It’s worth setting out some of what lies under Fury Road’s surface. Talking about Fury Road Brendan McCarthy explained, “one thing we thought was important when we were figuring it all out was subtext, like a graphic poem where you can read the surface but the resonance goes deeper.” The idea of Fury Road as a graphic poem, with more going on than meets the eye, inspired this talk, together with the questions that most interest George Miller: why do we make stories? What would the world be like without stories? And most importantly, why make this story? It’s amazing that George, Brendan and Nico spoke to the Opera House stage to answer questions about this movie (essentially a car chase going one way and then the other), a movie recently voted the year’s best by the International Federation of Film Critics. I began to realise just how much was going in this script (where hardly anyone speaks) and it became clear this incredibly dense and visual lesson in allegorical story making was worth unpacking in an on-stage conversation. With Fury Road’s bizarre, hyper-kinetic afterimage seared onto my retina and intrigued by the legendary 3,500 panel comic-style storyboard ‘script’, I started to read all the different takes on the film. After more than a decade of hearing whispers of this film I’d given up expecting to see it, and even if it did come out, had any film ever been helped by seventeen years of development hell? What I didn’t expect co-writers George Miller, Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris to create - and the astonishing Margaret Sixel to edit - was a psychedelic masterpiece of the sort that rewarded repeated viewings with its remarkable under-the-surface content. Around the end of the 90s or the start of the 2000s I was fascinated to hear that Brendan McCarthy, whose surreal and hallucinatory comic art I admired enormously, was supposedly working with George Miller on a fourth Mad Max installment. I don’t think I was allowed to watch it but I definitely caught terrifying glimpses and when Beyond Thunderdome came out three years later we all enthusiastically played it out as kids in the Pilbara desert. I think Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior was the first video we rented for our newly purchased VHS player in 1982 when I was seven.

Mad max fury road explained