mad max scene breakdown: “can i talk to you?”
I’ve been kind of joking that I could record my own MST3K-style DVD commentary for Mad Max: Fury Road, because there’s something to talk about in every scene, and usually there are like ten things to talk about. It’s filmmaking on the highest order.
The “can I talk to you?” scene between Max and Furiosa is a great example of this. It runs for just a minute and forty seconds, and includes just ten sentences of dialogue. But it’s a key turning point in their relationship and a great example of the kind of storytelling tools the film relies on. So for somewhat arbitrary reasons, that’s the scene I’m going to talk about here, going line by line.
We start with Max working on his blood map, which he instinctively hides from Furiosa even though he’ll show it to her the very next morning.
“Can I talk to you?” she says. The in private is silent but we get it when she walks all the way to the end of the War Rig.
She’s wrapped herself up in this Vuvalini blanket–the only time we ever see her cover her arms or really do anything to significantly change her costume. She’s a guarded person who’s about to make herself very vulnerable by admitting she wants him to stay, so she needs some extra protection.
She leads and Max follows, and they line up like this, with him a step behind her (isn’t he always?):
These characters hardly ever talk to each other directly face-to-face, which is part of what makes the little moments when they do look each other in the eye feel so intense.
The back-to-front blocking also means that when the person in front turns away from the other, they’re turning toward the camera, revealing to us what they’re hiding from the other character. We’ll see how this trick gets used throughout the scene.
Also note the Vuvalini in the background–doubtless waiting to find out if this fool is as reliable as Furiosa says he is.
“I’ve talked with the others. We’re never going to have a better chance to make it across the salt. If we leave the rig here and load the motorcycles up with as much as we can, we can maybe ride for a hundred and sixty days.”
Now we’re looking with them at the salt flats they’re talking about crossing, which look eerily beautiful but also pretty endless and unforgiving.
“One of those bikes is yours. Fully loaded.”
Furiosa is already looking at him before she says this, but Max turns his head at this line–the weight of someone giving away supplies and transportation in a world where people kill for those things is not lost on him.
“You’re more than welcome to come with us.”
This is a woman who speaks in short, blunt sentences with no filler. And yet he is not just welcome, but more than welcome. She is basically saying I need you, don’t go, and the associated vulnerability is scary enough that she has to look down and away from him when she says it–
–but she looks up again right away to see his reaction.
And now we’re in a close-up and the reverse angle so we can see Max’s face for his answer:
He reflexively says no, because his instinct at that point is still “run the fuck away as far and as fast and you can as soon as you get the chance.”
Oof. She turns away from him to hide her disappointment–which means she turns toward us, so we get to see it.
You can almost see her internal monologue going on in her facial expressions. Right. Of course he said no. He won’t even tell you his name. Stupid to expect anything different. What is wrong with you?
(Her reaction is even clearer in a gif set–look at #6 and #7.)
Max is watching her and appears to be thinking really hard, and maybe trying to identify some feelings he hasn’t felt in a while. Maybe he has the realization that he should have said something different, but he’s still too defensive and scared to reconsider.
She turns and walks away from him, so now their blocking is reversed; he’s in front and she’s behind.
“You know, hope is a mistake.”
And now we have a shot where they turn and meet each other’s gaze at the exact same moment–boom. Because now that he’s said he’s not going with them, we just have to twist the knife with a reminder of how connected they are.
“If you can’t fix what’s broken, you’ll go insane.”
Now it’s Max’s turn to turn away from her and toward us, because that line is not about the challenges of motorcycle maintenance in the desert.
And we hold on his face being all haunted and thousand-yard-stare-y until we fade into the next shot, where we see the consequences of his decision: he’s alone as the rest of the group rides off.
Max is a little slow on the uptake when it comes to feelings, so even through he rides after them immediately after this scene, his equivalent moment of unadulterated I need you, don’t go vulnerability doesn’t really come until Furiosa is dying–when the filmmakers can just rip our hearts out with it, because the realization might be too late.
This scene is a good example of how great filmmaking relies on all the elements of the craft working together at the highest level: Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy’s performances, which are full of amazing range and subtlety; their direction by George Miller; the blocking, shot composition, editing, music, and costuming, which help reveal their emotional states; and the color grading and post processing making the whole thing look drop dead gorgeous while making sure we can still see their eyes and read the full range of their emotions.
But underneath it all is the writing–the sparse, understated dialogue that leaves room for loads of subtext and non-verbal communication. I’m currently reading scripts for a major screenplay competition, and one of the most common mistakes I see less experienced writers make is having characters say exactly what they mean all the time.
In real life, no one says what they mean. We say “I’m fine” when we’re dying inside. We say “It’s cool” when it’s totally not. For an actor, part of the fun is getting to play something other than what the lines say–the subtext.
The delicious thing about Max and Furiosa’s relationship (which is true whether you see them as having some buried romantic feelings for each other or as two people who develop a strictly platonic war bond of mutual respect and trust) is that it happens almost entirely in the subtext, and in non-verbal areas of storytelling like their actions, glances and body language.
This scene is a very important moment in their relationship. But being able to fully read the text of the scene requires you to be quite an active movie viewer, to parse out a lot of very subtle details of things like body language, facial expressions and eyeline and figure out what they mean, in a time span of about a minute and forty seconds.
And the whole movie is like this–it requires a high degree of attention, active viewing, visual processing and emotional intelligence to fully understand what’s going on in a lot of the scenes, because the film doesn’t stop and explain characters’ emotional states and journeys to you. I think it’s a film that was designed for multiple viewings, because the sheer amount of visual information is just too much to take in all at once, especially when your higher cognitive functions may be overwhelmed by a titanic adrenaline rush, as mine were the first several times I watched it.
This is a level of complexity we’re not used to in most art movies, let alone in a big summer blockbuster that is also stuffed with balls-to-the-wall action. It’s a filmmaking style that demands a lot of active engagement from the audience, and may be more readily accessible to some people than others. To me, it is absolutely delightful to have such a complex film text to read, one that unfolds upon repeated viewings to reveal more and more layers of meaning. It makes me wish so many more movies were like this. To me, it makes so many other movies look totally amateur and overburdened with exposition and unnecessarily complicated plots and and fake relationships sold to us as true love and so much goddam talking.
But I think it’s also why you get people saying the movie had no plot (untrue–it has one of the oldest plots there is–“hero leaves home; hero comes back”) or that Max and Furiosa don’t have much of a relationship (omfg, 10000% not true–they have one of the most intimate relationships I’ve ever seen in a movie, and it works precisely because the filmmakers never sit down and spell it out for us).
I also have a totally unscientifically-tested theory, based on talking to many people about their reactions to the movie, that people who were, for whatever reason, more willing to instinctively identify with the characters are more easily able to see the film’s emotional subtleties. I’m someone who falls hard for broken, damaged characters who are full of defense mechanisms–and this movie has two of them, and it’s a story about them trying to connect with each other. So I had a high degree of empathy for Max and Furiosa from the beginning. I suspect if you’re empathically in tune with a character, you’re more likely to notice things like subtleties of expression, a glance, a shift in body language, which are the kind of things the emotional storytelling in Fury Road is built on. I’ve talked to some people who, for whatever reason, just didn’t particularly connect with the characters, and the movie was a much flatter emotional experience for them, whereas I feel like it gets richer for me every time I watch it.
Ultimately, this is a matter of personal taste and not something the filmmakers can control, and I think it’s pretty gutsy to take the risk of making a big summer blockbuster that may not appeal deeply to everyone.
The flip side of that is that the people who love it think it’s the greatest fucking thing they’ve ever seen and won’t stop blogging about it.
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