Mad Max 4:Fury Road pictures and interview

[Plainview1981]

Pictures:

Ok, so this is a lengthy transcript of an interview, from a couple of weeks ago, with Brendan McCarthy, one of the film's co-creators:

Is there other work in the pipeline? Is there anything else you're able to tease or hint at?

BM: Yes, I've just come back from Africa where I was invited by the director George Miller to look at the Mad Max 4 shoot. Mad Max: Fury Road, as its properly called, is a film I wrote and designed with George Miller, and I was just invited there to look at how the shoot is going. They're halfway through it....I've seen the vehicles, I've seen all the actors in costume...and I was completely blown away. I know the story, I did it with George, and I was absolutely staggered and stunned by this thing. This is going to be so good. The biggest fear is to disappoint, I think, and I really feel.....I saw a 30 minute stunt reel, and I was so overwhelmed and amazed I just thought "Oh my god this is going to be so good". I can tell you nothing about the performances, etc, but I can tell you about the vehicular action.....I met Charlize Theron. I met Tom Hardy.

You had me at Charlize Theron

BM: Yeah, she looks stunning. She's brilliant. I didn't even recognize her. Tom Hardy looked really great as well. Its going to be interesting to see how it all cuts together because there's a million miles to go from getting the footage to piecing it all together in a coherent way so the narrative works. I was absolutely stunned, I must say. This is taking the bar to another level. I'd say in terms of vehicles and stunt action it actually is probably about 'The Road Warrior', which to me, as it's the holy grail of film making, is saying a lot.

I was going to ask, 'cause as an Aussie Mad Max is a huge thing...

BM: Are you an Aussie?

Yeah.

BM: I didn't realize that.

It's kinda epic for us.

BM: It's the Star Wars of Australia, and for me, growing up, Star Wars was okay but Mad Max was for me the business. That's what it was really about.

So, is there a particular one you're referencing? Like you were saying its better than Road Warrior so it's more in line with the first?

BM: No. Personally I had a kinda religious experience in Road Warrior watching that film as a 22 year old guy. It blew me away. That led to me harrassing and stalking George Miller for about 10 years. Not really, but I actually did meet him by writing to him. I was involved in creating probably the worlds first computer animated long form stuff pre-Pixar called ReBoot. It was a TV series. And we did an episode which was a pastiche of Road Warrior, and it had loads of stuff in it called Bad Barbara rather than Mad Max, and I sent it to George saying "Whatever happened to Mad Max?" And then I got a phone call from his producer a few months later, Doug Mitchell, and then I thought "oh my god they're gonna sue me", but actually they were saying "what on earth is this stuff you're doing?", and I said it's computer animation, its bla bla bla. This is going back nearly 20 years. We kinda met up and sort of struck it off and gradually George phoned me and said "look, I'm thinking of doing a new Mad Max. Would you be interested in helping, just throwing stuff around"? I felt very strongly....these ideas and that....this is the best Mad Max....don't do that...I'm highly opinionated about all that stuff as you really should be if you're passionate about something. And that's how it came to be. This film has been up and down so many times....we lost Mel Gibson about 6 years ago and Tom Hardy eventually came along and seemed like the right guy. So, I think it will be worth the wait. I'm probably super critical of this stuff, and for me, I think you're not going to be disappointed. I don't want to be disappointed, so let alone you be disappointed.

I guess you'd make the film you'd want to see.

BM: I did. I just said, "how do I recreate the experience that I had in Road Warrior for somebody else" is kinda the mission. George Miller as well. He's really a genius film maker, from radicalizing and starting the revolution in Australian cinema with Mad Max, Peter Weir doing The Cars That Ate Paris, Fred Schepisi...all those Australian new wave directors similar to Scorsese and Copolla in America, liberate Australian cinema from parochial kinda brit stuff, and they were the trail blazers, and George is still going strong. The fire still burns.

You said you couldn't say much to us in terms of performances and stuff like that, but you could tell us more about the vehicles and sets and things. so is this from your design perspective in terms of what you brought to that? What can you tell us about, I guess?

BM: I can't tell you a lot about it because....um....I'm sorta from an earlier age where the less you saw of that movie the better. Now, everybody knows...has almost seen the entire movie before going into it through video diaries and the like. I'd would rather withhold as much of that stuff as possible. But already stuff has leaked onto the internet, on the vehicles. So it's all there if you just wanna look it up. I would just say that in my view, these are the best vehicles ever for any of the Mad Max films. Three days ago I was standing under a vehicle called The Gigahorse, and it is stunning. It's like....have you seen it with the two Caddys rammed together at the back? It's just one of the most amazing vehicles. It's a sculpture on its own. These mechanics and engineers that have built this stuff are geniuses.

So this stuff you designed, so essentially you drew or constructed this on the computer and then you're suddenly seeing this massive thing they've created from it.

BM: How the script and screenplay were put together is that we loosely worked out a story, and as we went along, being a comic book artist, which George Miller loved, is not only that you're a story teller but have the ability to also say "yeah, it should look like this", and then you've got design. So you loosely design the whole movie, we did it in about 6 months, just roughed out story, and then we did it about another year and actually really getting into it, refining it, and after about 2 years we actually had kinda coherent screenplay with core boards. Then we brought in some storyboard guys who were great as well...Australian guys...there's a brilliant guy called Peter Pound. Another guy called Mark Sexton. Both talented in a real way. They bring their thing in. And then when you get the actual mechanics and production designers who come in later, they bring their stuff as well. So you're always layering new creativity into it. As I say, I believe these vehicles are the best of all the vehicles. It's a brand new old look for Mad Max.

Okay, well thank you so much for coming to chat with us Brendan....