Fresh Air - 'Mad Max' Director George Miller

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

The fifth installment of the Mad Max series of post-apocalyptic action films is roaring into theaters. It's called Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, and it's a prequel to the 2015 film, Mad Max: Fury Road, which earned 10 Oscar nominations. First, Justin Chang reviews the new movie, and then we revisit our 2016 interview with director George Miller. Also, we remember alto saxophonist David Sanborn, who toured or recorded with David Bowie, James Brown, the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and others.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. Pliny and Jones! Start your engines! I'm Furiosa! One of the most anticipated summer movies opens this week in theaters. Furiosa, A Mad Max Saga, is the fifth installment of the amazing post-apocalyptic action series set in the expanse of the Australian desert. It's a prequel to the 2015 dystopian thriller Mad Max Fury Road, which starred Charlize Theron as the fierce warrior

Furiosa. The new Mad Max movie stars Anya Taylor-Joy as the young Furiosa, along with Chris Hemsworth as the biker gang leader Dementus. In a few minutes, we'll hear my interview with George Miller, the Australian filmmaker who's directed all the Mad Max films. I spoke to him when Fury Road was in theaters. But first, let's hear what our film critic Justin Chang has to say about the new Mad Max movie. He recorded his interview in between screenings at the Cannes Film Festival. Nine years after the release of Mad Max Fury Road, it doesn't feel too soon to call it one of the greatest Hollywood action movies ever made. We may have seen all the elements before in previous Mad Max movies, the post-apocalyptic

setting and the grief-stricken road warrior caught up in another desert demolition derby. But the director, George Miller, had never mashed them together with this much sustained excitement or sheer verve. One of the movie's most delightful surprises was that Max himself, played by Tom Hardy, wasn't even its best character. That honor fell to the brilliant and brooding Imperator Furiosa, played by a staggering Charlize Theron, in one of her best performances. A character this unforgettable was destined to resurface, and now Miller has given us a prequel called Furiosa, a Mad Max saga. Mad Max himself is nowhere to be seen, though.

This is Furiosa's origin story. It begins in a lush oasis called the Green Place, located somewhere in the desert, where Furiosa, a young girl played by Alila Brown, has grown up in a secret society of mostly women. But one day, male marauders on motorcycles invade the Green Place and kidnap Furiosa. Her mother, played by Charlie Fraser, follows in hot pursuit and briefly succeeds in getting her back. Knowing they will likely be captured again at any moment, Furiosa's mother hands her a seed from their home, the Green Place, and tells her to guard it carefully. Whatever you have to do, however long it takes,

promise me you'll find your way home. I'm going to plant this seed, protect the Green Place. Give me this one gift. Promise. Sure enough, tragedy strikes soon after, leaving Furiosa desperate to not only break free, but also get revenge on her captors. Her chief target is the biker gang's leader, Dementus,

played by a swarthily menacing Chris Hemsworth, who seems to relish playing a big personality in something other than a Thor movie for a change. The plot thickens from there. Dementus forges an unholy alliance with the evil warlord Immortan Joe, whom Furiosa will later take on in Fury Road. That film spun a ruthlessly taught and concise story, set over a breathless few days and sustaining extraordinary momentum from start to finish. The movie Furiosa, by contrast, divides into five chapters stretched out over more than a decade

and sometimes bogs down in plot. Simply put, Furiosa bides her time, passing herself off as a boy working in Immortan Joe's auto garage. By the time Anya Taylor-Joy steps into the role, Furiosa has grown into an ace mechanic, a skilled driver, and a powerhouse fighter, ready to take on Dementus, Immortan Joe, and anyone else who might stand in her way. This ushers in the movie's most thrilling sequence, in which Furiosa makes her escape from Immortan Joe's citadel by stowing away in a massive truck. The driver is a man named Praetorian Jack, played by the excellent Tom Burke, with whom Furiosa joins forces. Before long, the truck is attacked, by whom and for what reason I honestly can't remember, but it doesn't matter.

What matters is that we're watching a high-speed chase in a Mad Max movie, and Miller is entirely in his element. As usual, he ramps up the vehicular action to ludicrous extremes, with wildly acrobatic stunts that feel inspired by everything from Buster Keaton to Looney Tunes. Even in moments when the CGI looks a little obvious, the mayhem is staged and shot with the kind of blissful coherence that you rarely see in a Hollywood blockbuster anymore. As the camera darts in and around the truck, and drumbeats pound on the soundtrack, Furiosa comes fully into her own as an action hero, hurling dynamite one minute, and climbing up on top of the truck to fend off an attacker the next. Taylor Joy has never played a role this physically demanding before,

few actors have, and she meets the challenge head on. For all that, I didn't always buy her as Furiosa, or at least the Furiosa I thought I knew from Fury Road. Taylor Joy has a coolness here that feels very different from the fiery intensity that made Theron's performance so spectacular. There's something lacking in the script as well. While Furiosa's motivation for revenge is entirely plausible, something about her arc feels a bit too psychologically tidy to grip or disturb you in the way it's supposed to. In the end, the truest star of Furiosa, a Mad Max saga, is the post-apocalyptic world itself, with its burnt orange dunes and towering desert citadels. Miller has said there are more Mad Max movies in store, and part of me hopes he never stops making them. The more he returns to

this make-believe landscape, the more real it becomes. Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed Furiosa, which is the latest film in the Mad Max saga. All five of the Mad Max films were directed by the Australian filmmaker George Miller. I interviewed him in 2016 about his previous Mad Max movie, Fury Road. That film earned 10 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. It starred Charlize Theron commanding a massive Mack truck-like vehicle, trying to escape an armada of violent men driving motorized

rigs with bizarre armor and weapons. The film also starred Tom Hardy as Max. Here's his opening voiceover. My name is Max. My world is fire and blood. It's the oil, stupid. Oil wars. We are killing for gasoline. The world is actually running out of water. Now there's the water wars. Once, I was a cop, a road warrior searching for a righteous cause. To the terminal freak-out point. Mankind has gone rogue, terrorizing itself. The earth is sour.

Our bones are poisoned. We have become half-life. As the world fell, each of us in our own way was broken. It was hard to know who was more crazy. Me or everyone else. And the story begins. George Miller, welcome to Fresh Air. Great to have you. There aren't a lot of quiet moments in this film.

We hear Tom Hardy as Max talking there. This is a wild ride of war on wheels. And the vehicles are real, shooting all kinds of weapons, people leaping from one to another, huge cars and trucks and other kinds of vehicles smashing into each other and rolling over at various speeds. You didn't use a lot of computer-generated graphics here, right? Why did you want to actually have these vehicles in the action? Well, it's a film in which we don't defy the laws of physics. It's real people in a real desert. There's no men in capes flying around or space vehicles and so on. So it wouldn't make a lot of sense to shoot it all digitally

because it would lose a lot of authenticity. And it's very, very difficult, despite the amazing advances in 15 to 20 years of the digital world in filmmaking, it's still very difficult to make something feel really authentic. So we chose to do it old school, going out to a remote location with endless deserts and have real vehicles and human beings in that landscape and so on. You know, again and again, you'll see a vehicle of some kind that's chasing a big truck and

smashing into the truck. And the truck will wheel over and try and knock the vehicle off the road. These are real vehicles, real people in them. How do you manage that safely? With a lot of preparation, with a film like this, it's a long shoot. It's 120 days out there. Every day is a big stunt day. So you have to be almost fanatical about preparation and safety.

Otherwise, things could go horribly wrong. And so everything was very well rehearsed, very well prepared. And we had a wonderful stunt crew and rigging crew and effects crew out there. And it got to the point where, with proper preparation, you're able to sort of get the actors, who are all of them pretty physical, athletic people, in a lot of the shots. There's a moment when you see Max hanging upside down between the wheels of this war rig inches off the ground. While it's moving, right?

While it's moving. It's going fairly fast. Well, that's Tom Hardy there. But he has two very, very secure harnesses supporting him. And also, you know, nowadays you can erase them very easily, whereas in the past you couldn't. You said you can erase them. You can erase the harnesses.

And that's where the computer graphics comes in, I guess. And that's where it comes in. Plus, there's a lot of work creating or enhancing the landscapes. Because the film itself plays out more or less in real time over three days and two nights, we're also able to get a consistency in the sky and in the shadows and the landscape. So even though most of it is real world, virtually every shot has CG in it in some way. So the sky would be colored or the landscape would be colored, but the cars are really crashing into each other. Yes. You're also able to erase your previous takes. I used to watch movies when I was younger

and you'd know how many takes people did by the number of skid marks on the road. So we can now erase take one, two, and three and simply have the skid marks of take four. There's a series of wild and violent chases that happen in this movie. And you see one of the weapons that is used by these sort of dune buggy-like vehicles that are chasing this big truck is you'll see these poles, like 30 feet high, extending from these little chasing vehicles and men on them, which, if I'm describing this properly, the poles bend and then kind of like a pendulum, they swing the guy on top of the pole over to either attack the truck or jump onto it. This is an amazing thing to witness. And it was real, right? Tell us where this idea came

from. Well, in a chase story like this, you're always looking for something that is new. Now, in the same way that pirates board ships and so on, we had these things called polecats, which is vehicles with a wide wheelbase and these pendulum-like poles going quite a ways up into the air and men on top of them swinging. And as they come over the top of this war rig, they can jump down on top of it. I had seen some street performers with fixed poles in Australia and in period costumes kind of swaying in the breeze. I had seen some street performers with fixed poles in Australia and in period costumes kind of swaying in the breeze. I thought they were almost like those poles that pole vaulters had. And I thought, oh, that would be interesting if we could put them on vehicles. I never imagined that those vehicles would move. I always thought we'd basically shoot them static and then

comp them in in the usual visual effects way because I thought the physics of it would be would be too dangerous and if something went wrong it would be catastrophic so we worked on that and then because the film was delayed the stunt crew and the rigging crew basically really really paid attention to to how the physics of it would work, this pendulum-like effect in the flexible pole. And one day I looked across and coming out of the desert with several of these vehicles with guys up on top of the pole and swinging this way and that. And it was quite something to behold. And it was so safe that we were able to get Tom Hardy on top of one of those, even though it wasn't until he got up on top that he actually said,

hey, you do know I'm afraid of heights. And I said, oh, gosh, do you have one or two takes in you? And he said, yes, give it a shot. But that is Tom Hardy on top of that pole when Max is in that scene. The three previous Mad Max films were centered around Max. And he is a big part in this. But in some respects, the hero of this is a woman played by Charlize Theron. You want to talk a little bit about her role in this story and what she brought to the part?

Well, the original idea of this film, given that it was to be a chase, was also that what people were in conflict over was to be human. And in this case, five wives escaping a tyrannical warlord. And they needed a road warrior. And it couldn't be a male because that's a different story. And it had to be female. But she needed to be convincing as a warrior, not just someone masquerading as a warrior. So Charlize actually was the only actor I thought about for this role. She's somebody who's got a lot of stature physically and in her

spirit, and she's pretty uncompromising. She shaved her hair. She said Furiosa would not worry about hair in the heat and the dust. And Charlize is one of those people who just was able to do that. You know, at the heart of the story here, you have a very tough and determined woman who is fleeing this despotic warlord and in doing so, liberating his five wives, essentially women he uses for breeding. Did you think of this as a feminist story when you were writing it?

Not overtly. I was very interested in the character and in the way that the Max stories are told. I mean, basically, they're allegorical stories. They're in the same way, I guess, that the classic Western was that. And Max is a character who gets swept up into this story. He's that sort of wanderer in the wasteland looking for some sense of meaning in a very stark world. And he gets caught

up in their story. And because the MacGuffin, as Hitchcock used to say, the thing that's in conflict is human and female, it just evolved. The characters go that take you along in the story, and the sense that she was somehow a very, really interesting action hero, female, just arose organically out of the story. The feminist notions of the movie were the same. It was never the first agenda of the film. It was always story-driven, and the rest followed. As the story develops, there are these five women who are the captive wives of this warlord, and they're being liberated in this huge vehicle like a big tanker truck that's at the heart of the chase.

The wives, they're young women, don't have a lot of lines, but I read that you invited the feminist playwright and activist Eve Ensler, who wrote The Vagina Monologues, to come to Namibia to speak to those five actors. Is that right? Yes. Just as the war boys, we call them the half-life war boys, who are basically the cannon fodder for the tyrant who sits on top of the dominance hierarchy. So for the war boys, we had military advisors doing our own version of post-apocalyptic military group, I guess, quite a demented version of that. So it occurred to me that we needed somebody

to really help the female actors find a way into their characters and their world because everybody in this story, except the Immortan Joe, is in some way a commodity. Max himself is a trapped animal who's a blood bag. Furiosa is a warrior. That's the Charlize Theron character. Yes.

She's a road warrior in the service of the Immortan Joe, who's this despot. So we needed somebody. And as it happened, I was listening to the radio down in Australia. And Eve, who's extraordinary in the work she does for human rights in Africa, I mean, she goes right into the dark heart of it. She just happened to be in the Republic of Congo around about the time we were in Namibia while we were preparing to shoot the movie. And she gave us a week in the middle of a very busy schedule. And she came down and she ran wonderful workshops. A lot of them were quite intimate with just the five girls. And by osmosis, it crept into the movie. I'm quite certain of that. What crept into the movie?

Just a sense that this story is one that has been fairly constant throughout history. Women, and indeed other human beings, have been basically the goods and chattels of the powerful. I mean, there was a moment when you see a chastity belt and it's something that I remember seeing in Venice, you know, quite a brutal-looking chastity belt. And in that one image, you realize that you know that these are some kind of belongings of this powerful man. And that sort of thing happens much more brutally in this real world,

unfortunately, apart from what we have in the movies. George Miller, who directed all of the Mad Max action films, recorded in 2016. His latest in the series, Furiosa, a Mad Max saga, opens this week. We'll hear more of our interview after a break, and we'll remember alto saxophonist David Sanborn, who played with the long list of rock and blues stars. I'm Dave Davies. This is Fresh Air. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply.

Well, George Miller, you began your career in a way so many Hollywood folks do by going to medical school. This is interesting. You grew up in, I guess, a rural area of Australia, right, and went to medical school. You worked as an emergency room doctor. Is that right? Well, I did my normal rotations through emergency when I worked in a big city hospital. And once I started making films, I would work weekends in emergency and doing locums. And then during the week, I grappled with learning how to make movies. I tried that for about a few years

and I ended up basically spending all my time making movies and very little time being a doctor. And I went through medical school with my twin brother and I realised after about a decade how much I'd lost the practice of medicine. So by default, I became a filmmaker at a time when I didn't think there was no such thing as a career in Australia as a filmmaker, but I was just led to it out of a sense of inquiry, curiosity. Did the things you saw in emergency rooms have anything to do with the Mad Max films,

which are, of course, are about mayhem on the highways and some great respect? Yes, the very first one definitely was about that. There was something about how we deal with violence in society and how we deal with it in the media that I was very interested in. I guess thematically, but interestingly enough, I was also interested in very kinetic cinema as I was trying to understand what this new language, which is not much more than 100 years old, let's say 120 years old now, the film language is, and it's very universal. It basically was formed in the silent era, in the chase films of Buster Keaton and Harold

Lloyd and the two real Westerns. And I really went back and looked at those. I saw, oh, this is in a sense where cinema was forward. So I became very, very interested in the action movie. And those two things sort of drove me to make the first Mad Max in some way. There's quite a car culture in rural Australia, isn't there? Yes. We don't have a gun culture, but growing up in remote Australia, the car was the thing.

Big, big expanses of landscape and long, straight roads, and as soon as someone could get their hand on a car, I mean, like a lot of rural people, people were driving, you know, when they were kids already, not on the main roads, of course, but on country properties. And so I remember growing up there and the car was, I don't know, it was a way to get out of town,

it was a way to express themselves in some way by doing up cars. It was something that really, really struck me. Then we, my brothers and I, my parents took us to the city and I had an education where, you know, as I said, I ended up working in big city hospitals. And I saw the other side of it as well, the chaos of the vehicles and, you know, when people were coming into emergencies with really bad injuries and so on. And so that sort of got to me in a way. And I think making the first Mad Max was a way of processing that. Well, you made the first Mad Max film in 1979.

I thought we'd listen to some of the trailer of that film. They've broken his wife. They've killed his best friend. People don't believe in heroes anymore. They've pushed him too far. We're gonna give them back their heroes! Mad Max. The last law in a world gone out of control. where every day is a duel. Every life is on the line,

and every turn in the road brings you face to face with a new kind of terror. Mad Max. Pray that he's out there. Somewhere. And that is the trailer for Mad Max. Pray that he's out there. Somewhere. And that is the trailer for Mad Max. Directed in 1979 by our guest George Miller. Yeah, it takes you back to hear that? Well, it makes me a little squeamish because the film was Australian, a very low-budget Australian film. And here in America back in 1979, it was released by Samuel Ziarkoff from American International Pictures,

which made the kind of Roger Corman-type movies. And they took all the Australian accents and dubbed it with the American accent because the Australian accent back then, very few people had heard. And American audiences couldn't understand what they were saying? Yeah, yeah. I remember when I first came to America in the mid-'70s, people were surprised that Australians spoke English. It wasn't too many years later, of course, that people got used to listening to Australia. Now, the first Mad Max film is not in a post-apocalyptic nuclear landscape.

I mean society still exists. He's a cop, kind of a hero, kind of a Western hero fighting bad guys out on the highways. But the bad guys are like these really creepy, sadistic guys, just utterly ruthless and cruel. Where did those characters come from? Were there people like that on the highways in Australia? No, no. And unfortunately, I mean, there could be, but not as exaggerated as that. I mean, that story, I initially intended to make it contemporary. It was a very, very low budget film and it was the

first film that I made with my partner, Byron Kennedy. And we'd made short films, but had never really been on a movie set before. And it was very difficult. We could not afford, if it was a contemporary story, to block off busy streets and have other vehicles and pay location fees for expensive buildings and so on. So the solution was to go to the back streets, the empty back streets, and go to derelict buildings where we didn't have to populate it with anything but our key characters. And in order to make that convincing, and because the story was so hyperbolic that I just simply put the caption in front of it

a few years from now to imply some dystopian world, and that came out of just simply working with the budget. It wasn't until we made the second film, Road Warrior, that I was suddenly aware that we had unwittingly tapped into a kind of archetype. The first film did extremely well all around the world and it was recognised, for instance, in Japan. They saw Max as a kind of lone samurai

and the French critics picked up on it and called it a western on wheels, and in Scandinavia he was the lone Viking warrior wandering the wasteland. It seemed to have that sort of universal resonance, and that's when the second film became much more consciously mythological in that sense. George Millard recorded in 2016.

He directed all five of the films in the Mad Max series. We'll hear more after a break. This is Fresh Air. I want to talk about another film of yours. This is one that you wrote but did not direct, the adorable film Babe, where animals are talking. It's about the pig who becomes an award-winning sheep herder. In this clip, this is the beginning of the film, when this little pig

has arrived at the farm, all the animals can talk, and what we hear is a mother sheepdog talking to her puppies about the pig, and briefly with the pig, and with a comment thrown in from a horse. Let's listen. That looks stupid, Mom. Not as stupid as sheep, mind you, but pigs are definitely stupid. Excuse me. No, we're not. Good heavens. Who are you?

I'm a large white. Yes, that's your breed, dear. What's your name? I don't know. Well, what did your mother call you to tell you apart from your brothers and sisters? Our mom called us all the same. And what was that, dear? She called us all babe.

Perhaps we shouldn't talk too much about a family. I want my mom. And that's from the film Babe, which was written and produced by our guest, George Miller. So, George Miller, you have the Mad Max films, in which the villains are these just ruthless, cruel, sadistic people. And then we have Babe, and then Babe 2, Pig in the City, which you directed, and Happy Feet, the terrific movie about the penguin who can't sing but can dance. Is there a connection here? Well, there is. People do look at me weirdly. Even my mother said, you know, when you started making the Babes and Happy Feets, I thought you were calming down in some way. But when she saw

the latest Fury Road, she said, but, you know, I sometimes wonder what goes on in your head. But there is a logic. I said earlier that I really was aware that the Mad Max stories were a kind of corruption of the hero myth. And we all know the great work that Joseph Campbell did studying comparative religion and folklore and so on, and basically huge scholarship there, which has influenced movies and the classic hero myth. Now, what was interesting is that I happened to hear

somebody reviewing a book written by a pig farmer, Dick King Smith, in England, called The Sheep Pig. And the way this, this was someone on the BBC radio, and as she was reviewing this book, she started to laugh. And laugh in a way that it obviously really got to her. So immediately went and bought the book and read it and recognized that indeed this was a classic Joseph Campbell hero myth. By relinquishing self-interest, the heroic character basically is the agent of change and bestows some boon on the world and in a way changes it but it's a very very small story it's not it's not something that could be done as an animation it's not kinetic and flamboyant in in the way that you can do cell

animation which is the main the only way people were doing animation back then. So it was a question of waiting to see whether or not the technology was available to actually make the animals talk. And that took about, you know, this was still an analog era, and it took about five, six years. And the film was shot at Universal just at the time when Steven Spielberg was doing Jurassic Park. And that same technology was basically used.

It was early to mid-90s, and it was the beginning of the biggest shift, I believe, since sound, the digital era. Anyway, the point being is that there is that connection. Well, George Miller, thanks so much for speaking with us. Thank you. George Miller, who directed all five of the Mad Max films recorded in 2016. The latest in the series, Furiosa, A Mad Max Saga, opens this week.

Coming up, we remember alto saxophonist David Sanborn, who toured and recorded with some of the biggest names in rock. This is Fresh Air. That was David's sandboard saxophone solo at the top of David Bowie's 1975 hit, Young Americans. That same year he was in the studio again, cutting this session with James Taylor. How sweet it is to be loved by you. Whoa, yeah You were better to me than I was to myself

Alto saxophonist David Sanborn died earlier this month, on May 12th, after being treated for prostate cancer. He was 78. Sanborn kept busy during his career, recording or touring with James Brown, The Rolling Stones, Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Elton John, and others. He was also thought of as one of the major players in the smooth jazz genre, but he didn't love that description. Neither did many of his jazz peers. This is from a 2014 recording with Bobby Hutcherson on Vibes and the late Joey DeFrancesco on organ. Terry Gross interviewed David Sanborn in 1991.

Here's an excerpt of that conversation. Let's talk a little bit about your background. How old were you when you started playing the alto, and what made you choose it? I was 11 years old, and when I was a kid I had polio and when I was got to be about 11 years old the doctors and therapists suggested that I play a wind instrument for therapy and it was right about that time that I was you know starting to kind of really listen to music and know what it, you know, be able to associate a certain sound with a certain musician. And this was in the early days of rock and roll and rhythm and blues music. So the first music I remember hearing was like Little Richard

and Fats Domino. And there was some blues, B.B. King and Albert King, because I grew up in St. Louis, and so a lot of the music was being played on the radio. And I think the music that had the most profound effect on me, and probably what really pushed me in the direction of wanting to be a saxophone player, was the music of Ray Charles. The saxophone players was the music of Ray Charles. The saxophone players were kind of like the instrumental counterpart to what Ray was doing vocally. And I just thought it was such a great sound. You know, it was so hip to me. In 1967, you started playing with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, which I've come to think of as the blues band for the psychedelic era or something.

Yeah, well, it was one of the only blues bands in the psychedelic era, although James Cotton was working at the time. Right. And Michael Bloomfield was working with the Electric Flag. Remember those days for us, what it was like for you then touring with the electric flag. Remember those days for us, what it was like for you then touring with the band. It was a very exciting time. I mean, you know, we were young and foolish.

And, you know, we were traveling on the road, you know, weren't making a lot of money, but we were working, and there was a lot of exchange among musicians, you know, people hanging out. Jimi Hendrix was around. The whole jazz scene kind of went underground. The kind of overwhelming influence of electric guitars kind of eclipsed not only the rhythm and blues music that went before, but also kind of eclipsed the acoustic sound,

which included saxophones, trumpets, and what have you. For example, I was one of the only horn players that was working on the scene at that time. I mean, there weren't a lot of horn players working. After your years with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, you ended up playing, well, touring with, I believe, the Rolling Stones and with David Bowie. Well, I was actually playing with Stevie Wonder in 1971 and 1972, and we were asked to open for the Rolling Stones on the summer of 72 tour.

And so I consequently got to play with them, you know, on that tour. Were there things that you were... Were there things that were really fun about, you know, like a Stevie Wonder Rolling Stones tour and, on the other hand, things that were really alienating about it? Well, it was certainly exciting. You know, I mean, there was a lot of... There was a lot of intense behavior.

I don't know how else to put it. It was pretty... I guess you would say Dionysian. You know? A lot of sexual activity, a lot of drugs, you know, not so much with them, but with the people that were around them, you know, the kind of entourage, the people that, you know, the thing that I always noticed about the Rolling Stones is that they pretty much, you know, in spite of everything, took care of business. And they may have partied heavy, but certainly not as heavy as the people around them,

you know, the hangers-on, the sycophants, you know, all the people that were in the periphery, on the periphery of that. How did you start recording solo albums? Well, after I played with David Bowie, I was working with David Bowie and I was also working with Gil Evans at the same time. Now, that's an interesting juxtaposition. Because Gil Evans was one of the great jazz arrangers. Yes.

And David Bowie, a big rock star. So there's two different... Well, I know that one of the oddest situations I can remember was I played... The last show of Bowie's tour was in Madison Square Garden. And I played the show in Madison Square Garden and left there, got on a plane and flew to Italy.

And the next day I was in Perugia, Italy, playing with Gil Evans. And that was... The juxtaposition of that was very odd. I know you played off and on with Gil Evans for several years. Yes, I did. I saw you once with him at a small club in New York, and this was in the early 80s when your solo albums,

I believe, were selling quite well then. So obviously you weren't sitting in with him for the money. No. Why did you want to keep playing with Gil Evans, even though you were having your own successful solo albums and you'd done quite well playing on rock records? Well, it was such a great experience playing with Gil. I mean, he was, you know, one of the great arrangers of jazz and certainly of this century to me. I mean, I can think of so many great things about Gil's music, you know, and it was like when you were playing in the ensemble, every part was like a melody.

And so you really, you kind of wanted to play and, you felt like the part you were playing was so melodic, yet it fit with everything else that was going on. And I don't think, to my ears, there was never an arranger that had that kind of ear for color and texture and the atmospherics as Gil. You told us earlier that you first started playing the alto as therapy for your polio. Do you have any after effects from the polio now? Well, I don't have total use of my left arm, and I have some problems in my right leg.

How does your left arm interfere with playing? Well, I don't have total flexibility in my left hand, so I have problems with certain technical problems with the instrument. Fingerings? Yeah, certain fingerings, and I have to kind of lean a certain way to play, which is, it's funny because I sometimes I'll see a, I saw a young player who was like kind of imitating me, imitating my sound, and I saw a picture of him and he was standing like me, and with his little finger kind

of thrown up, which is the way I do, but it's not because I want to do that. It's because my little finger just does that. And he kind of stood crooked. And, you know, I wanted to find him and tell him and say, look, you know, if I could stand straight while I played, I would. Right. You know, and I wouldn't throw my little finger up like that if I could do it. So it was just kind of odd that, you know, so I'm imitating my, you know, my compensating characteristics.

Well, I want to thank you a lot for talking with us. Well, thanks for having me. Terry Gross interviewed David Sanborn in 1991. He died on May 12th. He was 78 years old. On Monday's show, we remember Stax Records, the Memphis soul label that produced hits by Otis Redding, Booker T and the MGs, Sam and Dave, Isaac Hayes, and others. It's now the subject of a four-part documentary series on HBO Max.

We'll listen to some of our interviews with musicians behind the music, guitarists Steve Cropper, Booger T, and Isaac Hayes. I hope you can join us. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld, and Al Banks. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.