EntertainmentMoviesAction Moviesmad max: fury roadAs Furiosa hits cinemas, we reflect on 9 years of Mad Max: Fury RoadWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
EntertainmentMoviesAction Moviesmad max: fury roadAs Furiosa hits cinemas, we reflect on 9 years of Mad Max: Fury RoadWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Warner Bros.)
As breaks in franchises go, 30 years is a pretty lengthy hiatus. The sun last went down on Mad Max three decades ago at the end of 1985’s Beyond Thunderdome. The road back to the big screen has been anything but smooth, which is the least you’d expect from the post-apocalyptic antihero, whose iconic reputation comes pre-loaded with heaps of expectation. Not that he was ever envisaged as the face of a franchise.
SUBSCRIBE TO TOTAL FILM(Image credit: Total Film)This interview was first published Total Film magazine Issue 231, 2015.You can subscribe here to never miss an issue.
SUBSCRIBE TO TOTAL FILM
(Image credit: Total Film)This interview was first published Total Film magazine Issue 231, 2015.You can subscribe here to never miss an issue.
(Image credit: Total Film)
This interview was first published Total Film magazine Issue 231, 2015.You can subscribe here to never miss an issue.
“After I finished the first Mad Max, I never thought I’d make a second. After I finished the second, I never thought I’d make a third,” laughs director George Miller, the driving force behind the series since its inception. “And here I am, doomed to make Mad Max movies…” Cursed might be a more appropriate term here, given Fury Road’s arduous production history. Not that you’d know it to look at the teaser footage unveiled on an unsuspecting audience at Comic-Con in July 2014. Six minutes of breathless vehicular destruction, with armoured buggies streaking across the desert and ghoulishly dressed futuristic tribesfolk thrashing the hell out of their cars and each other. One thing was immediately clear:Mad Max: Fury Roadisn’t going to be quite like anything else on the blockbuster release schedule.
“Tom brings his own unique quality,” asserts Miller. “It’s always the case. We had many James Bonds; we’ve had two Mad Maxes. There are a lot of overlapping similarities in James Bond, but each [actor] brings their own unique quality. That’s exactly the same with Tom versus Mel.”
New Max
(Image credit: Warner Bros.)
“I got to show up 20 minutes before we went on set and I would walk out of my trailer in my wardrobe and roll in the sand, literally just roll,” grins Theron. As for her hair? She’d just have it clipped every three days. According to Miller, the hairdo was her idea. “She called one day and said, ‘I’m thinking of getting a buzz cut.’ The moment she said that, I just thought, ‘brilliant’.” Stripped of her femininity in a future where survival is the sole priority, Furiosa’s another transformational role for Theron (unrecognisable to the tune of an Oscar in Monster). “When survival has to kick in, sex goes out of the window,” says the South African born actress. “I mean, it’s like there’s no conscious thought process of, ‘I guess I’m a woman so I can do this…’ It’s like, ‘No, I gotta fuckin’ survive – that’s it!’ According to Miller, “only time will tell, but I don’t think anyone’s ever seen anything quite like [Furiosa] in cinema before.”
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Nicholas Hoult also underwent quite a transformation to play ‘War Boy’ Nux. “Whenever you have make-up like that, it always makes it easier to act because your appearance changes so everyone’s approach to you changes, so suddenly you feel like a different person, and you look like it, so then it makes it easier to tap into different parts of your personality,” says the 25-year-old Brit, dressed down in grey sweatshirt and blue jeans. He’d spend a full two hours in make-up each day to give him pale, crusty skin and a scarred mouth. He also had his hair shaved to stubble, and used a skipping rope on set to drop weight. Theron, meanwhile, was bulking up to ensure she could cut it in the action environment. “I wanted to look like I had tremendous upper body strength because there was so much physicality in the movie – especially with someone like Tom Hardy. I just hate that idea of scrawny little girls fighting men off and then winning. I looked like a football player in this movie!”
(Image credit: Warner Bros.)
The “essential architecture” was there from the beginning, even if it was inevitably refined as more collaborators came on board. The idea, in Miller’s words, was to make “a continuous action piece”: to tell a story almost entirely visually. “Originally the script was just a comic book,” remembers Hoult. “It was 300 pages with no dialogue, essentially. You would just flip through looking at images of your character and kind of work out what was going on.” The objective was clear: the audience won’t be told a story; they’re going to have to try to cling on to one for dear life. Given the intensity of the Comic-Con footage, the full film could be something of an endurance test. Miller explains that “the aim is to immerse the audience as intensely as possible: they go in one end and come out the other end like a rollercoaster ride, and see what experiences they pick up on the way.” The 3D – which is currently being finely tuned – should add to that.
While summer 2015 is likely to see no shortage of spectacular set-pieces (with Avengers: Age Of Ultron, Jurassic World and Terminator: Genisys duking it out for box-office dominance), Fury Road is promising to be one BIG set-piece. “With a lot of movies, there’s the stunt sequences,” says Miller. “In this movie, every sequence had some element of risk or stunt. Even if it was a dialogue sequence, it was in a fast-travelling vehicle.
Often people were hanging off the vehicle, on top of the vehicle, or underneath the vehicle. That was the thing that basically created the most anxiety in me: how are we going to avoid maiming or killing someone today?”
With such a lean set-up, plot specifics are necessarily sparse, although Miller does share some details. Furiosa frees the so-called ‘Five Wives’ (young, child-bearing women, with Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, and Zoë Kravitz among the quintet) from the custody of the big bad, the Immortan Joe, and goes on the run with them. Max gets caught up reluctantly in their troubles, as does Hoult’s Nux, who’s looking for a glorious death in battle, in the hopes of a sweet afterlife. As one of the Immortan’s best pursuit riders, he’s sent to chase the fugitives down.
Real world
(Image credit: Warner Bros.)
But make no mistake, this won’t be anything like an evening with Madame Butterfly, with Miller’s commitment to immersion and the spirit of the Mad Max movies calling for real stunts, on the biggest imaginable scale. “Mad Max has a raw, elemental quality,” says Miller. “It’s not a fantasy CGI movie. So why CGI a car wreck when you can do it for real?” That meant building, marshalling, and crashing dozens of stunt cars in Namibia. For the cast – who were heavily involved with the stunts – the experience was staggering. Wide-eyed, Hoult recalls the first time he drove out in the big war party. “I was sat in my car, and there were like 50 other cars and bikes and trucks and everything just flying around the desert. And I remember looking around before the take and it did give me chills, actually.”
“I remember thinking, ‘God, people are going to think this is CGI…” sighs Theron. “It was one of those moments where you’re like, ‘We are in a world. WE’RE AT WAR! YES!” Shooting in the often brutal location of Namibia (“We were there for almost eight months,” remembers Theron, “We all went through everything”) added to that tangible quality Miller was after. It just wouldn’t have been a Mad Max movie if it was filmed on a backlot. “It’s not a greenscreen movie shot inside a studio. It’s out there in the real world,” says Miller. “The film looks different – it feels different – than a CG movie. It feels like you’re really there."
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4The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim review – “An uninspired expansion of the most iconic screen take on Tolkien”
4The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim review – “An uninspired expansion of the most iconic screen take on Tolkien”
4
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim review – “An uninspired expansion of the most iconic screen take on Tolkien”
5Nightbitch review: “Amy Adams' disappointing dark comedy is all bark and no bite”
5Nightbitch review: “Amy Adams' disappointing dark comedy is all bark and no bite”
5
Nightbitch review: “Amy Adams' disappointing dark comedy is all bark and no bite”
1Doctor Who 2024 Christmas special review: “Ncuti Gatwa is as magnetic as ever in this delightful festive treat”
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1
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2Secret Level review: “An uneven experience with serious highlights that ultimately make up for the misses”
2Secret Level review: “An uneven experience with serious highlights that ultimately make up for the misses”
2
Secret Level review: “An uneven experience with serious highlights that ultimately make up for the misses”
3Skeleton Crew review: “Perfectly captures the vibes of classic Star Wars with a swashbuckling twist”
3Skeleton Crew review: “Perfectly captures the vibes of classic Star Wars with a swashbuckling twist”
3
Skeleton Crew review: “Perfectly captures the vibes of classic Star Wars with a swashbuckling twist”
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4Creature Commandos review: “James Gunn’s heartwarming, R-rated tale about super-monsters proves that the DCU is in good hands”
4
Creature Commandos review: “James Gunn’s heartwarming, R-rated tale about super-monsters proves that the DCU is in good hands”
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5
Cobra Kai season 6, part 2 review: “Returns to the sort of hard-hitting form that made it such a fan favorite in the first place”