The long road to ‘Fury Road’
Director and actors tell the true story behind 2015 blockbuster epic
KYLE BUCHANAN
The characters were intriguing, the stunts were exhilarating, and every frame was bursting with incredible, how’d-theydo-that nerve. “Mad Max: Fury Road” set a new high-water mark for action filmmaking when it came out in 2015, and no summer blockbuster since has been able to match its turbocharged ingenuity. (It was nominated for 10 Oscars, including best picture and best director, and won six of them in categories like editing, production design and costume design.)
Even Oscar-winning auteurs have been awed by George Miller’s operatically staged spectacle. “Parasite” director Bong Joon-ho said last year that the movie’s scale brought him to tears, while Steven Soderbergh put it more bluntly: “I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film,” he said in a 2017 interview, “and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.”
So how did Miller and his cast pull it off and survive to tell the tale?
Five years after “Fury Road” was released, I asked key players what making it was like. Though its postapocalyptic plot is deceptively simple — road warrior Max (Tom Hardy) and the fierce driver Furiosa (Charlize Theron) must race across the desert to escape the vengeful Immortan Joe and his fleet of kamikaze War Boys — filming the movie was anything but easy.
“I feel a mixture of extreme joy that we achieved what we did, and I also get a little bit of a hole in my stomach,” Theron said. “There’s a level of ‘the body remembers’ trauma related to the shooting of this film that’s still there for me.”
Here, in the cast and crew’s own words, is the story:
After making three progressively bigger “Mad Max” movies from 1979 to 1985, Miller let the franchise he created lie dormant until 1998.
George Miller (director): For so long, whenever the idea of another “Mad Max” movie came up, I thought there wasn’t much more I could do with it, but I specifically remember the moment that changed. I was crossing the street in Los Angeles and this very simple idea popped in my head: “What if there was a ‘Mad Max’ movie that was one long chase and the MacGuffin was human?”
Doug Mitchell (producer): There were a number of names thrown out for the female lead back when we first started, (like) Uma Thurman.
Miller: I remember we were talking about Charlize even then. Her agent said she wasn’t interested, but I mentioned it to her over a decade later, and she said, “No one ever told me!”
With the series’ star Mel Gibson set once again to play Max, the plan was to shoot “Fury Road” for Twentieth Century Fox. Dozens of expensive vehicles and set pieces were built for a shoot scheduled for March 2003.
Miller: Then 9/11 happened and everything changed. We couldn’t get insured, we couldn’t get our vehicles transported. It just collapsed.
Miller pivoted to directing the animated film “Happy Feet,” and when it became a hit, he was able to persuade Warner Bros. to take on “Fury Road.” Still, his longtime leading man Gibson was now in his 50s and considered a Hollywood pariah. Miller and Mitchell decided to search for a new Max.
Mitchell: Mel is obviously blighted by a number of things that everyone in the world knows about, even though he’s a highly gifted filmmaker and a brilliant actor and a lovely guy behind that demon that sometimes pops out. But he was too old at that point.
Zoë Kravitz (Toast, one of the five “wives” fleeing Immortan Joe): I did a chemistry test with Jeremy Renner reading for Max, because they hadn’t hired Tom yet.
Miller: I had the same feeling about Tom that I had when Mel Gibson first walked into the room: There was a kind of edgy charm, the charisma of animals. You don’t know what’s going on in their inner depths, and yet they’re enormously attractive.
Tom Hardy (Max): I hadn’t done that much action at that time, certainly not with this level of involvement. The nature and sheer scale and volume of action set pieces was unlike anything I had experienced.
Charlize Theron (Furiosa): I grew up on all the “Mad Max” movies — they’re very popular in South Africa. I remember being 12 and my dad letting me watch it with him. So I was like, “Oh yeah, I wanna be in a ‘Mad Max’ movie. Are you kidding me?”
Kravitz: It was one of the strangest scripts I’d ever seen, because it was like a really long comic book.
With his cast in place, Miller set a late-2010 shoot in Broken Hill, Australia, the desert mining town where he had filmed the first two “Mad Max” movies.
Theron: The roughest moment was when we were in Australia, two weeks away from shooting, and they pulled the plug on us.
Mitchell: During pre-production, the weather pattern changed in Australia and it rained and rained in Queensland, the sort of weather that happens once in a century.
Miller: I said, “Let’s wait a year and see if it all dries up.” And when we saw that it wouldn’t, I decided we should to go back to Namibia, where it never rains.
In July 2012, a year and a half after the planned Broken Hill shoot, filming finally commenced on “Fury Road” in the Namibian desert.
Keough: It was the craziest thing you could imagine, and the craziest thing I’ve ever experienced. Everyone in this film was so excited to be their characters that walking around on set was like actually walking around in that world. It was almost like a cosplay thing.
Theron: At first, Furiosa was this very ethereal character, with long hair and some African mud art on her face. It was a different costume designer back then, before Jenny Beavan … I worried about it.
Jenny Beavan (costume designer): She travels long distances, Furiosa needed very practical clothing, and when I met with Charlize, that was one of the things we talked about. That, and what on earth would she do with her hair?
Theron: George was really incredible in just hearing me out. I called him and said, “I don’t know how she’s getting by in the mechanics’ room with all this hair. I think we need to shave my head, and she needs to be a more androgynous, grounded character.” You know, he trusted me so much that it kind of makes me emotional. In that sense, I feel like I let him down.
Tensions could run high on the set, where the principal cast was crammed into one vehicle for most of the blockbuster-length shoot.
Theron: The biggest thing that was driving that entire production was fear. I was incredibly scared, because I’d never done anything like it. I think the hardest thing between me and George is that he had the movie in his head and I was so desperate to understand it.
Margaret Sixel (editor and Miller’s wife): It was very difficult for the actors, because there’s no master shot, no blocked-out scenes. Their performances were made of these tiny little moments.
John Seale (cinematographer): It was tough for them. The crew can be protected by the elements — the cold and wind and sand — but they can’t.
Abbey Lee (the Dag, another “wife”): It looks warm, but we shot it in the winter and it was blisteringly freezing. Us girls weren’t wearing much, and Riley got hypothermia.
Riley Keough (Capable, another one of the Immortan’s escaped “wives”): There were night shoots that were brutal, and there was so much dust that your face would be covered with three inches of sand by the end of the day. We kept it together pretty well, I think, for the first five months.
Kravitz: By the end, we wanted to go home so badly. It had been nine months, and not nine months where you’re in a city and you hang out in your trailer. It was nine months of the environment you’re seeing in the movie, with nothing around. You really do start to lose your mind a little bit.
Miller, who was preoccupied with the dangers of the stunts, says now he “probably should have paid more attention to” the actors.
Kravitz: Tom really had moments of frustration, of anger. Charlize did, too, but I feel like he’s the one who really took it out on George the most and that was a bummer to see. But you know, in some ways, you also can’t blame him, because a lot was being asked of these actors and there were a lot of unanswered questions.
Theron: In a weird way, we were functioning like our characters: Everything was about survival.
Hardy: I would agree. I think in hindsight, I was in over my head in many ways. The pressure on both of us was overwhelming at times. What she needed was a better, perhaps more experienced, partner in me.
Lee: The gruelling nature of the shoot really served it, in my opinion. The characters are supposed to be exhausted, they’re supposed to be searching for strength. I just don’t think that any of the performances would have been the same had it all been greenscreen and we did it in a controlled environment.
As the shoot continued into late 2012, studio head Jeff Robinov prepared to intercede.
Colin Gibson (production designer): There’s a lack of control you have when you’re sitting in Los Angeles and 600 people are wandering the desert with what’s left of your money.
Kravitz: We were behind schedule and we heard the studio was freaking out about how we were over budget.
Miller: Jeff was in a bake-off with Kevin Tsujihara about who was going to head the studio, and he had to assert himself to show his superiors that he was in command and a strong executive.
Mitchell: He said, “The camera will stop on Dec. 8, no matter what you’ve got, and that’s the end of it.” We hadn’t shot any of the scenes in the Citadel yet, where the opening and closing book ends of the film are set, and we had to go into postproduction without them.
Sixel: I was worried about George. You should have seen him by the end of the shoot, he was so thin.
Iota (the Doof Warrior, a War Boy who wields a flame-spewing guitar): I saw him deteriorate over that six months. He looked so shattered by the end.
Mitchell: What happened then is that Jeff lost his job and Kevin Tsujihara was appointed, and he decided later that year, “You know what, let’s do this properly. We need to shoot these scenes at the Citadel.” So we brought back all these vehicles from Namibia, reassembled the team in late 2013, and brought Tom and Charlize to Australia.
In May 2015, “Fury Road” was released to rave reviews, starting with its Cannes Film Festival premiere. At a news conference there, Hardy apologized to Miller for the times he felt frustrated during the shoot: “There is no way George could’ve explained what he could see in the sand when we were out there. I knew he was brilliant, but I didn’t quite know how brilliant.”
Kravitz: As an actor, you make a lot of movies — some of them are good and some of them are bad, and you have to kind of let that go. But with this one, it really felt like we put our actual blood, sweat, tears and time into it, and if it hadn’t been good, I would have been devastated.