Yeah! I know exactly the part you’re talking about, when they’re inside the sandstorm and that big orchestral string theme just opens up, starting around here:
I think it’s one of the first times in the movie we hear something in the music that’s more classically orchestral instead of industrial and electronic, and it’s big and epic but also sad. And it continues through this part:
…which looks like the friggin’ gates of Valhalla opening up in the middle of a sand tornado.
Some of her crew members are definitely still clinging to the top of the Rig when she goes into the sandstorm:
And if you look carefully you can see three and maybe four bodies get sucked off the Rig after the other pursuit vehicle is already high in the air:
(This would be much clearer in a gif, where you’d be able to see that the bodies are coming off the Rig instead of falling down from the car, but I lack gif-making skillz.)
One of my fellow fan-friends observed that this is also the moment it hits you how destroyed the world is, that giant toxic sandstorm tornados are just the ecological norm now. People know they’re dangerous and scary, but no one seems surprised.
I would like to add two more things.
1) Nux looks at these glorious deaths and is inspired, as they are as natural to him as the toxic mega sandstorm.
2) Max, our POV character, expresses our horror (”It was hard to know who was more crazy – me or everyone else”).
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.
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?
