The excruciating story behind Margaret Sixel’s ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ Oscar victory
Margaret Sixel has collaborated with her husband, George Miller, on several films the Australian director has made; she has edited the likes of Babe: Pig in the City, 40,000 Years of Dreaming and Happy Feet. However, in 2015, Sixel was credited with editing a film genre with which she had no prior experience with Mad Max.
Miller released the fourth instalment of the Mad Max franchise entitled Fury Road, starring Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron. The film ended up winning six Academy Awards, most of them concerning costume and set design. Amazingly (seeing as she had not edited an action film before), Sixel also took home the Oscar for Best Editing.
When Miller was asked why he had given the job to his wife, he claimed that he wanted to create an action film through the eyes of a woman; otherwise, it would have turned out “like every other action movie” we had seen. However, the film is rather complex, so Sixel had one hell of a task on her hands to get it into the shape and texture of the award-winning final product.
Discussing the job on her hands, Sixel later said, “Editing this film was tough because there’s very little dialogue, which is how scenes are structured, so the options are endless. It was a relief to find a scene with dialogue.” Amazingly after principal production was completed, Sixel had 470 hours of footage to work with.
That 470 hours took three months to view alone, and then Sixel had the task of cutting it down into a 120-minute runtime. “This was not an easy film to cut, and the overall orchestration was more challenging than any one scene,” she said. “Some of it looks deceptively simple, but the variables were enormous. Every sequence had a huge number of hours put into it, and every scene had to earn its place. No fat. No repetition.”
Sixel worked ten hours a day, six days a week. The editing process took a whopping 6,000 hours to complete. However, fortunately, the film was largely shot chronologically, so Sixel at least had that in her favour. “It was wonderful having all of this stunning material, but it could be mindboggling at times,” she said. “The number of possible variations was daunting.”
Noting the fact that she was working closely with her husband, Sixel said, “Being his wife helps only in that when we make something better, 98 per cent of the time, we agree on the choice. We understand each other’s sensibilities. That’s important because when you are not in sync, lots of people have opinions in the editing room, and you can really go off in the wrong direction.” The next entry in the franchise, Furiosa, is set to come out soon.