the white clad liberals, if you like, inside the compound, then you've got the kind of
wild boys, you know, the William Burroughs, wild boys types of gangs outside.
(53:43):
What a subset of the gang was called the Gay Boy Berserkers.
So there was, they had a couple of other, there were a couple of other ones.
It's sort of, there was some thing worked out in Mad Max 2, where you had one big gang,
but among, in them you had the Gay Boy Berserkers, which Wes, the character with the thing in
the Asseless Chaps, was a part of.
(54:06):
So that made sense for that gang to have that kind of gear.
In this one, we were dealing with the gang, basically a bunch of, if you like, mind controlled
war boys for Remalton Joe.
And you know, we went through different costume looks.
I did come up with a white look, you know, the one kind of which they went for in the
(54:29):
end.
That wasn't, you know, to do with me.
And also I developed another look, which was more Mad Max 2, big shoulder pad kind of look.
There were a couple of others, you know, we sort of messed around with them.
But there was a lot of information there for whoever actually came on as the costume designer,
apartment rename, she took the white look and removed, and you know, if you look a lot
(54:56):
of gangs now, MS-13 gangs in America, those Latino gangs, they're bare from the waist up.
There was an element of where they were in black gloves and stuff, which I wasn't too
keen on because there was a sense of satirizing toxic male behavior into, you know, they looked
(55:17):
like demented Chippendales, you know, I mean, at least you didn't put cuffs on them, but
the black gloves, you know, thankfully didn't have bow ties.
But there was a bit of that, and there was also the day of the dead, if you look at the
skull motif, which I personally, it was starting to get used a bit by then, the day of the
dead stuff.
(55:37):
And I was thinking, we've seen that, see, my thing is not, if it's been in another movie,
we don't do it.
So the actual final costume designs were, you know, years after me.
But there was, what I developed was, in terms of the white look, white skin look, I developed
(56:01):
bullet hole tattoos.
So all of them had a bullet hole at the center of their face with, you know, when you shoot
into glass, you get all those cracks around the bullet hole.
And they're these cracks, and they would join up to another bullet hole, and the cracks
lead to another one.
And the idea is that for each kill, they got a bullet hole stamped on them, and their
faces were covered, and then the bodies would have this spider web of bullet hole tattoos.
(56:26):
Now they drop that, and then put on engine parts, scarification.
It doesn't really, it's hard to, you see it in the film, but it's a sort of deeper detail,
you'll catch it, but it doesn't, it's not really that avert.
To get back to your question, like, the gay boy berserkers of number two went into SM
gear, and then the war boys, formerly called the Necro boys, the war boys, were, you know,
(56:52):
more like a brainwashed youth cult.
And it was more driving from current gang wear, like, you know, where they're naked
from, and they wear baggy, baggy trousers and things like that.
That's how that came.
And the simplicity of where they put half, you know, the top part of the head, they just
rub engine grease on it, and you saw Furiosa do it at one point.
(57:15):
So that, you know, there were nice things like that.
Cool.
Well, that's amazing, Brennan.
Well, thank you so much for talking to us.
I mean, this has been a real, you know, delight and pleasure just listening to you talk about
the film.
I mean, just very quickly in the two minutes that we've got, like, when you saw, obviously,
you know how we felt when we saw the film, but when you finally got to watch it in the
cinema, did you feel like you'd achieved what you and George are set out to do, like
(57:36):
Road Warrior 2.0?
I'll tell you a really nice story.
Bear in mind that probably my favourite ever movie is Mad Max 2.0, Road Warrior, and, you
know, Mel Gibson, George Miller, you know, whatever.
Right?
So I saw Mad Max Furiosa, sorry, Furiosa Road at the premiere in Hollywood.
(57:58):
And I guess George must have manipulated this, but I was sitting, you know, in the premiere
at Man's Chinese Theatre up on the balcony and directly behind me on that seat is George
Miller and that seat is Mel Gibson.
And we both all watched it together.
And at the end of it, George put his hand on me and said, thanks, mate.
And I went like that.
(58:18):
And Mel Gibson went like that and thinking, well, you know, what a weird turnaround when
you're a 20-year-old kid watching a road warrior and then 20 odd years later, you get to see
the one that you co-wrote and designed with George Miller.
And there's the original Mad Max and the director both going like that to you.
(58:41):
You think, wow, that was quite an experience.
So that's how I saw it with those two guys sitting behind me, which was pretty freaky.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's amazing.
We got a result.
We got a result.
We put out a great Mad Max for all we didn't disappoint everybody.
And I wish in George the best with the new one.
I hope it comes out well.
(59:03):
Wonderful.
Well, thank you again so much for talking to us, Brendan.
That's a lovely note to end on.
I mean, yeah, full circle, you know, totally.
And yeah, I mean, thanks once again, Armand.
You want to quickly say?
No, that was it.
Thank you so much again, Brendan.
That was eye-opened.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much.
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I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Special Summer Offer: Exclusively on Apple Podcasts, try our Dateline Premium subscription completely free for one month! With Dateline Premium, you get every episode ad-free plus exclusive bonus content.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.