MAD MAX: FURY ROAD
As George Miller’s action masterpiece rides eternal, shiny and chrome, into the top spot, the director shares the secrets of a movie that refuses to run out of gas
George Miller on reinventing the wheel. And the axle.
The Doof Warrior had to go. The word had come from on high. a test screening of George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, the director’s return to the post-apocalyptic wastelands after three decades away, had gone well, save for one element. in a movie that embraced madness from the very first frames, the Doof Warrior — a mask-wearing musician who stood atop a giant stack of speakers on a moving vehicle and played face-melting guitar solos on an axe that doubled as a flame thrower — seemed to be a step too far for the popcornmunching masses, which in turn panicked the suits. “he was just a peripheral character, but a couple of people in the studio said, ‘We’ve got to cut him out,’” recalls Miller. “had i been a more naive filmmaker, i would have thought, ‘Maybe the studio executives are right.’ But i was able to diagnose the problem very quickly.”
it came down, ironically enough, to the temp track that Miller’s sound editors had chosen to accompany the Doof Warrior. “it was the same guitar riff every time you saw him, and it was incredibly repetitive and annoying,” says Miller. “But i knew that by the time we did the music, you’d see a progression in his guitar playing. and when the film was way more mature, the character tested extremely well.”
and so the Doof Warrior not only lived to fight another day, but became an iconic character in his own right. and all because George Miller stuck to his guns. hardly surprising, of course — when it came to Mad Max: Fury Road, Miller had been sticking to his guns for the best part of 20 years.
“if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” feels like it could have been written with Miller and Fury Road in mind. a ‘Mad Maxim’, if you will. it had seemed that 1985’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome had been the final outing for Mel Gibson’s road warrior, Max rockatansky, with both Gibson and Miller heading to hollywood thereafter to carve out their own respective paths. But Mad Max never left Miller’s thoughts for long. inspired by his observations of the way feudal society seemed to be cyclical, he began developing Fury Road, a tale which would see Max come up against immortan Joe, a warlord ensconced in his own citadel, and encounter furiosa, a female road warrior attempting to emancipate the women the immortan has imprisoned as his chattel.
The year 1997 marked Miller’s first attempt to make it. it didn’t come together. he tried again in 2001, before the financial impact of 9/11 put paid to that. once more he tried, in 2003, but this time the iraq War slammed the brakes on. Miller moved on to projects that were the antithesis of Fury Road, such as the ill-fated Justice League movie, and the two Happy Feet films, which didn’t feature any flamethrowing fenders, but did contain CG penguins singing ‘Boogie Wonderland’. But he never gave up hope of travelling down the fury road. “Whenever it fell down, it didn’t stop me thinking about it,” he tells Empire from his sydney office. “You couldn’t kill it with a stick.”
Miller was enchanted by the challenge of reinventing the wheel, cinematically speaking. “My initial interest was very simple,” he admits. “how much story can we tell during a sustained action sequence, if the whole film is essentially a chase? how much can an audience pick up and apprehend along the way?”
eventually, as the noughties became the tens, Miller persuaded the powers-that-be at Warner Bros. to let him embark upon his grand storytelling experiment. Much had changed about Fury Road in the interim — immortan Joe, once envisioned as bald and blue, was now a stocky white guy with an unnatural shock of blond hair, years before Donald Trump was even a gleam in Putin’s eye. and where once the immortan had hoarded potatoes in order to consolidate his power, now he controlled the water supply. “i remember being in india in about 2007, at the Lake Palace, and the lake was completely dry,” recalls Miller. “someone said, ‘oh yes, we’re in the middle of water wars.’ and i thought that was far more appropriate than the idea of potatoes.” also, crucially, Mel Gibson was no longer Max. That honour went to Tom hardy. “When Mel got involved, it was just before 9/11,” says Miller. “and then he started to get into all the chaos that was happening to him [surrounding his private life, DUI arrest and anti-semitic remarks]. That baggage, that’s all people would have talked about. i remember distinctly the first moment Mel walked into the room way back on Mad Max, when he was 21. When Tom walked into the room, it echoed that. That same sort of unpredictable, held-in, volcanic quality was present in both of them.”
Yet the blueprint itself remained broadly the same as it had been in 2007. So off Miller went, into the Namibian desert, with crew and cast including Hardy, Charlize Theron and Nicholas Hoult. They returned, some time later, with a masterpiece. But it wasn’t without its difficulties.
“Mad Max was essentially the first film
I ever made,” says Miller. “I came off that film completely bewildered. I remember talking to Peter weir and I said, ‘I don’t think I’m cut out to do this. Making Mad Max was like walking a really big dog. You wanted to go one way, it dragged you off in another, and you’ve got no control.’” The advice weir then gave Miller has stuck with him ever since: “You’re on patrol with your platoon. and you don’t know where the snipers are, you don’t know where the landmines are. But you’ve got to complete the mission.”
Fury Road was a shoot, and post-production process, riddled with snipers and landmines. Miller’s leads didn’t see eye to eye, at least for a while. “There were issues with Tom and Charlize,” he admits, reluctantly. “They’re not Method actors, but that was real dust, real heat and real wasteland in Namibia. and the movie starts with them trying to kill each other. But you have to find a way to negotiate that. Ultimately it didn’t affect the film at all.”
Virtually every day involved the kind of vehicular mayhem that most movies would be happy to claim for their climax. “The shoot was 120 days, and most days were a big stunt day,” says Miller. “There were things that I didn’t think we could do. Like the guys on the poles. I thought they’d be CGI, that it would be way too risky. But during one of the breaks in production, we worked on it and were able to do it safely.”
There’s a fair amount of CGI in Fury Road
— sequences like the sandstorm could not have been done without computers, while advances in compositing gave Miller leeway to fill the frame with sound and fury, or erase tyre tracks, once tell-tale signs of previous takes. But the director did want to do as much practically as he could. So if you think the bit where Tom Hardy is strapped to the front of a vehicle flying through the desert looks unusually convincing, take a wild guess as to why. “Normally you’d have a stunt double and they would be at risk,” says Miller. “But now you can put the actor there, and he didn’t mind. He did admit, later, that he didn’t like being up the pole because he was afraid of heights.”
The results are, simply, breathtaking. and all stemming from the mind of a director who, then at the tail end of his sixties, should have been making nothing more strenuous than Lorenzo’s Oil 2. Yet Fury Road thrums with the energy and vitality of directors many decades younger. It is visceral, intense, unrelenting. There are moments, particularly towards the end, when it seems that Miller has maxed out on the number of elements it’s possible for a viewer to follow without having an aneurysm. Yet, as polecats bob in and out of frame, and cars criss-cross, and the mayhem escalates, it’s easy to follow, thanks to Miller, DP John Seale and his camera crew, and Miller’s editor, Margaret Sixel, devising a strategy to position the action of each shot in the centre of the frame, so that the eye will never have to strain for information. “It is a film that is on the borderline of overloading an audience,” laughs Miller. and yet, somehow, it never does.
It takes huge risks narratively as well. It’s a Mad Max film in which the title character takes a back seat — sometimes literally — to Charlize Theron’s granite-edged Furiosa. Theron is unforgettable in the role. “Furiosa was a part of it from the very beginning,” explains Miller. “I don’t think you set out in any story to say, ‘This is a feminist tract.’ That was very much driven by the character. It was a chase across the wasteland, and what’s at stake are humans, the five wives. So there had to be a female road warrior initiating that. If it was a male road warrior stealing a warlord’s wives, that’s a completely different story.” Naturally, Furiosa pissed off, and continues to piss off, incels — “but that seemed to be a virtue,” laughs Miller. as effective as Hardy is as Max in the movie, it’s Furiosa’s movie. “There were times when I remember sitting at the back of The war Rig, and Charlize would be driving back to set and I’d think, ‘wow, if this was the apocalypse, I’m glad she’s driving The war Rig.’ She was Furiosa.”
AND Now Fury Road is your film of the 21st century. Miller, a true film scholar, is delighted by this news (“It’s a lovely pat on the back”), but is also all too aware that it’s early days yet. Twenty years down, 80 to go. He knows how fickle fate can be, and that Fury Road could be swallowed by the sands of time. well, if the next eight decades bring films that are more vital and groundbreaking than Fury Road, we’ll be doing well. Perhaps one of them will be the sequel to Fury Road, which Miller says will happen after he makes Three Thousand years Of Longing,
a drama with Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton. Miller won’t be drawn on details, but he does say that the next Mad Max screenplay is written and the storyboarding process is underway, although it won’t be as involved as that of Fury Road,
which indicates a slightly different approach. “That had to be told as a silent movie,” he says. Don’t expect another chase movie, in other words. “You can’t just remake the same film. It’s got to be its own thing as well.”
when it opened in 2015, nearly 18 years after his first attempt to make it, Fury Road
grossed close to $400 million worldwide, and picked up six oscars and a much-deserved Best Director nomination for Miller. Yet its endurance is the element that most pleases the director. “How do you measure the worth of a film?” he asks. “The best I can come up with is to ask, ‘How long does it follow you out of the cinema?’ Some films you’ve forgotten by the time you get to the car park. others seem to follow you around for the rest of your life.”
In Mad Max: Fury Road, Miller has made a movie that not only follows you to the car park, but insists on climbing onto the bonnet of your car and thrashing out a guitar solo as you hurtle down the road at 90 miles an hour. Maybe it’ll even throw in a couple of bursts of flame for good measure.