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For Fury Road’s fluid editing, Miller called upon his wife, Margaret Sixel, who had spent most of her career editing documentaries and had never cut an action movie before. ‘We’ve got teenage sons, but I’m the one who goes to the action movies with them!’ laughed Miller. ‘So when I asked her to do Mad Max, she said, ‘Well, why me?’ And I said, ‘Because then it’s not going to look like other action movies.“
And it doesn’t. Compare the smart, iterative set pieces of Fury Road to one of the incoherent car chases in Spectre, for example, and you’ll see that Sixel prizes a sense of spatial relationships that has become all too rare in action movies. ‘She’s a real stickler for that,’ said Miller. ‘And it takes a lot of effort! It’s not just lining up all the best shots and stringing them together, and she’s very aware of that. She’s also looking for a thematic connection from one shot to the next. If it regressed the characters and their relationships, she’d be against that. And she has a very low boredom threshold, so there’s no repetition.’
That Sixel was able to whittle 480 hours of footage down into a movie that sings still astounds Miller. ‘It’s like working in the head of a great composer,’ he said. ‘Movies like this one — in particular this one, because it’s almost a silent movie — are like visual music. In the same way that a composer has to have a strong casual relationship from one note to the next, paying attention tempo and melodic line and overall structure, it’s exactly the same process that a film editor must have.’ Sixel, surely, is one of the greats.

Director George Miller Explains Why His Mad Max: Fury Road Deserves These Oscar Nominations (via jag-lskardig)

so good on George Miller for giving credit to his wife and colleague. that said, FUCK YES women have ALWAYS edited for male directors without getting any recognition within the industry let alone any kind of mainstream acclaim. I mean, film editing isn’t really on the radar for most moviegoers/watchers so yeah, I don’t expect people to know this? But goddamn, even so many self-proclaimed film and cinema buffs fail to realize that so many of the “best” movies (mostly directed by men, natch) were edited by women. Does anyone remember that quote/anecdote about male directors discouraging their female film editors – or even actively sabotaging potential opportunities – because they didn’t want to lose the person who made sense of all their footage? 

(via lordlouiedor)

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charlesoberonn:

I like how both Fury Road and The Force Awakens are acclaimed “soft reboots” of franchizes from the 70s and 80s that came out in 2015, but Fury Road was really good because it was made by the original creator and The Force Awakens was really good because it wasn’t.

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For Fury Road’s fluid editing, Miller called upon his wife, Margaret Sixel, who had spent most of her career editing documentaries and had never cut an action movie before. ‘We’ve got teenage sons, but I’m the one who goes to the action movies with them!’ laughed Miller. ‘So when I asked her to do Mad Max, she said, ‘Well, why me?’ And I said, ‘Because then it’s not going to look like other action movies.“
And it doesn’t. Compare the smart, iterative set pieces of Fury Road to one of the incoherent car chases in Spectre, for example, and you’ll see that Sixel prizes a sense of spatial relationships that has become all too rare in action movies. ‘She’s a real stickler for that,’ said Miller. ‘And it takes a lot of effort! It’s not just lining up all the best shots and stringing them together, and she’s very aware of that. She’s also looking for a thematic connection from one shot to the next. If it regressed the characters and their relationships, she’d be against that. And she has a very low boredom threshold, so there’s no repetition.’
That Sixel was able to whittle 480 hours of footage down into a movie that sings still astounds Miller. ‘It’s like working in the head of a great composer,’ he said. ‘Movies like this one — in particular this one, because it’s almost a silent movie — are like visual music. In the same way that a composer has to have a strong casual relationship from one note to the next, paying attention tempo and melodic line and overall structure, it’s exactly the same process that a film editor must have.’ Sixel, surely, is one of the greats.

Director George Miller Explains Why His Mad Max: Fury Road Deserves These Oscar Nominations (via jag-lskardig)

so good on George Miller for giving credit to his wife and colleague. that said, FUCK YES women have ALWAYS edited for male directors without getting any recognition within the industry let alone any kind of mainstream acclaim. I mean, film editing isn’t really on the radar for most moviegoers/watchers so yeah, I don’t expect people to know this? But goddamn, even so many self-proclaimed film and cinema buffs fail to realize that so many of the “best” movies (mostly directed by men, natch) were edited by women. Does anyone remember that quote/anecdote about male directors discouraging their female film editors – or even actively sabotaging potential opportunities – because they didn’t want to lose the person who made sense of all their footage? 

(via ladyoflate)

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max + furiosa + touch

fuckyeahisawthat:

I’d been meaning to do this one for a while, but the hands gif set reminded me. I’m not the first person to have noted a lot of this stuff, but…well, I have a lot of screenshots at this point and they’re not gonna blog themselves.

If you take practical touching during battle out of the equation, Max doesn’t really touch anyone during the first three-quarters of the movie. Even after he calms down and stops pointing guns at people, he keeps his distance when that’s an option. His personal space barriers can get temporarily overwhelmed in a fight, and in that context he gets in some pretty close, physically intimate situations–

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–but when he has a choice and a chance to think about it, he tends to stay as far away from other people as he can. And in situations when he could get into someone’s personal space to intimidate them, he generally doesn’t.

Furiosa is not particularly touchy-feely either. They both spend a lot of time sitting against the doors of the Rig, in contrast to the puppy pile in the back seat.

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And in the scene in which Furiosa is making herself the most vulnerable at any point before the third act, she’s wrapped herself up so she can’t touch or be touched.

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The first time Max pro-actively reaches out for touch from anyone is here:

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The touch gets returned:

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And it’s like that breaks down some kind of barrier for Max, because during the final chase we get this:

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And this:

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And then when he finally gets to Furiosa after the final fight, he just cannot stop touching her.

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No, wait, you need a gif set to fully appreciate what’s going on here.

And she’s reaching out for him, too–from the moment when he pulls her up onto the back of the car–

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–to her hand on his jacket in the photo above this one.

The great thing about the “my name is Max” scene is that it doesn’t really matter what kind of relationship you think Max and Furiosa have or might have in the future, platonic or romantic. In the context of the scene, this is all platonic, comforting touch. It’s as much about Max comforting himself as anything else, and it’s very, very intimate, without having to signal anything romantic or sexual. This is the scene where a lot of movies would have gone for a kiss, but they don’t, so you just get to process the intimacy of the touch at face value, on its own terms.

And of course this continues through the end of the movie, Max rolling up to the Citadel with Furiosa resting against his shoulder:

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And this:

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And all this business, helping Furiosa out of the car, supporting her and checking up on her…

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…right up until he leaves. Then you’ll have to be satisfied with a pair of meaningful looks and a half-smile.

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I want to talk about another detail in Fury Road:

aveteucra:

aveteucra:

The personalized steering wheels. Because THOSE are what are important to the war boys at the Citadel, not the cars. You don’t think the cars get wrecked and either repaired or replaced every two weeks? That’s why the wheels are detachable: any war boy can drive any car with their own wheel. It’s a part of them.

But I really love the imagery of the scene after Max kills the Bullet Farmer. Look at where you’ve seen that before, how Max returns covered in blood, dragging a bag of bits taken off the dead, and hands the wheel to Nux. He may as well have presented them with the Bullet Farmer’s head. Because that’s the sign that lets the others know all what he’s done, that’s the symbol of the Bullet Farmer’s death, being separated from his wheel, because he wouldn’t have given it up alive.

And THATS why Nux reacts the way he does when Slit tries to take his wheel in the beginning. It’s not about missing the thrill of the pursuit, or losing his car to someone else like when they took Max’s car. It’s because by taking Nux’s wheel, Slit is declaring him already dead.

Another detail I want to add to this: when Nux crashes the war rig and dies, the wheel they took from the Bullet Farmer flies out towards the screen. Again, losing the wheel means losing their life.