Steven Soderbergh Is Amazed 'Mad Max: Fury Road' Didn't Kill Hundreds Of People
Steven Soderbergh has always been a filmmaker very open to praising fellow artists, and in a recent interview the Logan Lucky director sang the praises of George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road. In a bit of effusive praise for Miller and his directorial skills, Soderbergh commented on how incredibly well-staged the action set pieces in the recent Mad Max sequel were, and how they left him awestruck. Read the Steven Soderbergh Fury Road thoughts below.
It feels weird to refer to a film that only came out 2 years ago as a "masterpiece," but that truly seems like the correct classification for George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road. With his action-packed, high-octane cinematic spectacle, Miller put all of his contemporaries to shame, staging a movie overflowing with show-stopping moments.
And director Steven Soderbergh agrees. In a candid new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Soderbergh, who recently released Logan Lucky and has the experimental series Mosaic on the horizon, couldn't say enough good things about Miller's 2015 film. "I guarantee that the handful of people who are even in range of that, when they saw Fury Road, had blood squirting out of their eyes," Soderbergh says. "The thing with George Miller, it's not just that, he does everything really well."
When asked if he storyboards for his films, Soderbergh replied in the negative, saying "The ability to stage well is a skill and a talent that I value above almost everything else." He then went on to praise Fury Road:
"I just watched Mad Max: Fury Road again last week, and I tell you I couldn't direct 30 seconds of that. I'd put a gun in my mouth. I don't understand how [George Miller] does that, I really don't, and it's my job to understand it. I don't understand two things: I don't understand how they're not still shooting that film and I don't understand how hundreds of people aren't dead."
The Oceans 11 filmmaker goes on to add, "We are talking about the ability in three dimensions to break a sequence into a series of shots in which no matter how fast you're cutting you know where you are geographically. And each one is a real shot where a lot of things had to go right." The filmmaker is of course referring to the multiple jaw-dropping action scenes on display in Fury Road, the majority of which were filmed in practical ways, with real people and vehicles, while most modern day movies of this kind tend to lean heavily on CGI. Soderbergh shared similar thoughts on Miller on his Twitter account back in 2015:
Soderbergh is one of the most interesting filmmakers in the biz, frequently sharing interesting, insightful thoughts on filmmaking as a whole, often on his own website. I strongly urge you to watch this informative talk he gave on the state of modern cinema in general. The talk itself is four years old, but everything he says there still holds true today.