Latest / Half the Picture / #1 - BRENDAN MCCARTHY

Transcript

#1 - BRENDAN MCCARTHY · Half the Picture

• 0:00
  Hello, I'm Billy, with me here as Ahmed Ali, and joining us is Brendan McAfee, Distinguished
• 0:06
  Colt Macartist and co-writer designer of Man Maxphere Road. Hello Brendan. Hello, the champ
• 0:11
  story. Not too shabby, thank you. Oh well, thank you very much. Yeah, let's just talk to you.
• 0:16
  We thought we'd start with asking you, so going right back to the beginning of this film,
• 0:21
  you know, all the way back to 1982, I suppose 1981. So you had sort of in your career at that point,
• 0:27
  you had been a Coca-Cola straighter, you've been working with Peter Milligan for quite some time
• 0:32
  and then working on 2008. I believe you were starting to build your career as a
• 0:37
  Coca-cartist, and then I want to say you found yourself in Australia in a screening of Man Max
• 0:44
  2 Road Warrior, and I think it's better to say that that kind of blew your head off a bit. Is that
• 0:48
  fair to say? Yeah, there's a whole generation of us from that period in my age group, who
• 0:57
  if you like, what fury road is for you guys? Road Warrior was for us. It was the one that
• 1:03
  we all staggered out at the cinema with a smoke coming out of our head, thinking what an
• 1:09
  earth I'd just seen, this is amazing. In my case, I'd turned around, bought another ticket,
• 1:14
  went straight back into the movie and saw it twice that evening. Yeah, it was a big influence,
• 1:21
  and it affected it, it had a big cultural impact as well. You saw it in pop culture, you know,
• 1:26
  Jorangeran videos, books like Ridley Walker. The post-apocalyptic nuclear threat was quite big at
• 1:33
  the time with, you know, Fatcher and Reagan, and the feeling was that the apocalypse was imminent,
• 1:40
  kind of similar to now, really. And so it had a big influence on me. I also had, you know,
• 1:49
  doing what you call a gap year and being in Australia. I was very interested in surfing,
• 1:55
  as in those days, it hadn't really reached the UK. And I used to go out and watch surfers all
• 2:01
  the time and gradually thought about fusing Mad Max and surfers together in a drowned world,
• 2:07
  post-acupocalyptic thing, which I eventually turned into a comic called Freepwave,
• 2:11
  which preceded the film Waterworld. So you kind of had the curve when it came to Hollywood and
• 2:17
  Hollywood projects being made decades on. And then I suppose what happened next in terms of
• 2:24
  youth coming on board into the Mad Max into the universe and actually helping to make the next film
• 2:30
  was at the fourth film, Fear Road, was you can't add to George Miller, I believe, and with a letter
• 2:34
  that wasn't the opening line simply whatever happened to Mad Max, that was the pitch.
• 2:40
  No, it was, that's true, but what it was is that by this stage I was the production designer of
• 2:47
  a computer animated TV series called Reboot, which was a big phenomenon at the time. And we did
• 2:56
  an episode which was a pastiche of the Mad Max World, particularly Road Warrior. And so I sent
• 3:03
  a VHS as it was back then before the days of the internet to George with that a little post-it
• 3:11
  note on it saying whatever happened to Mad Max and the episode of Reboot, which was the Mad Max
• 3:18
  pastiche. And then a few, about a few months later I got a call from his producer, Doug Mitchell,
• 3:24
  to say, you know, what is this? This is really interesting. We're going to be in Hollywood,
• 3:28
  like, you know, in a couple of weeks. Any chance we could meet you and talk about this,
• 3:31
  we got a project we'd like to talk to you about. So I went up to Hollywood and met them both
• 3:42
  and, you know, explained about CGI because back then CGI was completely unknown. It was a brand new
• 3:50
  technology and Pixar's Toy Story had come out by then. And there was a lot of interest in CGI
• 3:57
  because each CGI film was hitting really big because the novelty of CGI was big. So you were getting
• 4:02
  Toy Story and it was brand new and everybody was sort of thinking what the hell is this and also
• 4:07
  noticing the box office on. So George Miller had been approached by Warner Brothers to develop a
• 4:14
  Mad Max TV series along the lines of Xena or Hercules before streaming. You had cable TV and the
• 4:22
  cable networks were a bit more open to, you know, violence or whatever. So George was thinking about
• 4:30
  doing this TV series and wanted to know instead of doing map paintings, could we substitute CGI
• 4:35
  so he could move the camera? So, you know, when you do a map painting, the camera is locked. So,
• 4:40
  you know, I was talking a bit about that but the conversation quickly spilled into Mad Max and that,
• 4:44
  you know, and you know, what about that bit in the film? You know, that shot to do, you know. So I was
• 4:49
  being a road warrior nut. I knew all about. I'd seen all the films hundreds of times and
• 4:56
  so the conversation, you know, and then I sort of, I suppose, foolishly in a meeting where you're
• 5:03
  pitching for a gig, I said, I don't think you should do a TV series. I think you should do a movie
• 5:07
  to save metal work and a movie's far more exciting. If you were to do an amazing Mad Max film,
• 5:13
  I think it would just blow everybody away, you know, just get that spirit of road warrior rather than
• 5:18
  thunder to into a new Mad Max film, blah, blah, blah. And you know, we were sort of
• 5:24
  to an enjoying on that and he was a bit more than I know about film. The thing about film is that
• 5:28
  with a TV series, you could go, yeah, I'm looking forward to a Mad Max TV series. But for me, I was
• 5:35
  more excited by a new movie. To me, Mad Max was a cinematic experience and so anyway, I said to him,
• 5:42
  look, if you ever think about doing a movie, I'll never make a Mad Max film, but you might.
• 5:47
  Here's some ideas and you know, you can have them. I'll never make what I've filmed. So,
• 5:52
  and so he let me pitch him this idea from Mad Max film, which involved a guy breeding a girl
• 5:59
  to produce offspring. In that case, I was thinking about the extinction event of the human race,
• 6:05
  a bit like the dinosaurs, it's out and this guy sort of trying to create a human being that was
• 6:14
  viable that would live because so many by now I was saying the world must be so toxic that most
• 6:21
  of everybody's dying off for their own last long. So some of the older generation are lasting
• 6:26
  like Max etc and this kind of warlord character. Anyway, there were other things as well in it,
• 6:33
  some quite ridiculously silly sci-fi stuff, but I feel what happened is that it kicked him off
• 6:40
  thinking about it and then about four months later, I got a call out of the blue,
• 6:45
  saying, do you want to come to Sydney and knock some ideas about, you know, I'm thinking about
• 6:49
  doing a Mad Max film and I thought, whoa, so I finished up a TV series I was doing called Weirdos
• 6:57
  where I was designing it and it happened to be an animation TV series based on
• 7:04
  hot rod toys from the 1960s, a bit like the Big Daddy Roth stuff if you know what that is.
• 7:10
  And so I had sort of hot rods raw in my head. By the time I got to Sydney, the first thing I did was
• 7:17
  say, right, you've got to have hot rods in a Mad Max film, this is crazy. So out with the
• 7:21
  Dune Buggies and it came the hot rods. So that was almost the first input into the film and if
• 7:26
  you've got hot rods, you then got, well, who's driving them, these young kids, who are these
• 7:30
  young kids. At first they were called Necro Boys and then George, when I left the project eventually,
• 7:36
  he eventually changed the name to War Boys and we started growing it from core ideas,
• 7:44
  who's this guy who's breeding women but George told me his idea then and it was kind of the core
• 7:51
  of Fury Road. What he had was there's a big citadel castle kind of thing and there's a guy,
• 7:58
  he's got these wives rather than one girl, he's now got five of them and he's breeding them to
• 8:04
  try and create a viable human. At that stage, the warlord still had a kind of a motive of trying
• 8:11
  to keep the human race going but that got lost really in the final film you saw a long laugh
• 8:18
  after I left. He became more of a sort of a evil patriarch who's just trying to keep his dynasty
• 8:25
  going. So for me that lacked a bit of moral complexity because if the girls
• 8:33
  were, if you like, the future of the human race and they were wanting to get, you know, run
• 8:39
  away from a safe environment, it made it a bit more morally complex but you know, that's in the
• 8:44
  end, I'm not the director and it's George's baby, you know, we're on the George Miller
• 8:50
  show here, not not my show, but you know, we just, so for the first year, we just basically,
• 8:59
  it's just me and George in the room with another guy who was a really good artist called Peter Pound
• 9:06
  who also happened to be Australia's kind of like main underground comic artists,
• 9:11
  underground comics are pretty perverted, you know, like those sixties underground comics,
• 9:16
  Robert Kram and people like that. I mean, I think it's quite interesting that George wrote
• 9:23
  Fury Road with two comic book guys, you know, I'm essentially a comics guy, although I've then
• 9:29
  went into pop videos, animation and feature films just because I've got bored doing comics.
• 9:36
  But you know, my roots are in comics and Peter's roots are in comics and so there was George with two,
• 9:41
  you know, nutcase comic book guys putting in all the craziness because we were all super fans of
• 9:49
  Mad Max 2 Road Warrior. And although I was the, you know, me and George Basing nutted it out, Peter Pound
• 9:57
  would be there sort of sketching things, you know, I'd be doing it too. One of the benefits
• 10:01
  have been a comic book guy is that when you're writing, you're also, I would be designing the things
• 10:07
  as we went along and the design of certain things we then feedback into the story.
• 10:14
  So, you know, that's that was sort of how the process so basically we just me and George locked
• 10:20
  in a room for a year by the end of that year we had the whole story worked out and then we'd written
• 10:26
  a loose script and then the second year was the storyboarding year and we brought in another guy
• 10:31
  after that, fun enough, another comic book guy, Mark Sexton. And so what was interesting for me was
• 10:39
  the influence of comic book people on Fury Road, you know, the craziness and the far outness and the
• 10:46
  risk taking in the design and the understanding of how how do we give the experience that we had
• 10:53
  from Mad Max 2 25 years ago to a new generation like you guys where you're coming out, if you can
• 11:00
  cast your mind back to when you first saw Fury Road, you know, you went to the cinema, you maybe
• 11:06
  had heard it was good, you've seen a few trailers and then you sit down, you know, that great feeling
• 11:10
  when the curtains open and the cinema and the lights go down and we think, okay, let's go on the
• 11:16
  journey. And you know, I got a lot of feedback from people saying, man, you know, like it's been so
• 11:22
  long since I saw a movie that was just amazing and I was in it, I was completely wrapped in it
• 11:28
  and by the time I come out the end of the film, I was gobsmacked and didn't have anything to say,
• 11:33
  you know, that, and that was the feeling we were trying to get, that if you're going to do a new
• 11:36
  Mad Max film, it has to be amazing or don't even bother to do it. I mean, that's definitely,
• 11:41
  I would agree, like when I saw it, I'd actually watched that weekend before Mad Max 1,
• 11:49
  Mad Max 2, I didn't get around the Thunderdome by the time the film came out and it felt very much
• 11:56
  like these are two great movies, two more so than one in my opinion, but two great movies.
• 12:02
  And then it felt like I was watching a comic book slashface. Almost every scene was a variant cover.
• 12:09
  And one of the questions that Billy and I were sort of thinking to ask, he was, how did
• 12:14
  coming from that background, how did it, how did you sort of feel like
• 12:19
  playing in somebody else's toy box because you could have gone away and sort of created a
• 12:27
  Mad Max-ish story. So when you had that opportunity, did you feel like you had a good sense
• 12:36
  of idea of where you want to go with the character or was it a lot more dialogue, a lot more,
• 12:41
  this is like you said, George Miller's baby, and I'm just here to sort of help that dream come along.
• 12:47
  George obviously devolved his power down so that we could just be equally great,
• 12:54
  you know, because it was a very casual thing. We weren't sitting around worshiping George every day.
• 13:00
  It was, we know we would have disagreements and no, that's Alex 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
• 13:13
  you know, two writers sitting in a room typing away. It wasn't that experience at all.
• 13:18
  It was, we were basically standing on our feet all the time. It was, we did everything on
• 13:23
  electrical on these whiteboards where you could write and draw on the whiteboard with right
• 13:28
  dialogue. I'd do drawings next to the dialogue, you know, so the whole thing, then we'd print out
• 13:32
  what we'd done that day and there was a giant file of printed out sheets from these whiteboards.
• 13:39
  And that was the first six months where we then sort of had the feel of the whole movie down.
• 13:44
  And then we spent another six months writing a first draft script from these
• 13:50
  electrical drawings. We'll pull one out and go, okay, today's is to let's turn this into text.
• 13:56
  We needed a script and we had the designs because when you're going to storyboard it,
• 14:00
  everything has to look the same. You can't have five different designs drawn by different
• 14:04
  storyboard artists for a truck. It has to look the same. So a lot of that design work was,
• 14:10
  was you know, loosely locked in. But you know, it also then the second year of storyboarding
• 14:17
  refined, you know, the new, it was basically a very detailed second pass on the script.
• 14:25
  And so by the end of the second year, we've done two thirds of the film up to when the third
• 14:32
  big chase happens. By then I was getting a bit burnt out. And also George had was developing
• 14:39
  happy feet, the animated film because he's got very interested in the computer animation. I was
• 14:45
  given him, you know, lots of tips on a CGI because I'd be working in that field for about four or
• 14:50
  five years. So he was developing happy feet. He started to get into that while, and at the same time,
• 14:57
  he was looking for another CGI project to sort of have on the runway after happy feet.
• 15:02
  And he saw one of my projects and said, I'd like to buy that off you
• 15:07
  and develop it. And so I'm, I then, as I say, getting a bit burnt out from Mad Max, I moved off,
• 15:13
  I took some time off and I came back and did this new project called Third Brigade,
• 15:17
  which was going to be the follow up film to happy feet.
• 15:23
  What happened there was happy feet came out, went to number one,
• 15:27
  at the box office, the week it came out. Warner Brothers phoned him up that weekend and said,
• 15:32
  we want to see cool to happy feet and you're greenlit. So he now is doing a sequel to happy feet,
• 15:38
  so my thing gets punted back after that. Takes about four years to make an animated feature.
• 15:44
  So once, you know, I had, by this stage, we had a full script with loads of images and pictures
• 15:52
  through the whole script of Third Brigade and it was ready to go. And, you know, there was nothing
• 15:59
  for me to do. I didn't want to hang around. So I just, I sort of moved on and started doing some
• 16:04
  other stuff. And sadly, what happened with happy feet too, he kind of took his eye off the ball a
• 16:11
  bit and started getting back into the Mad Max project. And happy feet didn't really have the
• 16:19
  attention of the first one and it came out and it completely tanked. And he just said, all right,
• 16:24
  screw this. And then Fury Road gets greenlit. So he says, I'm getting out of animation,
• 16:30
  I'm going to do Mad Max Fury Road live action, I'm returning to my roots, etc.
• 16:35
  And so Third Brigade got lost in the, and it sits on the shelf somewhere in George's office,
• 16:42
  somewhere gathering dust, which is a real heartbreaker because it's an amazing animated feature film.
• 16:49
  You know, it's kind of, if you can imagine something like Toy Story, but with the
• 16:53
  georgement or energy through it, you know, that really, it's a really boisterous,
• 16:58
  boys film. It's not, you know, girly princesses and all that stuff. It's, you know, it's,
• 17:05
  I wouldn't say hardcore, but it's for boys, you know, age about 12 or something up, you know,
• 17:10
  adults would love it too. But so I don't know what happened to that. I mean, I suppose it's so long ago,
• 17:19
  I've probably accepted it, it'll never see the light a day. But at the same time, knowing that
• 17:24
  there's amazing movie sitting there on the shelf, which I created, I sort of feel like tempted to
• 17:31
  try and kind of get some interest from a studio and then buy off George something like that.
• 17:36
  I don't know. We'll see what happens. But that's the state of play with all that stuff. But
• 17:45
  I think I kind of answered your question and went off an attention, sorry.
• 17:49
  One hundred percent. Thank you so much.
• 17:51
  No, that's great. I mean, sort of follow that up, Brendan. I mean, just going back to what you're
• 17:56
  saying about how the script, it was a script and then, you know, for the first six months to a year
• 18:01
  and then it was a storyboard and you were sort of boarding it. And then I was just thinking,
• 18:05
  when I was watching the film again, the, just thinking about how it was scripted, the number of sort
• 18:10
  of great sort of kind of punk lines in the film. There are so many sort of wonderful bits of
• 18:15
  dialogue. Even though it's a film that does not rely on dialogue per se, it's not driven by dialogue.
• 18:20
  There are still so many great little bits like I've written a few down here on my screen. I've
• 18:24
  got the terminal free count point. We have to come half-life these kinds of things. These sort of
• 18:29
  great sort of sci-fi things. And I know that it's quite a while ago now, but when you, if you
• 18:33
  cast your mind back when you and George were actually putting, you know, a pen's paper and getting
• 18:37
  stuff down, do you remember sort of coming up with lines kind of like that and sort of having fun
• 18:42
  doing the actual scripting? Yeah, I mean, what we would stand next to each other and act out scenes
• 18:50
  and we would say loads of dialogue about the rubbish, but now then we'd hit on the good line
• 18:54
  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,
• 19:03
  the spirit of how we wrote the film was more like a bunch of, you know, rock and roll people
• 19:10
  putting together an album than it was, you know, two screenwriters typing away. It wasn't that at all.
• 19:17
  And I feel that, you know, George was very adamant about saying that the energy at this point
• 19:24
  that we put in, he's going to set the tone of the whole movie right to this
• 19:28
  two directing shooting editing. So he was very aware that, you know, look, we had a kind of deal
• 19:35
  in the end, George, if, after a year, he doesn't, he's done three Mad Max films, remember.
• 19:41
  And if he doesn't feel like this is going to blow everybody away, just flush it, you know, I mean,
• 19:47
  I was very strongly like a Mad Max film has to be amazing. It can't be, yeah, not bad, yeah,
• 19:55
  it seems all right. Yeah, you know, what happened with all the alien franchise, you know,
• 19:59
  what happened with the terminator franchise. So is this going to be another one of them,
• 20:03
  just a half baked sequel that you go, yeah, nice cinematography, you know, or something like that.
• 20:08
  We don't want that. It's either going to blow you out of your socks or go home and don't bother
• 20:13
  to do it. So that was, I mean, we were playing for keeps and it has to be amazing. And I can assure you
• 20:20
  that if I'm doing a Mad Max film, I'm not going to let it be crap. And, you know, I think George
• 20:27
  appreciated that I wasn't a little kiss ass and yes, George, that's amazing. You know, I was really
• 20:32
  holding his feet to the fire saying, my thing was to I had to read George as a person and make
• 20:38
  sure I could get him back to that younger copier guy who made road warrior. Because when George
• 20:44
  Miller plugs in his guitar and does those Mad Max risks, something transcendent happens,
• 20:50
  something amazing happens. He's probably, to me, the finest action director on the planet.
• 20:55
  Those old guys, those guys from that era, Cameron Miller, you know, it's Beallburg with Raiders,
• 21:01
  there's an understanding of film and action stuff that that generation has that I'm not seeing in,
• 21:07
  you know, mainly I'm not seeing in newer directors. Like for example, when you look at say a
• 21:14
  director like Ridley Scott, who is obviously fantastic, you know, it's a genius and the first
• 21:20
  alien is probably one of the greatest films ever made. Ridley shoots action by coverage. He sets
• 21:26
  that the action up in the actors and then he has tons of cameras around and covers everything.
• 21:31
  And he edits together through coverage. So it's action through coverage. What we did, we wrote
• 21:36
  the action. We actually would storyboard and lay out the action and George would shoot the action
• 21:42
  that we storyboarded and then he'd have extra cameras on the fly just to catch stories to give
• 21:48
  him some extra editing options. But we scripted all our action. Whereas, you know, a director like,
• 21:55
  as I say, I'm just picking Ridley Scott as an example, who directs action through coverage.
• 22:01
  He puts his action together in the editing room more than actually when he's shooting it. I mean,
• 22:07
  he does it to a degree of course. I think CGI has made a big difference as well because you're
• 22:12
  seeing the film films like the Fast and the Furious, those types of movies, you're saying the level
• 22:18
  of fantasy they're allowing in their film, you know, in CGI, you can drop a car out of an
• 22:22
  aeroplane and it'll land perfectly on the freeway. You know, so the laws of gravity are not
• 22:28
  being observed. It's more there's a fantasy element in it, which I think is probably the
• 22:32
  influence of Asian cinema. But with Mad Max, you know, one of the things we established very early on
• 22:41
  was that we got to do this stuff as real practical stunts as often as possible because
• 22:47
  bone-meeting metal, which is what you got in Rodewari, gave you that visceral,
• 22:52
  holy, cranky, that really happened, you know, like, you really felt it. Whereas with CGI, there's
• 22:56
  a softness. You don't, you don't really feel it. You know, it's a trick. And so there was a lot of
• 23:03
  CGI in Fury Road, but it was, in a way, it was the CGI of the mission rather than commission,
• 23:11
  other than the big scene with the storm whirlwinds. Most of the CGI was removing elements,
• 23:19
  like cables and safety harnesses and all that stuff. Look, if you're doing an action movie,
• 23:24
  you've probably got the greatest action director in the world, George Miller. What we had to do,
• 23:28
  obviously, that the challenge is to make each action scene discreet unto itself and slightly
• 23:34
  different to the ones. So you don't get what we used to call car sick. There's a monotony to action
• 23:42
  after a while where you start to get bored with it. And so we had to make sure that the audience
• 23:46
  didn't get bored because they'd seen it like 10 minutes before and another sequence. So if you
• 23:52
  notice that the action, the first main action sequence is those spiky buzzard cars attacking like,
• 24:01
  we looked at wildlife footage. You know when you get a big water buffalo and then you get low
• 24:05
  to hyenas circling it, what they do is nip the legs to try and take the buffalo down because it's a
• 24:09
  bigger beast than they can pick it off. So if you notice that the buzzard attack is the small little
• 24:14
  light vehicles coming in with their buzz swords trying to take the wheels out so that they can
• 24:20
  slow the vehicle down then stop it and then they can pick it off. So if you like, there was a
• 24:28
  rationale to the action and then what George has is the idea of canon the action to canon it is to
• 24:34
  take it up to another level. So you've done your buzzard scene and then we canon up with the incoming
• 24:39
  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.
• 24:52
  So when you go into the storm once Nuck starts spraying his mouth you know what it means.
• 24:58
  So that is if you like a two-part action scene. So then you get quietness you've got a fight scene
• 25:05
  with Furiosa and then they travel into the canyon and then you've got a different scene where you
• 25:11
  got people bouncing around like mountain goats on bicycles up in a canyon totally different to
• 25:16
  what you've seen before. There's a period then when they go into the swamp and there's a bit of
• 25:21
  the quiet scene where they're underneath all the stars wondering what to do and then they turn
• 25:26
  around and go back. Now when we go into that scene at first you feel like hang on I've seen all
• 25:32
  this already but then there's that amazing shot where income those guys on the poles and so we
• 25:39
  knew we had that up our sleeves as the new thing that you hadn't seen before and then that changed
• 25:43
  the dynamic of that final scene. Once you have those guys on the poles suddenly the whole film comes
• 25:48
  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
• 26:00
  it allows the audience to breathe whereas like a lot of action films they think it has to be at one
• 26:04
  level constantly whereas like and I think some people when Furiosa came out were like oh it's only
• 26:09
  at one level and it's like you when you watch it you realize it's not it's got these the pacing is
• 26:13
  so well constructed in terms of it knows when to hit you when to let you breathe and take stock.
• 26:19
  Yeah I mean honestly I stopped doing interviews this is the first one I've done in a while
• 26:23
  because all everybody wanted to talk about was um yeah you know overthrew the patriarchy and all
• 26:29
  that stuff and I'm thinking well what about the actual rollercoaster ride that you went on when
• 26:35
  you saw the movie for the first time when you were your knuckles were gripping the side of the
• 26:40
  synomacy and you were going fuck you know what about that that apparently is not relevant let's talk
• 26:46
  about overthrown the patriarchy and I just thought you're missing we put as much work into that
• 26:51
  rollercoaster ride and the structure of it as you were saying earlier to make sure that you know
• 26:56
  when we crank you up and then you go on a giant action sequence we follow up with a bit of calm
• 27:03
  all the time developing the story and the characters you know and what we also did was make sure
• 27:08
  that we had character development inside the action sequences rather than just here's some characters
• 27:14
  now let's do an action sequence here's some characters let's do an action you know so the thing
• 27:17
  the characters are always moving through the action um I mean this is all stuff listen
• 27:24
  I've never written a giant Hollywood feature film before and I learned I was watching George Miller
• 27:29
  and listening to him like a hawk because I was being mentored and getting the information from one
• 27:35
  of the world's masters now he's getting on a bit and when he kicks the bucket you're going to lose
• 27:39
  of all that generation of filmmakers I'm saying you know those 80s action guys camera room and
• 27:45
  Spielberg and George etc um that's a huge sort of massive uh level of talent that will disappear
• 27:56
  and you know there are good new directors of course but I'm not I do go now and check out action
• 28:00
  films just to see what are they doing well and what are they doing badly and I do find for
• 28:07
  example with Marvel films I'm uh I mean I am so bored by the so by by halfway through I'm thinking
• 28:15
  how long more of a god oh my god there's an hour and a half to go with the Stan thing you know
• 28:19
  that sort of stuff um you know now and then there's a good Marvel film but generally I feel that
• 28:24
  these people don't understand the internal um dynamics of of engagement rest uh I like because
• 28:33
  I saw that new Doctor Strange movie and it was just a mess of CGI and it was like oh god you know
• 28:40
  um I mean there were some good bits in it Sam Raim is a good director but you know you've got
• 28:45
  death by a thousand executives when you do these films everybody's modifying it and putting that
• 28:51
  bit in and it's got referred to that TV series from you know all that crap um uh I feel Marvel
• 28:58
  films are getting bogged down by their own mythology now uh I haven't seen the new Thor one I mean
• 29:03
  I think the director is quite fun you know um the New Zealand guy uh but possibly might be too he might
• 29:10
  be too playful and undermines the drama so you don't kind of care that much if you're winking at the
• 29:18
  audience all the time do you know I mean there's a payoff with that stuff you have to be careful
• 29:22
  there's a line cool so um I think the next thing I wanted to um bring up Brendan uh we're
• 29:28
  kind of fascinated by his um so when so what was it like visiting the set in Africa actually going
• 29:35
  in seeing you know the designs that you'd worked on for years and sort of talked about with George
• 29:40
  and seeing the characters you know brought life what was it like seeing that the world you'd
• 29:44
  sort of worked on in the flesh their last um it was uh it was interesting and um you got
• 29:52
  to remember it took we I finished working on Fury Road about uh sort of 2000 so and it took
• 30:03
  12 years to get it made remember I wrote it was originally the one I wrote which is about say 85
• 30:12
  to 90 percent the film you saw that's called Fury Road now it was always called Fury Road but um
• 30:19
  uh I wrote the fourth installment of the Mel Gibson Mad Max is what it was and then once Mel Gibson had
• 30:27
  a meltdown you know and then was co-incidentally the film fell apart due to some financing issues
• 30:33
  they had to recast it and Heath Ledger was going to play Mad Max and then he died so that
• 30:40
  screwed the whole thing up and um Brad Pitt turns it down which was I think
• 30:48
  very bad decision by him and um in the end you know you looked around you thought well as George said
• 30:54
  in the end it was Tom Hardy you know to get somebody with a bit of that raw
• 30:59
  masculine kind of quality that you know Tom Hardy has that wild quality about so uh
• 31:05
  eventually once they locked in Tom Hardy they could get going again um but that I mean you know it's
• 31:11
  a great testimony to George Muller's persistence that after all the incredible you know gets get it
• 31:18
  it was it was set up and ready to go twice and then on the third go they finally got it made
• 31:24
  and originally it was going to be shot in Australia but that they were forced over to
• 31:28
  in Namibia in Africa which is largely a desert country and um uh so it was interesting to go out
• 31:34
  it's great going down to Africa but it never been to Africa before and it was just
• 31:38
  you know when you go into a place you pick the vibe up or the you know the feeling of Africa was
• 31:43
  amazing really uh was interesting and um yeah I was only there for about you know just about the best
• 31:50
  part of a week and you know I wondered about looked at staff watched how George was shooting
• 31:56
  everything and met a few of the cast and you know just hung around really since I wrote
• 32:02
  and designed it with George you know something like I'd started 15 years previously you know
• 32:09
  the designs had evolved but they were still the same designs there were still hot rods there were
• 32:13
  still pole cats there were still buzzards there were still uh but the he then he offered me production
• 32:21
  design but I didn't want to do you know I just I really wasn't interested in production designing
• 32:26
  I'm more up the front end of the film I like coming up with the ideas the designs the story
• 32:32
  the characters all that stuff that's what interests me uh I had worked in Hollywood for 10 years
• 32:38
  previously so actually shooting films is quite boring because it's it's night certain time is
• 32:44
  hanging about and then with a bit of you know three minutes of shooting and then another 10 hours
• 32:50
  of hanging about uh so after a while he actually got quite boring so um it was nice to see it all
• 32:57
  you know I was you know it was I was very happy that they'd like me out to see it all and um yeah
• 33:02
  but uh in the end to me it was the fun was creating it inventing characters I mean one of the things
• 33:08
  that was shocking to me I hadn't realized is that you'd be sitting around in the in George Miller's
• 33:14
  studio in Sydney going wouldn't it be great if he had a character who looked like
• 33:18
  near cineoblava blah and we're all laughing just saying saying that's really crazy and the next
• 33:23
  thing you know in our later it's actually in the mood and I think crikey it's that casual you know
• 33:28
  you could just throw something out just to try and make George laugh or something and it ends up
• 33:33
  in the film you know and you think wow so that was a rule that was one of the biggest
• 33:37
  educations to me was you know don't hold back goes far go as far out as you can and even further
• 33:46
  I mean there was stuff that we came up with that was so over the top that we couldn't do
• 33:50
  um and it's something that kind of people come complaining about stuff like that so we took it out
• 33:56
  but um this was stuff this was internally at George's studio and people go no come on that's too
• 34:03
  much but now I'm actually thinking I wish we'd kept it you know because uh why did why did we listen
• 34:09
  to that person we should have kept it in that you know I'm curious to ask now what kind of stuff
• 34:14
  was left out this because that was two examples what example is there's a piece of the film
• 34:22
  fury wrote that to me didn't quite as comedians say the joke didn't land meaning it didn't
• 34:29
  click it didn't pay off in the movie which was when the um the blonde third girl who's pregnant
• 34:36
  splendid or a rancor or her name's um uh she hangs that hangs off the door and the door falls and
• 34:46
  she goes under the thing and she gets killed right and I didn't really I didn't feel anything I didn't
• 34:55
  care I didn't I didn't it didn't impact it didn't make me go oh no I just went hmm why isn't and
• 35:01
  I thought why isn't that worked you know why didn't that land that that she got killed we all we
• 35:05
  should have gone and that's that that's all things don't work it interests me and I have to
• 35:12
  roll it over in my head for years thinking well what about it the original idea we had we had
• 35:19
  was she's in the car does her thing to block the shot at max because he you know the wall
• 35:26
  won't shoot her because she's she's carrying his offspring and she goes back inside the truck but
• 35:32
  one of the idiot war boys takes a shot and shoots her in the head in the back of the truck and she
• 35:40
  faces dead and all the girls are just pumping blood all over the girls going off all the girls are
• 35:45
  freaking out and furiosa has to do a cesarean on her in the middle of the truck while those guys
• 35:55
  are going over on the motorbikes in the canyon you know and rescue the baby otherwise the baby
• 36:03
  will die with her and I felt that that was a really exciting scene you know shocking but it was
• 36:11
  too shocking for some of the people that were working in the studio and the basically they were
• 36:17
  girls who's women who said oh no that's just you know you know it was too much and we sort of
• 36:24
  rethought for anger maybe this is too much and we're not being you know it made sense to me
• 36:31
  that they would have the baby and he's after them because that's what he's after is the baby
• 36:37
  and you know and the means obviously producing more babies at the other girls and so you know it
• 36:45
  changed the store when we changed that and then you had to see where they pull the baby out and it's
• 36:49
  dead and all the rest of it I wonder well we better off sticking to the original idea you know
• 36:55
  so it's hard you know it's hard you don't know but I do know that's for me and I've spoken to our
• 37:00
  friends who've seen Fury Road said did that work for you when she died and they said well it wasn't
• 37:06
  a big moment but yeah it's okay I thought yeah it should have been a big moment and you know so
• 37:12
  I'm just throwing you out you know the things I think you know I mean you look from the film from
• 37:17
  the outside it I'm looking at it from the inside out you know you know when I see it I think all right
• 37:22
  what worked here and what didn't and some there's other things we had in the film that we didn't put
• 37:28
  in which I think yeah maybe we should have been a bit more ballsy about sticking with our you know
• 37:35
  guns but you know you have to just at the time you you make decisions and you're not sure sometimes
• 37:41
  you don't are we getting too far out here or are we getting to are we being too safe you know the
• 37:47
  main thing is don't be safe you know that's a last thing you want me to yeah I mean anyway that's
• 37:54
  an example of something where it could have gone one way didn't and then you know you've got
• 37:58
  the film the films the film in the end of course I mean I suppose that's really interesting because
• 38:04
  following on from that I know in the first few drafts of the script there were a lot of differences
• 38:10
  like they're the whole third act at one point with the Vivi Lani the female warriors it wasn't a
• 38:15
  shake it wasn't a chase back to the Citadel it was originally a sort of airborne attack I want to
• 38:20
  say it was deferred at different yes I mean George didn't want us to have an ending when we were
• 38:26
  right you know just like for some one I mean I meant really stop once to pitch a mirrored film and he
• 38:32
  said the main thing is this know your ending you know before you before you start writing and that's
• 38:38
  was a 180 degree opposite to George Miller who said I don't want to know the ending I want the
• 38:44
  characters to take us there so that was a thing where he but what we did is we sort of blocked out
• 38:51
  the ending just a sort of rough so we kind of knew that there was an ending there if we were
• 38:56
  start or it just as a security blanket really and we didn't use it the ending that we had was that
• 39:02
  the fury road led to was a dead end it just led to a sheer cliff face and so you've got furios
• 39:11
  driving the truck towards by now they've jettisoned the tanker and they're only in the
• 39:17
  the front part the rig part of the truck and they're hurtling towards a high speed down this track
• 39:23
  towards a sheer cliff edge and he's got what's left of the armada still pursuing them and
• 39:32
  there's a missed covering this escarpment which is a sort of circular escarpment with a sheer drop
• 39:39
  and as she hurtles towards the edge of the cliff you think they're just going to drive over the edge
• 39:45
  she flips the truck she pulls the will steering wheel and the truck starts sliding sideways
• 39:50
  and then she pulls the gears and revs it up again and just as it slides to the edge of the cliff
• 39:55
  what comes into view is a slip road that goes down the cliff and they drove they started driving
• 40:01
  down the cliff wheels coming off the edge and super tents and all the rest of it but meanwhile
• 40:05
  lots of the armada just can't stop and go right over the edge because they don't know that there's
• 40:10
  slip road down there and and from this cloud cover came up these a bit like the gyro captain in
• 40:17
  magmax 2 there was an airborne quality of these women in kind of these helicopter contractions
• 40:24
  who came up out of the thing like harpies you know in the Greek mythology the avenging female
• 40:30
  interesting enough in the title of the new one called furiosa furiosa is derived from furies
• 40:37
  which is the other name for the harpies in Greek mythology and a fury is an avenging woman
• 40:43
  and so what we wanted to do was one giant fuck off fight between men and women and right who's
• 40:49
  going to win you know and in the end they're both devastating each other and immortal joe gets killed
• 40:56
  the main leader of the the vavelini is killed as well and there's a truce and they basically
• 41:04
  part what they work out is that look the men have got the oil and the armaments and a small green
• 41:10
  place but they below the cloud cover have a sort of damp climber and have got all this food growing
• 41:18
  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
• 41:29
  what I said you know but in the end we didn't go with that I just remember vividly George walking
• 41:35
  in one morning and saying they go back it's the only green place and so suddenly the whole
• 41:43
  movie sort of pivoted so we've taken it right up to the bit where they're looking up at the scars
• 41:48
  at stars and seeing satellites and you know that sequence out in the plains of silence and we
• 41:55
  then turned it around and realised oh actually they're going to head back now they're going to have
• 41:58
  to go through the entire model to get to the only green place that we've seen as the audience in
• 42:03
  the film is on the top of that citadel so that's how that went I mean I mean although you know
• 42:11
  I've got a plenty of fight on things that I didn't agree with just ultimately George had the
• 42:19
  executives ultimately it's his film you know but you know he psychologically he was robust enough
• 42:29
  to do to you know assume the role of not being the boss and the powerful guy and just being like
• 42:37
  Len and McCartney or something you know just equal so that we could create equally to each other
• 42:42
  and not you know he said say you know that's complete nonsense you can't do that because of that
• 42:46
  or he'd come up and say yeah but that won't work because of that you know and you go yeah right
• 42:50
  you know whatever you know so you know it was it was an equal relationship because he devolved
• 42:55
  power down so you know that there wouldn't be that power in that but when it came down to it in the
• 43:01
  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
• 43:08
  somebody who's a big name and I'm writing all the songs of them and putting everything in but
• 43:12
  in the end it's their album so they get to make the final decisions so that's fair enough I mean
• 43:17
  I knew that but in order for it to work between us correct on a creative level we had to be equal
• 43:23
  even though it was a roleplay by George one of the one of the sort of things that you touched on
• 43:29
  there was the idea of like Bureaucer and this and this sort of the mythology that you guys were
• 43:36
  thinking about when you were creating her is that the way that you work where are you do you do a lot
• 43:42
  of sort of backstory of each character just so you can understand where they're going who they are
• 43:47
  or where you guys oh brilliant as I was going to say the you know sort of to add to that is
• 43:54
  did you guys have any other sort of ideas about sort of what a potential prequel because I know
• 44:00
  there is a prequel coming down the pipe um was that something that you and George had discussed
• 44:05
  for that particular character no we totally focused on this film there wasn't you know prequels
• 44:10
  sequels or you know it's a trilogy or anything like that because you know you don't know it's
• 44:16
  the film could come out and tank um but no I think it's a bit of a mistake to think of
• 44:21
  trilogies when you're doing the first one because uh it's going to diffuse your commitment to that film
• 44:28
  so we just focus totally on this film has to be a masterpiece it has to be amazing but we talked
• 44:34
  about everything I mean I would have conversations with George about why can't you genre films get
• 44:40
  nominated for Oscars we have to make this Mad Max film I said I remember saying George
• 44:46
  wasn't this film was called Mad Max Apocalypse Now you know now Apocalypse Now on one load of
• 44:52
  Oscars it was a serious film that serious stuff I said why can't our film a Mad Max film which is
• 44:57
  considered a genre be a substantive and meaty as if you like mainstream films and so that was always
• 45:04
  our aim was to create a film that although purportedly genre is also going to you know deal with issues
• 45:12
  that are substantive once you have a group of women that are breeders at basic sex slaves you
• 45:18
  then got the whole politics of that and that's how that started to develop now there was less of that
• 45:26
  in the version I wrote and George amplified it for for uh you know as you know you worked on
• 45:33
  the film for another decade after I left it so no it would accrue different weights and shift
• 45:40
  tones here and there and stuff like that as I say it's essentially I recognized the film that I wrote
• 45:45
  90% of it is the one I wrote with George but the extra 10% was pushing it adding say the feminist
• 45:54
  element to it um there were you know like for example we didn't have the name Furiosa for
• 46:03
  Charlize Theron's character ever when I was writing it she was called warrior woman the
• 46:08
  Praetorian she was inverted that way and that to call her Furiosa was like right in front of our faces
• 46:15
  because originally the word Furiosa was gonna was the name of the land around the Furiosa road
• 46:22
  they're traveling through the Furiosa so this word was around but we'd never connected it to
• 46:27
  Charlize Theron so that came later I think because what happened um after I left a few years later George
• 46:33
  took on another writer I was in LA at that time and they and he took on an Australian writer
• 46:38
  and and obviously then amplified elements of the film and around that time is when the obvious
• 46:46
  name Furiosa got attached to Charlize Theron the sequel Furiosa is a prequel and the story
• 46:52
  derived from the backstory we had on Furiosa I mean we knew she had been abducted and taken to the
• 47:01
  Citadel and it had come from a green place of many mothers right we knew that sort of stuff and
• 47:06
  a bit more stuff about it but George then developed the backstory a bit more than you know in the
• 47:15
  10 years intervening before he got it in a theory wrote a lot of it doesn't appear in the in the
• 47:20
  fury you wrote film but he got so interested in it and because Charlize Theron was such a strong
• 47:26
  character you know if you like the female Mad Max that um you know he obviously became interested
• 47:33
  enough to want to do a film about Furiosa so um so I mean I have he did he did ask me to read
• 47:43
  the script which I did read just to give him some notes as we call them you know just to say what
• 47:48
  did I think of it I said well okay very good you know really rocks along I think this bit's a bit
• 47:54
  boring this bit's weak you need to think about that scene blah blah blah you know you do all that
• 47:59
  stuff and I just gave him a you know just what we call notes just you could I think you could improve it
• 48:04
  if you did this so whether how much of that he takes on board I have no idea I'm not involved in it
• 48:10
  in the slides I'm very happy he took on the theory wrote it's the Brenda McCarthy Mad Max and I'm
• 48:16
  very happy about that I've done one for I've fulfilled a giant tick off my bucket list so um
• 48:24
  I'm happy with it but that's two years of my life I put into to Mad Max that I think that's enough
• 48:29
  were you gonna ask something Arma or yeah yeah yeah I was gonna I was gonna ask the um that
• 48:34
  that 12 years it took to to make the film how much of that was the touching on this notion
• 48:41
  of too much CGI how much of that was convincing the executives convincing the studio that actually
• 48:46
  this film needed to be almost practical um almost like a throwback too um the first uh the first three
• 48:53
  and and that sort of punk style 70s early 80s sort of filmmaking um that in today's sort of uh uh
• 49:02
  scene has become a lot more digital has become a lot more put in front of a green screen save money
• 49:07
  that way uh well even though I'm bitching about CGI and the bad use of it you do have to look at the
• 49:16
  box office of you know endgame and you know Batman films and all the rest of it and uh you know
• 49:23
  they're all sort of have the executives are happy as long as the films make gazillions you know so uh
• 49:30
  I mean Mad Max Fury Road made about I think 400 plus or something at the box office so
• 49:36
  compared to a billion for you know it's a Marvel film or whatever it is you know
• 49:44
  Mad Max probably if it wasn't so prestigious and so well loved by people um it's happened
• 49:52
  you know the Mad Max Fury Road is at a great afterlife on people watching it and streaming and
• 49:59
  look at you guys you know who me now seven years later you know uh so you know I mean they can
• 50:07
  roll the dice on Fury Road uh our Furio so they'd probably like another one maybe get a trilogy
• 50:13
  before George is getting on a bit now so hopefully you'll get three new ones down in and they'll
• 50:18
  be great um you know um it's all it looks all about money does it make money
• 50:27
  tax costs or do you get loads of askers and do we get prestige everything's about uh money prestige
• 50:34
  and uh power that's what Hollywood runs on I mean I suppose we've got a trivial question but it's
• 50:42
  a question that I sort of found in the back of my head to ask this whole time but you know they give
• 50:45
  you know they're like you know so just go back to what the stuff that you don't
• 50:49
  designed on the movie uh the vehicles and the uh the the war boys and stuff I've got to ask and I'm
• 50:54
  sure you've probably ever been asked this before but the doof warrior the guy with the flaming guitar
• 50:58
  was that one of those ideas where you and George are in the room and you're thinking okay how far
• 51:02
  can we run of this can we get a guy with a flaming dude was that you guys spitballing that or was
• 51:06
  that okay yeah no that was um I didn't have a lot to do with that specific character that was uh
• 51:13
  George came up with him as a you know as you said like a you know a guy plays the bugle in the
• 51:19
  cavalry let's have a guy playing in guitar as the the sort of cavalry bugle if there's such a word
• 51:27
  and then Peter Pound developed the actual look of the character but his look sort of
• 51:35
  developed a bit more after I left so in the in the case of the guy with the guitar that shoots
• 51:41
  flames uh I didn't have a lot to do with that particular one so you know just to be honest about
• 51:47
  what I did at point of credit for she haven't done but uh I would say Peter Pound Peter Pound was the
• 51:52
  big influence on that and then you had the production designer who I think added the flame
• 51:59
  thrower at the end I think that was how it went so you had the idea for it you had it developed by
• 52:05
  Peter Pound the comic book guy and then when they hired the production designer who came in
• 52:12
  and then you know obviously had all the designs on a plate by me he could then develop bits extra
• 52:18
  bits and add bits to them and all that sort of stuff I was going to say sort of like um to sort of
• 52:23
  touch on that and uh sort how how come how come you guys sort of moved away from the the SNM-ish
• 52:34
  site of uh costume design that that was going on and the in the sub-earlier earlier uh movies um
• 52:43
  well um thinking as a man who clearly loves SNM armadar Lee yeah sorry the
• 52:50
  the SNM stuff was related to first of all the costume designer normal morcio
• 52:56
  was like she put all that stuff in with all the American shoulder pads which at the time
• 53:02
  that look in the 80s was uh big shoulders was you know kind of that look and it was sauce she
• 53:09
  was then developing it into an absurd degree also there was there there was a convergence of style
• 53:16
  with 2018 judge dread and that stuff with the big shoulder pads as well so that kind of look was
• 53:22
  more in the air and because the group uh there was a the gang that were terrorizing the
• 53:30
  you know the the sort of the white clad liberals if you like inside the compound then you've got
• 53:36
  the the kind of wild boys you know the William borrows wild boys types of gangs outside what a
• 53:43
  sub-sector of the gang was called the gay boy berserkers so uh there was they had a couple of
• 53:50
  other they're a couple of other ones it's sort of there was some thing worked out in Mad Max 2
• 53:56
  where you had one big gang but you among in them you had the gay boy berserkers which was the
• 54:00
  character with the thing in the assless chaps was uh part of so that made sense for that gang
• 54:08
  to have that kind of gear in this one we were dealing with the gang are basically a bunch of
• 54:16
  if you like mind controlled war boys for remote and Joe and you know we went through different
• 54:23
  costume looks i did come up with a white look you know the one kind of which they went for
• 54:29
  in the end that that wasn't you know to do with me and also i developed another look which was more
• 54:35
  mad Max 2 big shoulder pad kind of look there were a couple of others you know we sort of messed around
• 54:41
  with them but there was a lot of information there for whoever actually came on as the costume designer
• 54:48
  a kind of rename she took the white look and removed and you know if you look if you look a lot of gangs now
• 54:58
  MS 13 gangs in America those Latino gangs they're bare from the waist up there was an element
• 55:04
  of where they were in black gloves and stuff which i wasn't too keen on because there was a sense of
• 55:11
  satirizing toxic male behavior into you know they looked like demented chippendales you know
• 55:19
  with i mean at least you didn't put cuffs on them but the black gloves you know they
• 55:24
  thankfully didn't have bow ties but that there was a bit of that and there was also the day of the
• 55:28
  day if you like the skull motif which i personally it was starting to get used a bit by then the day
• 55:36
  of the dead stuff and i was thinking we've seen that see my thing is not if it's been in another movie
• 55:42
  we don't do it so the actual final costume designs were you know years after me so but there was
• 55:53
  um what i developed was in terms of the white look white skin look i developed um bullet hole tattoos
• 56:02
  so all of them had a bullet hole at the center of their uh face with you know when you shoot
• 56:08
  into glass you get all those cracks around a bullet hole and they had these cracks and they would
• 56:12
  join up to another bullet hole and the cracks lead to another one and the idea was that for each
• 56:17
  kill they got a bullet hole stamped on them and their faces were covered and and then the bodies
• 56:22
  would have this spider web of bullet hole tattoos now they dropped that and then put on engine
• 56:28
  parts scarification it doesn't really it's hard to you see it in the film but it's a sort of deeper
• 56:34
  detail you'll catch it but it doesn't it's not really that avert to get back to your question like
• 56:40
  the gay boy berserkers of number two went into sm gear and then the war boys formerly called the
• 56:47
  necro boys the war boys were you know more like a brainwashed youth cult and it was more driving from
• 56:57
  current gang wear like you know where they naked from and they wear baggy baggy trousers and things
• 57:03
  like that uh that's how that came i liked the simplicity of where they put half you know the
• 57:09
  top up part of their head they just rub engine grease on it and you saw furios to do it at one
• 57:13
  point um so that you know there were nice things like that cool well um that's amazing brother well
• 57:19
  thank you so much for talking to us i mean this has been a real you know delight and pleasure just
• 57:24
  listen to you talk about the film i mean it's very quickly in the two minutes that we've got like
• 57:28
  when you saw obviously you know how we felt when we saw the film but when you finally got to watch
• 57:32
  it in the cinema did you feel like you'd achieved what you and George is out to do like road warrior
• 57:36
  2.0 i'll tell you a really nice story bear in mind that probably my favorite ever movie is Mad Max
• 57:43
  2 road warrior and uh you know mel Gibson George Miller you know whatever right so i saw mad
• 57:51
  i saw Mad Max Furio Furio sir sorry Furio Road at the premiere in Hollywood and i guess George
• 57:59
  must have manipulated this but i was sitting you know in the premiere at man's shiny theatre
• 58:05
  up on the balcony and directly behind me on that seat is George Miller and that seat is Mel Gibson
• 58:11
  and we both watched it together and at the end of it George put his hand on me and said thanks to me
• 58:16
  and i went like that and uh Mel Gibson went by that and uh thinking well you know what a weird turn
• 58:25
  around when you're a 20-year-old kid you go out and away by a road warrior and then 20 odd years later
• 58:33
  you get to see the one that you co-wrote and designed with George Miller and there's the original
• 58:38
  Mad Max and the director both going like that to you you think wow that was quite an experience
• 58:43
  so that's how i saw it with those cute guys sitting behind me which was pretty freaky
• 58:48
  wow yeah that's amazing we got a result we got a result we put out a great Mad Max film
• 58:55
  we didn't disappoint everybody um you know and i hope i'm wishing George a best of luck with
• 59:00
  the new one i hope it comes out wonderful well thank you again so much for talking to his
• 59:05
  Brendan that's a lovely note to end on i mean yeah full circle you know totally and uh yeah i mean
• 59:11
  thanks once again i want to quickly say no that was it thank you so much again Brendan that was
• 59:16
  that was i-open thank you so much