The 25 Best Movies of the Century: No. 9 - 'Mad Max: Fury Road’

0:10I'm Sean Fennessey. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is 25 for 25, a big picture special conversation show about Mad Max Fury Road. Witness me! Today we ride into Valhalla because we have selected Mad Max as number nine. This, of course, is the 2015 action epic masterpiece written and directed by George Miller, co-written by Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lothoris, starring Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Holt, Hugh Kearsbyrne, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, Zoe Kravitz, and many more. Let's get right into this movie. why did we choose Mad Max Fury Road? This is the action achievement of the century so far, maybe of movies as they have been filmed.

0:58You know, there's a very famous Steven Soderbergh quote about this movie. That is, I don't understand how they're not still shooting that film and I don't understand how hundreds of people aren't dead. But what this movie accomplishes in terms of But doing the things that you see on screen and getting them on film and then editing them together and putting them in a movie is unprecedented. This episode is presented by LinkedIn ads. Sometimes marketing gets wasted on the wrong people. Like if you see an ad for movie themed dog sweaters when you don't even have a pet. Reach exactly who you need with LinkedIn ads with a network of 130 million decision makers.

1:44They can help you target by job title, industry, company size, or even skills. It's one of the reasons LinkedIn ads generates the highest B2B return on ad spend of all online ad networks. Seriously, all of them. Try it out. Spend$250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com slash the big picture. Terms and conditions apply. It is unprecedented. This is the fourth Mad Max movie. This film was conceived some 35 years before its production. George Miller, famously a medical doctor before becoming a filmmaker, has had one of the most extraordinary careers in movie history.

2:29Mad Max is really the root and heart of his career. And he had been away from this story for a very long time. Conceived it in 78, this film. he made three Mad Max films in roughly a 10 year period in Australia made a star out of Mel Gibson I think in some ways put Australia along with a handful of other filmmakers you know including maybe Peter Weir a handful of others who came to America to start making films on the map and Beyond Thunderdome from 1987 was the last time we had seen a Mad Max movie and then 28 years go by and there had been rumors of this movie for some time if you were following it and I like the Mad Max movies.

3:13I wouldn't say that The Road Warrior is like an all-time classic for me but I was looking forward to this. I vividly remember seeing this movie in movie theaters. I was not covering movies full-time professionally. I went on the Friday it released in the afternoon at the Vista Theater here in Los Angeles. Oh, fun. I went by myself. I don't even really know why I went by myself, but I remember being there by myself and I thought I was a little bit late, but there were some trailers. And I walked in, I'd rarely eat popcorn at the movies and I got popcorn and I got a giant soda. And within the first 12 seconds, I felt like I had gotten a syringe full of adrenaline in my neck.

3:58Like I, this is one of the most vivid movie going experiences I have ever had in my life. And it's weird because like, everybody knows George Miller's a genius, right? he's roundly celebrated Mad Max iconic film franchise I guess there were some questions because there was some conversation about the challenges of that production that the Soderbergh quote alludes to you know there's a there's a incredible Kyle Buchanan book about the making of this movie Blood, Sweat, and Chrome you can read all the details about how difficult it was to accomplish this and I'm sure I knew some of that stuff but this felt like a new form of movie like I don't remember a movie feeling quite like this.

4:37And I think we use that, Cunard, about talking about like, oh, the first time I saw Pulp Fiction, I didn't know you could do storytelling this way. This is actually like how the film felt to my body. Felt different. It felt so alive and tense and in your face. Not a 3D movie, but it felt like it was happening. And so when I look back at the movie and I think about it, I think we should be trying to capture that in this list. You know, like some things take time to develop cults or fandoms. This was one that the moment I saw it, I was knocked out. Yeah. I had a different relationship to it and I'm trying to, I don't know if I've seen this movie in theaters, which is something I'm embarrassed to say, but is just kind of how it shook out because like, I guess I had seen a Mad Max film, but I don't know.

5:28You know, I wasn't like rare and like, oh yes. And now we'll find out, you know, what's happening in the desert. Like in general deserts, like I can take it, I can leave it. And this, maybe I did see it in theaters because it had such an awards season tale. And it was a, it was a pretty sizable hit as well. Yeah. But, but I wasn't, I wasn't there on the Friday being like, yeah, I got to connect with this. Like this is the latest installment and a very exciting thing. And I think when I finally did see it, I felt viscerally all of the things that you felt. It is loud. It is propulsive. It is disorienting.

6:07It is like broad and vibrant. I felt and still feel kind of like I'm watching like maybe not a new art form, but like fine art essentially. And there's a little bit of like almost a silent film quality to it, which is funny to say about a movie that is as loud and uses sound and specifically an electric guitar as beautifully as this does. But I was like, oh, I see like action is an entirely different type of art form to you than making a movie. And you're doing something. It's almost like sculpting in real time here. and it is like amazing and a breathtaking and like a little perplexing to watch at times the way that like really good art kind of grabs you and is like, wait, what am I looking at here?

7:01And how are you doing this? And is this really happening? So I continue to be fascinated by this movie in particular and Furiosa to like a lesser extent. But when that movie is really working, it's because what he's doing with set pieces is like museum quality. Refresh your good vibes with Tic Tac. With the right vibes it's... Oh man!

7:37...to...

7:53Last night I had a little experiment. I re-watched the movie. I've seen this movie many times. I feel very comfortable with, you know, remembering sequences and lines and action. but I watched it in the black and chrome edition which is the black and white version of the film which I know our producer Jack saw in theaters earlier this year and has become a little bit of a cult object onto itself and I thought I had seen it in that way and I had not and obviously it has been drained of that high contrast color that's in the movie and the post work in this movie is kind of amazing so yes he does get a lot of stuff practically on screen that is amazing, right?

8:37There's a level of choreography in the action and a level of conception in the filmmaking that is remarkable. It's a huge part of it. Right, and it's just like the scale, right? There are just hundreds of rigs. Vehicles, yeah, people. They are flipping and they are exploding. Weapons, explosions. Yeah, like all of that stuff is happening. But it is also a major act of post-production artistry. that there is an enormous amount of CGI in this film, that there is an incredible score from Junkie XL in this movie. A lot of things that are not necessarily a part of the actual production of the movie.

9:14And we praise that part of it because it just looks like it was so hard to do. Right. Right? And I'm fond of like praising that for movies. Right, and we also praise it because we are at this point, and probably even in 2015, we're accustomed to it not happening in real life anymore. Yeah. Right, right, right. We become comfortable with CGI. Yeah, and we almost expect like, okay, they're going to do this big extravaganza, except it will all... None of it will be real. Yes. Yeah. And this is a case where, you know, the things that would be real would be a person wearing a green suit that would be animated around them.

9:51And there are aspects of this movie that have some of those things. There is a plenty of CGI. There's an insane sandstorm sequence in the movie that is obviously hugely benefits from computer-generated imagery. It's just that in this film, it looks amazing. Like that work is at such a high level because there's so much time and painstaking detail that goes into it. I think you and I fall into the trap of very easily being like, oh, CGI, it's a purple schmear. It doesn't look like anything. Well, there's no purple in this. Like honestly, the colors are very beautiful. Yeah, and I don't know if it is easier to work and to invent against this palette, the sort of like orange, brown, yellow in the sand, and then that allows the other colors in the film to kind of pop more discreetly.

10:34But I think it is just an absolute fusion of all the things that make, to your point about silent cinema, a kind of total cinema, a pure cinema, which is something that we say and joke about, but there is actually a version of it. Like if you look at, you know, when you're in school and you study film, you study Eisenstein and you learn about technique, You study Murnau and you learn about Shadow. You study Abel Gantz's Napoleon and you learn about Scale. And there's all these movies in the first 30 years of film that show you the different strategies that you can deploy to tell a certain kind of story.

11:11And this movie does feel like one of those huge D.W. Griffith epics or like Napoleon where it doesn't need the sound. If you just had the subtitles, it is a movie about forward momentum. It's like continuous, endless, deathless strain of race. And that's really it. There are other ideas. There are a lot of themes that gird the movie. But even there, dialogue is not used to express them or it is very sparingly. And you could cut the dialogue and still understand what exactly is going on, between every character. And obviously there's that, there's that shot of Charlize Theron once she's learned that the green place is no more and, you know, and like goes out on her own for the, yeah, and it's like, I mean, it's a ready-made movie poster, but like you don't need to hear the scream to understand what's going on there.

12:10She and Tom Hardy communicate pretty much through looking at each other. There was a lot more acting done, like of someone's eyes behind a wheel, real or, you know, green suited than there is of two people standing like in some room, like having a conversation. And that's the other way that it is like silent cinema. It's a movie of faces. It's expressionistic in the way that it's shot. It's also expressionistic on their faces, you know, like Tom Hardy has maybe 30 lines of dialogue in this movie. Right. Charlize Theron, maybe 40. it's very sparse in terms of what how much information is being communicated and yet you're kind of getting everything that you need I think that there is something about it too that is it's like it's like the problem that it is reflecting which is this kind of ecological crisis and who controls natural resources controls the world just doesn't necessitate a lot of explanation it's not a particularly deep movie about those ideas well the explanation is there in the like in the visuals and the production design and in the setting and in those heightened colors, but also the completely sparse scale of what you're seeing.

13:25So again, it's what you see doing the work. It's interesting too, because the amount of information, the visual information that you're getting is high, is really high. And part of it is because you've got this kind of sped up frame rate style where it feels like the movie is happening in a kind of hyper reality, which I think we've heard a lot about frame rates. Peter Jackson during the Hobbit films was trying to, you know, change the frames per second. Ang Lee did this, I believe, in Gemini Man. Oh, yeah, sure. You know, there were a handful of examples of this that were, they were sort of purposefully shooting in a style that would communicate the information visually.

14:00What were the Hobbits doing? What were they doing? Usually they were eating. Right, but like, what did the, was it just so they could, what did the change, enhanced frame rate do? I think the idea was that it would immerse you more deeply in the world. That the world would feel hyper real in the same way that this does. The difference is that at least in the Hobbit movies, they're not pure action. No. You know, there's like, there's a lot of sitting around talking about being a Hobbit and Hobbiton and all that. They're very normal movies that men go see together and enjoy. What kind of foods do they eat?

14:35We'll save it for when we get to the Hobbit on this countdown, which is number six. Gemini Man it actually kind of made sense what he was going for because it was a movie also about like doubles and remember there's like the motorcycle sequence I do remember I mean I was trying to remember what was happening in Gemini Man and it was like something about a parking garage and the motorcycle and he jumps you nailed it yeah that's correct and then and then he jumps and at some point I believe there you know they filmed I think a lot in Atlanta as people do So I think at some point they go to the Georgia coast and I was like, hey, I recognize that.

15:12So, you know. You summed up Gemini, man. We don't need to do our episode about that film either. Those were interesting, like, attempts at changing the way that movies looked. Right. You know, and this is something that happens, obviously, every 20, 30 years. There's a new iteration on how a movie looks. First, you got black and white and silent. Then you got sound. Then you got color. Then you got CinemaScope. Then you've got VistaVision. Then you've got 3D. than you've got in theater, you know, physical experiences like William Castle movies. Yeah. You know, movies are kind of constantly evolving.

15:43This is one where he used a very straightforward methodology to just change how it felt watching a movie. And when you combine that with that artistry and craftsmanship that you were talking about, it creates something that is sui generis. Like there's not really a movie that feels like this movie. We could talk about Furiosa and kind of the legacy of Furiosa. Very scandalous episode of our show where we said, Furiosa, pretty good. Not my favorite movie of all time. Yeah, and what was the scandal that that was... People were like, how dare you? Because it's... There's like a cult of Furiosa fandom.

16:16Oh, yeah. And then there's people who are not in that cult. And you know what? I think some of it is correlated to time of life. Because if you saw Furiosa on the big screen, but maybe you were too young to see Fury Road on the big screen, and you look at the, you know, the sort of war rig set piece with the bombs in Furiosa, you might be like, that's one of the best things I've ever seen in a movie. Right. That is some of the most thrilling. And the difference is, and this is, I think, useful in talking about these two movies, Furiosa is an action epic, not just in scope, but in terms of duration.

16:49It's a film that takes place over a long period of time. Right. This is a movie that takes place in a day. Yeah. And it is micro. It's a mini epic. It's just a big chase movie. And there's also not a lot of examples of that at this scale too. That's something that is like shrunk down, but also so big that I struggle to find comps. You know what I mean? Yes. Yeah. There is a simplicity to what is the most ornate, difficult film ever put on film that is um that that i really works in its favor and also like allows you to focus on exactly what it is doing in furiosa you know chris hemsworth is walking away with the half the movie there are competing narratives there's you know with as with any origin story there's it's on a couple different tracks um and this is on one very specific track that honestly like they just like drive one way and then they just drive back the same way quite literally yep um and and so you are it's more immersive you're just kind of you are literally along for the ride sorry i walked into it but it was right there no it's true i mean the other thing too is that miller's sensibility the world that he has created in the previous mad max films is kind of a weird like little gross kind of visceral odd collection of characters with weird names and funny voices and his comic timing is fairly unusual and so all the interactions between Immortan Joe and his sons and his sort of generals and his army are all very odd.

18:36There is something that feels displaced from reality in the storytelling. For the most part Imperator Furiosa is, I guess, a grounded character. You know, her dialogue is not like extravagant. She doesn't speechify, but she does have only one arm and has a claw for a hand and is in a constant state of battle. Yeah. And everyone surrounding her, especially, you know, all the war boys are, they're like an ancient tribe, but they're also slaves. They feel like they're part of the history of zombie movies from the 50s, but then they also feel like they're cultists from the future. It's like a very strange collection of created people.

19:29But also, we don't have to know anything about their lore. Right. That's true. And if you do, it's there on the surface. It's in the costuming and the makeup and the production design. You get the one speech from Immortan Joe at the beginning of the movie that kind of clarifies, like, here's what's going on in this world right now. Here's what this apocalypse is. And then that's it. You get signposts. Yeah. And I'm sure books have been written about this world and the lore of it all. Yeah, I've published seven. Right. But those are people projecting onto the text. You know, you don't have to have any of that.

20:02It is, they are symbols. They are things to be moved around and in service of this visual play that you're watching. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. There's nothing better than having friends who support you in your passions. That's so true. I'm so grateful to have Sean support me as I explore my interest in 4Ks.

20:32Like those friends, State Farm is there to help you along the way with so many coverage options. It's nice knowing you have support in finding what fits for you. Go online at statefarm.com or use the award-winning app to get help from one of their local agents. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. When I was doing the series of conversations with Bill Hader about Barry on the Prestige TV podcast, there was one episode that we were discussing where Barry was overlooking like a base camp of some kind. And he asked me, do you know what I was ripping off there? I said, I don't. He said, that's from The Road Warrior.

21:08And then we did like a side-by-side and it was, you know, shot for shot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Take. And, you know, Bill is a huge cinephile and he did that a lot in Barry. He picked and chose a lot of different kind of visual inspirations. And Miller is a very inspirational figure. He makes a lot of images that filmmakers, especially action filmmakers, but not just action filmmakers, tend to pull from. This is a movie where it would be hard to do that because of the way that the film was made. you know, you could recapture that scene where, you know, she falls to her knees or you could pay homage to the absolutely, like, to me, breathtaking final moments of the movie.

21:47Yeah, of course. Which is like one of my favorite endings in movie history, just visually. But there's so much that is difficult to accomplish in this movie, you know, the pole cats swinging and the war boys jumping off the spikes. And also so much of it is movement and it is, you know, and it's cutting so fast, which is the you know it's a feature not a bug but um so it's meant to communicate that everyone is just moving forward as as fast as they can and so that like what you're talking about like a shot is when we think about it in our minds it's a stationary image you know when we want to play compliment to someone's vision something's visuals we often say it's very painterly you know which is still and there is something like the kineticism of these images are part of what makes them the images that they are.

22:38So you can't recreate it unless you get everyone to move in that exact same way and then cut it in that exact same way. That's a great point. Charlize is an interesting component in this movie. She is kind of used like a living painting in some ways. She has imposing physique. She's very strong. She's very striking. As you said, she doesn't say a lot. At this point in her career, though, she is representative of something, right? She's like one of, if not the most powerful woman in movies. Right, yeah. And the timing for this makes a lot of sense. She's already won an Academy Award at this point for her work in Monster.

23:19She's used that to kind of elevate out of the girl in movies to being the center of the film. And she goes on this stretch of films that are sort of like, some of which are unglamorous. You know, she's in North Country and in the Valley of Ella. she does do some Hollywood movies like Hancock, where she plays a strong figure. He's an angel in that? No, he's a superhero. Oh. And she's also a superhero. Oh, okay. Just spoilers for the 2008 film Hancock. And then the old guard are angels, sort of? Yes. Okay. I was just making sure. We're going to get to that. I'm bringing that up for a reason. No, I know, I know.

23:57But I was conflating my... What kind of superpowers have been assigned to Charlize? Yeah. I mean, in the run-up to this movie, though, she's in kind of a weird stretch. She makes Young Adult, a movie I really like. Yeah. Jason Reitman's Young Adult. Okay. Snow White and the Huntsman, Prometheus, A Million Ways to Die in the West and Dark Places are the films that immediately precede this. Okay. Prometheus is great. She's got a modest-sized role in that movie. This movie hits, makes$380 million at the box office. It's tremendously successful. And then you're like, okay. Here we go. this is going to be one of the great film careers of all time.

24:34And since then, it's been kind of weird. And she's taking some risks that I really admire. I mean, Atomic Blonde is after this, right? Atomic Blonde, which is a very fun movie. But as also her leaning into now I'm just going to like really kick people. I'm John Wick. And this obviously set it up. This set up the trajectory for her as a true action heroine. But she also makes The Old Guard and she starts appearing in the Fast and the Furious films as Cypher. One of the key villains. She makes Tully after this, right? She does make Tully. Another movie that I think is... It's amazing until the end.

25:07Right. I'm more okay with the ending. I'm not okay with it at all. But I realize mothers are not fond of the ending of that film. Yeah, it's really, really, really not okay. Again, I think that she and Jason Reitman are very good together. I think he gets something good out of her as a performer. Long Shot we loved. Yeah, no one else did though. Bombshell's okay. Yeah. That's pretty much it. Old Guard 2, Fast X. She's in one cameo in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and will never be seen again in a Marvel film probably. She is going to be in the Odyssey. Ah, yes. As Cersei. Yeah. And I think it's...

25:46That's good. It makes sense. It is good casting. I think this is an interesting 10-year period for her where after this movie, you could say, I don't know that there's ever been a woman at the movies who can do what she does. Right. You know, Angelina Jolie has kind of like, has tipped in this direction at times, but she's really - But has stepped back. She's pulled back from this stuff heavily, give or take the Eternals. Like, she doesn't really make movies like this anymore. And Charlize has kind of firmly stayed in this with the occasional Reitman movie or long shot. Right. And so I bring all this up and I'm saying all this to say, like, is this the iconic Charlize Theron movie?

26:27I think so. what else would you put in the... Well, she won an Academy Award for Monster. Yeah, but we all know that that's just, you make yourself, you know, ugly in order to win an Oscar. Well, she... The Italian job? Like, what else is in the running? Yeah, she's very good in some, you know, she's good in the yards and she's trying her best in The Devil's Advocate with a woefully written part. Yeah. And she is iconic in Two Days in the Valley and 14-year-old me appreciated her work. But yeah, I mean, And I think this is pretty far and away, her signature performance, her signature character, her signature work.

27:04Anya Taylor-Joy, that's another thing about that movie I think had a lot to live up to. I thought she was good in Furiosa, but this is a, she carved this character. And conversely, Tom Hardy has the same job. Tom Hardy has to represent what Mel Gibson did. Right. Which, as Van would say, why Mel? Why? Yeah, why? Because Mel Gibson, one of the great movie actors of the 1990s, 1980s, 2000s even. And his Max is different from Hardy's Max. Hardy's Max is a bit strange. You know, you can tell that there was a lot of clashing on this production. You can see clearly that maybe Hardy and Shirley's didn't get along so great.

27:46Right, that's the rumor. You can see, I mean, they are all used as interchangeable pieces of the tableau. and I would imagine if you're an actor you're not like thrilled about that I agree I think that yeah so that's that's hard and I you know Tom Hardy as I know has opinions about things so maybe he resisted it he loves a weird voice he does his voice is very dubbed in this film which I do find a bit distracting I do as well I mean also knowing everything we know now about his voices yes if he would just do the Bane voice in this film I would be okay with that he does have the mask on a thing I like about if this is Mel Gibson then Mel Gibson has taken up a lot more space in this movie.