Quand on m’explique les règles d’un jeu de société pendant 45 min mais que je demande quand même ce que je dois faire à chaque fois que c’est mon tour.
George Miller handed 480 hours of Mad Max footage to an editor whose credits were Happy Feet and Babe: Pig in the City. She had never cut an action film in her life. She was also his wife.
When Margaret Sixel asked why he wanted her, Miller said if a guy did it, it would look like every other action movie.
It took her three months just to watch the footage.
Then two years to cut it. Ten hours a day, six days a week, much of it while raising two teenagers alone because her husband was in the Namibian desert shooting for months at a time. The finished film runs 120 minutes and contains 2,700 cuts. The Road Warrior, the most celebrated action film of the 80s, had 1,200.
Cutting that fast usually turns action into blur. Miller solved it before she ever sat down, composing nearly every shot with the key detail dead center of frame. Your eye never has to hunt. Sixel could cut every 1.5 seconds and your brain kept up, which is why Fury Road feels fast where other action films feel like noise.
She won the Oscar for Best Editing. The only action film she ever cut.
And Miller was right about the guy thing. An action editor inherits the genre's reflexes. Sixel had none, so every one of those 2,700 decisions got made from scratch.