MAD MAX: FURY ROAD
George Miller director
What did it feel like to go back to the world of Mad Max after 30 years?
It was interesting to me, coming back after doing animations, because there’s an intensely strange, masochistic exhilaration to doing live- action movies in a desert where you’re crashing cars every day and risking things that can go horribly wrong unless you’re really, really, really rigorous to pull off the stunts and all the action sequences and keep everyone safe. That happened for us, but it took a lot of work to do that.
Why did you choose Tom Hardy to replace Mel Gibson as Max?
When I first met Mel there was a quality about him: on the one hand you wanted to get to really know him, he’s very loveable; on the other hand, there was an element of danger and unpredictability. There is that quality: that paradoxical thing that gives these actors charisma. It’s always the paradox. The moment I saw Tom and engaged with him, he felt very much like that as an actor. It felt to me like Mel did all those years ago.
How did you conceive Charlize Theron’s character, Furiosa, and how did she help shape the part?
She’s the boss of one of these oil rigs, a big truck. She’s essentially a female road warrior. But unlike Max, she has purpose. Max is running from his past and his better nature, so he wants to be alone. She’s very strong. We wanted someone who’s unmistakably a woman, and she’s a hardcore warrior.
Charlize has the ability and the passion as an actor to go there without fear. I think there’s a character that we haven’t seen before. When you’re casting, you’re sort of looking for someone who breaks up those dimensions of the characters where there’s overlap with the actual person.
RELEASED
15 May
DIRECTOR
George Miller
STARS
Tom Hardy, Nicholas Hoult, Charlize Theron, Zoë Kravitz, Rosie Huntington- Whiteley
THE PITCH
Tom Hardy pulls on Mel Gibson’s leather jacket as creator George Miller “revisits” the Oz-pocalypse for the first time in three decades.