Are we there yet?
Latest Mad Max brings new meaning to bad family road trip
George Miller couldn’t help but smile when told his latest Max Max chase movie seems like a family road trip gone horribly wrong.
“It really is like a bad family holiday,” said the director promoting Mad Max: Fury Road. “There’s Mom and Dad in the front and the children are in the back.”
More seriously, the fourth Mad Max film is an actionpacked pursuit flick showcasing Mad Max (Tom Hardy), who joins up with new road warrior Furiosa (Charlize Theron). They are escaping in an 18-wheel truck with five young breeding brides belonging to warlord Immortal Joe (Hugh KeaysByrne).
The tyrannical gang leader and his horrible henchmen are hot on their trail, which is the cue for smashes, crashes, explosions and lots of close calls for the crew on the run.
Certainly, the new Mad Max flick is reminiscent of the previous Miller movies, but with some 21st-century adjustments.
“I noticed how much film language has evolved, and how we speed-watch movies now,” said the 70-yearold filmmaker, who acknowledged the contemporary pace with more edits. “The Road Warrior (in 1981) has 1,200 cuts and the latest film has 2,700 cuts, and it’s not much longer.”
In another nod to the modern world, Theron’s Furiosa is equal to Hardy’s Mad Max, a key ingredient for Theron.
“I knew George has an innate understanding of what women represent in society, and he wanted that to be reflected in a post-apocalyptic world in the most truthful way possible,” said the Oscar-winning actress.
“And the truth of women is that we are powerful enough, and we don’t need to be put on pedestals.”
Indeed, the essence of Furiosa’s creation arrived with Miller’s early drafts of the narrative.
“It came from the very first version of the movie,” the director said. “First, I thought it should be human cargo, capable of breathing the air for a warlord. The rest followed organically from that, because it couldn’t be (Mad Max) stealing the women. It had to be a female road warrior.”
Special effects are updated, too. Yet the essential bits of a Mad Max pursuit flick are loyally in place.
“I’ve always loved chase movies because they are a pure expression of the syntax,” Miller said. “Once I expanded the parameters of Fury Road’s extended chase sequences, plot things started developing around it.”
It’s fortunate that anything developed around another Mad Max at all.
Miller had resisted the temptation, and many offers, to do another one after completing the third in the series with 1985’s Beyond Thunderdome.
“I never wanted to make another Mad Max because I had already made three, and I felt like that was it,” Miller said.
By the mid-1990s, the writer and director started conjuring up some irresistible Mad Max concepts that he couldn’t shake.
“The idea came to me one day but I kept pushing it aside,” Miller said. “But it kept growing, and I kept getting excited by what it could be, and then it became fully formed and it wouldn’t let go.”
Confident in his vision finally, “I told my colleagues we are going to make another Mad Max movie.” More than a decade later, they did.
A few things got in the way. For instance, Miller was sidetracked by his two animated Happy Feet motion pictures. And freakish wet weather in the Australian Outback delayed the fourth movie when flowers sprouted where the Mad Max wasteland was supposed to be.
In the end, Miller and company moved principal photography to the Kalahari Desert around Namibia, replacing the Outback as the post-apocalyptic backdrop.
The good news is that preview audiences are already wondering if there’s a fifth Mad Max in the works.
“Fury Road had to have a strong eternal logic, so we wrote lots of backstories and notes for the actors,” Miller said.
“Without thinking about it, we’ve written two other stories — one is a script and the other is a novella.”
So fans can expect another Mad Max?
“If this one does well at the box office, and I have an appetite for it, we will go back to the wasteland,” Miller said.