A REMARKABLE WIN

MARK ASKWITH

Mark Askwith is a Canadian television producer and writer. From 1982–87 he was the manager of Toronto’s Silver Snail comic book store. He left to work with director Ron Mann on a documentary called Comic Book Confidential, and to collaborate with Dean Motter on The Prisoner: Shattered Visage, a graphic novel based on the ground-breaking television series. In 1989 he co-created the award-winning TV show Prisoners of Gravity, a show that featured interviews with writers and artists who worked in the field of speculative fiction. When PoG ended its five-year run, Askwith became the producer of Imprint, Canada’s flagship literary TV show. In 1997 he became a founding producer of a national Canadian television channel—SPACE—where he is the producer of special projects.

The Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation was awarded to Mad Max: Fury Road, written by George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, Nick Lathouris. The category was very competitive this year, and the other nominees showcased the finest writing in animation (Inside Out), television (Jessica Jones), and feature films (Ex Machina, The Martian, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens).

Mad Max: Fury Road is the fourth film in the Mad Max franchise, and it continues the story of a former policeman who now inhabits a bleak post-­apocalyptic world. The film begins when Max is captured by an army of War Boys led by a despot called Immortan Joe. When one of Immortan Joe’s lieutenants, Imperator Furiosa, goes rogue, she drives away with his five wives, and thus begins a roughly two-hour chase through a windswept desert.

George Miller’s initial idea for the script was a simple one: could he write a film that was a continuous chase scene? Miller enlisted artist Brendan McCarthy to collaborate on the design and storyboards, and they broke down each sequence as if they were working on an animated movie. McCarthy called the document “a surreal fusion of graphic novel and Hollywood screenplay”—and this manuscript, with 3,500 panels of artwork, became the “Mad Max Bible.” Rumors began to circulate that there was no script, but Charlize Theron (Furiosa) stated “there was a script; it just wasn’t a conventional script, in the sense that we kind of know scripts with scene numbers. Initially it was just a storyboard, and we worked off that storyboard for almost three years. And then eventually, there was a kind of written version of the storyboard, which just felt like a written version of the storyboard, again not like a script.”

Mad Max: Fury Road’s win is remarkable given how troubled the production of the film was. The film was to begin shooting in Australia in 2001, but after the events of September 11 the American dollar collapsed. In 2003 the film was set to film in the Australian desert, but the locations were ruined by rainfall. In 2009 the project had morphed into an R-rated animated film, to be released in 2012. After years of delays, principal photography began in the Namibian desert in 2012.

Mad Max: Fury Road was a critical success and was chosen by many publications as one of the top ten films of 2015. In fact, it ranks first on Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes as the highest reviewed film of 2015. It was the second most nominated film with ten Academy Award nominations, including Best Director, and Best Picture, and it took home six awards.

The movie is an energetic whirlwind of action. The plot and dialogue are stripped to the bare minimum, but the visuals are so rich and evocative that the story becomes mythic. Fittingly, the film ends with a quote from Albert Camus: “Where must we go, we who wander this wasteland, in search of our better selves.”