Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1544300
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 33 Did you thank her when you got your Oscar? MM: On the night, not till the last second. I had a speech, and I had Dave White as a co-nominee with me, and so we had to split the 45 seconds allotted. I had timed out my speech to 21.5 seconds and that left about 23 seconds for Dave's speech. It wasn't till I got on stage that I realized that I hadn't included Ann in the speech. I redeemed myself as I walked off stage. She was seated just offstage right where they put the nominees and, as I walked into the wings, I said, "Baby, I love you" or something like that. And then walked off stage. She was crying and her mascara was running and there was a TV camera in her face! SSS: She apparently was the reason why you went to Australia. MM: Yeah. Amazing, right? How one small decision can have such titanic repercussions. We joke about it a lot. I would have said no if she hadn't jumped in the middle of it. This was not the first nor the last time she gave me advice that changed my life in a meteoric way. Can I say "I love you" to my wife here in a magazine? SSS: Is that wild? So how long were you there total? MM: I was initially in Sydney for eight weeks, and that was to get us through a final mix for an audience preview that would happen in Southern California. Then all bets were off. George didn't know what he was going to do after that. It really depended on how that preview went. Having gotten them to the finish line and, as I was about to leave, I had this unsettling feeling that the work wasn't finished. I felt like I saved the patient, but it couldn't walk on its own. All I did was make sure it didn't bleed to death. I didn't feel like the movie really shined or excelled sonically. It was "good enough" … but not good enough for me. I screwed up my courage and wrote a three-page manifesto that I presented to George Miller. In it I said, "I think the movie can sound a lot better. Here's how" and on three single-spaced pages, I went through the movie dramatically, talking about movie beats, character ideas, how sound was working and not working, and how it could be better. I identified individual areas and individual scenes that needed work and how to bring them to life. My recommendation was to bring the post back to Los Angeles where I knew the crews that could make this happen and, in the timeframe, we had to make it happen. Not that I couldn't have done it all in Australia, great people there, but I knew I could just hit the ground running, hire these designers, these editors, these Foley Mark Mangini, David White c. 2016