What George Saw in the Sand

Blood, Sweat and Chrome is a terrific read — an oral history of MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, its long gestation, its making, and its near unmaking. No mention of the 3D version or the black & chrome version, oddly enough — though we do get a brief history of the abortive attempts by Kennedy-Miller to create their own 3D camera that could survive the heat and dust of desert filming, something that doubtless added a few bucks to the eventual cost (reckoned at “over $250 million” here, described as “$500 million!!!” by industry scuttlebutt that came to my ears).

Author Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter who puts together a great story. I wish he’d had more of the nerdy camera stuff — before the film appeared, cinematographer John Seale and his second unit man David Burr did a fabulously indiscrete talk which appeared online and hinted at the troubles, the craziness and the extraordinary approach director George Miller took to his material.

Miller’s approach was, appropriately enough, mad. I love the movie — a two-hour anxiety attack — and so, in a sense, one can’t fault his methods. But, in another sense, one can. It was nuts.

Apart from the opening and closing scenes in the Citadel, Miller shot in sequence. This is rarely done even in small movies because it’s not practical. On a big movie, it’s crazy. On a HUGE movie, it’s suicidal. It was basically a way of making the easy bits of a mostly insanely difficult movie become also difficult. Need two shots of a character at the steering wheel, one for scene ten and one for scene twenty? Don’t film them together, film them weeks apart, necessitating two set-ups where one would have done you. Then multiply that by hundreds. Actors like filming in sequence, when they can, because it allows a clearer sense of the emotional throughline. But both Miller’s stars confessed themselves hopelessly confused.

Tom Hardy, confused while wearing a garden fork on his face.

Miller worked from a storyboard, not a script. Everybody says there WAS no script, though I also read interviews where Miller’s collaborators claimed they had to produce a script to satisfy Warner Bros, which seems plausible. But then they never referred to it and apparently didn’t show it to the actors. This was all supposed to HELP. A more detailed, granular plan, which shows exactly what has to be shot. A more useful, visual document for a movie that’s literally almost all action.

Storyboards are great for specifics but a trifle unwieldy — MM:FR’s boards papered a large room — it can be hard to get an overview of the story because of all the detail — Miller or a collaborator would have to talk interested parties through the boards, because storyboards can be hard to interpret if you’re used to scripts. They tend not to be as intuitively clear as comic strips. One of the “writers” claims that reading action scenes is “fucking boring” so storyboards were the only way to go. Read a James Cameron action scene sometime. Or read a book. It’s true that most screenwriters suck at describing things, just as most directors suck at filming them. But the exceptional ones prove it can be done.

Miller’s mania was, at every level of the production, to focus on details, and attempt to make the perfect film by assembling a series of perfect details. Crazily, it kind of worked. You can’t say he wasn’t seeing the big picture, because he obviously very much had a vision. But he didn’t always succeed in conveying its essentials to his actors. (In that talk above, Seale says he didn’t have a clue what the film was going to look like, since digital cinematography is so utterly, dizzyingly flexible.)

Miller also largely eschewed master shots, shooting little tiny pieces, like Hitchcock. The stars would beg him for a bit of run-up, so they weren’t just acting in five-second bursts. “No, I don’t need that,” he would say.

Now, coverage is not in itself a wicked thing. And Miller had final cut, so he had no need to fear it. USUALLY if you’re shooting five seconds of vital material it does no harm to surround it with ten or twenty seconds on either side, which will give you cutting choices. Miller was working on the theory that there’s only ever one correct camera position, while Seale was shooting multicamera because he suspected this was an approach that could easily land one in difficulties. And some of the B and C camera stuff did make it into the movie, so he was right.

We’re told that an assembly of early scenes was created (Margaret Sixel, Miller’s wife, is also his editor, and they obviously have a beautiful relationship and understanding) but this, apparently, was not shown to the actors. It would have been INCREDIBLY useful, I would have thought. Hitchcock did this to Sylvia Sidney on SABOTAGE — confused her by shooting piecemeal then wowed her with an assemblage. Psychologically a masterstroke: you disorient your star, make them worried that you don’t know what you’re doing, then dazzle them with your brilliance, and they have no choice but to trust you from then on. I mean, I wouldn’t do it: I’d prefer to keep people onside throughout. But, in the wild, cult-like atmosphere of Miller’s film, this seems like a workable scheme.

Miller also believed in fine-tuning every sequence in the cut before moving on to the next one. Which is also batshit. I always tell my students to assemble the outline of the film quickly — you don’t make shonky cuts you know aren’t acceptable, but you work fast and aim to get, as quickly as possible, an overview, all the scenes in order. That way, you learn as quickly as possible how much trouble you’re in. You get to the most depressing part as quick as possible, and then everything after that is about making it better.

To some extent, that may have been impossible for Miller due to his “goddamn jigsaw cutting,” as Selznick referred to Hitch’s approach. But if everything’s following a storyboard and there’s no fat, it’s not that hard to cut off the clapperboards and string the shots in their intended sequence, even if the timing is initially rough. Slightly harder when you have 480 hours of footage, I know…

George Miller is clearly a more successful (and better) filmmaker than I am, as a comparison of LORENZO’S OIL and episode 13 of Intergalactic Kitchen will demonstrate. But I learned about shooting masters, putting things in a clearly formatted script, communicating with my actors and aiming for a rough cut as fast as possible relatively early in my career. It maybe took ten years. Miller turned 70 while making FURY ROAD, and he’s a very smart guy (a doctor!). He clearly handled his crew brilliantly, his supporting cast were happy (working with a dramaturge), and his struggles with the studio all worked out in the film’s favour (the diciest moment was when the head of Warners ordered him not to shoot the opening and closing of the film, a ruinous decision which had to be reversed later, at great expense, when it turned out that a film without an introduction and a climax tended to be rather incoherent).

So it’s a mystery — maybe George never made the early mistakes I struggled with, and so he was able to discover them at an advanced age? Or maybe he’s right and I’m wrong.

Cox’s Orange Pippins: Michael J. Pollard’s ass is a dish best served cold

This piece contains spoilers and in fact they’ve already started.

The Old Testament’s Book of Ezekiel identifies the four horsemen of the apocalypse as Sword, famine, Wild Beasts and Pestilence but in the New Testament’s Book of Revelations their names are given as Conquest, War, Famine and Death. But here’s Lucio Fulci to settle the debate: they are Stubby, Bunny, Clem and Bud. As played by Fabio Testi, Lynn Frederick, Michael J. Pollard and Harry Baird. The judge’s decision shall be final.

We really enjoyed FOUR OF THE APOCALYPSE… (1974). It’s unusual. Alex Cox is fairly dismissive of it, as he is of all post-1970 spaghettis. He points out that with its pop music soundtrack and soft-focus, backlit, long lens cinematography, it strongly resembles a TV commercial of the period. I’d Like to Buy the World a Gun. This is true, and the songs are fairly diabolical, though they do add to the weirdness which is one of the film’s key virtues, and Fulci’s love of diffusion is evident in his horror movies too. Giving a romantic gloss to hardcore prosthetic gore is agreeably perverse.

The violence has a point, which coincides with what I take to be the point of Fulci’s horror films, which aren’t scary but deal with a disturbing idea — human beings are composed of meat. Fulci being a doctor (!), like George Miller (!), he seems to have had a sense of mission in teaching us this valuable if depressing truth. (The sadism in Fulci is clinical and lacks joi de vivre, it’s more squalid and abject.)

The colour-supplement beauty may have a point too, but at any rate for those who don’t enjoy the Leone aesthetic — orange makeup, clogged pores in massive close-up, dust — here’s an alternative. Scenic beauty and spouting rubber appliances.

As with his previous (1966) western, MASSACRE TIME (haven’t seen it yet, but going by Cox’s report), Fulci stages a lot of squib-splatter effects, not otherwise seen much in the Italian west. If he was doing that in ’66 he was really ahead of the curve — ahead of Penn and Peckinpah. I’ll check that one out and report back.

Fiona christened these guys “the notorious Elephant Man Gang.”

This one begins with multiple “explosive bullet hits” spurting red, red vino in an opening massacre largely unconnected to whatever plot the film has (arguably, it has none). While it’s going on, our main characters are spending a night in the jail, which introduces them. Fabio Testi (literally “Fabulous Balls”) is a smooth gambler, Lynn Frederick, soon to marry Peter Sellers, is a pregnant hooker, Michael J Pollard is passed-out drunk (and, in reality, apparently high as a kite) and Harry Baird is a gravedigger who sees dead people. While the town’s other undesirables are being slaughtered by white-hooded vigilantes, and the sheriff stuffs his ears with bread, Fulci crash-zooms in on Baird’s frightened face…

Run out of town on a cart, our ill-matched quartet head for the next town — and never get there. That’s the closest thing to a plot. Also, they meet up with outlaw Tomas Milian, who carves inverted crosses carved under his eyes and is basically a wild west Charles Manson, an idea I suppose someone was bound to explore at some point. Manson’s actually living on a wild west movie set makes it inevitable.

Milian, much less appealing than in DJANGO, KILL! (a Christlike Yojimbo) or THE BIG GUNDOWN (a scrappy underdog), is a horrific villain. His arrival triggers a spate of actual animal killing, in the Italian cannibal movie vein: he’s a one-man REGLE DE JEU hunting party. Getting the foursome high on some ill-defined peyote or something, he stakes them out in the desert and rapes the stoned Frederick. This is staged in a very spaghetti western manner — a lingering build-up with a startlingly sudden conclusion. It’s at once highly exploitative and slightly squeamish, as if Fulci wanted to get the sadists aroused and then leave them high and dry.

The four, having briefly become five, are now reduced to three, two, one. Pollard, a veteran of the European western, having played romantic lead (!) in LES PETROLEUSES/THE LEGEND OF FRENCHIE KING, dies (too soon!) from a gunshot wound. Baird goes fully schizo and serves Pollard’s severed buttock to his friends as a meal, then capers off. ALWAYS ask what the “large animal” your crazy friend found and butchered actually is.

Frederick gives birth, and dies. Her baby, born in an all-male town of eccentric outlaws, is adopted by the whole community, and christened “Lucky.”

“What’s the surname?” wondered Fiona.

“Bastard,” I suggest.

The slender thread of plot running through the latter half has been a revenge quest — Testi gets his revenge, in a messy and unpleasant manner, and walks off, crying.

W.H. Auden said that works of art are not divided into the good and bad (and ugly), but the interesting and boring. This movie is, I submit, interesting. Lots of implausible, childish stuff, but Fulci for once seems to actually care about and like his characters, or at least made us do so. Everyone is post-synched but apart from Testi, their real voices have been used — Frederick’s combination of wild west saloon gal and stage school brat is rather adorable, and Baird just plays it with his Guyanan accent. Revenge is an imperative, but it’s main value is, it seems, to allow the hero to grieve.

The acting is, as Cox might say, “a certain kind of acting.” Or certain kinds. Frederick strives to condense as many facial expressions into as short a space of time as possible. It’s strange to see such a porcelain doll countenance moves so much. Her line readings are frequently incomprehensible, even though she has perfect elocution — it’s that opera singer thing, where everything is enounced beautifully but has no relation to natural speech and so the brain stumbles over it. The protean features, however, are the natural uncontrolled expressiveness of a child, something Frederick never offers in any other performance. Pollard is just out of his face, agreeably so. Baird is given a lot of conflicting stereotypes to contend with (singing spirituals AND cannibalism) but his character’s craziness is benign, and atypical. Rather than being afraid of spooks, he likes them. Testi’s character arc is, on one level, the retrieval of his shaving kit, on another it’s the classic revenge motive, but on some other unstated level it’s an attempt to become involved with humanity. It’s not at all clear if this is a good idea for him.

Maybe the film’s unusual sentiment and humanity comes from the Bret Harte stories it purports to adapt; maybe from Ennio de Concini, co-writer, whose varied credits include DIVORCE: ITALIAN STYLE and Bava’s likeable THE EVIL EYE/THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH. Maybe Fulci was in an unusually sympathetic mood: perhaps DON’T TORTURE A DUCKLING had a brief purgative effect on his toxic sensibility.

There is, as usual with Dr. Fulci, a lot of unpleasant imagery, and the prosthetics are as usual gloated over until the seams show. But there is very attractive imagery too. The sense of the west as a nightmarish world of anarchic violence, in which our protagonists are defenceless innocents, is touching and scary and unlike anything I’ve seen. It’s like if you digitally erased Clint from A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and left the weak and the bad to get on with it. The title is hard to parse, since these four are not powerful destructive forces, and do the 1880s count as an apocalypse? One is forced to conclude that, in Fulci’s universe, the apocalypse is happening ALL THE TIME.

FOUR OF THE APOCALYPSE… stars Zorro; Tatiana Romanoff; C.W. Moss; Big William; Provvidenza; Tatum, the killer; Agente della Pinkerton; and Dr. Butcher.

Striking Down the Unroadworthy

Wrote this last year after enjoying MAD MAX: FURY ROAD — we watched all the previous MAXES, I wrote this, and then forgot to publish it. Now I’m thoroughly sick of staring at it in my Drafts section, I’ll finally punt it out there.

***

So, we finally watched all the MAD MAX films, in the wrong order. Fiona hadn’t seen any, and I had seen MAD MAX II: THE ROAD WARRIOR on VHS and the first film at my school film society when I was 17. FURY ROAD got us all pumped up and fuel-injected and we thought it was time to catch up. Oddly enough, my teenage self hadn’t been all that taken with the first film, so we left it to last. But in the interests of clarity, I’ll take them in order here.

MAD MAX — first seen at my school film society — has all the strengths and weaknesses in position already. The action is hairy and scary and impressive and the ruthlessness is total. The movie menaces a child in the first reel and kills one to motivate the last-act carnage. Max’s wife isn’t killed, just horribly wounded, and then allowed to completely disappear from the movie, and the series. Maybe he likes Charlize Theron in the latest film because she reminds him of his wife’s missing arm?

Throughout the action the movie contrasts Max’s heteronormative family values with the rampaging psychopathic polyamorous biker gang led by Toecutter (Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall Keays-Byrne) who are equal-opportunities rapists. “A woman! My favourite!” remarks one. Director/doctor George Miller takes a bully’s gloating delight in their depravity and laughs along with their jokes, which I think is what I disliked about the film first time.

Max and his sex-sax-playing wife actually play at Tarzan-and-Jane, and like that previous screen couple, they have an unimaginative way with baby names: their’s is called Sprog.

I don’t remember the cartoonish eyeball-bulge moment, played twice in the film. Either it was censored from our UK print or it went by so fast I convinced myself it never happened. Or I suppressed the memory and Miller should start paying my therapist bills.

The second film is an exponential leap in budgetary terms, and also in bringing in the self-consciously mythic aspect of the series. The ending is particularly fine in this respect, unearned by the preceding action — the Gyro Captain’s going to make a terrible tribal leader, obviously. The weird lack of continuity between films — no series save THE PINK PANTHER has survived so much surreal garbling — already creeps in, but is less overt. Miller’s skill with actors seems to have actually regressed, with this movie brimming with lousy supporting players cast for their appearance. Emil Minty as the Feral Kid is good though.

Isn’t he YOUNG? Mel Gibson is actually too boyish in the first film, struggling to appear bad-ass enough or convincingly tormented until his descent into nemesis mode at the end. He has just enough gravitas by the time of the second.

Once more, though, the film is far more in love with its bad guys, and can’t quite bring itself to give the hero much to do or say — only at the climax is there a clear imperative to get his arse in gear.

The third film is probably the most dated, since its budget now allowed Miller and his co-George to really indulge themselves, so we get more sex-sax, Tina Turner, some dubious hair for Max, and a bit of a Frankie Goes To Hollywood vibe. Everything at Thunderdome is a bit confused, with baddies who aren’t bad enough, fighting other baddies, and Max stuck in between without a clear role. Once we get to the “Jesus in leather” part, the high concept that made the film worth making to Miller, with Max as messiah leading a tribe of semi-feral children from the wilderness, things pick up. The Riddley Walker devolved dialect of the kids is inspired, and it’s only when you start picking at it that you realize the whole thing makes no sense at all — how long have these kids been here?

So the third film is the least satisfying and most naff, but also has a lot of the best bits of the series, with the epic, mythic ending of film 2 extrapolated out so as to occupy considerable screen time. In the first film it’s a really cool grace note at the end of a silly, nasty romp. Here, it’s almost substantial. The post-apocalyptic poetic is a major thing in literary sci-fi, but rarely gets a look-in at the movies. Surprising that the most brutal, comic-book and nonsensical post-apoc flicks should also approach the sublime most nearly.