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| Jacket design by Gregg Kulick |
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
My first viewing of Mad Max: Fury Road was all wrong. That is to say: not in the cinema. We were living in China when it opened in most of the world, but foreign releases were limited back then. So that summer we got Jurassic World, Cinderella and Tomorrowland... But not Max Rockatansky. Reality reflected cinematic disappointment as Laura and I found ourselves needing new employment. This led to a desperate move across the province for jobs that didn't work out, and in September 2015 we found ourselves returning to America well ahead of schedule, uncertain of what would happen next. Somewhere shortly after that we rented a DVD of Fury Road from Redbox and watched it on a 32-inch TV in a friend's basement. Not quite watched-it-on-a-flight bad, as far as first viewings go, but close enough. It's a testament to the filmmaking that its genius translates to the small screen, but it clearly desired to be as overwhelming as possible.
I didn't see the film again until last Saturday. On a bigger TV. In higher definition. I still feel like I missed an important cinematic moment, but after reading Kyle Buchanan's book the geographical isolation and chaotic circumstances that caused me to miss so much of the online hype and the theatrical experience of Fury Road are somewhat appropriate. It was a movie that took 20 years to make; if it takes me a few more to see it in a theater, that's okay. Blood, Sweat & Chrome also does such a good job of transporting the reader back to the times and places it was made that it felt like I was getting a do-over.
The book is an oral history, consisting of dialogue from interviews with roughly 140 participants, primarily the film's cast and crew. I have no idea how Buchanan and the folks at William Morrow managed to sculpt these elements into such a cohesive narrative, but I'd bet this herculean effort was compared to the seemingly Sisyphean one of George Miller's masterpiece more than once during editing. It's layered so beautifully that you'd swear this was an extended reunion panel, that all these people must be in the same place. Their recollections are so vivid and united with each other, in the way that only a true ordeal can bond memories and people. Even if, like me, you missed the Hollywood gossip about Fury Road's studio problems, feuding stars and halted production timelines, the conversations in this book radiate the magnitude of the experience.
If you've combed through the Blu-ray features or sought out previous interviews, there will be some redundancies here. But 1) that shouldn't matter when the topic is a miracle of modern cinema, and 2) there's no way these things have been covered on this scale or in this much detail. As with the movie, there are moments so unbelievable that you'll be forced to go back a second, third, fourth time. The delays caused by storms and global catastrophes and panicked studio heads, the logistics of freighting caravans of custom cars halfway around the world, the intense workshopping that turned the stunt team into actual War Boys, and the fact that no one was seriously hurt during the grueling shoot - mind-blowing stuff! I found myself stupefied by the numbers presented here. It's casually dropped that the fuel cost alone for the film's featured vehicles was around 1.3 million dollars. That fact takes up two lines in a book of over 300 pages, and every page has a similar reveal.
Fury Road never should have happened, and everyone involved knew it. Except for George Miller, who with clear vision, quiet demeanor, and bottomless patience just kept chipping away at this thing until the rest of us could see what he was sculpting. Logically, economically, artistically - it shouldn't exist. Movies like this are rare. There's Fitzcarraldo, Apocalypse Now - and those spawned two of the most important behind-the-scenes documentaries in cinema history. I guess cameras weren't following Miller and his team for the two decades it took to get the movie made. But Buchanan has done work of equal importance, preserving and contextualizing the long, chaotic road the movie rode to get here. And much like Burden of Dreams and Hearts of Darkness, the book stands alone, accessible to all who are interested in film, whether they have seen (or liked) its subject or not. It's the kind of book that screams "Witness me!" and deserves to be witnessed.
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