Dedication

To my parents, Kirk and Linda

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Author’s Note

Cast of Characters

Part I: Building a World Gone Mad

Introduction

Chapter 1: Eyewitness Accounts of Those Who Survived

Chapter 2: The Mad Mastermind

Chapter 3: Everyone in the Old World Had a Show

Chapter 4: The History Men

Chapter 5: Who Killed the World?

Chapter 6: I Live, I Die, I Live Again

Chapter 7: Where Are You, Max?

Chapter 8: Pick Up What You Can and Run

Chapter 9: Witness Me

Chapter 10: “We Were Basically Defeated”

Part II: Shoot to Thrill

Chapter 11: Preparing for War

Chapter 12: Oh, What a Lovely Day

Chapter 13: My Name Is Max

Chapter 14: “It Was All in George’s Head”

Chapter 15: Figuring Out Furiosa

Chapter 16: Out Here, Everything Hurts

Chapter 17: All Hail the Immortan

Chapter 18: “The Last Great Action Film”

Chapter 19: The War Party

Chapter 20: Shiny and Chrome

Chapter 21: We Are Not Things

Chapter 22: The Many Mothers

Chapter 23: “Dudes Were Coming in Through the Roof”

Chapter 24: Fire and Blood

Chapter 25: Some Furious Vexation

Chapter 26: “Spent and Enriched”

Part III: End of the Road

Chapter 27: If You Can’t Fix What’s Broken

Chapter 28: “That’s Not a Mad Max Ending”

Chapter 29: The Final Battle

Chapter 30: What Was Lost

Chapter 31: Some Kind of Redemption

Chapter 32: Awaited in Valhalla

Chapter 33: “Nothing Good Comes Easy”

Acknowledgments

Sources

Index

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Author’s Note

In the world of Mad Max, a memory can become a legend based simply on who’s doing the telling. Stories from the past are passed down from History Men to their eager listeners, and as these tales are told and retold, the truth of what really happened is left up to the audience to piece together.

This oral history about the two-decade making of Mad Max: Fury Road is primarily comprised of over 130 new interviews I conducted with members of the cast and crew, as well as a number of the film’s notable admirers. Most of these conversations took place in 2020 and 2021, though a handful of the interviews occurred around the time of the film’s release in 2015.

Whenever people were unavailable to speak, I pulled from other published interviews, audio recordings, and video footage to provide additional perspectives. Many of the interviews have been condensed and edited for style and clarity, and a full list of sources is at the end of the book.

Cast of Characters

The Visionary

George Miller, director, co-writer, and producer of Mad Max: Fury Road

The Cast

Courtney Eaton, “Cheedo the Fragile”

Megan Gale, “The Valkyrie”

Coco Jack Gillies, “Glory the Child”

Jennifer Hagan, “Miss Giddy”

Tom Hardy, “Max”

Josh Helman, “Slit”

Nicholas Hoult, “Nux”

John Howard, “The People Eater”

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, “Splendid Angharad”

Jon Iles, “Ace”

iOTA, “Coma, the Doof Warrior”

Melissa Jaffer, “Keeper of the Seeds”

Melita Jurisic, “Vuvalini”

Hugh Keays-Byrne, “Immortan Joe”

Antoinette Kellerman, “Vuvalini”

Riley Keough, “Capable”

Zoë Kravitz, “Toast the Knowing”

Abbey Lee, “The Dag”

Richard Norton, “The Prime Imperator”

Chris Patton, “Morsov”

Joy Smithers, “Vuvalini”

Charlize Theron, “Furiosa”

The Crew

Eugene Arendsen, stunt driver

Jenny Beavan, costume designer

Eric Blakeney, writer

Steve Bland, adviser

Jasin Boland, still photographer

Matt Boug, bike cosmetics and salvage artist

David Burr, director of photography, second unit

Tom Clapham, production runner

Chris deFaria, executive producer

James Doherty, unit assistant

Henry Dray, transport manager

Eve Ensler, consultant

Eugene Fillios, trailer editor

Mark Gatt, steelworker

Sean Genders, senior prosthetic artist

Colin Gibson, production designer

Robyn Glaser, second assistant director, action unit

Mark Goellnicht, camera operator

Dayna Grant, stunt performer

Scotty Gregory, stunt driver

Todd Matthew Grossman, audition camera

Dane Hallett, key prop maker

Richard Hobbs, art director

Shira Hockman, art director

Tom Holkenborg, score

Dean Hood, unit production manager

Natascha Hopkins, stunt performer

Petrina Hull, production and development executive

Alison Ingram, visual effects coordinator

Andrew Jackson, visual effects supervisor

Chris Jenkins, rerecording mixer

Belinda Johns, assistant to George Miller

Andrew AJ Johnson, camera operator

Shane Kavanagh, extra

Lora Kennedy, casting

Ronna Kress, casting

Adam Kuiper, key grip

Nico Lathouris, writer

Jacinta Leong, art director

Mark Mangini, sound editor

Kelly Marcel, writer

Brendan McCarthy, writer

Samantha McGrady, key second assistant director

Michael Mekash, makeup

Victoria Mielewska, dialect coach

Doug Mitchell, producer

Anthony Natoli, engineer

Mark Natoli, panel beater

James Nicholas, assistant

Guy Norris, second unit director/stunts

Harlan Norris, stunt performer

Harrison Norris, stunt performer

Chris O’Hara, on-set second assistant director

Ryan Osmond, additional assistant director, production assistant

Peter Pound, principal vehicle designer and storyboard artist

Massey Rafani, marketing

Tim Ridge, EPK, director (The Madness of Max)

Michele Robertson, awards publicist

Mick Roughan, stunt rigger

Ricky Schamburg, first assistant camera

John Seale, director of photography

Georgina Selby, script supervisor, action unit

Mark Sexton, lead storyboard artist

Zeb Simpson, video assist operator

Margaret Sixel, editor

Iain Smith, producer

Brendan Smithers, construction manager

Ben Smith-Petersen, stunt performer

Matt Taylor, stunt driver

Lisa Thompson, set decorator

Matt Town, postproduction supervisor

Nadia Townsend, assistant dramaturg

Michael Ulman, salvage artist

Tate Van Oudtshoorn, set dresser

Courtenay Valenti, executive producer

Lesley Vanderwalt, hair and makeup designer

P. J. Voeten, producer, first assistant director

Michael Wannenmacher, production assistant

Kento Watanabe, visual effects editor

Cory Watson, director (Going Mad: The Battle of Fury Road)

David White, sound designer

Andy Williams, special effects supervisor

Stuart Williamson, stunt performer

Shyam “Toast” Yadav, VFX data wrangler

J. Houston Yang, marketing

The Rest

James Cameron, director (Aliens)

Scott Carlin, former EVP at Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution

Justin Chang, film critic at the Los Angeles Times

Nia DaCosta, director (Candyman)

Manohla Dargis, film critic at the New York Times

Gregory Ellwood, journalist at The Playlist

Scott Feinberg, awards columnist at The Hollywood Reporter

Gal Gadot, actress

Pete Hammond, awards columnist at Deadline

Karen Han, journalist at Slate

Ron Hayes, former senior vice president of Warner Bros. toy division

John Horn, journalist

Joshua Horowitz, journalist at MTV News

Patty Jenkins, director (Wonder Woman)

Dave Karger, TCM host and Oscar pundit for Today

Richard Lawson, film critic at Vanity Fair

Gregg Maday, former senior vice president at Warner Bros. Television

Drew McWeeny, writer at Formerly Dangerous

Amy Nicholson, host, The Canon

Patton Oswalt, actor

Hutch Parker, former president of production at 20th Century Fox

Gina Prince-Bythewood, director (The Old Guard)

Peter Ramsey, director (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse)

Dan Romanelli, former chairman of Warner Consumer Products

David Sims, journalist at The Atlantic

Kris Tapley, former awards editor at Variety

Anya Taylor-Joy, actress

Anne Thompson, editor-at-large at Indiewire

Alison Willmore, film critic at New York magazine

Edgar Wright, director (Last Night in Soho)

Jen Yamato, journalist at the Los Angeles Times

Ziwe, comedian

Part I

Building a World Gone Mad

Introduction

For 55 million years, the Namib Desert has been where things go to die. Thought to be the oldest desert on the planet, it’s a barren wasteland almost completely devoid of human life, a place where the coastline is still studded with the remains of a thousand shipwrecks.

And in September 2012, it was where Mad Max: Fury Road would crash and burn.

Nearly ten thousand miles separate that south African desert from Los Angeles, but midway through Fury Road’s very long 2012 shoot, plenty of stories about the troubled production had already made their way back to the Hollywood rumor mill. Was it true that the film was wildly behind schedule and over budget because its mercurial lead, Tom Hardy, often failed to show up to set? Had a massive blowup between Hardy and his costar, Charlize Theron, required an outside intervention just so the film wouldn’t collapse?

And what the hell was George Miller making, anyway? Though the director had spent months filming Fury Road in Namibia, the footage he’d sent back to Warner Bros. left many executives freaked out. The dialogue sounded incomprehensible, the action scenes appeared astonishingly dangerous, and since Miller wasn’t working from a traditional screenplay—instead, in an unprecedented move, he had plotted the film out solely through storyboards—studio executives worried that Fury Road would make no sense once it was cut together. If this expensive boondoggle turned out to be a box-office bomb, forget just losing their jobs: They might never work in Hollywood again.

Jeff Robinov, the bald and beleaguered head of Warner Bros. Pictures, had been sending underlings to the desert to check on Fury Road ever since the movie’s June start. But during the last week of September, Robinov himself flew over to Namibia to take control.

The production was based in a massive tent city in the middle of the desert, a troubled oasis where several hundred crew members now waited to learn their film’s fate. The first person Robinov encountered there in the sands was P. J. Voeten, Fury Road’s loyal producer and first assistant director. “We’re going to finish this film with or without George,” Robinov told him.

Under his breath, Voeten muttered, “Good luck with that.”

Eventually, Robinov made his way to Miller, who cuts a deceptively mild figure: At five foot seven, with wavy white hair, twinkly eyes, and a pair of amber-colored teashade glasses, he has the pleasant Australian lilt and chatty disposition of a favorite grandfather. Perhaps because of that, Miller has been underestimated his whole career, with rogue crew members and studio executives frequently trying to seize control from a man who simply will not budge.

Robinov was hardly the first money man to clash with Miller, but on that day in the desert, he threatened to be the very last. Though there were still three months of shooting left on Fury Road and many crucial scenes still to come, Robinov told Miller he would shut the film down early and then laid down an impossible ultimatum: With such limited time left, Miller could either shoot Fury Road’s third-act chase or sacrifice it to film the still-unshot beginning and ending of the movie.

No matter what decision Miller made, the outcome would be disastrous. The director had been imagining his dream project for over a decade and a half, and the head of the studio was about to blow a massive hole through it.

But this was just another catastrophe on a project that was beset with them. Fury Road was one of the most elaborate and difficult shoots in Hollywood history, and the making of the movie stretched over two decades and three studios. Still, over years of countless obstacles that would have prompted almost any other artist to give up, Miller persevered. He could not quit until he had told this story, and what he fought for is now considered by many to be a masterpiece and the finest action movie ever made.

Over several interviews with Miller, I had to ask: How did he keep the faith for so many years when everything was stacked against the making of this film?

“The real answer is you have no choice,” he said bluntly. “I just had to keep going.” Then, as if he were a character from his own movie, Miller added, “You can’t surrender.”

Though the scope of Fury Road is massive, the film’s postapocalyptic plot is boiled down to its barest essence: Nearly the entire movie is told on the run as drifter Max Rockatansky (Hardy) joins forces with the determined driver Furiosa (Theron) to spirit five young sex slaves to safety. Along the way, they are aided by the zealous turncoat Nux (Nicholas Hoult) and pursued across the desert by a staggering armada of vehicles commanded by the warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), who wants to reclaim his harem of “Wives” and murder his rogue lieutenant Furiosa for freeing the young women in the first place.

But while Fury Road initially appears to be a simple car chase stretched to feature length, there is plenty going on underneath the hood, and the subjects that Miller smuggled into all that spectacle were subversive and unexpectedly powerful: How often do you see an action movie that tackles up-to-the-minute issues like environmental collapse, female empowerment, and resource hoarding by the rich? The world here is so detailed and incredibly realized that it resonates well beyond the borders of the frame. A film like Fury Road isn’t just one of a kind—in this era of increasingly bland superhero movies, it’s the sort of film that could probably never be made again.

Many thought Miller couldn’t pull it off, and some of those doubters were even working on the movie. To be fair, by the time Fury Road hit theaters in 2015, Miller was seventy years old and had not directed a live-action film in seventeen years. It had been even longer—three tumultuous decades—since the world had seen a new Mad Max movie, and original series star Mel Gibson became professionally toxic in the interim, requiring a thorough rethink of what Miller had in mind.

And what exactly Miller had in that prodigious mind remained the point of some contention. The confusingly piecemeal way he filmed Fury Road could frustrate his actors, who felt adrift and often clashed with Miller and each other. During the better part of a year spent in the vast, remote desert of Namibia—surrounded by sandstorms, shrieking stuntmen, and insane vehicular mayhem—there was such an emphasis on making this fantasy world feel real that the conflict of the characters even seeped into the actual lives of the cast and crew. You either had faith in Miller’s mad vision or you struggled.

Almost every movie is hard to make, but few movies have a making-of story as wild, long, or difficult as Fury Road, and absolutely none of them turned out as influential and awe-inspiring. There’s no doubt now that the movie is an all-time classic, but an important question still remains: Did Fury Road become great despite being forged in fire, or because of it?

Chapter 1

Eyewitness Accounts of Those Who Survived

In almost every possible way, Mad Max: Fury Road is a movie that should not exist.

It’s the fourth film in a long-running franchise . . . yet it was hailed by critics as one of the most original movies ever made. It’s a big-studio action movie . . . yet it was nominated for Best Picture and won several Oscars.

And while it was a major hit when it was released in 2015, earning $375 million worldwide, Fury Road has only become bigger in the years since: At the end of the 2010s, nearly every major publication—including the New York Times, USA Today, Rolling Stone, and the Los Angeles Times—named it one of the best films of the decade.

With its iconic characters, exhilarating stunt sequences, and incredible ingenuity, it’s only natural to wonder how this modern classic was made. Even A-list auteurs can’t figure Fury Road out: Parasite director Bong Joon Ho has said that the sheer scale of the movie brings him to tears, while Steven Soderbergh put it more bluntly. “I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film,” Soderbergh once said, “and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.”

* * *

Gina Prince-Bythewood (director, The Old Guard) You watch Fury Road, and you’re really pushed back in your seat. Even knowing all the tricks that directors use, you still can’t figure out how he did it.

Tom Hardy (“Max”) It’s Technicolor, surreal, and over-the-top with all these car crashes that are actually happening. It’s magic. I haven’t ever seen anything like it.

Edgar Wright (director, Last Night in Soho) It’s an engine of pure cinema.

Patty Jenkins (director, Wonder Woman) How often do you see something so mind-blowing? First of all, George’s taste is unparalleled—he’s got the edgiest, most unbelievable eye. And this visceral, gripping vitality that comes out of the action is stunning.

Jen Yamato (journalist, Los Angeles Times) It makes me feel more alive just watching it, and that feeling has never gone away as I’ve watched it over and over and over again.

Patton Oswalt (actor) I don’t have words for it—it should just be “holy fucking shit.”

Nia DaCosta (director, Candyman) The audacity of it all! That’s the sort of thing that initially got me into directing—the fact that you could literally do anything—and what George did is to say, “Yes, I’m going to go to the desert in Namibia to make this completely tonally wackadoo movie.” And somehow it fucking works. I never would have been able to pull this movie off. It sounds like hell!

George Miller (director) Every day was physically demanding. There were no soft days. It was very noisy, very dusty, and very arduous.

Robyn Glaser (second assistant director, action unit) No one can say they’ve worked on a movie like Mad Max.

Charlize Theron (“Furiosa”) Hands down, this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

Jasin Boland (still photographer) I think it was our Apocalypse Now, I really do.

Dane Hallett (key prop maker) You’re not really allowed to make those movies anymore. You’re not allowed to commit to this fucking insanity and get away with it. The studios are too scared.

Sean Genders (senior prosthetic artist) We call it the most expensive independent film ever made.

Doug Mitchell (producer) It was destined, one day, to be what it is today. It’s now in the library of films, but there were umpteen times where it was irrelevant: “Nah, that’s never going to happen.”

Tom Hardy Looking back now, it’s impossible to put into words what being a part of it meant to me. It left me irrevocably changed.

Riley Keough (“Capable”) It was one of the wildest, most intense experiences of my life—to this day. Every moment is so emotional to me.

Abbey Lee (“The Dag”) It was like being in a very tumultuous relationship with the love of your life.

Charlize Theron Like anything that matters in your life or has some worth to it, it comes with complicated feelings. 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. There’s a level of “the body remembers” trauma related to the experience of shooting this film that’s still there for me.

Nicholas Hoult (“Nux”) It was chaos out there, to be honest.

Kelly Marcel (writer) Sometimes I think, Was it made to be that way? Was it made to be really, really, really hard? George is not a person that wants to see one suffer. He really is the sweetest, kindest, gentlest man. But it’s just like . . . is he an evil genius?

Josh Helman (“Slit”) If you ever sat me down and showed me Fury Road, knowing nothing, and told me to draw the director, it certainly wouldn’t be a gray-haired man who’s incredibly soft-spoken and kind. It’s something special that these two things exist so indelibly in him at the same time.

Edgar Wright You have to kind of wonder when you meet the man, Where does it come from? Then he’ll tell you.

Chapter 2

The Mad Mastermind

Even some of George Miller’s closest collaborators still regard him as a bit of an enigma. “George is a master and it’s all inside his head,” says Charlize Theron. “Sometimes I want to climb in and spend time in there to understand it better.”

From a young age, Miller dreamed bigger than seemed possible. Hollywood could hardly have been farther away from Chinchilla, the rural town in the Australian outback where Miller grew up, but the young boy was mad about the movies anyway. Born March 3, 1945, to Greek immigrants Jim and Angela Miller, George and his three brothers lived for Saturday matinees at the nearby Star Theatre. Even when the films that played there were deemed too violent for children, Miller would sneak into a crawl space beneath the theater and listen for the sounds of gunshots, fistfights, and squealing cars as they filtered down through the floorboards. The movie being watched up above could only be surpassed by what he was assembling in his own imagination.

There was no such thing as a local film industry while Miller was coming of age, so the creative young man initially pursued work as a doctor, attending medical school at the University of New South Wales alongside his twin brother, John. But a sudden opportunity to swerve toward moviemaking presaged a career full of left turns: As a director, Miller would go on to make family films, wild action spectaculars, and fact-based dramas.

It’s an unconventional résumé, to be sure, but Miller is an unconventional figure. How could a man so mild-mannered create such eccentric visions, and what gives him the determination to see them through whenever Hollywood tries to tame his sensibilities? Blessed with a doctor’s intellectual rigor and a self-taught auteur’s willingness to break the rules, Miller has become one of Hollywood’s most idiosyncratic filmmakers. But that career did not come without conflict.

* * *

Drew McWeeny (writer, Formerly Dangerous) He has always been fascinating because of his range. The fact that the man who made The Road Warrior also made Lorenzo’s Oil and The Witches of Eastwick and then could make Babe: Pig in the City and Happy Feet is a mystery to some degree. I mean, when you look at The Road Warrior and Mad Max, those movies feel like they were made by these lunatics on another planet and then beamed to us.

Courtney Eaton (“Cheedo the Fragile”) George is the sweetest man on this planet and it’s crazy that he has these things that come out of his mind.

Edgar Wright George is essentially haunted by these images of the tragic deaths of people he knew and complete strangers growing up in an Australian car culture.

George Miller There’s no question that Mad Max was influenced by my childhood in rural Queensland. By the time we were out of our teens, several of our peers had already been killed or badly injured in car accidents, and there were those long flat roads where there was no speed limit and people would just go. It wasn’t until I ended up being a doctor in emergency and seeing carnage as a result of car accidents that it kind of got into me.

Cory Watson (director, Going Mad: The Battle of Fury Road) He trained to be a doctor, all the while nurturing this nascent interest in filmmaking.

George Miller I really did like studying medicine, but I started to see myself in flux.

* * *

After graduating from medical school at the University of New South Wales, Miller became a resident at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney. But even as he committed himself to a demanding career, another path began to beckon: A short film Miller made with his brother Chris gained them entry into a directors’ workshop at the University of Melbourne, where Miller met his future producing partner, a cinema-savvy gearhead named Byron Kennedy.

Miller and Kennedy soon collaborated on their own short, the black comedy Violence in the Cinema, Part 1. Made for only fifteen hundred dollars, the award-winning short vaulted Miller into a budding Australian New Wave of filmmakers that included Peter Weir (Dead Poets Society), Gillian Armstrong (Little Women), and Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy). Besotted with the creative possibilities of cinema, Miller decided to forgo his original career plan for a calling that was much less certain.

* * *

Tim Ridge (director, The Madness of Max) A film crew member from the original Mad Max said, “As a doctor, George Miller made a very good director.”

George Miller A filmmaker has an obligation to look at the world from many points of view, and that’s exactly what a doctor of any worth does. You’re looking at those individuals during surgery, or even postmortem. You’re looking inside of them; you’re looking at them as a full human being.

Amy Nicholson (host, The Canon) There’s this moral code at the center of a George Miller film where nobody’s life is cheap, whether you’re a pig or a penguin or one of the last human beings on this planet.

Guy Norris (second unit director, stunts) Those early images from being a doctor stuck with him and shaped a lot of what he made later.

George Miller I wouldn’t be the filmmaker I am if I hadn’t had that life experience. It resonated with me, the feeling of working in casualty at St. Vincent’s Hospital and being quite disturbed by the violence and road carnage and the way we processed it. We accepted it.

Tim Ridge George had this blue Bongo van, and him and Byron used to drive around Victoria on weekends. They’d go to any sort of medical emergency and patch people up.

Edgar Wright They were raising money for the first Mad Max by doing double shifts as EMTs and essentially performing roadside surgery on the victims of horrific car crashes.

* * *

At age thirty-one, having collected $350,000 from family, friends, and private investors, Miller prepared to make his debut feature, Mad Max. In this down-and-dirty thriller, Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson, plucked straight out of drama school) is a young highway patrolman tasked with chasing down a gang of depraved bikers led by the maniacal Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne). For a film that would launch a franchise, Mad Max ends on a surprisingly bleak note, as Max’s wife and child are killed by the biker gang, and he becomes consumed with revenge.

Filmed in a hurry at the end of 1977, the production was nothing short of a guerrilla-filmmaking experience, as Miller and Kennedy shot on locations they hadn’t secured permits for and learned as they went. But the film’s rawness was an asset whenever Miller staged an action sequence: These car chases felt far more visceral than anything a more polished production would dare to attempt.

* * *

Jen Yamato It’s interesting to watch Fury Road and the first Mad Max in proximity to each other. He had a fraction of the resources to make that, but the themes that were urgent to him at the time are still as important by the time you get to Fury Road. And there’s an economy to it. You hear him talk about it and he says, “I didn’t know what I was doing,” but he took a lot from silent filmmaking that really works.

George Miller When I started making the first Mad Max, I didn’t have very much experience and I found the process absolutely bewildering. I thought if I prepared properly, it was a matter of execution. What I didn’t know was that things could go wrong, and they do, every day.

* * *

Only four hectic days into shooting Mad Max, Miller’s stunt coordinator Grant Page and leading lady Rosie Bailey were involved in a motorcycle accident as he sped her to set: Cut off by a sixteen-wheeler, Page crashed his bike and both he and Bailey were left with broken legs. The movie shut down for two weeks to replace Bailey, allow Page to recover, and reassess a chaotic production where much of the crew was already skeptical of Miller’s vision.

Overwhelmed by all the turmoil on his feature-film debut, Miller considered asking a more experienced director to take over.

* * *

George Miller My nerves were shot. I said, “I’ll step down as a director and I’ll help produce the movie and get it made, and that way, we’ll get through it.” Effectively, I was fired as the director of the movie because I really kind of thought, We haven’t even started, and people are gonna die.

* * *

But Miller found himself unable to shake the vision he’d created in his head. Hours after telling Byron Kennedy that he planned to abdicate the director’s chair, Miller changed his mind: He had to make the movie his way, or else it just wouldn’t be Mad Max.

* * *

George Miller I said, “Look, I’m not an arrogant man, but one arrogance I do have is that I can make movies.” And I knew deep down how to make the movie, even though all these things were going wrong.

Tim Ridge So many crew members thought he didn’t know what he was doing. They were worried that all this effort might’ve been in vain, that what they were making wasn’t going to cut together into something successful.

George Miller I spent a year cutting the film by myself, and every day, I woke up having to confront all the mistakes I made and somehow salvage them. That’s the worst thing, when you’re saying to yourself, Why didn’t I solve that problem better? Why did I give up on that day and not push harder? Those endless recriminations basically fueled me for all those things that were to come.

Tim Ridge There was such a long postproduction period that a lot of the crew went, “God, that film is probably never going to come out. We finished filming it in ’78, and here we are well into ’79, and it’s still not out. What the hell’s going on?”

George Miller Byron had more confidence in the movie than I did. By then I thought, I don’t think this film is going to find an audience anywhere.

* * *

Mad Max finally debuted in Australian cinemas on April 12, 1979. Film critics who were shocked by its visceral violence called the film “a nasty piece of work,” “blatantly exploitative,” and “morally queasy.”

With audiences, it was an immediate sensation.

* * *

Hugh Keays-Byrne (“Immortan Joe”) When you sat down and watched Mad Max 1 for the first time, everybody in the cinema went, “Oh fuck, what’s this?”

Sean Genders I remember being a thirteen-year-old boy, seeing the ad on TV, and my father saying, “Who’d want to see that rubbish?” And me going, “I do.” I saw it in cinemas, and it had a profound effect on what I like about film.

Edgar Wright There are bits in that movie that you’ll never really forget. The final shot of Mel Gibson driving off with an explosion behind him and not even flinching, it’s something that was burned into my head.

Tim Ridge The budget was $350,000 and within the first few years, it returned over $100 million—it was in The Guinness Book of Records for cost-to-profit ratio. There seemed to be so many things going against it, so for it to turn around and become what it’s become . . .

George Miller It was a very valuable experience to have something that felt like a failure. The irony, of course, is that the film was a great success, but had I not been confronted with all my mistakes, that success would have really been pretty damaging, in the sense that it would have made me artistically hubristic, which I subsequently recognized in a lot of directors and artists I know.

Because I went through that year of recrimination, I started a much deeper inquiry about how the first Mad Max had somehow tapped into a universal archetype, and that led to reading Joseph Campbell and everything that follows. I can promise you, that would not have happened had I thought, Gee, I’m really cut out to make films. What’s next? I’ll just do what I did last time.

* * *

In a bid to redeem the miserable experience he had making the first movie, Miller poured everything he’d learned from it into a sequel, the bigger and bolder Mad Max 2. While the first, stripped-down Mad Max film was like a car-chase version of Death Wish, the second left its revenge-thriller origins behind and fully embraced postapocalyptic spectacle. And Miller, inspired by Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, began to recontextualize Max as a near-mythological figure.

This time around, civilization was nowhere to be found: As Max roams a blasted desert wasteland at the end of the world (the movie was filmed in Broken Hill, Australia) he helps a community of refugees defend themselves from vicious marauders trying to steal their fuel supply. With its outrageous outfits, dystopian setting, and spare dialogue—Gibson has only fourteen lines—Mad Max 2 feels the most like Fury Road of any of the original movies, and its car chases are still among the most propulsive ever filmed.

* * *

George Miller Mad Max 2 was different. The budget wasn’t the issue. The biggest shift in Mad Max 2 was my head. I felt utterly defeated by the first Mad Max. I felt that the film was unreleasable. What I didn’t realize is that filmmaking is tough, and it wasn’t until I spoke to Phil Noyce and Peter Weir, and they said, “Oh, it’s always tough,” that, as simple as that sounds, it really changed my attitude. We ended up having a very good experience on that film. I felt as though I was able to achieve something much closer to the film in my head than I did with Mad Max. I think every film that you do is a kind of rehearsal for the next one.

* * *

The second Mad Max was retitled The Road Warrior when Warner Bros. released it in the United States on May 21, 1982, and this time around, critics had caught up with Miller’s vision: Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times that The Road Warrior was “one of the most imaginative Australian films yet released in this country,” while Roger Ebert called it “exhilarating” and “a movie like no other.”

* * *

Amy Nicholson The second film on a franchise is often the best one, or often captures the franchise as we think of it: You see that in Terminator 2 or in Aliens, and you absolutely see that here. The Road Warrior is where George Miller takes a good idea and blows it up into a mythology, into a worldview. It’s this moment where Max goes from a B-movie hero to something larger-than-life.

Edgar Wright And because George Miller is operating outside Hollywood, it makes it even more impressive that he’s able to do it on his own terms and match films with ten times the budget. It’s an astonishing movie.

Peter Pound (storyboard artist, principal vehicle designer) It blew my brains out completely. I was twenty-one years old, in art school, and I could not believe what I was seeing.

Drew McWeeny It got to America a year late, in the summer of ’82, and by that point, it already had a reputation. In the middle of a summer marked by some of the biggest hits by some of the biggest names in Hollywood, The Road Warrior still managed to cut through: It was still a film that didn’t look and feel like anything else. It was immediately iconic, and it made Mel Gibson a star.

Patton Oswalt It felt like everything was going to be different after this, that every other filmmaker would be taking notes. It was so popular that they rereleased the first Mad Max. I remember an ad that said, “Find out what made Max so mad!”

* * *

Hollywood took avid notice of Miller, who was invited to contribute a segment to 1983’s Twilight Zone: The Movie alongside directors like Steven Spielberg and Joe Dante. His entry, a thrilling remake of the classic episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” even outshone his famous collaborators.

* * *

George Miller That was at Amblin with Steven Spielberg and Frank Marshall, and I recognized a very similar thing we had at Kennedy Miller: It was basically a bunch of filmmakers making films together with very little interference from the studio. It was illusory at the time because I didn’t realize Steven Spielberg had a very rarefied circumstance there and he was very protected.

Drew McWeeny They recognized that he was the same kind of hyperkinetic storyteller, the guy that understood the tools of film innately and realized that you could push things further, you could do things harder, and you could be a little crazier. What made George Miller stand out is because they did it in Australia, there was a sense that there were no rules.

* * *

But Hollywood had its own rules, and it was determined to make Miller bend to them. His 1985 sequel, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, was made with a milder PG-13 rating in mind and earned mixed reviews. Co-directed by George Ogilvie, it plays like two separate films stapled together: For the first half, Max tangles with Aunty Entity (Tina Turner), the fierce ruler of a stratified survivor community, while in the much lighter second half, Max becomes the savior of a band of children living in a far-off desert oasis.

* * *

Manohla Dargis (film critic, New York Times) By the third one, George Miller is letting it all hang out. There’s a sense of play: “I’m going to bring in Tina Turner and put her in chain-mail stockings.”

Patton Oswalt But now he’s working for a studio, and he can’t be as nihilistic as the first two. So suddenly, there’s kids and animals.

Edgar Wright That was sort of a troubled production for George.

Drew McWeeny Part of that is the heartbreak of losing Byron Kennedy, his producing partner, and suddenly not having that other half of who you are creatively.

* * *

With the profits he had made from producing the first Mad Max, Kennedy had bought his own Bell Jet Ranger helicopter. During a July 1983 flight outside Sydney, he crashed in Lake Burragorang and died later that day, only thirty-three years old. Without his longtime producer partner, Miller had been tempted to abandon Thunderdome altogether.

* * *

George Miller Byron Kennedy was killed and that kind of blew it all out of the water and I was reluctant to go ahead. Then there was a sort of need to do something just to get over the shock and grief of all of that. George Ogilvie, who was like a mentor to me, said, “Come along, we’ll make this thing together.”

Tim Ridge His experience with actors now is a lot better than what it was back when he was making the first films, but he absolutely saw himself as someone who could direct action very well. That’s why he thought with Thunderdome, he would bring in George Ogilvie to look after the actors, to take some pressure off him so he then could just concentrate on the action sequences.

Drew McWeeny That third film ate him alive a little bit. There are wonderful pieces in it, but it’s also a movie that ultimately doesn’t work. I think that film dented Miller in a lot of ways, and he retreated.

Colin Gibson (production designer) I don’t count Thunderdome. It was an LSD flashback George and Mel shared that isn’t really in the chronology, in my head.

Tim Ridge I’ll be honest with you: I remember coming out of the cinema, and the first thing I thought was, What have they done?

* * *

Miller next moved on to an even more troubled production. Adapted from the novel by John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick was big in every way: a big premise—where three witchy sisters are wooed by the devil himself—a big cast that included Cher, Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Jack Nicholson, and a whole lot of big egos. Miller butted heads with flamboyant producers Jon Peters and Peter Guber throughout the shoot. They tried to steamroll him, and he quit the film twice.

Though The Witches of Eastwick was a financial success upon its release in 1987, that dysfunctional big-studio experience scarred Miller forever.

* * *

George Miller I thought, Oh, it’s just going to be like working with Amblin and that whole cohort, and it wasn’t. Some of the producers were very chaotic in their thinking. It kind of got crazy.

The first mistake I made was I sat down at a production meeting, and they said, “Okay, where can we cut the budget?” I said, “Oh, I don’t need a trailer,” because I’m never in the trailer—I’m either with the actors or I’m on the set. But that was code to them that, Oh, this guy’s negotiable on everything. Jack told me, “Be careful. They mistake your politeness for weakness. You’ve got to make them think you’re a little bit crazy.”

When I asked for 150 extras, 75 turned up, and I said, “Well, I can’t shoot.” So, if I needed 150 extras, I’d ask for 300. The game started playing and it went on and on and on. And then one of the producers threw a tantrum on the set for a reason I still don’t know, and I didn’t turn up to the set the next day.

Drew McWeeny He is a guy who is more suited to doing things himself, his way, and he works better when he’s not directly under the thumb of the studio.

George Miller That’s when I hit the full force of Hollywood pathology. And I didn’t make another film for many years.

* * *

After five years away from the big screen, Miller returned to movies in 1992 with the intimate medical drama Lorenzo’s Oil, which was based on a true story and cast Nick Nolte and Susan Sarandon as parents trying to cure their son’s rare terminal disease. It was the perfect subject for Miller to return to his roots as a doctor-turned-director, but response to the film was mixed: Though it was well reviewed and the recipient of two Oscar nominations, Lorenzo’s Oil made just $7.2 million on a $30 million budget.

* * *

Drew McWeeny At that point, Hollywood knew that George Miller could make a hit, but they also knew that he was scary and risky. He had left Contact very, very close to production, at a point where it was tough for Warner Bros. when they pulled the plug.

* * *

In 1993, Warner Bros. had signed Miller to direct Contact, an adaptation of the science fiction book by Carl Sagan. He courted Uma Thurman and then Jodie Foster to play the lead, an astronomer who makes contact with intelligent life. But Miller and the studio never saw eye to eye on how the movie should be made, and executives were anxious to stop Miller’s script tinkering and push Contact into production.

* * *

George Miller It was creative differences. They were constantly saying, “We want to go out there and make something really special,” but at a certain point, they lost their nerve and they wanted everything overexplained.

Drew McWeeny The difficulties on Contact were legendary. There were major preproduction delays, budget problems, and he kept pushing the rewrite thing to the point where he and Warner Bros. pretty much realized they were never going to get to the same film.

George Miller I could not have made the film I should have. It would have let down the source material.

* * *

After two years of work, Warner Bros. fired Miller and replaced him with Robert Zemeckis. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly when Contact was released in 1997, Jodie Foster said of Miller, “He’s the kind of director that could make a two-and-a-half-hour movie about an eye blinking and it would be the most extraordinary, deep, beautiful film. But he’s very naive about the business.”

In response, Miller sued Warner Bros.—the distributor of nearly all the films he had made so far, including The Road Warrior and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome—for breach of contract.

* * *

George Miller Every filmmaker I’ve ever spoken to who’s worth anything has had a very dysfunctional relationship with studios. Great films or breakthrough film franchises ultimately resulted because the filmmaker, of course, knew way more and was much more invested than the studio executive at the time, who was trying to assert their authority over what they perceived was a dysfunctional or disastrous process.

* * *

The lawsuit stretched out over two years, but the settlement came with an unexpected upside: Warner Bros. returned the rights to the Mad Max franchise back to Miller. Over those three movies, Miller had learned how to bring his wildest ideas to life. But now that Miller had the option to return to the Mad Max universe, was there a new story worth telling?

* * *

George Miller It’s very, very simple: If there’s something intriguing about the film, then I can get up the energy and the obsession to make a film, but if it’s not there, I can’t do it. You end up phoning it in and you think of yourself as a hack. So, I never think in terms of a franchise, ever. And that’s why each film is quite different.

Nico Lathouris (writer) George is a mythmaker, isn’t he? His stories are so fundamental to who we are and the world today. Mad Max is the Oedipus of our time, I keep telling him. And I do believe it.

George Miller Stories have to be uniquely familiar. There’s got to be something that is still accessible and at the same time, it’s got to feel as if you’ve never quite seen something like this before. If you get that balance right, then you might have a film.

Chapter 3

Everyone in the Old World Had a Show

Mad Max movies are essentially stand-alone adventures. Though Max’s tragic backstory from the first film is implied in every sequel, the films are more episodic than serialized and could be watched in any order without missing much.

So, would Mad Max work just as well if it were a TV show?

This is the question a group of Warner Bros. television executives batted around in 1995 as they oversaw a syndicated block of weekly prime-time programming that included science fiction series like Babylon 5 and Time Trax. To add a name-brand title like Mad Max to that lineup would be a major coup.

Though the series would never be made, the attempt to mount it was the very first step on a very long road. When those executives took their idea to Miller, they were simply hoping he could be lured to TV. What they inadvertently set in motion, just as the rights to Mad Max were returned to Miller, was the twenty-year journey to make a movie masterpiece.

* * *

Gregg Maday (former SVP at Warner Bros. Television) I used to create lists of properties from the studio inventory and circulate them to a small group, saying, “Does any of this spark your interest?” And one was Mad Max.

Scott Carlin (former EVP at Warner Bros. Television) Dan Romanelli was chairman of Warner Consumer Products, and he thought it would be a great idea to develop a TV show around this property, given that they had a very robust merchandising business. Having a Mad Max series running every week on television would obviously be very good for that.

Ron Hayes (former SVP at Warner Bros. toy division) I knew the boys’ buyer at Toys “R” Us, and he leaned over to me once and said, “If you can make Mad Max toys, I’ll buy everything.”

Dan Romanelli (former chairman of Warner Consumer Products) It was such a great series of movies, and George Miller seemed reluctant to do another one. So, we chatted about creating a TV series he could syndicate.

Scott Carlin We would have been looking at something between twenty-two and twenty-four hours of TV a year.

Gregg Maday I flew to Australia, met with George and Doug, and had an initial conversation, then we met in L.A. and had dinner. Even then, George was not sure if he wanted to take the TV route or hang on to it for another feature.

George Miller For so long, whenever the idea of another Mad Max movie came up, I’d always reject it. I’d been there enough, and I thought there was not much more I could do with it.

Gregg Maday The tantalizing thing for George was to have twenty-four hours of storytelling—you don’t get that in a movie. But I was crazed to get it going. To be in business with those guys would have been a shot in the arm.

Scott Carlin When this bubbled up as a possibility, I thought to myself, Wow, this will be one of the easiest projects we’ve ever had to bring to the marketplace. It was such an incredible franchise, and you could see why it would work on early Saturday evenings or late Saturday nights in syndication. It checked off all the boxes.

George Miller I said, “Look, I’m interested.” And they said, “Well, we’ll help you put it together.”

* * *

On November 6, 1995, Warner Bros. announced the budding project with great fanfare in the industry trade publication Variety. Miller was listed as the series producer and director, while Carlin promised a somewhat toned-down take: “While we are being faithful to the original movie premise in our television adaptation,” he told Variety, “we are sensitive to the issues of violence.”

* * *

Gregg Maday: I always felt that the energy of the show wasn’t violence, per se, but comic-book violence—cars crashing, and that sort of stuff. I thought we could pull it off.

Doug Mitchell Eric Blakeney was the suggested showrunner who had emerged.

Eric Blakeney (writer) I was a showrunner for a while on 21 Jump Street with Johnny Depp, and George was put together with me because I was a known TV guy at the top of that world. We all got together to discuss how it could be done, and it was funny: I was warned from Hollywood people not to go work with George Miller on this. They said, “He’s impossible, he’s really difficult,” which I didn’t find to be true. If he’d been the kind of asshole they’d been portraying to me, I would have butted up against him in five minutes, because I’m the kind of asshole they’re portraying, in any case.

We were at dinner, having a couple of glasses of wine, and I said, “George, I was warned not to do this gig. I was warned you were really difficult.” He said, “You know, what I discovered in Hollywood was that you don’t get anywhere if you behave nicely. Halfway through Eastwick, I started taking Nicholson’s advice and being very demanding, very, very difficult. But the truth of the matter is, I couldn’t function that way.” And he said, “I went back. I got tempted one more time on Contact, and I got caught up in that thing, and I got fired.” It’s hard not to be tempted by Hollywood! They offer so much.

* * *

Miller and Blakeney began to brainstorm a syndicated Mad Max series with Miller’s producing partner, Doug Mitchell. Almost immediately, they ran up against some restraints.

* * *

Eric Blakeney George and I would electrify each other with dangerous ideas, and we could both read the expression of the executive going, Well, there’s no way we can get that on TV.

George Miller It would’ve been very neutered had it gone ahead in that way. In fact, I remember having to cut Mad Max 2 for network viewing on television and the network censor basically said, “There’s no real notes, you’ve just got to take the intensity out of it.” That was something counter to everything that you try to do as a filmmaker, particularly with a Mad Max film—you’re trying to make it an intense, immersive experience.

Eric Blakeney When you speak to a Hollywood executive, it is a different language, and I think George’s antenna went off. And while he probably needed the money at that time—and the credibility, because he hadn’t had a success in a couple of years—I don’t think George’s heart was in it. At the end of the day, I don’t think he really, really wanted to do it as a TV show.

Doug Mitchell But we did start off with that as a possibility, and through that, we first tapped Brendan McCarthy to come and have a chat.

James Nicholas (assistant to George Miller) Brendan’s a well-known comic-book artist in the UK, and he had reached out to George a couple of times.

Brendan McCarthy (writer) When I saw Mad Max 2, I was absolutely blown away. It was one of those fundamental moments where your psyche’s rearranged by a piece of art and you realize that it’s going to have this enormous effect upon you. I concocted a comic strip with Peter Miller called Freak Wave, which was basically Mad Max goes surfing, and that led to a career in American comics.

I was working on a TV series called ReBoot, a CGI TV series made in Canada, and we did one as a pastiche of The Road Warrior. I sent a VHS of that episode to George Miller, with a little card on it saying, “Whatever happened to Mad Max?” They were interested in finding out more about the computer animation, so I went down to Hollywood to have a meeting with them, which I thought would last about half an hour, because they were thinking about doing a Mad Max TV series along the lines of Xena and Hercules.

Mark Sexton (lead storyboard artist) Brendan, being very direct as he is wont to be, turned around and said, “Why would you do a television series and not a movie?”

George Miller He’s a very forthright person, and wonderfully so.

Mark Sexton This was obviously before HBO and The Wire and Band of Brothers and all that stuff started changing the television landscape, but you can certainly credit Brendan with ushering George into thinking about it more as a movie again, as opposed to something else.

Brendan McCarthy I probably drove George Miller up the wall talking about Mad Max, but we had a very good, intense, honest conversation about why it was great and what worked and what didn’t work in the trilogy. We clicked and hit it off, and before I left, I pitched him an idea for Mad Max 4, which is completely mental and very silly, but it had fun elements in it that were later going to turn up in Fury Road.

* * *

In McCarthy’s movie pitch, Max was tasked with transporting a mysterious package through a storm-ridden, postapocalyptic landscape. At the end of this journey, Max arrived at a giant castle where the man he delivered the package to then opened it to reveal a vial of “pure” sperm. This man’s ultimate intention was to impregnate a teenage girl he had been holding captive, a twisted bid to continue the human race in the face of near extinction.

* * *

George Miller Somewhere along that story, [he] sent me about three pages of drawings, even characters and things that were not ultimately in the movie, and they blew me away.

* * *

Though he had spent years nixing another big-screen adventure for Mad Max, Miller was starting to come around. During a trip to Los Angeles that Romanelli had put together to plan for the syndicated Mad Max series, Miller found himself more drawn to the idea of making a movie instead.

* * *

Dan Romanelli At that meeting, we presented the television idea first, and George was not very interested. But when we lifted the sheets and I showed him this toy collection from Ron Hayes that would come out of the TV series, he got excited.

Ron Hayes I’d been warned that George is persnickety about Mad Max and didn’t let anyone do anything with it, so I was expecting to get blown out. I took a blanket off the Mad Max toys, and he was like, “Oh my gosh.” I didn’t even start pitching to him—he was like, “Okay, I get it now.”

George Miller They put together some artwork and some imagery from the three earlier Mad Max movies, and I’d never thought of them as being one cohesive piece—each of the films was different from the other and, in many ways, had different aesthetics and explored different things. But when they were all put together, having not thought about it for so long, I was surprised.

Dan Romanelli I thought, Oh, maybe he’s going to greenlight this! At the end of it, he stood up and said, “This is great! I really appreciate this,” gave me a big hug, and left. Scott said to me, “Does that mean he’s gonna do it?” I said, “I don’t know, but let me run out and ask him,” and I ran out to the elevator and said, “So what do you think?” He said, “Dan, I’m so excited! I love it!” I said, “Are you going to do the syndicated series?” And he said, “No! I’m going to do another movie.”

George Miller I was in Los Angeles, crossing the street, 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? Can you tell an entire story on the run, and how much of the backstory can you pick up on the way? The essential task was to see how rich the story could be while it’s on the road.

Doug Mitchell It’s such a simple, pared-back story, especially after Thunderdome.

George Miller In one way, it was surprisingly restricted: When you think about it, most of the key characters are sitting in the same spot all the time, and those vehicles are hurtling through the wasteland in some form of chase or race. Those sorts of restrictions are stylistically interesting as a filmmaker but also, it’s a very seductive world to work in because of the allegories. It’s all there for you.

* * *

Having begun to mull the basic elements of what would become Fury Road, Miller brought some of those ideas to Peter Pound, the in-house sketch artist for Kennedy Miller Mitchell. It was the opportunity that Pound had long hoped for.

* * *

Peter Pound In 1991, when I first got called into the studio to talk about doing storyboards with Chris Noonan on the first Babe film, I sat in the receptionist area and in the front foyer was a huge poster of Mad Max. I was like, One day, he’s going to mention it. Eventually, George came to me and said, “Look, I’ve got an idea for another Mad Max film.” And of course, I’d been waiting six years for him to say that! I was like, Yes! It’s on.

* * *

Miller gave Pound a list of characters that included Max, a female lead who was dubbed “Warrior Woman,” and six female escapees ranging in ages from fifteen to twenty-six. Miller also included potential settings like a “toxic storm,” a “salt pan,” and a “dead city.”

Two days before Christmas 1996, Pound produced a series of sketches in his notebook under the heading Fury Road. Those early drawings contain several early tableaus suggested by Miller that found their way into the finished film. In one sketch, Max stumbles upon the freed hostages as they wash themselves, while the Warrior Woman stands defiant, ready to protect her charges. In another, Pound drew an armada of cars streaking across the desert, leaving a vast cloud of dust in their wake.

There is also a sketch of the villain that would become Immortan Joe—here a wild-haired “Warlord” with a golden nose—as well as a preliminary design of the Warrior Woman, who was then equipped with a solar-powered robotic arm.

* * *

Peter Pound Sometimes it’s like someone’s path is laid out before them. When I was ten years old, I was making cars and trucks out of cardboard: We’d play with them for a while, and then we’d set them on fire and take photos of them. I was also fascinated with robotic arms, and I built a mechanical arm. There’s a photo of me at the ripe old age of sixteen, with a 1970s hairdo, sporting this mechanical arm—it’s even on the left arm, which is what Furiosa had in the film.

George Miller We were working on other things then, but I allowed myself to think about it from time to time. Usually, with these things, if they’re any good, they don’t go away. They stick around. They’re insistent somehow.

James Nicholas I’m pretty sure that when George closes his eyes and sees something, the only way he can stop seeing it is if he puts it on film.

George Miller If I’m the guy who ends up in a wheelchair in the nursing home, staring at the ceiling, I’ve told my family you can bet I’m making some movie in my head.

Chapter 4

The History Men

During the time Miller spent mulling a potential Mad Max TV show, his fortunes in Hollywood changed dramatically. Against all odds, a modest family film he was involved with became a major, Oscar-winning hit.

Audiences went wild for Babe, the story of a talking pig with an unlikely talent for sheepherding, and the lovely little fable grossed $254 million worldwide and was nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture. Miller had co-written and produced the film, which was directed by Chris Noonan, and its success gave him plenty of newfound capital to spend.

Though he had been too busy with Contact to direct Babe himself, Miller decided to supplant Noonan in the director’s chair for the sequel, Babe: Pig in the City. At the same time, Miller began taking dramatic steps to get Mad Max: Fury Road off the ground, and at the beginning of 1997, he convened a writers’ room for the postapocalyptic sequel. Since it was Miller’s first trip back to the wasteland in over a decade, he would need reinforcements.

* * *

Brendan McCarthy I got a phone call saying, “George has got an interesting new idea for a Mad Max and would you like to go to Sydney and maybe knock it around with him?” He was going to hire another writer, and I was going to design it as we went along.

Eric Blakeney My agent got a call from George Miller and Doug Mitchell, and I’m thinking he’s going to offer me a writing job on the sequel to Babe. So, we go to dinner at the Ivy, and they say, “We want to resurrect Mad Max as a feature. Would you come to Australia and work on it?” I wanted to work with George. He could have told me it’s about this furious ice cream truck in the middle of the desert, and I would have been like, “Yeah, okay, let’s fucking go.”

Belinda Johns (assistant to George Miller) George is very single-minded on the one hand, but collaborative on the other. There’s nothing better for George than to find the best of the best. That’s what he really thrives on, surrounding himself with talents that he knows can get the job done.

Nadia Townsend (assistant dramaturg) And he listens to them. That takes a lot of confidence, to go, “I know what I want, but I’m so interested in what you have to say and I’m willing to let you contribute.”

George Miller I like to think it’s because I grew up with a twin brother and we spent virtually every day of our education together. There was always sort of a collaborative interchange between us—it’s great when you have someone to throw things around with.

* * *

In January 1997, Miller assembled a Fury Road brain trust in Sydney comprised of Blakeney, McCarthy, and the late Norma Moriceau, who had served as the costume designer for The Road Warrior and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

* * *

Eric Blakeney I showed up for work and there was this bizarre team. I guess I was the token writer.

Brendan McCarthy [George] saw the benefits of working with a comic-book artist and writer in that you can get a script written and elements visually designed as you go along. And I was steeped in the mythology of the series and had a million new ideas to express. I took the task of co-creating a new Mad Max movie as a sacred artistic duty.

Doug Mitchell You don’t have to have “writing staff” on your head for George to take you seriously. If you have some sort of creative skill, he’ll take you as seriously as anyone else in the room.

George Miller It’s collaborative in the extreme, except ultimately, I get final cut.

Brendan McCarthy As we went through it, I would sketch, mainly design ideas and what characters and vehicles would look like.

Peter Pound He was the concept artist and imaginer of George’s ideas. He could really pinpoint those ideas that George had into a visual comic strip.

George Miller Brendan was sort of the wild brother, who was telling me, “Plug in the amps and start playing a bit of rock and roll, and whatever you do, do not disappoint me, George.”

Brendan McCarthy When I entered into the relationship with George in order to produce the Fury Road script and designs, we also had a handshake agreement that if this wasn’t absolutely, stunningly brilliant, we shouldn’t do it. We should not disappoint Mad Max people by putting out a lackluster reboot.

George Miller He was relentless in pushing me and staying true to Mad Max 2.

* * *

For six months, the foursome worked together to tease out the world of the movie.

* * *

Brendan McCarthy George had almost a one-sentence storyline about a citadel run by a warlord.

George Miller The first notion of the story was to be an extended chase of people fleeing across the wasteland. Secondly, that cargo was to be human—five “Wives” of a tyrannical warlord looking for healthy heirs.

Eric Blakeney The warlord had these viable young women, and we started looking at a little bit of a theme of who gets to control reproduction rights. And I thought, This is interesting.

George Miller To the warlord who dominates the wasteland, they are basically breeding stock. They all carry, in one way or another, his brand seared onto the back of their necks.

Brendan McCarthy His favorite Warrior Woman sneaks these women out on a supply run to take them to her own ancestral home, called the Green Place of Many Mothers. And in taking them there, she incites an armada to follow her, with Mad Max strapped to the front of one of the hot rods.

Eric Blakeney George trained in medicine, and he was talking about these warrior boys who were riddled with cancer. When a cancer victim is losing all their strength, you can top them up with fresh blood, which I noticed when my dad was dying of it and a transfusion would give him energy for a few days. George said, “You know, it would very cool if Max’s first contact with them is that he’s captured as a blood bag.”

James Nicholas There were a lot of conversations about where Max has been, what he’s been through, and why is it different this time? How feral had he become?

Brendan McCarthy Max is a man who is probably insane through isolation, who doesn’t want to be involved. By the finale of the film, we see that he has formed an attachment and expresses love to this Warrior Woman, who probably feels the same way about him. So you have this quite interesting story structure where you’ve got two disparate arcs that join together.

Mark Sexton Even back then, when George very much considered that it’d be Mel who would be playing Max, the whole point was that there needed to be something at least a little bit fresh about taking Max further down into a basic level of almost subhumanity. The idea was that Max would start as completely insane. He’d been out there too long, and he’d lost what made him human, and the thing that George really wanted to play was the idea of reintegrating Max back into society through action.

James Nicholas There was some concern that Max is this kind of passenger, which he was, since he is physically tied to the front of Nux’s car. But what is really smart about what George did is that Max is essentially us: We’re learning as he’s learning, so that actually makes us be more attuned to him.

Eric Blakeney I also found we were encountering a story problem that absolutely was never solved, which is: This is not Max’s story. This is Furiosa’s story, and she runs into Max. At the end of the day, it is more of a cousin of the Mad Max movies than a Mad Max movie.

Nico Lathouris It’s a story of a man running away from his better self, but his better self catches up to him. And you could argue that Furiosa is his better self.

Belinda Johns It ended up being quite a feminist film in many ways, but he didn’t set out to do that.

George Miller Mainly it was there because of the basic premise of the story. It couldn’t be a male road warrior stealing five Wives because that’s a different story. Had to be a female. Once you start with that, the rest of it emerges.

But what happens unconsciously in our storytelling? You don’t know. I grew up with only brothers, went into an all-male boarding school, and went to medical school at a time when only 30 percent were female. Then I had a daughter of a very, very wonderful, powerful mother, and I have a fantastic life partner, and suddenly I’m reading the world differently. That unconsciously gets into the work—plus, we are servants of the zeitgeist.

Mark Sexton It’s very fair to say that of all the characters in the film, the one that took the most work to get right was Furiosa. Once Charlize Theron was cast and shaved her hair, then that’s when the character finally started to come together as her own thing, as opposed to a female reflection of Max.

Doug Mitchell At that time, one of the actresses George was interested in was Uma Thurman.

Peter Pound I did a drawing of Uma with the makeup and stuff, with a few scars on her face.

James Nicholas Another name that was thrown around for a while was Bridget Moynahan.

Belinda Johns I remember Monica Bellucci as a name that came up.

George Miller There were a number of actors that we were talking about back then, and one of them was actually Charlize. I remember talking to the casting agent, who said, “Oh, Charlize is not interested.” Over a decade later, I mentioned that to her and she said, “You know, I’d never heard of it. No one had ever told me about it.”

* * *

While development on Fury Road continued, the long, demanding shoot for Babe: Pig in the City drew closer. The deeper Miller got into preproduction, the less available he became to work on Fury Road.

* * *

Belinda Johns George was so busy. It was that time when getting little pieces of George was like getting the little nuggets of gold, and then once you had him, you could get so much work done. George had to come over and be able to say, “You’re onto it, this is exactly how I saw it.” He’d been utilizing Eric as a bit of a scribe while he couldn’t have his whole brain on it.

Eric Blakeney It was incredibly frustrating. George was prepping Babe 2 upstairs, so mostly I would be in a room with Brendan. He and I would throw ideas around, and then we’d get, “Well, George isn’t coming in today.” So, we’d have lunch, throw a few more ideas around, and I’d come back the next day and Brendan had made a drawing of all the ideas that we had. He would always be there before me in the morning and show it to George, so George would go, “Man, Brendan’s got this amazing idea. You’ve got to see this.” And I’d be like, “Uh . . .”

Doug Mitchell George is massively collaborative and highly respectful of anybody who can advance a story with skill and touch. He saw that in Brendan, so I think that chilled the alliance between Brendan and Eric.

Peter Pound Eric was going off down the path with his own ideas.

George Miller The work was obvious and superficial, and he was writing Max as if he was Arnold Schwarzenegger, saying cute action-hero lines without really digging down deep into what we were trying to do. I told him, “Look, it’s not working.” And he said, “Well, I think it works.” I said, “Brendan agrees with me,” and he said, “What the fuck would he know? He’s just a cartoonist.”

Eric Blakeney That might have been me, but I don’t know.

Peter Pound George went, “You’re fired.”

George Miller A guillotine dropped.

Eric Blakeney Loved working with George, couldn’t stand working with Brendan. It wasn’t a marriage of mutual benefit.

Brendan McCarthy In the end, [George] liked my ideas so much, he said, “Listen, do you want to write the film with me?” I said, “I’d love to write the film with you, but you’ve got to bear in mind, I’ve never written a Hollywood feature film before.” And he said, “Well, don’t worry. I have.”

Peter Pound Brendan became his co-writer and rightly so, because he has an imagination that was similar to George’s. They both suited each other.

* * *

By September 1998, the film was set up at Universal, and news of the new Mad Max sequel made its way to Variety:

“Mad Max” is revving up his motorcycle at Universal Pictures.

The studio plans to release a fourth installment of the action-adventure series in time for a major summer release in either 2001 or 2002. But whether Mel Gibson will return as the post-apocalyptic gunslinger battling violent car and motorcycle gangs is another matter.

The actor, who was paid $15,000 for the first “Max” in 1979, now commands $20 million per picture, plus a sizable portion of the profits. Gibson, who did appear this summer in a fourth “Lethal Weapon,” has not been approached to star in the new “Max,” his representatives said.

Despite all the buzz building around Fury Road, Miller’s newfound career momentum would be short-lived: In November 1998, Babe: Pig in the City bombed at the box office. The gentle first film, directed by Chris Noonan, had earned $63 million in the United States, but Miller’s dark and far more expensive sequel topped out at just $18 million.

Some major critics were in its corner, and Gene Siskel even named Babe: Pig in the City the best film of 1998. Still, Miller’s sequel never recovered from early reports that it was too scary and extreme for small children.

* * *

Doug Mitchell It’s a very strong movie in its own way, but after we watched first previews, seventeen minutes were cut out because the audience found it terrifying, really.

Drew McWeeny It made children cry a lot and it was not received well. It is a very strange, very personal film that was released as a big-studio sequel to a beloved, down-the-middle hit.

Doug Mitchell It was disappointing. That was a massive amount of work that George put in. In a sense, that film had been rushed. One of the big mistakes in filmmaking, we’ve learned, is trying to rush for a release date.

Manohla Dargis Even if he didn’t direct the first Babe, I really see him as the kind of visionary behind them. And Babe: Pig in the City, which he did direct and is the greater movie, has one of the great moments in movie history when the dog is chasing Babe across the bridge and Babe turns around and asks him, “Why?” For someone who’s such a genius of cinematic violence, to pose this very tender and profound question was quite lovely.

Drew McWeeny It’s a beautiful movie and it’s technically brilliant, but it definitely put a dent in what Hollywood thought of Miller. They knew that if you gave him money, one of two things might come back: Babe or Babe 2. And one of those scares the shit out of suits.

James Nicholas When I first started working there, it was the year after Babe 2 had come out and there was this “what are we going to do now?” mentality. And they started seriously talking about doing Mad Max.

* * *

Chastened by the response to his family film, Miller returned to the wasteland. He assembled a second group to work on Fury Road, reenlisting McCarthy and adding Peter Pound and the storyboard artist Mark Sexton. Together, they would come up with an innovative way to compose the screenplay as a series of thousands of images.

* * *

Mark Sexton I had worked with George on Babe 2, and it was an interesting experience, not least because all the cool kids were downstairs starting to do Fury Road while we were upstairs drawing bloody talking pigs. A couple of years later, around November 1999, I got a call from Bill Miller, George’s younger brother and a producer on some of the Kennedy Miller projects. He asked if I was available to come in and get started on Happy Feet, and I thought, Oh bloody hell, I’m gonna be the talking-animals guy! To go from bloody talking pigs to bloody dancing penguins, bloody awful.

So, I went to George’s offices in Potts Point and Bill said, “George is waiting to speak to you. He’s upstairs in the Mad Max room.” I wandered upstairs and walked into this big, long, oval-shaped room that was covered with artwork—all these insane vehicles and characters and a very small amount of storyboards, and there was a big whiteboard at the end of the room with just a logo written on it: Mad Max: Fury Road. I thought, Shit, they are doing it!

George walked in and said, “Hello, Mark,” all this how-are-you stuff, and then said, “So, when can you start on this?” And to this day, I’ve got to admit, I don’t know whether Bill legitimately had brought me in for Happy Feet and George made a mistake, or that was just the way of getting me into the building and not telling anybody that Mad Max was happening.

James Nicholas It was Mark, Pete, Brendan, me, and George in a room for the next two years, basically.

George Miller In many ways, it was the time of our lives.

Belinda Johns It was that room that enabled it to gather a lot of momentum. Essentially, the visions could be on the page so that George could see how the narrative was looking.

George Miller We plotted out the story but basically wrote the screenplay as one extended storyboard, thirty-five hundred panels around a room.

Peter Pound I’ve tried to find any other feature films in the history of film that have been entirely storyboarded instead of a written script. Traditionally, it’s a typed or handwritten script, and we didn’t have that.

P. J. Voeten (producer, first assistant director) George is about the telling. He’s never been into the written word quite as much.

Mark Sexton He’s got an idea in his head about what he wants it to be. He’s just waiting for someone to find that one key image that crystallizes it all together, then he uses that as the linchpin to say, “All right, that picture there is what this is going to be. Now work off that.”

George Miller I was always really taken by Hitchcock’s notion where he said, “I try to make movies where they don’t have to read the subtitles in Japan.” That’s what we tried to do with Fury Road: I wanted to do one extended action movie where there’s very little language to speak of and to see how much of the characters and their relationships you could pick out.

Mark Sexton It was a film that was 95 percent action, and writing action in a script form is very, very boring to read.

Cory Watson Reading about action is like dancing about architecture.

Mark Sexton A basic day is that we’d all get there—Brendan and Peter and me in the Mad Max room with George, who’d rock in about nine-ish.

Peter Pound Each morning, I’d put on the Road Warrior opening sequence: After the black-and-white prologue, there’s a moment where it screams down onto a highway, and I cranked the noise so the whole building would shake. They’d say, “Okay, Poundie’s here now, so we can start working.”

Mark Sexton George would be talking to Brendan about the visuals he could see, Brendan would debate with him whether that was a good idea or not, and usually George would win. Brendan would very quickly sketch out a vague idea of how those frames would play out, and once George was satisfied with that, it would be handed over to Peter and myself, and we’d split the sequence up between us.

James Nicholas The guys would do a better version of it on the electro board and print it out.

Mark Sexton That was pretty much how we worked for about a year, storyboarding and stepping through the film bit by bit. They’d be printed up in this tiny format a couple of inches wide, and he’d cut them all out and start to edit. That’s where the magic was really happening, when George would edit the boards as we were drawing them.

George Miller What was so great about it is you could see the progression. The musical analogy is there are some modern-day film composers who literally write the score out without playing on the piano—they can see the notes, they can hear the full orchestration and the coloring of the orchestra. It’s a little bit like that, except storyboards are hard to read because they’re missing the most valuable dimension, which is time.

Peter Pound George and Brendan were basically searching for the story and Mark Sexton and myself were following along like hungry dogs, going, “What’s going to happen next?” That’s how we had this inspiration of imagery that we kept throwing at them. What if this? What if that?

Brendan McCarthy It was wonderful to watch a new Mad Max movie taking shape in front of my eyes. I used to run to work every day. I had to find out what was going to happen next in the story, what madness we’d come up with.

Peter Pound We were literally working out what was going to happen next by what had gone before. There was a moment when we got toward the end and I think it was George that said, “They’ve got to go back to where they came from.” All the storyboarders looked at each other like, “What? You’ve got to be joking. We just got here alive, and you want us to go back again?”

George Miller The three of us spent nine months in a room laying out the movie, and a good 80 percent of what people see today, all these years later, is what was on that wall.

Chris deFaria (executive producer) One of the enduring stories of this production is that’s the movie he shot. People would ask, “So what does George have in mind?” And you’d go, “It’s right here in the storyboards.” They’d say, “No, I got that. So, what are you going to shoot?” “Going to shoot what’s right here in the storyboards.” Even later, when the studio looked at the first cut of the film and didn’t quite fully understand it, the question was, “How could he shoot that?” And he’d say, “Because it was right here in the storyboards.”

Peter Pound When we’d finished the storyboards, we knew that this was a unique film, and we were really happy with what we’d done, especially George. It was just dealing with the studios that was upsetting to everyone, because it kept falling over. Everything was going against us.

Chapter 5

Who Killed the World?

Though George Miller’s tumultuous experience in the Hollywood studio system could serve as a cautionary tale, his longtime leading man Mel Gibson was living the dream. In 1986, the year after Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome was released, the charismatic, blue-eyed Gibson was named the first “Sexiest Man Alive” by People magazine, and over the next few years, he would become Hollywood’s biggest movie star.

“It may be very hard for younger people to understand how important Mel Gibson was when he was at the height of his stardom,” says New York Times critic Manohla Dargis. “I went with my younger sister to see him in The Bounty and every single seat was filled with a woman. He was such an incredible erotic manifestation, and that doesn’t happen often, where you have someone who is very beautiful to look at, is this incredibly charged presence, and he’s a great actor.”

With Miller’s three Mad Max movies in his rearview mirror, Gibson had moved on to an even bigger franchise, Lethal Weapon. Hits like Maverick, The Patriot, and What Women Want continued to cement Gibson’s reputation as an international icon, and he eventually became a major presence behind the camera, too: The 1995 epic Braveheart, which Gibson directed and starred in, won the Academy Award for Best Picture. (In an amusing twist of fate, his Oscar competition that year included Miller’s Babe.)

In his mid-forties and still riding high as Fury Road got underway, could Gibson be lured back to his breakout role? When Miller had first cast him, Gibson was just a twenty-one-year-old unknown fresh from drama school. Now that he was Hollywood’s most in-demand actor, signing him would present a whole new challenge.

* * *

James Nicholas In 2001, most of the storyboards for Fury Road were done. Then it was a question of, Okay, we’ve got to start planning the film and get it financed.

George Miller It was finally getting off the ground. We were in negotiations.

James Nicholas We weren’t sure whether Mel was going to be able to do it.

Eric Blakeney George wanted to find somebody else—he was like, “Mel’s getting too old.”

Doug Mitchell He was interested in Brad Pitt at one point. And Angelina at one point!

James Nicholas I remember putting Brad Pitt’s face on Mel’s Road Warrior body, just to see what it would look like.

Eric Blakeney George asked me, because I’d worked with them, “What do you think about Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp for it?” I didn’t think either of them would be right, although probably Brad Pitt could have done it better. Johnny is so specific to his own kind of Lon Chaney universe.

Peter Pound The appeal had started to get a younger actor to play the Max role, but I objected to that. If it wasn’t Mel then it wasn’t Mad Max, you know? I thought it was going to be a big mistake.

Eric Blakeney I was trying to argue for Mel Gibson in the lead, and I came up with this sequence for how we could reintroduce him. When Furiosa steals the Wives, we go down to this basement where all the War Boys are begging for bleeds so they can go out and fight and the bleeders are hanging from their ankles like meat, upside down, naked. It was like a cross between a big abattoir—where the dead carcasses are all on hooks—and a dry cleaner where you press the button and your clothes come around.

So, they agree to give Nux a bleed, and they wheel this ass in front of him on the rail, and then you turn the ass around and it’s Mel Gibson. That would be the best reveal!

Brendan McCarthy I was an advocate for Mel Gibson probably long after everybody else was, because I think it’s interesting that you got this guy when he was really young in the first Mad Max film. And if you do Mad Max 4, you’ve got him on the cusp of going into mature age, when Mad Max is a crazy old coot. That would have been an amazing arc of an actor and a film series that nobody had ever done before.

Belinda Johns With Mel, George probably thought, Well if I’m going to do this, I may as well do it properly.

Eric Blakeney I wasn’t surprised when they went back to Mel. When you’re asking for that kind of money, the studio is going to demand a star.

* * *

Early in 2001, as Gibson began to circle his next directorial effort, the biblical drama The Passion of the Christ, he agreed to come to Miller’s office to hear the pitch for Fury Road.

* * *

James Nicholas The only way you could get to know the movie is to fly out to Sydney, and George would take you through the storyboards, because there was no written-down version of this at all.

Peter Pound We’d hang our storyboards one above the other, so you’d read the images from top to bottom for about twenty-four frames. And by the time you did about two hundred or three hundred frames that way, it was almost playing out in your head like an animation.

Mark Sexton Mel came in for two days, and George basically sat him down in the Mad Max room and started walking him through the storyboards.

George Miller Remember, he was already directing movies then, and he’s a very fine director.

Mark Sexton Mel and George hadn’t worked together since 1985 and Mel had this massively successful career as a filmmaker himself, so that changed the dynamic between them quite considerably. I think George found that quite interesting to figure out. My overriding memory of that is watching Mel slowly sink lower and lower and lower into his chair as it went on. George was sitting there, talking, and Mel’s like, “Yep, yep, yep, yep!” He was plenty hyperactive and fiddling a lot.

Peter Pound He’s a weird guy, Mel Gibson.

Mark Sexton George was unaccountably, incredibly nervous. George fumbled, blathered—“Oh, forgot this bit”—and Brendan, who was very, very, very invested in Mel playing Max, was visibly shaking, going, “George, listen! Listen!” George: “. . . Oh thanks, Brendan. Yeah, yeah.”

George Miller Mel has this quality of when he really likes something, he laughs. And pretty soon, I think he decided he would like to do it, because there were enough laughs.

Mark Sexton By the end of the second day, George finally got through the storyboards, and we had a lovely lunch with Mel where he turned around to George to say, “George, it’s fucking fantastic and I love it. But we’ve got to get this going now, because I’m nearly fifty, and I don’t even know if I can do it now, let alone in five or six years.” And George was like, “Yeah, yeah, of course.” As we know, history didn’t play out that way.

Doug Mitchell We had held the rights to take the film different places. It had gone with us to Universal when we were doing the Babe films there, but then they chickened out.

Belinda Johns Babe 2 wasn’t as successful financially as they’d all hoped. Universal wanted to do it, but they were not going to give George free rein.

Doug Mitchell We had the ability to bounce it out of that studio and take it to Fox, because that’s where Mel had gotten a deal.

Hutch Parker (former president of production at 20th Century Fox) George is a singular filmmaker, an incredible artist and master of artful commercial films, which is a rare breed unto itself. And the script did succeed in telling what felt like a deeply original and unique story that built on a foundation established in the previous movies. That’s a tricky thing to do: Many times, sequels fall short because they don’t take the risk of doing something new and unique in addition to reminding us about what we loved in the original material.

The next task becomes, what does it cost? How do you marry the creative ambitions with the practical? And that proved to be a much more challenging journey.

* * *

In December 2002, after ten months of heavy negotiations, 20th Century Fox agreed to take on Fury Road. Fresh off the massive M. Night Shyamalan thriller Signs, Gibson would be paid $25 million to play Max, a paycheck that amounted to nearly a quarter of the film’s announced $104 million budget. Shooting was projected to begin in May 2003.

* * *

James Nicholas We were shocked that it was going to get made, because we were always like, “Who would ever make this movie?” When they said, “Looks like Fox is,” I was like, “Great, don’t say anything, because this is insane.”

Doug Mitchell When Mel was to be Max in Fury Road, the budget was very different. His cost at that stage was very high as an actor, and probably merited.

Hutch Parker Mel’s deal was kind of a threshold deal for us—it represented more than we had done before.

P. J. Voeten They did such a deal with Mel that the film was really locked in at a budget where we couldn’t really go above a certain limit. That was always going to be tight.

Hutch Parker The issue was that I don’t think it was ever really $104 million. In all likelihood, it was more like $120, $130 without being a fully vetted, rock-solid plan. And in order to proceed within the window that had been mapped out with weather, cast availability, and all that kind of stuff, we would have been required to start spending money without really knowing if that number was going to hold.

James Nicholas There were discussions about how we get the budget down and George was always holding the line heavily, because there was one point where Fox wanted a lot of cuts. They ended up cutting one sequence, a gyrocopter sequence when they get attacked by helicopter people at night who are made of bird feathers.

P. J. Voeten Nobody else was really locked into the cast at that point but ironically, Tom Hardy screen-tested for a War Boy.

* * *

Though the three previous Mad Max movies had all been shot in Australia, Miller kicked off a worldwide location scout to find the right locations for Fury Road.

* * *

George Miller We always wanted to shoot in Australia, but we couldn’t guarantee the landscape and no rain.

P. J. Voeten Most people think Australia is all desert, but in fact it’s desert with quite a lot of saltbush and green and rock. You can’t just drive wherever you want—I worked on Thunderdome, and we were out in Coober Pedy literally handpicking rocks off the earth so that we could drive around. We really needed a place that had canyons, sand dunes, and flat-driving desert.

George Miller We looked at all the desert areas around the world, basically.

P. J. Voeten Mel was going to come on board, and he didn’t want to leave North America. We could have done it in places like the salt lakes in Nevada, really great-looking places, but financially, America would have been too expensive. During research, I suddenly zeroed in on Namibia. Colin Gibson then flew down and sussed it all out, drove across minefields without realizing it. It was logistically brilliant and visually fantastic: It had the canyons, sand dunes, the flat desert, great film crews out of South Africa. Ticked all the boxes.

Guy Norris We’d spent so much time planning it, and it was so close.

P. J. Voeten Colin was over there building cars.

Hutch Parker The kind of financial outlay that you have to make for a movie like that is significant. If you’re doing a practical build, you can only imagine how far in advance you’d need to commit to that construction in order to be ready on day one, and by the time you’re really down to the nitty-gritty of what will something cost, you are far into prep. You’ve got people on the ground.

Guy Norris We were six weeks away from shooting, literally. And then it happened.

* * *

In February 2003, Fox executives began to panic about the film’s rising cost.

* * *

Hutch Parker New challenges kept surfacing, whether it was the construction of the vehicles or the availability of certain resources down in Namibia. The budget kept shifting and it kept, frankly, growing. As that persisted, it becomes a very difficult conversation with the studio.

George Miller And once 9/11 happened, everything changed.

James Nicholas The U.S. dollar started to go down during the Iraq War while the Australian dollar came up, and suddenly you’re eating into that profit margin.

George Miller The American dollar collapsed against the Australian dollar close to 30 percent. We lost and couldn’t recover 30 percent of the budget.

Mark Sexton It put a whole new spin on overseas productions.

George Miller Insurance and shipping became completely restricted. So, we couldn’t get insured, we couldn’t get our vehicles across the Indian Ocean from Australia to Namibia. And it collapsed.

Hutch Parker You’ve got a moving target of a budget on a movie that was already pretty expensive with a lot of back-end participants in Mel and George and company, and that made it almost impossible to assess what we really thought it was going to cost. My job at the time was to try to make those ends meet, to make that marriage between everybody’s creative interest in it make sense with the economics. The challenge of that was that it wasn’t really lining up and ultimately, that’s what took us out of it.

That was a potential franchise and a movie that you could anchor an entire year on. Those are very hard to come by, so the decision not to proceed was a heavy one. All of us reached out to George and Doug to say, “With regrets, we just can’t get there.”

James Nicholas Fox pulled the plug. They basically walked away.

Colin Gibson I was in Namibia in 2003 when I got the call to stop spending money.

Lesley Vanderwalt (hair and makeup designer) It was a horrible sinking feeling. We had got all excited and then suddenly it was like, ugh!

Doug Mitchell It’s massively disappointing because you feel obligated to all the people who were going to work on it. What are they going to do if I say, “Sorry, guys”? It’s not just a film falling down, it’s money for their families.

James Nicholas For me, that was almost year four by that point and I was obsessed with making that movie. It was hard.

Colin Gibson Most of the vehicles had to be destroyed. The studio wasn’t interested in paying for it to go anywhere, so what we built, we videotaped ourselves cutting up with a gas ax or five. It all went into a big pile of molten steel. I covered over the roads that went into the dunes and moved on.

Peter Pound I went, Okay, this film’s never going to be made. I won’t get more work based on these drawings because no one will ever see them. And I pretty much put them away in the bottom drawer.

Hutch Parker One of the great blessings of getting to work on all this is falling in love with ideas, stories, and filmmakers, so when you find a film that you believe in and you ultimately have to let it go, it’s very, very painful. There are a lot of things that have to align to get a movie made, and part of what you need is a company that has the risk tolerance to take on doing something of that scale. I was sorry for George that I couldn’t help summon the conviction on Fox’s part to make that movie.

George Miller That’s what happens in the business, and that’s what happens often in life. And really, it’s a test of the film. If it’s really powerful, if it’s really compelling, if you feel this gravitational pull towards a story and it keeps intruding into your thoughts, then you keep collecting little notes about it: Oh, that would slot into Mad Max very well. When that process is happening and it won’t let go, then it’s a test of its worth to some degree.

James Nicholas When I worked on other movies after we got shut down, people would ask me, “What’s it about?” I said, “I can’t tell you, but basically it’s the best movie that will never be made because it’s too insane, it’s too freaking cool.” I didn’t know who would ever allow that to be made the way that George envisioned it.

George Miller I often wonder had the film been made when it was intended to be made, whether it would have had the same resonance. Probably, it’s safe to say it would not.

Colin Gibson It would have been a very different movie in 2003. More time let us get through each of the vehicles to turn them all from cars to characters, to the point where every bit of embroidery said something else about character and story and reality.

Doug Mitchell There’s a shitload of cameras I don’t think we would be able to afford way back when, not as they exist now. It would have been vastly different. Much, much less of a film.

George Miller Was it more appropriate to its time in 2015 or 2000? I don’t know.

Colin Gibson It’s a much better movie than it would have been if it had come out early. It’s just a pain in the ass that it had the gestation period of an elephant.

Chapter 6

I Live, I Die, I Live Again

People call Hollywood a dream factory, but what that leaves out is the number of dreams the industry dashes every day. After the years of hard work spent on Fury Road culminated in a shock collapse, most filmmakers would have lost all hope and moved on, figuring it wasn’t meant to be. But could George Miller really give up on Max?

In the meantime, another movie offered him a lifeline. There had been a changing of the guard at Warner Bros. since Miller’s contentious Contact days, and new studio president Alan Horn was eager to mend fences with the filmmaker. In a 2001 meeting, Miller’s producing partner Doug Mitchell offered Horn the script to Happy Feet, an animated film about an emperor penguin who finds his voice through dance.

Horn was delighted by the idea, and development of Happy Feet began alongside the Fox production of Fury Road. When the latter fell apart, Miller pivoted to his more viable project.

* * *

George Miller The way you get by in this industry is to have more than one thing prepared. It got to the moment where the facility we were going to use in Australia to do Happy Feet was ready and waiting, and Warner Bros. were keen to do it. So, we had to let Mad Max go, and I moved into Happy Feet.

Mark Sexton The cool project went away, and we ended up working a really cold project. But I’ve worked with George enough to know that he doesn’t let go of ideas unless it becomes truly ridiculous to continue, and Mad Max took a huge amount of work and was so vivid in his head that I had faith George would try to do it again.

Margaret Sixel (editor) We had all the concept art pinned on the walls for years. All that work, it had to be put out there. It would have been awful, don’t you think, if it had never happened?

George Miller There are many stories of which I was very passionate, and I have screenplays half-written, or fully written, that I was really, really keen on. But as time goes on, you finally ask yourself the question, Do you really want to do it? Does it feel relevant to you? And it’s interesting, the ones that fade away.

James Nicholas It’s part of George’s character. Even if you look at the original Mad Max, it was an ambitious project for someone who’d never made a feature film before to do. And George hates being told he can’t do something.

Belinda Johns It’s almost like the harder it gets, the more it makes him determined to go to the next level.

George Miller I’m now hardwired, after all the years, to tell stories. It’s all I can do.

Margaret Sixel It was always in our lives, sitting in the background. But George has a lot of films sitting in the background, and you never know which one is going to rear its head.

Colin Gibson Everyone moved on to other things, but it seemed every time I was about to start something else, I’d get a phone call saying, “We may or may not be back on again. Quick, fly home!” There were a lot of false starts. In a way, I can’t complain about that because it basically gives you a shitload more time to think and drill down on the details.

* * *

While Miller was busy working on Happy Feet, an important new collaborator came to the fore: Nico Lathouris, a drama coach and creative philosopher whom Miller knew from his school days.

Though Lathouris initially worked as an actor and even appeared in the first Mad Max as a mechanic, he would eventually find more fruitful pursuits as a dramaturg who specialized in an intense, unconventional interrogation of story and character. Soon, he became Miller’s creative partner and a co-writer on Fury Road in his own right.

* * *

Nico Lathouris I’m not known. I don’t have a profile and I try to keep away from the internet. In fact, I demand it, because I want my work to speak for itself. It’s so easy to get corrupted or to start thinking what you’re doing is good when it isn’t. It’s just an exploration, a continuous exploration.

I was an actor, and in our country, we have what we call the AFI Awards—like the Academy Awards, but lesser. I got nominated twice for an AFI Award, and I thought, Oh my God, I’m getting rewarded for lying. I couldn’t get to the truth of the work, I could only use tricks. I thought, I’ve got to stop and go right back to the beginning. I’ve got to ask what acting really is and try to find another way of going at this.

So, for several years, I left the industry completely and worked to unpack the whole thing and understand it from a different perspective. Then I was offered a role on a program called Heartbreak High and they didn’t have anybody to work with the young people, these kids just out of school, so I agreed to do it. For the first time, I used these strategies I’d developed over the years, and it was very successful.

Nadia Townsend The way the show allowed Nico to run the rehearsal room, it completely shifted the culture of filming. These young actors, he allowed them to have their own voice within the work they were doing. That required the crew to shift, because now in order to capture that authenticity, they needed not to hit marks, they needed to allow the actors to overlap. The ferocity with which he attends his work and the truth he fights for really changed a lot in Australia.

Nico Lathouris George saw that change in television and thought it was pretty interesting and called me in to work on Fury Road.

George Miller It really occurred to me that the process that the actor goes through and the process that the screenwriter goes through are virtually parallel. Often, I’ve had my most successful collaborations with actors: Nick Enright on Lorenzo’s Oil, Michael Cristofer on Witches of Eastwick. They know what it’s like to be in front of an audience live and responding moment to moment to the rhythms and the feedback that’s happening, so I asked Nico to get involved.

Petrina Hull (production and development executive) I understand that relationship from how it works in the theater—it’s a bit less common in film and television. Basically, Nico is a creative companion and he gate-keeps the subtext of the piece. George knows it’s easy to get distracted and pulled away when you’ve got the studio pushing for what they need and then marketing teams get involved and they want the sexy shot. If you go too much in that direction, you can get further and further away from the core authenticity of what you’re trying to do. George surrounds himself with people like Nico who can help look after that.

Nico Lathouris George thinks like a painter, in big terms, and about how to tell story through editing. Whereas I am focused on the drama within it, and I really don’t care about the editing. This is an ongoing thing that I have with George, and it’s very fruitful.

George Miller Nico was my quiet guru brother telling me, “Let’s look at this much more carefully.”

P. J. Voeten He really questions George and ignites debate as to why those characters would do things and where they come from. It keeps George on his toes.

George Miller I can’t think of starting a story with the subtext first. You tell the story and then you begin to see these emerging themes and you amplify them as you go.

Nadia Townsend Nico’s an incredibly deep thinker, one of the most dramatic minds I’ve ever met. He absorbs everything George is doing, and then they have these back-and-forths. They go for hours and hours and hours, and they’re trying to get to the very essential element of what this thing is that they’re doing: “Is this what the heart of the story is?”

* * *

Left to his own devices, Lathouris wrote a 190-page dramaturgical analysis of Fury Road that was meant to clarify the movie’s thematic spine and imbue each of its plot beats and character arcs with symbolic weight.

* * *

Nico Lathouris I was very fortunate that I received the legacy of thirty-five hundred storyboards already done, but I looked at it and thought, Oh my God, what am I going to do with this? It’s this crazy, mad, wall-to-wall action. I decided to find a way of understanding this totality bit by bit, so I laid out a huge sheet of paper and drew a timeline.

I had a little corner of the studio, and I sat there day after day. I’d be there first in the morning and last to leave at night, and I did the research. I looked at the symbolism within the story and tried to draw that outward. I tried to figure out the psychology of it. I pulled it apart, basically, wherever I could, in every way I could.

* * *

The danger with a movie like Fury Road is that it could become a repetitive barrage of action scenes—all flash, no soul. Instead, Lathouris sought to shape each of the three primary chase sequences so that every beat would deepen the character arc shared by Max and the female lead, who was at that point called “The Praetorian.”

Here’s how Lathouris put it in his dramaturgical analysis:

The first chase brings the Road Warrior and the Praetorian together, the second chase manacles them together in mutual obligation, and the third chase bonds their hearts together as they fight for each other.

* * *

Nico Lathouris My responsibility was to clarify those ideas so that they were not messy. I was slowly developing Max through each of these action sequences: It’s the step-by-step evolution of a human being from an animal.

* * *

In the hands of Lathouris, a sequence like the car chase through a toxic storm acquired profound metaphoric resonance: The storm became the physical manifestation of Max’s troubled mind, with each lightning strike symbolizing a synapse that fired anew. If Max could break through all those clouds of toxic dust, he would no longer be a passenger in his own life, diminished by years of trauma and wasteland-induced insanity. On the other side of that maelstrom, he would finally be able to think and act for himself.

As Lathouris wrote:

In the Road Warrior’s emotional development through the first half of the story, the journey out is about coming face to face with those repressed feelings, and the return story, the journey back, is about resolving those feelings and moving on.

* * *

Nico Lathouris You don’t see any attempt from Max to fight at the beginning—it’s all flight, which is significant. There comes a point later on when he turns around and says, “I’m going to fight,” because now he has something to fight for. I also tried to find the premise—George always regarded the premise as important, but I don’t know to what extent he and his team had actually sat down and gone, “We have to start thinking what the nub is of this thing.” And that changed over several years until we got to “What’s broken can be fixed by love only.”

* * *

The wasteland is barren and unable to take seed. Yet there is a “Green Place” and the seeds have been kept, so that when the Man animates the Woman by giving her his blood, some hitherto unimaginable hope, the re-greening of the wasteland, seems achievable.

* * *

Nico Lathouris In the meantime, George was doing Happy Feet in another location at Fox Studios, so I’d walk over a couple of times a week and have lunch with him and that way, I could keep him in touch with Mad Max while he was doing Happy Feet. This is where we’d have our discussions about montage and mise-en-scène.

P. J. Voeten To have all that time to get all that backstory and the density of all the characters in the world was a blessing for them. They love to theorize and talk about things until the cows come home.

Petrina Hull And it was in this period that the story for Furiosa came to George.

George Miller As part of the deep probing into the Fury Road story, we had to really fashion really strong backstories. First of all, Nico Lathouris and I mapped out Furiosa—how did she get there, what was the Green Place, and so on. It was purely a way of helping Charlize and explaining it to ourselves. Now, only the surface of that story appears in Fury Road, but we wrote stories for her, the Doof Warrior, Max . . . and the Furiosa one was strong enough for a screenplay.

Petrina Hull [Miller] started working on that, as well as the other Mad Max: Wasteland story.

Nadia Townsend [Lathouris] wrote a fucking book about Max while he was waiting for the project to start, and I read it. It paints the whole world. It’s the year of Max’s life before Fury Road starts, and it’s amazing.

Nico Lathouris That extra time gave us an opportunity to go deeper and deeper. It’s a little bit like you’ve got a rug that you want to make: If you’ve only got time to draw the pattern, well, that’s that. But if you have more time, you can actually weave the rug into that pattern, and then if you have even more time, you can make the thread yourself and color it to get the right colors. The wonderful thing about George is that he creates that time.

George Miller That’s the only way you have a chance for the movie to feel coherent, because otherwise it’s just too crazy. It’s crazy enough!

Brendan McCarthy The final film you see is about 80 percent of what I wrote with George that George and Nico then refined, and they came up with some great stuff that seemed so blindingly obvious when you see the film. But when myself and George were doing it, we didn’t see it.

Nico Lathouris You’re dealing with a very powerful, potent piece of real estate, which is a story. We could have just done the surface, and that would have been easy—it would have been what most people do. But if you want to get beneath the surface, it’s a serious job.

* * *

At the end of 2006, Happy Feet was released, and the penguin musical quickly became Miller’s biggest-ever hit, earning $384 million worldwide as well as an Oscar for Best Animated Film. After the back-to-back disappointments of Babe: Pig in the City and the collapsed Fox production of Fury Road, Miller and Mitchell were back on top.

* * *

Petrina Hull In the wake of Happy Feet, George and Doug obviously were presented with a lot of opportunities, and there was a lot of vying for George’s creative attention. In this brief window of time in ’07 and ’08, Fury Road resurfaced. However, there was obviously a lot of interest in another Happy Feet film. And then George, who really likes that challenge of trying to do something new and different, had a period where he did Justice League for a little while.

David Sims (journalist, The Atlantic) The George Miller Justice League movie is the last gasp of the weird 2000s superhero boom where they were like, “Let’s give people like Ang Lee and Christopher Nolan these properties and let them do whatever they want!” Which obviously would never be allowed again.

Petrina Hull Once George had made the decision to do Justice League, that was a massive thing to mount, and we were in full-on preproduction.

* * *

Miller spent most of 2007 casting the superhero team-up, which would have starred Armie Hammer as Batman, D. J. Cotrona as Superman, and Adam Brody as The Flash, in addition to two actors he would later use in Fury Road: Immortan Joe himself, Hugh Keays-Byrne, was cast as Martian Manhunter, while Megan Gale, who’d appear in Fury Road as the youngest member of the Vuvalini, was tapped to play Wonder Woman.

In January 2008, the cast assembled in Sydney for the shoot, but on the eve of production, Justice League fell apart. Undone by a writers’ strike, budget issues, and a significant tax credit that the Australian government refused to issue, Justice League provided a potent reminder that while big movies are challenging to make, big George Miller movies are nearly impossible.

* * *

Hugh Keays-Byrne That seemed like a good one. It was a shame that it didn’t come off, because George has a feel for those things that’s unusual.

Drew McWeeny Part of me still wonders what would’ve happened if they had made that Justice League movie. I’ve seen designs from it, I’ve read the script, and it was definitely not a traditional take on the characters. It would’ve been his Superman, his Batman—characters that were recognizable, but put through a George Miller filter. It would have been the kind of gamble that either would have defined the next ten years of what they did at that studio, or the kind where they would still be pretending it didn’t happen.

Petrina Hull Once it was clear that wasn’t happening, it was really, “Well, there’s Fury Road and there’s Happy Feet Two.”

Mark Sexton Harry Potter was coming to an end, Warners needed a new franchise, and they thought that Happy Feet might fill part of that gap.

Doug Mitchell I had a negotiation about a double-dipping.

James Nicholas So, Fury Road was made off the back of a penguin.

Petrina Hull Doug agreed to do the Happy Feet sequel on the condition it was a two-picture deal: Warner Bros. were obviously very enthusiastic for the follow-up to Happy Feet, and Fury Road was the dream that hadn’t yet been realized for George. There was a bit of carrot-dangling there to get that mounted.

Margaret Sixel It always came down to George, because I don’t think anyone else thought it needed to be made. I suppose in the movie industry, you get used to the negativity: “Who needs to see another Mad Max film? If it’s not Mel, it’s not gonna happen.” A lot of us were quite nervous about it.

George Miller This film, ultimately, you couldn’t kill it with a stick. It kept on falling over. It went to three studios. I just had to wait for the moment when all the planets align.

Doug Mitchell They wanted to do it, and we wanted to do it.

Chris deFaria They really laid out a vision for this movie and for a transmedia experience where it would exist in the theatrical form but also in video games, in this Furiosa animated film, and there was even talk at the time of a traveling live show. They had great, great plans for it. The studio didn’t fully buy into the complete interconnectivity of the different media, but they did commit to the movie.

Drew McWeeny The Warner Bros. that Fury Road was being made at was getting far more IP-driven and corporate-driven and fear-driven. Thank God somebody there decided that Mad Max was an asset and a jewel to exploit, but I don’t think they had any idea what they were getting into when they did that.

Chris deFaria I knew, because I had worked with George and Doug on Happy Feet, and it had been an exciting and torturous undertaking to get that movie out. It was innovative technically, it was ambitious creatively, and it was also subject to the meticulous attention of George Miller and the wily producing of Doug Mitchell. It drove the studio crazy, and at the time, Bruce Berman, who was the Village Roadshow co-financer, accused me of suffering from Stockholm syndrome: In order to get Happy Feet out the door, I had to cross over to the dark side, in their opinion, and spend a lot of time in Australia with George completing that movie.

So, by the time the conversation was all about Fury Road, I thought I was well positioned to understand the undertaking. Of course, we all wildly underestimated what it was going to take to get this movie done.

George Miller And Mel hit a little turbulence in his life.

* * *

In 2006, three years after Fury Road first collapsed, series star Mel Gibson was arrested in Malibu for driving under the influence. During the arrest, Gibson made sexist and anti-Semitic remarks that torpedoed his career, and the former A-lister would not act again for four years.

In 2010, as Gibson began a tentative return to the big screen, he was accused of domestic violence by girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva and tapes of their explosive fights were leaked to the press. For Miller and Mitchell, who had considered replacing Gibson when they first tried to mount Fury Road, it was now abundantly clear that they would need to find a new Max.

* * *

George Miller I remember hearing those tapes when he was talking to his girlfriend. He was completely out of control. There was something deeply, profoundly enraged. And I was shocked.

Doug Mitchell I’m still very fond of Mel, and he’s an extraordinary man—obviously blighted by a number of things that everyone in the world knows about but nonetheless, he’s a highly gifted filmmaker and a brilliant actor and a lovely guy behind that sort of demon that sometimes pops out. But he was too old, it just didn’t make sense.

George Miller We knew we needed someone special.

Chapter 7

Where Are You, Max?

How do you recast the role that minted a megastar?

For that tricky task, George Miller tapped veteran casting director Ronna Kress, whose work on The Fast and the Furious and Pirates of the Caribbean had demonstrated a real knack for finding franchise talent. But in addition to casting an actor charismatic enough to take up Max’s mantle, Kress would also have to find an actress for Furiosa who was every bit his equal. And then there was the matter of casting all those Wives and War Boys . . .

Though the cast was sprawling, the script was spare. The characters in Fury Road are hardly big talkers, and there were no showy monologues that Miller and Kress could pull to test the mettle of auditioning actors. To fill out most of the ensemble, they’d have to go about things a little differently.

In 2009, a yearslong, worldwide casting search began.

* * *

Ronna Kress (casting director) When I think of all the people who auditioned for that movie! We saw, at the time, what I consider now to be many of the movie stars of our day.

Josh Helman Every man and their dog was auditioning for Fury Road.

Megan Gale (“The Valkyrie”) I did a workshop in L.A. with Michael Fassbender, who they were considering for Max. He wasn’t as big a star as he is now, but he was on the rise, so it was a wee bit intimidating for me.

Ronna Kress For Max, we looked at Michael Fassbender, Jeremy Renner, Armie Hammer—and these are the people we didn’t cast. Joel Kinnaman didn’t even have an American agent at the time, he was just out of Scandinavia.

Petrina Hull There was always a cap of people that thought that Max should be an Australian to take over the reins from Mel. Eric Bana was an Australian actor that was considered. In the general public, there was a big push for Sam Worthington.

Ronna Kress The whole process of casting Max took close to a year. We were talking about every actor in the world, essentially, and having very in-depth conversations about the benefits of someone famous or someone unknown in the role of Mad Max.

Belinda Johns For a long time, Heath Ledger was in the picture.

George Miller The person who was foremost in my mind was Heath. Every time he’d come through Sydney, he’d pop in and we’d talk generally about things, and then we started to talk about Mad Max. We lost him, which was such a pity—not for Mad Max but because he was an exceptional person. He had a very powerful sense of inquiry and was amazingly humble.

Brendan McCarthy Once he passed away, George was looking for that slightly similar, kind of animal spirit.

Mark Sexton This is something I don’t hear about very much and that George never admits, but I have a very, very, very strong memory of George talking about Eminem for Max.

Petrina Hull That is true! See, that’s one of those wild-card things: There were always these people that George would see in popular culture, and he’d want to know more about this person.

George Miller He’d done 8 Mile and I found that really interesting—I thought, He’s got that quality. We’d done the first Happy Feet with the late Brittany Murphy, and she had done 8 Mile, so I asked her what he was like and would this be something really interesting for him? She had no reservations about saying what a wonderful talent he is.

Mark Sexton I got brought back in to redraw a bunch of storyboards in March 2007 and do a bunch of cut-and-pastes to put blond hair on Max.

George Miller We did get in touch with him, though that’s as far as it went because we were going to shoot it in Australia at that point and he simply didn’t want to leave home. I think he had the impression that if he could do it out of his home state, then he’d be up for it.

Mark Sexton I’m kind of glad it didn’t happen. Eminem, really? Whole different bent there. And the feminist story behind Mad Max: Fury Road might have taken a bit of a hammering if he’d played the role.

* * *

Though bigger names had been up for Max, Miller was intrigued by the up-and-coming actor Tom Hardy, a brooding, full-lipped Brit who had a career breakthrough playing a charismatic criminal in the 2008 film Bronson. Off that leading role, Hardy landed a supporting part in Christopher Nolan’s then-upcoming Inception, as well as a place on the Fury Road casting sheet.

* * *

George Miller All charisma is paradoxical. Mel and Tom are very accessible and warm and you feel you can be their best friend—and yet, at the same time, there is always something hidden, something held in reserve, inaccessible. I think you can feel that on the screen and Tom had that quality. I saw it in the work he’d done in Bronson.

Tom Hardy Nobody paid any attention career-wise to me in America until Bronson. It gave me a calling card and passage into America, where I’d always wanted to work.

Petrina Hull That film made a really strong impression on George. It felt like an edgy choice. And again, that’s sort of something that’s typical of George—he’s really looking for the right thing, not the obvious thing. Every now and again, he’ll surprise you and do something a bit left field.

Lora Kennedy (former head of casting at Warner Bros.) Tom has this amazing duality as a man: He’s got this incredible physical presence that is so scary and mean and masculine but then he’s super soft and feminine and delicate at times, which is a unique combination for a guy who looks like that.

Ronna Kress He was one of the last people that we saw, and in some ways, for George, that was a good thing. By the time we got to Tom, we were ready to make a decision about who was the right person for that part.

Tom Hardy Initially, I was daunted because obviously Mad Max is synonymous with Mel Gibson and a much-loved character by many people.

Ronna Kress The night before Tom’s big audition, his agent Mick Sullivan called me saying, “He can’t do it.” It was nine thirty on a Friday night and I was out to dinner with my husband, and I had to walk out of the restaurant. I was like, “What? What are you saying? George flew to Los Angeles to see this guy and I have an entire day wrapped around him,” because he was supposed to read in the morning with one actor and in the afternoon with another. Mick was like, “He’s not coming,” and I was like, “He’s coming. He is coming.” I said, “Whatever I have to do to tailor the experience to him, I don’t care. Even if it means he just has a cup of coffee with George, he’s coming to that room.” The next day, he showed up.

George Miller Tom read with the actress Kat Dennings, and one of the things that really struck me is she was kind of anxious doing this exercise, and Tom started helping her relax, coaching her.

* * *

Near the end of the process, Hardy emerged as a front-runner alongside Jeremy Renner and Armie Hammer. Hardy and Hammer even read together as part of their audition, and when Hardy gnashed his teeth and spat at his scene partner, Hammer told Miller that Hardy needed to be Max more than he did.

* * *

Todd Matthew Grossman (audition camera) Jeremy and Armie were equally wonderful but there was something about Tom in the room where it felt like that was Max, without a doubt. He had that kind of suppressed emotional dryness that you’d find in a postapocalypse and, buried underneath it, disdain for the world. There was this intensity that burned through the lens.

Ronna Kress After Tom auditioned, George and I went into another room, and we had a long moment of quiet with each other. Then I said to George, “Is this the person that you can spend nine months in the desert with, telling this story? Is this the person that’s right for you?”

Tom Hardy I knew he checked my background with other directors to see what it was like to work with me.

George 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 I was excited to get the job. It’s such a big fish to land that the seesaw effect, the other side of that, was everybody loves Mel as Max and nobody’s gonna want me. So, it’s like being the new boy at school and set up in some way for failure immediately.

* * *

With Hardy emerging as the top contender for Max, Kress and Miller worked hard to lock down his female counterpart.

* * *

Ronna Kress There were a lot of women who read for Furiosa. Jessica Chastain read for me, and this is when she was starting out. Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Ruth Negga, some French actresses read for it. We had really thrown a net around the world and narrowed it down to a handful of people. Gal Gadot read for it, and she gave an incredible audition. Incredible!

P. J. Voeten That was even before she was in Fast and Furious.

George Miller She tested, and she did incredibly good work—already, you could see that she was very fine. But here’s the thing about Gal: We were testing her not just for Furiosa but also for the Wives, and in terms of age, she fell in between.

Gal Gadot (actress) I was the runner-up for Mad Max with Charlize. I had so many almosts for big, great things, but I was never big enough of a name.

Ronna Kress Warner Bros. had that Mad Max audition for years. That’s all I’m saying! But we had an eye on Charlize the whole time in the same way we had an eye on Tom.

* * *

Several years removed from her 2003 Oscar win for Monster, Charlize Theron had hit a quiet patch in her high-profile career. After roles in underperforming films like The Road and The Burning Plain, the formidable Theron was in search of her next great project and had begun to explore options behind the camera.

* * *

Charlize Theron I was not really being sparked by anything as an actor and I didn’t act for three years but I was working my ass off trying to start a production company. Actors go through spells where you’re not moved by anything and then you go from one extreme to the other, where you can’t stop fucking thinking about something. That was kind of where I was at.

Because I was starting a production company, I thought I might need representation as far as material and I should probably meet with agencies. So I had a meeting at CAA with Bryan Lourd, who represents George. The timing of it all is quite crazy because if I had never had that meeting, I don’t think I would have ever known about that script.

Ronna Kress Charlize was at a point in her career where she may not have been the first choice on studios’ lists. She was established, no question about it, but sometimes you find people and there’s perfect timing in terms of where they are in their lives and careers.

Charlize Theron Listen, I grew up on all the Mad Max movies. They’re very popular in South Africa. So that part of it, for me, was like, Oh shit, yeah, I wanna be in a Mad Max movie. Are you kidding me? I remember being twelve years old and my dad letting me watch it with him, and it was huge. I was raised on a farm, and I was also raised in a country where I was kind of surrounded by violence. Watching the violence of Mad Max felt very visceral, very real, and very connected to my environment. I wasn’t scared by it. I remember kind of being in awe of it.

George came to L.A.; I had a meeting with him at lunch. He was absolutely lovely, and I said, “Oh my God, I’ll do whatever I need to do, I really, really want to be part of this movie,” and he said okay.

P. J. Voeten He cast her there, over that lunch.

Charlize Theron I couldn’t believe it. I literally couldn’t believe it.

George Miller I knew behind that elegant façade, there was some real grit to that person. Even as she’s sitting somewhere having lunch, you understand that. And you see it in her work.

Ronna Kress Charlize was the only person we cast who did not audition. You just couldn’t beat it. It was the perfect moment for her and the perfect piece of casting in that role.

Lora Kennedy Charlize is so physically powerful: She’s tall, she’s lean, she’s gorgeous. She’s one of the few people that when you see her in person, she doesn’t disappoint. You’re going, Oh yeah, you’re a movie star. She’s breathtaking, she’s got this inner power and inner strength, and I don’t think she’s afraid of anything. To take on this role and to take on Tom—who’s lovely but hard to work with sometimes—you have to be formidable. This isn’t for a weak actress, that’s for sure.

Ronna Kress The truth of it is that we didn’t end up casting Tom until we had Tom and Charlize together. At that point, George had gone back to Australia, and we did a videoconference call at Warner Bros. with George so he could talk to Tom and Charlize, because it was really important for him to see them together. Once we saw them, we just knew. It was an indescribable, perfect thing.

George Miller Susan Sarandon said it well: When you’re pairing couples, you always want a female to skew male and a male to skew female. She told me, “If you look at the great male movie stars, they have a female quality—they’re not effeminate but there’s a looseness to them that reminds one of the female approach to life. And the female stars have always had a male quality, which is to be very direct.” The classic example is Hepburn and Tracy: She was very direct and Spencer Tracy, for all his rough masculinity, has a looseness with him.

Ronna Kress After the video call, Tom and Charlize and I were in the parking lot. I was looking at them and they looked so unbelievable together—it was perfect, there was no question in my mind that we had done the right thing—and while I was waving goodbye to them, I backed my car into a pole and crashed the side of my car. Charlize ran up: “Oh my God, Ronna, are you okay?” I said, “I’m fine. I was just staring at you guys!” That’s how intense it was.

* * *

To cast Nux and the five Wives, Kress saw hundreds of young performers, some of whom had never acted before. Even the most experienced among them were surprised by what their auditions would entail.

* * *

Zoë Kravitz (“Toast the Knowing”) I remember getting an audition with very little information. There was no script, of course. All it said was that the story followed some people in a car, and they were running away from something, which kind of is the entire story. That’s not not the plot!

George Miller My colleague and I, Nico Lathouris, we devised a way to cast people that was a little less typical.

Nico Lathouris I think it’s a real mistake to use material from the film to audition people—they get a snippet of something and they’ve got no context for it. The motivation behind an audition is more often to get the job, not the motivation of the character. We tried to subvert that process by asking them to do several things.

Ronna Kress It was a very nontraditional audition process in that you had the actors tell a story about the saddest thing or the happiest thing that ever happened to them.

Lora Kennedy From that, you can glean their vulnerability and their willingness to go deep, take a chance, and trust you.

George Miller And whether you pick a sad story or a happy story can tell you a lot—the choice you make, your humor, your general disposition.

Zoë Kravitz Sometimes my reaction to auditions like that is to roll my eyes a bit. Ten years ago, I wasn’t really thinking big movies were something I would have the opportunity to do. I remember being very nonchalant about it.

Lora Kennedy You could really tell the people who were full of shit, who were embellishing a story to make it more interesting or dramatic. It was like, yeah, I’m not buying one second of this.

Nico Lathouris We didn’t say it had to be true, so they could make it up if they wanted to.

Ronna Kress There was this urban myth going around at the time about a first date where the girl goes to the bathroom in the guy’s house and somehow ends up leaving her poop on his dressing table. It was not a true story, but several people told that same story as if it was their story.

* * *

For the second part of their auditions, actors were given an eclectic packet of dialogue scenes from movies including Network, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, When Harry Met Sally, and Erin Brockovich. Attached to the packet, Miller wrote the following note:

The purpose of these auditions is to find out how you work as an actor. Included are six scenes. Pick any one that you fancy. You may recognize some of them, but we’re not looking for mimicry of the original performance. Any approach you take to your selected piece, including characterization, is completely up to you.

* * *

Ronna Kress That’s unlike any audition process, but he didn’t want the actors to act out being Mad Max or Furiosa or any of the other characters. He was just looking to see who they were. We spent a lot of time analyzing the choice of material and the choice of story.

P. J. Voeten Whichever scene the person chose gave George and Nico an insight into those people.

Petrina Hull Not many people chose Monty Python, I have to tell you. A lot of people chose the “mad as hell” Network speech, as you can imagine. High drama!

George Miller The audition that most comes to mind is Abbey Lee, who played the character of The Dag.

Abbey Lee Through my Australian modeling agent, I got asked to do a self-tape audition, and at that time, I had absolutely zero acting experience. I didn’t even know what a self-tape was! But it’s my nature to jump through an open door, so I gave it a shot.

Lora Kennedy Abbey Lee’s audition was the highlight of the entire thing. She’s this tall, skinny, Australian model and she did Network in this Southern preacher Pentecostal voice that was phenomenal.

Abbey Lee I don’t know how that came out of me.

Lora Kennedy These were scenes that you’d seen your entire life, but then these actors would read them, and it would be like, Oh my God, I never thought of it that way.

Abbey Lee It was ridiculous, and I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I was having so much fun. But George always told me it was my personal story that captivated him most: I told him that I didn’t eat meat because I was a mermaid and since there’s no mammals in the sea, it wouldn’t make sense for me to eat one. When I was a kid, that was one of my reasons for not eating meat, so it was true in my own way.

Ronna Kress I’ll never forget the telling of that story, ever ever ever. It was amazing. And she believed it!

George Miller I knew a lot about her immediately. I knew her attitude, her humor, her style, and all those instincts proved to be true.

Abbey Lee I do remember making the tape and thinking, There’s something that feels good about this but I don’t know. I was a model and a musician living in Bushwick at the time, and I was doing other things—it didn’t really feel like a possibility for me. Then, six weeks later, it was 2:00 A.M. in New York and I’d had quite a few whiskeys and I was walking up my staircase when my agent called me. She was like, “Why are you not answering your phone or checking your emails? You just booked Mad Max!” I was so shocked that I walked to the rooftop of my building without even realizing it.

Lora Kennedy It was one of the top ten auditions I’ve ever seen. It left my jaw open. I was like, I don’t even know who this person is, but she’s phenomenal.

Abbey Lee George Miller FaceTimed me the next day, told me a little bit about the story, and said, “I need someone who’s willing to give up their life for six months and I’m asking you to take that chance with me. Will you come?” I was like, “Fuck yeah, I will!”

Ronna Kress I’d spend hours poring through that material and he and I would have hours and hours and hours of Skype conversations where we would watch the auditions together and talk about it in great detail. It was a breathtaking experience. And these were just the pre-reads! We were establishing and narrowing down our list of people we wanted to see, a very wide swath of people.

Nico Lathouris We thought, Let’s not bring ten people into the room and start judging them. If we’re going to work with them, let’s give them something in return. Let’s do a workshop and spend a day with them, at least.

Ronna Kress We would see two people in the morning and two people in the afternoon for four-hour auditions. They didn’t know it at the time, but the piece we gave the actors to perform was a scene from the Furiosa screenplay. I’ll read to you George’s workshopped notes about that, because it gives you a sense of what we were doing.

This scene is derived from the backstory of a character we encounter in Fury Road. It is elemental because that’s the way that things are in the wasteland. This is a world in which there are no favors. The only imperative is survival. Honor, compassion, and love are the extreme exceptions—fragile as candles lit in a great darkness.

F has been wronged by D, brutally. In this climactic scene, their roles have been reversed and for the first time, D has been stripped of all power except for her or his reasoning. Please prepare for both roles. Age and gender are interchangeable. Interpret the characters according to your own instincts. In the world of our story, language is spare but in the service of survival it can have rhythm and sometimes a degree of pageantry.

The purpose of this workshop is to give us some understanding of how we might work together. This is not about an end result. This is about the process.

Zoë Kravitz One person in the scene was being held captive and someone else had a gun to their head, trying to get information. There was no information about whether the person was male or female—there was just the person who had the power and the person who didn’t. I did a chemistry test with Jeremy Renner, and we did it one way, then we swapped roles. George has such an interesting way of going about things.

Todd Matthew Grossman The process was incredible. You would have the actors go off in the room by themselves for a little while and repeat the lines to such an extent that it lost all meaning, until it had stripped away any preexisting context that an actor might bring to it. Then George would come in and he would start building them back up slowly.

Ronna Kress With the exception of one other director, I’ve never had a process like this. And I don’t think the actors had ever had a process like this. They were basically in an acting class for four hours and in many instances, when they were doing the scene, George would switch them. That was such an extraordinary experiment.

Nicholas Hoult It wasn’t about trying to do a scene as well as you could but about breaking down how people think and observing them.

* * *

Though he was only nineteen when he auditioned for Fury Road, Nicholas Hoult was already a veteran of the British film and television industry, having starred in projects like About a Boy and Skins as a young actor. Now six foot three and ready to make his mark as an adult, Hoult was circling the role of Nux, the manic War Boy who becomes Fury Road’s third lead.

* * *

Ronna Kress George was very on the fence about Nicholas Hoult—he was worried about the size discrepancy between Nic and Tom.

Petrina Hull And Nux was much younger. There was always a concern about whether Nic was too old.

Ronna Kress George’s AD would send me the audition schedule and when I saw the schedule for London, Nic wasn’t on it. I said, “P.J., you’ve got to put Nic on there,” but he said George didn’t think it was right. So, I called George and said, “George, we have to include Nic. We have to!” He said, “I’ll think about it.” I’d get the schedule again, and still no Nic! That went on for a couple of rounds and then I finally convinced him to put Nic in.

Nicholas Hoult The second audition was four hours long, and I’d never been through something like that. You were asked to sit opposite your partner, look at them, and say everything you’re feeling or thinking. We were also given these single words or phrases to repeat over and over again to each other for about twenty minutes.

Nico Lathouris They’re allowed to sing it, they’re allowed to shout it, they’re allowed to whisper. They’re allowed to do whatever they want as long as they keep repeating those words. That way, they’re exploring it in such a dynamic way that they could never remember this stuff, but it’s imprinted it in their bodies.

Nicholas Hoult It was all these things I hadn’t experienced before, and I remember sitting down after and having a coffee and going, That was mind-blowing. It didn’t matter if I got the job or not, I was just happy to have the experience.

Ronna Kress I’ll never forget it. He left the room, and George turned to me and said, “Yep. I understand now.” That’s the relationship he allows me to have in the casting process, to be adamant and strong in my convictions and my beliefs in these actors.

Petrina Hull I’m so glad that that worked out and he got to stay on, because he’d become more of a man by the time we were actually shooting.

Ronna Kress Casting the Wives took about three and a half years. We read actors, we read musicians, we read everybody—maybe five hundred girls or more. Even Jennifer Lawrence and Margot Robbie read.

P. J. Voeten When Margot came in, she was working on the show Pan Am. Not getting the job was the best thing that ever happened to her because she went and did Wolf of Wall Street.

Lora Kennedy Finding that group of women was an integral part. It was endless, endless days of these multiple combinations, like spinning on a lock: You lock in one number, then you spin to another, and you’ve got another number. They all have to complement each other in tone, in shape, and in size, but you don’t want them to look exactly the same.

P. J. Voeten Towards the end, George even met with Rihanna.

George Miller Usually, actors turn up dressed very casually, but boy, Rihanna looked spectacular when she walked in. I’m not sure she was even aware of the content of the movie, so she dressed up as Rihanna, which was the right thing to do.

Riley Keough They were holding crazy, nontraditional auditions in Australia. They’d have a bunch of us, five to six girls, go through this audition process with no scenes from the film but a lot of improv, a lot of Meisner, and a lot of acting class stuff. At one point on the last day, George came and sat in on the room and watched us. We had no idea if we’d get chosen or not and out of my group, I was the only one who got selected.

Ronna Kress We did go down a whole road with models, too. Courtney Eaton had done nothing. She came out of Australia.

Courtney Eaton At sixteen, you don’t know what you want to do, so I was just discovering that acting was something I wanted to head towards. In Australia, you do a school camp called Outward Bound where you go to the bush for a week or two, following maps and cooking your own food, and I was there when my dad called my teachers up and said they had to pull me out to fly for a callback in Sydney with all the girls.

I left that, I flew to Sydney, and I had the weirdest audition I’ve ever experienced in my life. We got put in a room with cameras everywhere, and I don’t even think we were given sides to follow along. We were talking to each other, figuring out the dynamic of the girls. There was a lot of crying, working through emotions.

P. J. Voeten Splendid was the hardest one to cast. It was like a ticking clock at one stage: “We still don’t have a Splendid.”

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (“Splendid Angharad”) It was the second audition that I’d ever done. I remember not hearing back for several years and I’d kind of forgotten about it. I’d really put it in the back of my mind.

Petrina Hull There was always a bit of an aura around Splendid. Maybe because of how she presented herself to the Immortan, or maybe because she was going to sacrifice herself and it was this devastating thing that they would lose her. That was a really difficult one in the casting process.

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley I got a call from my agent one day saying, “Mad Max is happening, and George Miller wants to meet you. Can you fly down to Australia in a few days?” I was kind of shocked and perplexed but I jumped on a plane and went down to meet George. He had me workshop for a few hours with Courtney Eaton and then he and I had a conversation and he offered me Splendid on the spot, which was very exciting.

I’d just come off this movie with Michael Bay and I met George and felt so relieved and protected. He was this cuddly, warm, teddy-bear character who was so easy to talk to. I felt really safe with him, and that was the exact experience I was looking for from a director.

* * *

In October 2009, Hardy and Theron’s casting was reported in the press. A summer 2012 release was announced, though many more delays were still to come.

* * *

Ronna Kress When I went back and looked at all these people that we explored and debated and discussed, it’s breathtaking to me how thrilling everyone was to expose such very personal aspects of themselves.

Lora Kennedy Ronna works with the two crazypants directors, right? She’s got George Miller and Baz Luhrmann, and their process is sometimes incredibly indulgent, but it is really thorough, and George really loves the process of casting. For us as casting directors, when we get that, we relish it. When you get somebody who respects it and enjoys it, it’s a pleasure.

Chapter 8

Pick Up What You Can and Run

They may have looked like a set of nondescript warehouses, but they contained an entire universe.

In 2009, Mad Max: Fury Road set up shop in suburban Villawood, just fourteen miles west of downtown Sydney. Inside those warehouses on Birmingham Avenue, some of the most creative minds in the world would spend the next two years crafting outlandish weapons, vehicles, and props. To get in the mindset of the characters who would wield those tools of the wasteland, it helped to go a little mad.

* * *

Tim Ridge It was like someone had the directive, “Find the biggest, most cavernous workshops hidden somewhere in Sydney, and that’s where we’ll go and build all the cars, bikes, and props.”

Matt Boug (bike cosmetics and salvage artist) One of the really great things about this production is that everyone was under one roof, so looking out over the workshop, you could see everything. You could really get a vision for how it was all starting to come together.

P. J. Voeten I would walk around with my jaw on the ground, watching these people craft the most beautiful vehicles out of the meagerest of starting details. It was a very hands-on approach, and you could see the love and the detail going into each and every car. It was like a Wonderland.

Jacinta Leong (art director) I was working with hugely talented craftspeople—mechanics, petal-beaters, metalworkers, special effects crew, the set dec team. All these crafts came together to create objects from a different world, a world we had not seen before.

Michael Ulman (salvage artist) George and Colin had been looking for artists that work with found objects. They decided to google “found object sculptors,” and my name came up and I got a call: “If you know Mad Max, here’s an opportunity to come work on the vehicles and the motorcycles of the new one.” My mind was blown. I was like, Really, you found some random kid in Boston? In Roslindale, no less?

Peter Pound If you’re a petrol head and you know what it’s like to be in a garage with hot rods and engines roaring around you, you know that when that workshop was set up at Villawood, we were in heaven. There were 120-odd guys and girls working in this workshop of vehicles, and I remember saying to some of them that this is never going to happen again, so enjoy this moment.

Dean Hood (unit production manager) They’re normally pretty grumpy and rough kind of guys: “Yeah, yeah, I’m at work. I’m just doing this to earn money.” But this was the only workshop, still to this day, where I’ve seen all these guys smiling because of an amazing piece of artwork they’re all working on.

Anthony Natoli (engineer) They were head down, arse up, with the biggest smiles on their faces.

Chris deFaria It was a little bit like going up the river in Apocalypse Now. I mean, these guys were completely into what they were doing, and the stuff they were building was incredible. They had grease on their faces and these vehicles are shooting flames! When most of the higher-up executives from Warner Bros. finally came to Sydney and went out to the barn, it was this quiet conversation of, “Who agreed to this? Did you approve this? Who approved this?” Nobody stood up and claimed credit.

Dean Hood For me, going out to the workshop was like being a kid in a candy shop. You go out there and see a big cardboard box: “What’s in there?” And it’s a brand-new 350 Chev engine waiting to go in some cars. Or you’d go to the corner of the workshop and oh my God, there’s three XP coupes done up as the old Mad Max vehicle! There was even a Monaro, which is the car I learned to drive in, but it had huge wheels on it like a monster truck.

Michael Ulman Being in Sydney, I felt like a rock star. They gave us a car; they gave us an allowance. I was hanging out, telling people at the bar as much as I could tell them: “Oh, I’m here for three months working on Mad Max.” And people were like, “Holy shit, dude!”

George Miller To hold a film like this together, one of the obligations of the director is to come up with very, very comprehensive strategies. One of the key strategies in the design was that everything has to be created out of found objects repurposed.

Colin Gibson There’s a moment in the race of the War Rig where Charlize is supposed to lock the accelerator on so she can swing out through the side door and begin shooting. I decided to send to America for an old shoe-size measurer that you used to see in the shoe stores in the old days, where kids would put their feet in them and wind up and down that little clicker to find out exactly how fat and long your hoof was. I thought that was a fantastic idea because it does indeed work like an accelerator: You can pump it up and down, but it also has locks. It was a great little shorthand for how to take something totally out of context and repurpose it for battle.

Lisa Thompson (set decorator) Colin had an amazing ability to pick something up, turn it upside down, twist it, and say, “Oh my goodness, wouldn’t it be fantastic to shoot that at someone?”

Matt Boug Colin made a point of coming over to me as the newbie to explain the ethos: Every single thing in the film had to have three or more functions. I ended up making this leather-wrapped tool kit that you would find in your car when you have to change a tire, and in it, one of the main pieces was a large crowbar. I’d also turned it into kind of a religious icon, like a big cross, as well as a weapon that you could swing and do some damage with. So those were the three functions: You could fix a car with it, attack somebody with it, or hang it on the mantelpiece as a beautiful object.

George Miller Our mantra that all the designers had was that just because it’s the wasteland, it doesn’t mean that people can’t make beautiful things. I’ve noticed that there’s an aesthetic with these postapocalyptic movies and games in which people tend to make it look like a junkyard. If you think about it, you can go to some of the most impoverished places in the world and people take a bit of wire or a Coke can and make the most beautiful toys. Even the Paleolithics made those beautiful cave drawings.

Matt Boug Colin also had this thing at Villawood that we called the boneyard. It was a whole bunch of wrecked vintage cars and trucks piled up out the back, and he said to us, “There is where you get your materials from. You go out in the boneyard and find what you need to build out there.” We weren’t allowed to go down to the local hardware store and buy something specific that we needed, we had to go and salvage it ourselves.

Colin Gibson Basically, we found things that we thought were beautiful enough to salvage, or at least to tickle at some futuristic apocalyptic to think, I wonder what that was? What did they use it for? And now I’m going to repurpose it for war. So all that flotsam and jetsam that washed up at the end of the world, we put it to new and slightly brutal use.

Mark Natoli (panel beater) You might’ve brought a Cadillac in and took the body off because that’s all you need, and then all the chassis and everything else went out the back into the boneyard. Everything there was basically the pickings for the boys to build weapons or to put stuff on motorcycles.

Michael Ulman There were massive, massive amounts of junk. I love junk! I get a woody when I go to the junkyards.

Dane Hallett They went to an abandoned piggery and purchased all of the shit there—bolt throwers, cleavers. And one time, a crate full of fire extinguishers turned up. A crate of them! We’d attack it and turn it into a whole bunch of different shit.

Michael Ulman There were no rules: Make whatever freaking weapon you want, and we’ll put it in the weapon bin—axes and tomahawks and guns and things. You’d take a table-saw blade, cut it in half, then attach that to a stick and now you’ve got a pointy, weird ax.

George Miller You’d see a steering wheel put together with dolls’ heads and all sorts of junk and repurposed. It’s basically found art.

Colin Gibson The design process was to design them the way they would. Take salvage, put it together, fetishize it, and give it the most power it could possibly have because you are then sending it off to do glorious battle in the wasteland against other vehicles, other men, and what’s become a fairly terrifying nature.

Matt Boug During my workday, the first thing would be to go out and scavenge and find some cool stuff to add to my project that I was working on. Because there were other guys out there doing the same, you’d have to be quick about it: If you find something cool, you cut it off the car and you hide it under your bench because you don’t want anyone else to see it. It’s like I’m competing against the guy next to me to make the coolest motorbike using only the stuff in the boneyard.

Dane Hallett If you really got the spirit of it, then you were allowed to go nuts, man. It was inspirational.

George Miller Often you see unmotivated designs that look cool but don’t have a lot of function. In this case, everything had to be very, very organic and you had to see its antecedents. Every prop had to have a backstory.

Matt Boug I remember finding a big roll of wire and going, Well, what would one of the Vuvalini have done with it? I ended up knitting out of electrical wire a cover for the Vuvalini’s fuel tank. I was really proud of that one because it added an extra layer of protection to the fuel tank, but it was also an aesthetic thing which made it look loved and cared for, like a tea cozy.

George Miller Everything had multiple purposes. The Immortan’s mask was basically a therapeutic mask to get filtered air, but it also had to be part of his dominance hierarchy. Had to look fierce, had to be intimidating. Furiosa’s arm was a prosthetic arm but it, too, had to have a very high functional quality and look fearsome.

Peter Pound That was one of those first ideas that George had, even in the very early days, that Furiosa has her left arm severed below the elbow. She made that arm herself because she’s an engineer and modified it and refined it as she grew older.

Tom Hardy Arguably one of the fucking coolest female leads ever and she’s an amputee.

Mark Sexton That was very much born of trying to get her to feel like a reflection of Max. Max has got a leg with the brace on it, so she had to have a damaged limb. You couldn’t have it be another leg, so to a certain degree, it would have to be an arm.

Matt Boug I like the fact that George doesn’t focus on it—it wasn’t some kind of weapon, it was a functional replacement. It’s respectful to people with disabilities in the sense that it shouldn’t be made a big deal. It’s not some kind of freaky, weird thing to have lost an arm, it’s just a matter of fact in life.

Charlize Theron I absolutely loved that. George shared the prequel script with me and said, “This will just be good backstory for you to understand where Furiosa comes from,” and in that story, there’s an explanation of how she lost her arm. Maybe because I read that, we never really talked about it, which is so fucking refreshing. I had to learn how to fight without an arm and that was challenging, but it’s interesting how nobody ever went, “Isn’t that weird?” Everybody just embraced it, and it makes you wonder why we don’t do that more.

Matt Boug Colin gave me two drawings to make the arm. One was a sketch of Furiosa by Peter Pound, and the other was an image of a man who was involved in the Hutu-Tutsi conflict in Rwanda, had lost his arm, and had this rudimentary strap-on cigarette holder with a pincer that he smoked with. He said, “These are your references, off you go.”

I found a pair of dental pliers used for extracting teeth in an old junk shop that eventually ended up being in the final design—they had beautiful handles that looked a little bit like bones. My job with the arm, ultimately, was to mash all these ideas together that had been developed over a long period of time and to be the mediator between them all: “Okay, this is George’s idea for the arm, this is Colin’s idea for the arm.” Finally, when Charlize got involved as well, I was trying to get all these things and crush them into one object that everyone was happy with.

P. J. Voeten For a long time, there was a big push not to have that arm, because they kept saying it was going to cost too much. We could never believe the numbers, because I was watching Robert Rodriguez’s movie where she had the fake leg [Planet Terror] and I thought, Well, if those relatively low-budget films can do that, I’m sure that we can do one arm!

Matt Boug During the first fitting with Charlize, I was incredibly nervous. There had been a few fittings of other arms with her before, and they hadn’t gone very well—she hadn’t been happy with the design, or there’d been problems. There was a sense of foreboding over this meeting because it was kind of at the point where if Charlize didn’t like this arm, then maybe they would have gone down the green-screen route and done the whole arm as digital replacement. And I know that George and Colin both really wanted to do something for real.

I remember the pressure, and then I was on my knees in front of Charlize, attaching the arm, and she was looking down at me. We finally get it all on and she’s looking at the arm and moving it around, and she goes, “This is totally badass!” What a sense of relief! It was awesome that she was really into it.

* * *

Another centerpiece prop made at Villawood was the electric guitar for the Doof Warrior, a wild character from Immortan Joe’s armada who played earsplitting, flame-spitting rock and roll to rally the War Boys.

* * *

Joshua Horowitz (journalist, MTV News) How do you come up with the Doof Warrior? What combination of ideas do you arrive at to get a guy in a red onesie with a guitar that shoots flames? It’s the ultimate example of these batshit ideas that work against all odds.

Karen Han (journalist, Slate) The idea that there’s this guy that they keep around just because he can rock out so hard . . . I love that!

George Miller He came to some degree to distill the nature of Fury Road: kind of wacky but rooted in some sort of reality. He was the equivalent of the drummer or the bugler, with his electric guitar.

Michael Ulman After a month at Villawood, I was sitting there like, “What do you want me to build next?” And then Colin came up to me and he said, “Do you want to make the guitar?” I was like, “Hell yeah, I want to make the guitar!”

Matt Boug Michael found all the key pieces that are in the final guitar and put them together into the shape of a guitar. He built this really beautiful sculpture.

Michael Ulman They were like, “Okay, you have three stipulations. It has to blow flames, it has to have two necks, and it has to look like a sick-ass weapon.” The body of the guitar is a white porcelain bedpan that you poop in when you’re laying down. I saw that at one of the flea markets and immediately, I was like, “That’s what I want as the body.” Then I cut it and put in a French horn inside. George was so excited about that. He was like, “It totally looks like the inside of someone’s stomach.”

Matt Boug Michael had taken care of the aesthetics and then it was now my job to take care of the functionality. For the flamethrower, the whammy bar was connected to the gas jet and we had a wonderful special effects department who helped me with that. But the actual music part was tricky.

Colin Gibson This is a good time for me to admit failure. We built the guitar, we had it strung, and I operated it a couple of times on top of the truck. It shot flames, it looked beautiful, it had sixty or so moving parts. I was very, very proud of it and then George came to visit and said, “I’m really looking forward to hearing it play.” For some reason, I hadn’t imagined that when we were out in the middle of the desert with thirty-six V-8s rolling, we would actually need the guitar to make sound.

Michael Ulman So Matt had to retrofit mine and make it work.

Matt Boug I’m a huge Queen fan and I remember reading an article that Brian May wrote about building his own guitar, so I tried to come up with a plan. I ended up building a chassis, kind of like in a car, for the structure of the guitar, and then wrapped all Michael’s pieces around the chassis and bolted it all together. Getting all the distances right and all the angles was a tricky project, and because of the way it all kind of came together, I counted at least two hundred pieces to make the guitar. A very difficult prop to make, but obviously worthwhile.

Michael Ulman The guy who played the guitar said it was the most uncomfortable guitar to play. That’s probably why they added the bungee cord because it was, like, eighty pounds. Form over function sometimes, you know?

iOTA (Coma, the Doof Warrior) It is the shittest guitar I’ve ever had the misfortune to have hanging in front of me.

Michael Ulman I say to people, “Oh, did you see Mad Max 4? Did you see that guitar?” They’re like, “That was my favorite fucking part,” and I’m like, “I made that guitar.” People’s mouths drop all day long. It’s the greatest feeling.

Chapter 9

Witness Me

By the time Mad Max: Fury Road got off the ground again, George Miller had been envisioning the movie in his head for over a decade. To bring those visions to life, he would need an incredible crew to serve as his eyes on set.

Miller intended to shoot the movie with cinematographer Dean Semler, who had filmed The Road Warrior and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (not to mention Dances with Wolves, which had won him an Oscar). But Fury Road was a different beast than Miller’s previous Mad Max movies, and its challenges would require some very creative thinking.

In the years since Miller had made his last live-action movie, Hollywood had begun to transition away from blockbusters shot on film: Now, digital cameras like the Arri Alexa were all the rage, and many blockbusters were using IMAX or 3-D cameras to really make their images pop. But a complicated desert shoot would test even the most high-end units, and Miller still needed to find trusted lieutenants to operate his A camera (the rig that handles most of the filming) and B camera (used for off-angle and pickup shots).

To assemble a camera crew and find the right equipment to shoot the movie, Miller continued his unconventional audition process.

* * *

Mark Goellnicht (camera operator, A camera) This is one of the most fascinating stories of the movie, and I don’t think I’ll ever go through this ever again in my entire career. Dean was keen for me to do the movie and be the main camera operator, and he said to me, “Look, George is very particular, and he’s anxious that whoever comes on this journey with us has to be the right person.” He really didn’t want to get out in the middle of the desert and be stuck with someone that was not quite the right fit because you can’t just pick up the phone and order another operator.

So, I thought I’d meet George and he’d interview me like it’s a normal thing, and they said, “Well, no. It’s actually going to be a two-hour block where he wants to audition you, and the way we’re going to audition you is that we’re going to put you in a soundstage with the War Rig mocked up.”

Andrew AJ Johnson (camera operator, B camera) I thought it was a joke and then I got an email saying the auditions were next Tuesday, along with a call sheet.

P. J. Voeten George was conscious of the fact that he was never going to be close to the actors. He was never going to be in that space, just by the nature of it, and he wanted immense trust in the camera operators.

George Miller It’s not a typical movie where you’re blocking in a room. They’re sitting in a vehicle for the most part, and you don’t have the ability to actually be next to them. You’re watching on monitor.

Andrew AJ Johnson I went rocking up to this audition, and there’s literally four seats—it’s that awkward thing where the other guys are people who you are friends with, but you never normally meet these people going up for the same jobs. But I’m sitting there and feel super awkward.

Mark Goellnicht We were in this warehouse space in the back of Fox Studios in Sydney, and they had a big grid of fans going with massive amounts of desert dust, as well as these super powerful, bright lights to sort of emulate that we were out in this hot desert with no air-conditioning. The front cabin of the War Rig was a mock-up onstage, and they threw me in this situation where I was in the War Rig with the five Wives, played by stand-ins.

Andrew AJ Johnson The only reason it went really well for me is that when I got the call sheet, I googled all these stand-ins’ names and luckily, they ended up being with modeling and casting agencies! I looked at their photos and memorized their names and their faces so when I got in there, I knew, “That’s Nikki, that’s Karen, and Dave, can you move to your left a bit?”

Mark Goellnicht There was a camera crew there that was shooting everything that was going on but mostly shooting me to show George what I’m doing. I was sweating, completely freaking out, going to Dean, “What do I do?” He said, “He’ll tell you what to do. It’ll be fine.” I had headphones on so I could speak to the crew, and then another headset that had George’s direct communication. George was in another room—he wanted to see how I would relay directions and changes that he wants on the fly because I might be the only person that can fit in a vehicle at any one time.

Ricky Schamburg (first assistant camera) It was the most unusual process I’ve ever witnessed, and it’s funny because we weren’t actually recording the shots that these guys were doing. George was looking at the way the operators interacted with the actors, because the original concept, which we kind of strayed from a bit, was that George was going to direct everything remotely from a pod.

Andrew AJ Johnson In his brain, it would just be the camera operator in the cab as these trucks are going across the desert and then he would be directing from another command vehicle where they have a remote video, almost like a TV broadcast.

Mark Goellnicht The noise was ridiculous from the grid of fans because he knew that during shooting, the vehicles would be really, really noisy. And what he created on that stage still wasn’t as bad as what was in real life! George would be giving certain directions and then seeing how I would react, and this went on for two hours. By this stage I’m sweating bullets, absolutely freaking out, thinking, I’m not dealing with this very well.

Andrew AJ Johnson I did a couple of versions and then George said, “AJ, just do whatever you want.” Then I was lying down on the bottom of the War Rig and doing some crazy 360 shot that he ended up loving.

Mark Goellnicht The two hours passed, and then he had a chat and then that was it. I went, Oh my God, I’ve completely failed that, and then the next person came in and they did the same thing again. That happened all day.

Andrew AJ Johnson Mark and I got chosen in the end after that little process. I’ve got a lot of actor friends who go on about how auditions are really hard—you never know if you got the gig. After doing this audition process, now I understand what they go through every week!

* * *

Miller had settled on his key camera operators, but a new challenge presented itself: Late into preproduction, his cinematographer Dean Semler pulled out of the movie.

* * *

Doug Mitchell Dean’s situation was such that physically, he just wasn’t going to be able to do it.

P. J. Voeten I rang Doug and said, “Dean’s out,” and I drove from Fox to Kennedy Miller studios, which was about ten, fifteen minutes in the car. By the time I arrived, Doug had John Seale on the line.

* * *

Seale was a legendary Australian cinematographer with a lengthy Hollywood résumé including Dead Poets Society, Rain Man, and the first Harry Potter film. Even better, he had plenty of experience shooting movies set in the desert—he’d even won an Oscar for it, since he was the director of photography on The English Patient. There was just one hitch: He had been retired for years.

* * *

John Seale (director of photography) I had accepted the fact that I wouldn’t work anymore. It was a personal choice—I was getting lots of lovely offers and it was very difficult to start to wind down, but I’ve done sixty-odd feature films and documentaries and commercials, and I was living on airplanes. All my children were brought up wonderfully by my wife while I was away, but I missed so much of their lives, and I wanted to be there a lot more and enjoy them and my grandchildren. You do a film like Harry Potter and you’re away for eleven months, door to door. That’s a killer for families! But then out of the blue, Doug Mitchell rang, and I could sense straightaway in his voice that there was something going on.

Doug Mitchell I phoned him up and ran it by him and I could hear silence. I realized he might have to go over and speak to Louise, his wife, just to work out whether it was vaguely a possibility.

John Seale I knew they were in preproduction in Sydney, and I knew it would be an iconic movie. I could sense there was a lot of urgency in that phone call, because I was given a very short amount of time to make a decision and they needed to move very quickly on somebody.

George Miller I’d worked with Johnny Seale on Lorenzo’s Oil back in the early nineties, and I’ll never forget that one of the grips or gaffers made a terrible mistake on set very early on and Johnny went up to him and whispered something in his ear and the guy left set. Later that night, we went back to the big hotel we were staying at in Pittsburgh, and in the darkest corner of the bar, there was Johnny talking to this person, having a very intense but quiet conversation, putting him straight.

I realized what he had done: He did not humiliate the guy on set, he didn’t shout at him, he just asked him quietly to leave the set and then he corrected him that night, away from everybody else. Now, I’ve been on sets where there was a display made of checking somebody, but not with Johnny Seale. That guy returned to set, and he was so devoted to the project and to Johnny. He would do anything, because Johnny managed it so that in no way did he lose his dignity.

The people that come around Johnny are so devoted to him, and it’s because of that graceful behavior. And the other thing I have to say is part of that relaxed discipline is that he’s hilarious. He’s got a very dry wit and it’s so lovely on the set. It defuses any tension.

John Seale I thought about it, and the next morning, I rang Doug back and said, “Doug, I’d love to do it. Can I read a script?” He said, “Ah, well, we don’t have a script. Come into the office, and we have these storyboards.” They started in the top left corner of the conference room and ended in the bottom right corner of the far wall. I couldn’t make head or tail of it, so I gave up. I thought, They’ve been in preproduction for ten years, they know what they’re doing. Let’s just go make it.

Andrew AJ Johnson John is the most down-to-earth Aussie. He’s the kind of guy you could meet at the pub and have a chat about anything.

George Miller One day I said, “Johnny, how’d you get in the business?” Well, he started off as a jackaroo, which is where you go to a distant, vast cattle ranch and basically become the equivalent of a cowboy. Then he happened to get a job with the national broadcaster and one day they needed an extra cameraman. He picked it up, and that was his career. Plus, he’s a highly skilled sailor, so he’s got a life outside of all this.

Mark Goellnicht He was the perfect guy for shooting this movie because he gets really involved. A lot of cinematographers in his role, especially in a movie as big as this, would’ve maybe stood back in the tent and directed the camerawork from there. John was hands-on, operating B camera and on set all the time. For a guy who turned seventy while he was doing that movie, he was more fit than a lot of the thirty-something crew members that were on the shoot.

P. J. Voeten John inherited Dean’s camera crew and the grips and electrics. It was hard for him. We’d all talk in shorthand because we knew the film inside out, yet he had to come in and suddenly jump in the deep end.

John Seale By jumping on it, I accepted all the problems Dean had. I’d never done digital shooting before in my life, and now suddenly I’ve got digital cameras and they’re 3-D.

Iain Smith (producer) A lot of money and time was spent building 3-D rigs for the shoot, and George was very keen on trying to do that.

George Miller Look, for me, cinema has to be as immersive as possible. I always loved the immersive quality of 3-D.

Colin Gibson Even in 2000, George was interested in doing a 3-D version.

P. J. Voeten This was before Avatar, before the 3-D craze. We were going to have anaglyph 3-D [with red-and-blue glasses] and he wanted that whole storm to be 3-D.

George Miller There would be certain cues in the movie: If you saw Max put on his goggles, you put on your goggles.

Mark Sexton And then at the end of the storm, as everything goes quiet, you end on the frame of the glasses off beside his head half-buried in the sand, a visual cue for everybody to take them back off.

P.J. Voeten By the time the movie got going again, 3-D was everywhere, and the mantra was, “We have to shoot it in 3-D.” I kept saying, “Why can’t we do it in post?” Everything I’d heard about 3-D shooting at that point sounded like a nightmare, and the cameras were so big.

Colin Gibson I went to look at the 360-degree systems in L.A. It would have lasted, I don’t know, about a minute and a half in the desert?

P. J. Voeten George’s mantra with 3-D was the camera has got to fit through the windscreen of the truck. I kept saying, “But there’s never a shot boarded where we have to do that, George,” but George insisted it had to be a small camera package. We spent easily two years of our lives coming up with an off-the-shelf 3-D camera.

John Seale George and his team were building their own 3-D cameras, which I thought was amazing. That’s filmmaking at its damnedest!

* * *

It’s also filmmaking at its trickiest: Back in 2010, even the best 3-D cameras were still unwieldy and temperamental. Could something better really be built from scratch? The production brought on Ricky Schamburg, a camera operator who had worked on Baz Luhrmann’s 3-D adaptation of The Great Gatsby, to determine whether shooting Fury Road in 3-D would be feasible or folly.

* * *

Ricky Schamburg George wanted to invent his own 3-D system and I thought, Wow, I should really talk to them because I feel like I could have some input into that. Then P.J. rang me up and said, “You know a lot about 3-D and I’ve got this project. It’s top secret.” I said, “It’s not so top secret.” Then he said, “Well, we’d like you to come on board, unofficially, as a cameraman.”

To come on board as a 3-D technician was the most exciting day of my life and then, instantly, the most deflating day in my life because you’ve got to make this thing work. It was amazing what they did, but I always use the analogy that if you want to invent a Formula 1 racing car in your garage, it would be quite a difficult thing to do. There are companies with lots of money around the world that have spent years doing that and spearheading state-of-the-art technology.

Andrew Jackson (visual effects supervisor) In the intervening years, the Alexa was released, and the quality of the images was so good compared to the cameras that we were using.

Ricky Schamburg The problem for me was that George’s team were always just a little bit behind and because the project kept being delayed, that technology was constantly being superseded. They were constantly trying to adapt it and fix it, and it grew out of control. I was like, It’s amazing that you invented this thing out of nuts and bolts in the garage and it actually worked. The problem is, you’re not going to win the race and we need to go out there like we’re race car drivers. We need to take the best stuff to make this movie, and unfortunately, we can’t do it with what you got.

Petrina Hull There’s no way that camera could have worked in that environment. There was a real concern about how it would’ve slowed things down.

Andrew Jackson We had a test day in Sydney where we mounted the 3-D camera on a helicopter and it had an umbilical cord connected to this massive cooling and power-supply box, where water was running through tubes to keep the camera cool enough to operate. The helicopter was all ready to go, the rotors were spinning, and there was a shout of, “We need another bucket of ice!” They needed ice to get the temperature down enough that the camera would operate. It wasn’t even the summer, it wasn’t even hot, and we were on the verge of heading into the desert to use this camera on a full-on feature film shoot. That was the moment where we all knew.

Iain Smith The first effect of that would be extending the schedule to a point where Warners would say they couldn’t afford it.

Ricky Schamburg It was literally a couple of weeks before we were due to go and everyone was like, “What should we do? Should we push on with the 3-D thing or not?” I stood firm on saying, “Look, I don’t think we can make the movie George wants with that stuff.” It was a heavy decision because a whole bunch of people that were George’s best friends and colleagues had been working on this thing for ten, fifteen years. But those are the decisions that someone has to make to get the movie made.

George Miller And P.J. said, “Oh, there’s this edge arm thing you’ll fall completely in love with,” this extraordinary vehicle with a crane on it which allows us to put the camera rather dynamically wherever we really want to. He said, “You’ll want to do the whole movie with it, even the interior scenes,” and it was true. By the time we finished the film, we had two of them, and we would not have been able to achieve that if we made it in 3-D.

P. J. Voeten Thank God. It would have been a totally different film had we not done that.

Ricky Schamburg We had to brush it aside, go out and pick up the new Alexa camera. In a couple of weeks, we put it together.

John Seale When we swung over to 2-D, we heard the studio said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, we want 3-D.”

Mark Goellnicht Warner Bros. still really wanted to release it 3-D and they saw that as a good income earner at that time. George said, “Well, we’ll do it in post. If you want it, you pay for it.”

George Miller That is the only sensible way to do them, anyway.

Ricky Schamburg John and I talk about that every now and then and dig up the old photos of the old 3-D stuff: “Imagine if we had actually tried to do it that way. Would we still be shooting day one?”

Chapter 10

“We Were Basically Defeated”

The cast was set, the cameras were secured, and the guitar could shred and shoot flames at the same time. At the beginning of 2010, it looked like Mad Max: Fury Road was finally ready to shoot, and a June start date was set. Still, for many of the crew members who were still stinging from the last-minute collapse of the film in 2003, it was hard to shake the feeling that something could go wrong yet again.

“I was skeptical that it would ever happen and so, by the time it did come to fruition, I always expected the worst,” said Margaret Sixel, Miller’s wife and the editor of Fury Road. “Actually, I guess that was good training for this film.”

At least some new steps had been taken to keep costs in check: Instead of filming in expensive and remote Namibia, as Miller had intended in 2003, the revamped Fury Road would now shoot in Broken Hill, Australia. It was a closer-to-home location that Miller knew well from filming The Road Warrior there in 1980, and by staying in Australia, the production would save on travel expenses and be eligible for significant government rebates.

But there was still plenty of work to be done to get the film’s elaborate stunts up to snuff, and Miller’s attention remained split between Fury Road and his animated sequel Happy Feet Two, which was racing to make a late-2011 release date. As Fury Road’s key players scrambled to get everything into place, literal storm clouds began to appear on the horizon.

* * *

Charlize Theron The roughest moment was when we were in Australia, two weeks away from shooting, and they pulled the plug on us.

P. J. Voeten George was doing Happy Feet Two, and we were prepping Fury Road in Broken Hill at the same time—the two films were going at once.

George Miller I don’t make many films, but I have a great admiration for the likes of Steven Spielberg, who often makes two films more or less at the same time and they’re often great films. I asked him about it, and he said something interesting: “One is a holiday from the other.” You can become obsessive with just one film, but if your mind has to go from one to the other, you can call it a palate cleaner, if they’re different enough.

Chris deFaria George was going to have monitors on the set of Fury Road where he would be approving animation of Happy Feet. That drove Warner Bros. crazy. The studio would say, “No, we need to declare right now that we’re not going to do that,” and I would say, “You don’t need to declare anything. All you’re doing is going out there picking a fight.” A lot of the production of Fury Road was about unnecessary fights.

Mark Sexton George has done this twice: In 2003, he thought he was going to shoot Mad Max in Namibia during the day, and he was going to direct Happy Feet at night—he very much gave the impression that he didn’t think it was going to be so hard. And then, when we were doing Happy Feet Two, George thought he’d do the same thing again. Having done one CG animated feature and seeing how bloody hard it was, he thought he could do bloody Mad Max and Happy Feet Two again at the same time!

George Miller Well, they’re two different things. Animation is the complete flip side of a live-action movie, particularly an action movie. Depending on the stage of it, animation is very cerebral, there’s no real pressure. It’s all CG, it’s working with one person at a time—not a massive crew, even though the work filters out to many animators—and it’s something that is very iterative. You’re looking at something and you’re making adjustments until it gets to what you hope is its optimum stage.

Chris deFaria George and Doug have a vision for this, and there’s no point in telling them it can’t be done, right? In fact, the best way to work with these guys is to support their idea all the way. Half the time, it’s going to surprise you because the thing you thought could never get done, the thing you thought would never work, works. And the other half of the time . . . well, they’ll figure it out, right?

P. J. Voeten So we got the vehicles up to Broken Hill and we were doing testing. We were probably eighteen weeks out and that was the middle of that year. I don’t know if I’m getting into trouble here, but we got shut down so George could focus on Happy Feet. We were going to be suspended or put on hiatus until George had delivered Happy Feet Two. They suddenly went, “You need to focus on that film because you’re splitting your time and it’s not so good.”

Mark Sexton Given what Fury Road ended up being, yeah, that would have been an absolute fucking disaster if we’d been doing two films.

Iain Smith I’ll put it this way: There was no way that you could shoot anything else alongside Fury Road. From a production and creative standpoint, it was a humongously challenging prospect.

George Miller Yeah. I’m glad it never happened that way.

P. J. Voeten So then I argued very strongly that we take the vehicles to Broken Hill. I said, “Well, if we’re going to make this film, let’s do the testing now so we can learn from it and we can use this time—even though we’re not funded—to actually work out what we want to do. The one thing you can never get back in filmmaking is time, so let’s do this now rather than shut down and then do the testing.” So, we took the vehicles up to Broken Hill and we did two weeks of testing of all the vehicles. We did every key shot of the film in terms of the camera positions, from a rigging and camera point of view.

Colin Gibson We put in an airstrip and decided to take the vehicles out for a run. We probably had sixty-five to seventy vehicles built, and a lot of the weaponry set up, and had outfitted about two dozen stunt guys who were in training.

P. J. Voeten We had the War Rig and Gigahorse in Broken Hill, and we were testing the polecats. I kept sending George clips, and everything was black and white because I wanted to make the film in black and white.

Jon Iles (“Ace”) And of course, the day we left, it rained and turned into a garden.

* * *

In 2010, Broken Hill was beset by superstorms and experienced its second-highest season of rain in 121 years. Though the stunt tests there had already been completed, plans to shoot the entirety of Fury Road in Broken Hill were suddenly in doubt.

* * *

Doug Mitchell While we were doing all this and laying down the cash to build through preproduction, the weather pattern changed, and it rained and rained.

George Miller It rained at Broken Hill for the first time in fifteen years, and what was red, flat earth was now basically a flower garden. We were supposed to shoot in some salt lakes in southern Australia and they now had water in them, and reeds, with great flocks of pelicans and fish.

Margaret Sixel By the time I got there, you were knee-deep in purple flowers.

P. J. Voeten There was a farmer up there going, “I’ve lived on this all my life. There’s plants I’ve never seen.” It was unbelievable.

Jon Iles And George’s mouth is hanging down going, “What the hell? How’s this possible?”

Doug Mitchell We were basically defeated, because how the fuck are we going to shoot it there? It was meant to be a world denuded of vegetation, and you can’t have someone shoot a film and try to rub it out in CG. It was like, Okay, we’re screwed.

Petrina Hull There was so much activity and adrenaline and for it to cease through some natural occurrence that you have absolutely no control over, it’s one of those really sobering moments where you’re going, This is a decision that is being made for us, not by us. You have no choice but to come to terms with it.

Colin Gibson So we put everything into storage up there and slunk away yet again with our tails between our legs. You’ve put a shitload of thought, love, care, and imagination into it and built an awful lot of three-dimensional objects. It was hard to let it go.

Petrina Hull It was quite devastating. I remember the calls and the emails that George had to make to the cast and people didn’t believe it. Movies get pushed all the time, but the fact that it wasn’t going because of a flood, I mean, it sounds ridiculous.

Riley Keough I cried, I was super heartbroken. It was the first time I had experienced a big push on a film, and I was like, Is it really because of the weather? Am I fired? What’s going on?

Mark Sexton How the film was going to be done was another matter entirely. At that stage, P. J. Voeten was very, very keen on making it as much blue screen as possible and replacing environments. It would’ve been a very different execution because they were literally talking about shooting it on airstrips and then replacing the backgrounds.

P. J. Voeten I looked at trying to shoot the whole film in an airport and we’d just use the runway. There was an airport in Sydney that had just closed down, in fact.

George Miller But to their credit, Warner Bros. said, “Well, let’s wait a year or eighteen months and see whether or not it starts drying up in Broken Hill.” And we saw that it wasn’t.

Doug Mitchell You realize this isn’t going to happen, yet again: Damn, we had a little light at the end of the tunnel.

* * *

Another casualty of the rain delays was a second film, which had been labored on mostly in secret: In the years since Miller and Nico Lathouris had written a full screenplay exploring Furiosa’s backstory, Miller had given the script to the Japanese director Mahiro Maeda to turn into an animated prequel to Fury Road.

* * *

P. J. Voeten The original plan was to release the anime and the game before the movie so they could reintroduce people to these worlds through different media. There’s a lot of imagery that people would have seen in an animated form and think, Oh, you could never do this in live action, and then they would see the live-action stuff on Fury Road and hopefully be blown away even more.

Mark Sexton George had this very well-respected anime director, Maeda-san, and they came in and showed George some magnificent illustrations. This is very much before the looks of anything had been solidified, so they started working with what Furiosa was going to look like way before Charlize Theron was cast. It was a very stylized Japanese anime execution of a Mad Max film and there was some beautiful stuff. And they worked fast, because they wanted to get it done.

Petrina Hull But there was so much happening already between Happy Feet Two and Fury Road. The anime had to be put on pause because there was nowhere to go with that at that particular time.

Mark Sexton To a certain degree, they went far faster than George ever thought they would. They had the bit between their teeth and were going for it and George went, Oh, wait a minute. Hang on, I haven’t had a chance to really think about this and that. You’re going to be done before we’re even started.

P. J. Voeten He couldn’t really have all these fingerprints over that anime at the same time as making Fury Road. Then I think he realized that was such a good story it would have been a missed opportunity as an anime.

* * *

Much of 2011 was spent in a holding pattern as Miller raced to finish Happy Feet Two, while producer Doug Mitchell explored contingency plans now that Broken Hill was too verdant to stage Fury Road’s wasteland chase.

As they waited, Tom Hardy went off to make The Dark Knight Rises, Charlize Theron shot Snow White and the Huntsman, and Nicholas Hoult and Zoë Kravitz joined X-Men: First Class. All the while, the cast and crew wondered if Miller and Mitchell could find a way to keep Fury Road from collapsing once more.

* * *

George Miller There are still films I grieve a bit. This has happened to me several times, and I daresay it’s happened to every filmmaker. Doug Mitchell said, “There’s so much money invested in it already, it’s carrying such a load because this is the second time it’s happened, that it will have to be made one way or another.” And you have that faith.

Colin Gibson There’s a process with avalanches: Once it reaches a certain amount of mass, it’s going to crash down and land somewhere.

Guy Norris My conviction got stronger in the sense that we had a great story to tell and by hook or by crook, we were going to get it out there. We would joke about it, saying that we’d take all the vehicles out ourselves with our handicams and shoot our own version of it.

Mark Sexton At that stage, it was like, If it doesn’t happen, it’s a crime now.

Guy Norris Many, many other directors would have said, “Look, I’m done. Let’s put it away.” But when George has a story to tell, he wants to get that story out. And again, it was the tenaciousness of Doug not letting it go.

Belinda Johns “Tenacity” is an understatement. Doug’s ultimate goal is to protect George and that vision.

George Miller We call Doug Mitchell, my producing partner, the Honey Badger. You know about the honey badger? He won’t let go. And he looks like a honey badger!

Doug Mitchell I do have the ability to never give up easily. At the time, it may have looked like a dead turkey, but it was always a great film.

Kelly Marcel (writer) He’s very much the gatekeeper of George’s world, and very much the protector of George and George’s vision. They’re a team, those two. They talk about the woman behind the great man—he’s the man behind the great man.

Petrina Hull He’s incredibly focused and strategic in what he does, and he knows how to play the cards of that game. It’s such a particular thing, that director-producer relationship, when you’ve partnered together to form a company. Their professional life is inextricably linked to one another.

Dean Hood If it was anyone else producing it, the film wouldn’t have been made.

Doug Mitchell Together, we sort of lobbied the concept that because we couldn’t shoot on an Australian desert, we had to find another that was appropriate. Which eventually led us to Namibia.

George Miller We had already gone to Namibia a decade earlier, where it never rains.

Chris deFaria All along, George talked about how beautiful the sands in Namibia were, and there was no interest on anybody’s part to go there because it’s extremely difficult logistically and it would threaten the Australian rebate.

Doug Mitchell Somehow, I managed to get support from Screen Australia, even in spite of Warner execs saying this is a dead duck. With the help and approval of the Australian government, we could get the producer’s rebate carried with us to Namibia, the 40 percent on qualifying expenditure that was permitted legally through a small document called the Gallipoli clause.

Chris deFaria The studio very clearly said, “Look, we’re not going to go to Africa. That presents too much risk.” Doug Mitchell’s answer to that, more or less, was to put all the vehicles on a boat and send them to Africa, but he failed to tell the studio that before the boat left the port. I remember a studio executive going, “What the fuck are you fucking talking about? The cars are on a boat?” Doug goes, “Yeah, the cars are on a boat and that boat is going to Namibia.” It was hysterical, oh my God.

Kelly Marcel Doug doesn’t give any fucks. Zero, zero, zero fucks. You can’t fight with someone who doesn’t give a fuck if you’re not going to make their next movie or not. You have to be like, “I’m doing it.”

Chris deFaria What Doug was able to also do at the same time was find a way to ensure the Australian rebate if we met certain conditions. So, in some respects, the studio’s biggest argument for not going back to Namibia was pulled out from under them because Doug found a way to get that thing in place. But that meant that we had other practical considerations of going to Namibia and, of course, some budget implications as well.

Dean Hood We had to lease a freight ship that was two million U.S. dollars to load up 120 vehicles. Every piece of equipment that we would ever need for the whole film, we had to take with us.

Richard Hobbs (art director) I can’t begin to tell you how big an undertaking that was. On the ship, there were seventy-two containers full of stuff, and that didn’t even count the vehicles. These vehicles don’t fit on the backs of trucks, they don’t fit in a container. You have to build custom freight boxes to move just about all of it.

Adam Kuiper (key grip) I don’t believe we will get taken halfway across the world with that much equipment ever again.

Margaret Sixel When Doug said, “We’re gonna shift a hundred cars to Namibia,” I thought, No way. Seriously? The thing with Doug and George is that they will do things that few other people would do. It was kind of nuts to take all those people and all those vehicles to Namibia. I guess that’s George. He isn’t like other people, really—which is what I love. He will do things that other people would immediately put a stop to.

Colin Gibson In a way, I was secretly relieved, because we got to go back to the place I had originally envisioned it while George finished off Happy Feet.

* * *

After a hectic and troubled production, Happy Feet Two came out just under the wire at the end of 2011. Critics were cold to the sequel, which Miller had directed alongside Gary Eck and David Peers, and it mustered a surprisingly low opening weekend, netting only $21 million at the U.S. box office.

In the end, Happy Feet Two finished its worldwide run with $159 million, less than half of what the first film had made. Like Babe: Pig in the City, it was a follow-up that snuffed a franchise, and it came just as Miller was about to embark on his biggest sequel yet.

* * *

Mark Sexton He had two co-directors on Happy Feet Two and he was setting them up to do stuff while he was going to go off and do Fury Road. Happy Feet Two went further down the track of the two directors co-directing underneath George’s auspices and then George coming in and going, “Oh, wow, this was really bad. What can we do to fix it? Not much. Shit.”

By the end of our process on Happy Feet Two, George had dropped the ball so badly that I thought, I can’t see how he can do Fury Road in a way that’s going to be what we thought it was. He allowed a lot of people to go off and do their own thing on Happy Feet Two and it went to pieces. So, I have to admit, I was sitting there thinking, It would be a crime for Fury Road to not happen, while at the same time also thinking, But I don’t think George could make it anymore.

George knew he had to do the film, but I think he was terrified by the immense task he had in front of him as it became more and more real. And to a certain degree, he’d lost a lot of faith in himself. I’ve seen him do it twice. When Babe 2 came out, he went from being very sure to really questioning everything. And then Happy Feet Two was not received well—it was a terrible, awful movie. I’m obviously biased when I say that, but I’ve got nothing good to say about that film.

But I think George came out of that immensely questioning his own abilities and his own decision-making processes. George is an instinctive filmmaker whose decisions are bloody good most of the time, but he was off going, I don’t know whether I’m doing the right thing.

Chris deFaria He’s an extraordinary man, and he is capable of such singular focus. I don’t think the events around Happy Feet Two set him back. I think he moved forward.

P. J. Voeten He was happy to be distracted by the disappointment of Happy Feet Two with a new challenge of a film that we’re finally going to make.

George Miller Initially, when you prepare just one film, you put everything into it. It can be soul-crushing, but as time goes on, you get a little wiser and you find yourself working on a number of things and you know that this is a part of the process.

P. J. Voeten We were all good to go in February. And then George had his heart stent.

George Miller Before the film was starting, I found I had some coronary artery disease. I was getting a checkup before the movie, and I went to one of my old professors, a wonderful man called Ron Penny who’s a very eminent doctor here, and he said, “George, you’ve got to do something about your coronary arteries.” He referred me to another professor, David Muller, who worked at St. Vincent’s Hospital in the center of Sydney, where I had trained as an intern.

I had to have stents to my coronary arteries. I was lucky enough that I didn’t have any loss of heart muscle and I walked out of there in a way better shape than I went in. I doubt whether I would have got through the movie without them.

P. J. Voeten We got another push because George had his heart stent operation. We delayed three months—again, another blessing in disguise because the vehicles needed more work. They were built for Broken Hill conditions and not the dust in Namibia. So, in the vehicles department, they used every minute of the day that they got.

Dean Hood There were penalties to pay on the delays, because we were obviously pay-or-play on the major cast. It was part of the renegotiation, but the cast wanted to make the film, so they made space.

Charlize Theron I had come back from the first shutdown and started filing for adoption. I wasn’t sure when I would get a call and then, of course, George was like, “We’re making this movie,” and I’m like, Oh my God, my baby was just born. What the fuck am I doing? If it was anything other than Mad Max, I would have pulled out instantly, but I was willing to pack up. Jackson was seven weeks old, and I flew alone to the middle of Namibia with a newborn baby. I don’t think a lot of projects would have made me do that.

* * *

Nearly everything had gone wrong while attempting to mount Fury Road, but as the crew began to head to Namibia in advance of the film’s new production start date of June 26, 2012, Warner Bros. executives dealt the film another significant blow.

* * *

P. J. Voeten We had to cut four weeks out of the schedule. It was ridiculous.

Iain Smith When I looked at the plan that they had, I realized that it was never going to hold because they weren’t giving themselves enough days and the days they needed would have cost a huge amount of money. So there had to be a kind of rationalizing, which George really didn’t like, but he understood that this was the only way that we would get this show off the ground and into production.

Cory Watson He was really confronted with the choice of not making the film or slashing the production schedule by a third on the eve of production. And then they had to, on the fly, go about remapping how they would make this movie with a third less time, which is incredible when you think about it.

Iain Smith It was a step-by-step process of looking at everything in detail. What could we do without damaging his original vision? What could we shoot more efficiently? We went through thirty-five hundred storyboards to see how we could make it work for the money available.

George Miller I’m by no means a prolific filmmaker, but I know that when you’re taking on something with a high degree of difficulty, that’s going to be inevitable. What you’ve got to do is find that sort of neutral place in yourself, where you can judge what’s happening as dispassionately as you can.

Chris deFaria That’s what makes a great director, right? In the midst of all the pressure of a movie like Happy Feet Two not performing, this incredible pressure from the studio to not be in Namibia and to bring the budget down, and the practical issues associated with a movie where a director has to make huge decisions every five minutes, he just finds this calm in the middle of all that, stays incredibly focused, and gets through it. And he works tirelessly.

Very few people could have gotten through that period leading up to the shoot of the movie. And then there was the movie itself, of course.

Part II

Shoot to Thrill

Chapter 11

Preparing for War

If making a movie is like fighting a war, how do you ready yourself to go into battle? First, you must rally the troops. And on Fury Road, their numbers were legion, and their name was the War Boys.

Even before George Miller came to Namibia in mid-2012 to begin shooting Fury Road, a vast array of department heads, crew members, and stunt performers had already descended on Swakopmund—an eccentric city on the coast of Namibia that would house nearly everyone involved in the production—to build a fantasy world so real that the line between making a movie and inhabiting a brutal wasteland would soon begin to blur.

Nowhere was that immersive approach more evident than the film’s lived-in way of transforming stuntmen into zealous War Boys, ready to serve in Immortan Joe’s army with bare-chested, wild-eyed fervor. To summon their fighting spirit, a series of unconventional workshops were held by actress Nadia Townsend. A protégé of Fury Road dramaturg Nico Lathouris, Townsend was on the verge of turning thirty when she was sent to Swakopmund to lead dozens of young stuntmen in a series of unusual missions.

If Townsend could persuade these men to lower their guard and follow her, the lessons they’d learn would electrify the entire production.

* * *

Mick Roughan (stunt rigger) In the early days of rehearsals, the stunt performers would have to go to drama workshops. When you walked in, it would basically look like you were walking into a cult.

Matt Taylor (stunt driver) There was a young lady that they had hired, basically a drama teacher, to get those that were facing the camera into that War Boy spirit.

Nadia Townsend It came about because Nico needed someone to work with him, because there was going to be such a volume of work to do out there. I was dubious, because I wanted to actually do the work—I didn’t want to just be sitting there, having to stay silent. Nico had to stay in Sydney because they had to work on the script, so I ended up going there by myself for quite a few weeks before he and George arrived.

I knew that I was going to have two three-hour sessions a day. I had between twenty and thirty of these guys in a room by myself for a couple of weeks, and I had to come up with a program to work with them. My brief was these conversations with Nico and this portal that George created where he made all these videos of his thinking around the script, which was hours and hours of recorded videos of him talking.

My only other brief was that wherever we point the camera, it should be like a documentary—there’s authentic behavior occurring but tweaked, so it’s from another world.

Richard Norton (“The Prime Imperator”) A lot of people were cast who probably had very little acting experience, and they were being taught how to develop a mindset, how to build a backstory. Where did you grow up? What happened to your parents? Who do you love in this life? Who do you hate?

Nico Lathouris All those questions were designed to give the War Boys a sense of story. If you don’t examine the truth of everything, if you don’t break it down, then you’re going to end up with a cardboard-cutout movie.

Petrina Hull Particularly in a big shoot like that where there are so many practicalities and logistics that are being organized every day, it’s very easy to focus on just the nuts and bolts of organization. You can’t afford to be worried about, Why is my character saying this kind of stuff? But someone needs to keep that in check to make sure you’re telling the story underneath that you really want to tell.

Nico Lathouris I do not believe in rehearsing the actual script. It would be like rehearsing a football match—you can’t rehearse the actual match, but you can do all the prep. You can give them an experience that they can take with them when the camera’s rolling.

Nadia Townsend There was a lot of ritual, so they’d come in, shoes off, and we’d stand in a circle. The way that I saw it was that you had to create a brotherhood and ensemble that was guided by something greater than just wanting to be in this film. They had to be working kinesthetically, meaning they had to be working off body impulse, and they had to be connected by an idea of serving something greater than themselves, so we were connecting them to the idea of Immortan being this father figure.

Harrison Norris (stunt performer) Initially, they’d bring us to improvisational exhaustion. We’d be flailing around in these wild mosh pits where you’d be going in as what you thought your character was, and then you’d find new little connective tissue with each other in there. That became part of your War Boy’s narrative, in a surreal, disconnected way.

Mick Roughan At first, a lot of the guys were going, “Oh, why do I have to do this crap?”

Nadia Townsend I had to get their trust. Usually stunt guys are just asked to perform an exterior, and I was saying, “Connect to your feeling, because then that will translate to the way that you hold your ground in a stance. It will have a very different aesthetic.”

Stuart Williamson (stunt performer) They’re getting us to come face-to-face with each other, to actually cry for each other, because they made us think in our minds that the man in front of us is going to die soon. So, we have to basically fight for our last breath.

Harlan Norris (stunt performer) You’re trying to get into the mind of someone that’s half-dead out in the wilderness.

Stuart Williamson In the character’s mind frame, I’m not scared of death, so I’ll push it however far I can push it. I get myself so deep in tune with the character, I basically become lost.

Josh Helman The War Boys knew that their place was to basically martyr themselves and to be a part of this army which was constantly self-generating.

George Miller When we first wrote the screenplay in the late nineties, the War Boys were based to some degree on the kamikaze pilots, those young warriors who felt that if they died or sacrificed themselves bravely in war, in the interest of what they perceived as the common good, they would ascend to some warrior paradise. That’s existed throughout history—that was one of the ways in which young men were coerced into fighting passionately for their rulers. And of course, that’s exactly what 9/11 brought to the fore. So that was very striking to me.

Chris Patton (“Morsov”) You would think all these people were actors, but the majority of us were stunt guys that had never done acting in our life before that. But on camera, it seems so real, and that was due to these odd classes. We would say one word and the other person would say one word, and you’d do that for an hour, and at the time I was like, What are we doing? What is this for?

Nadia Townsend There were particular people that were more skeptical than others. The ones that wanted it and came on board pulled everyone else along with them. How do you win the trust of those people? You’ve got to stick to your guns.

Ben Smith-Petersen (stunt performer) I really thrived in that, because I was a theater nerd.

Harrison Norris We were naming ourselves and discovering a shared history, but part of it was cerebral and personal. What have you been through? What’s something you’re vulnerable about that you can bring to this thing? What’s something really raw about you?

Chris Patton That’s what George was all about. He’s like, “There’s no small roles.” Every War Boy, even if you saw him for five seconds, had a full backstory.

Scotty Gregory (stunt driver) Everyone had to have their own character. I’ve got a Vegas tattoo, so I called myself “Vee Gas.”

Richard Norton If George would come up on set and want to know, “How did that dent get on the mud flap of that vehicle,” or “What’s that scratch,” then it was the stunt guys’ obligation to have a story about how that occurred: “Oh, it happened in this skirmish.” The same with any rip in a costume—in other words, it would lay elements of a life lived over your character. I think it shows in the film.

Stuart Williamson I’ve never worked on a job since then where they put so much effort into getting the stunt guys to think that way, even if you were a background performer.

Chris Patton You could choose to be like, Oh, it’s a bit silly, and not get involved, but you’d look around and everybody is doing it. And then you’d get into it and it would start to resonate. You could really feel it deep inside you when everyone else is starting to chant.

Richard Norton Out of that came a real sense of camaraderie, too.

Petrina Hull That was easy to achieve with the more experienced stunt guys from Australia, but there were a lot of South African War Boys as part of the stunt team that were completely new to it, and they had to have a very quick immersion.

Nadia Townsend For one of the very last sessions, I went, “We need to bring the Namibian boys together with the stunt guys, because they haven’t worked together yet.” I’d been training them separately, the Namibian boys—there were about eighty in the beginning, and they were more like the War Pups, because they were physically scrawnier. And then these buff, huge, foreboding stunt guys all arrived, and the girls were invited to come and watch.

Courtney Eaton In the lead-up to filming, we had a ceremony where all the Wives came in wrapped in cloth, with our faces kind of covered, and all the stuntmen and actors hired to play Immortan Joe’s henchmen were beating drums and they weren’t allowed to look at us. That was part of the rehearsals, to build that tension with us.

Harrison Norris That was a particularly wild day.

Nadia Townsend We asked for them to be veiled, to give them a chance to really sit in that protected space a little bit.

Abbey Lee You could barely see through the veil, so to hear the boys yelling and the drums banging, it was terrifying!

Stuart Williamson It was literally mad, but it brought the South Africans and the New Zealanders and the Australians all together in one room. At one point it was like a vibration, because we had to grab each other by the head and scream at each other, “Immortan! Immortan!” Immortan was our god, and we would die for him.

Nadia Townsend I went, Oh, they need to actually be united by skin. I was like, “Shoes off. Shirts off.”

Stuart Williamson Everyone was hugging each other—no shirts, all sweaty, very much like a big orgy.

Josh Helman It was wonderful cultish behavior.

Zoë Kravitz It was a strange experience. It really was.

Ben Smith-Petersen It went for forty-five minutes. People started to move together in these small movements, and then it slowly kind of grew. iOTA was playing on the guitar, and it was such a hypnotic trance that it’s really hard to remember it. But it ended with us all doing this thing—eight fingers, the V-8 symbol.

Scotty Gregory I came up with the V-8 sign! I thought of it on the day.

Courtney Eaton We sat there as all these men were chanting and treating us as the most precious things the world had left.

Richard Norton The Wives were the possession of the Immortan, and as a result, they were untouchable. For the War Boys to even look at them—and maybe even in a War Boy’s mind assume some sort of sexual attraction—would be the worst thing they could do, a betrayal of the Immortan. Who knows what sort of subliminal effect it had on the minds of the people playing those characters?

Stuart Williamson We got so intense that one of the actresses actually started crying because it was so overwhelming. But all our focus was on Immortan. He is our god, he is our man.

Abbey Lee It was haunting! George really wanted us to get a sense of how scared these girls would have been in front of these War Boys, and how abused they had been. When you’re having a full-body experience like that, it makes resonating with the character so much easier, and gives you this incredibly helpful sense of what those girls might have gone through.

Chris Patton It was those moments where you could be like, Oh, this film is going to be epic, because we’re not filming it in the normal way and we’re not requesting the normal stuff of people. I haven’t done a film since like that.

Mick Roughan Before long, everyone sort of cottoned on to the fact that it gave so much integrity to everyone’s character. And to bring it to light, there was one scene we were shooting halfway through the film where the Immortan was standing on top of this rock wall. He was a big, older guy, and not super stable on his feet in the costume he had to wear, and he took a fall off this rock wall. It took a while for him to get up, but before he did, the whole set was shouting in unison, “Immortan! Immortan!”

It was like being at the football game with a hundred thousand people chanting for their team. It was hair-raising, and as he got up off the ground, there was a crescendo of joy. It was real, but it was all in the flavor of what they’d been learning, and from then on, it all made total sense—their relationships, the weirdness of it all.

Nadia Townsend No one’s ever told me that story! I’m so happy to hear that it had resonance. It’s very interesting that when you’re working in drama, if you’re working deeply enough, the essential elements of the story will start to play out in the human beings carrying that story. There were so many offshoot projects within George’s opus, so you can understand why the experience for everyone resonated on a much bigger, deeper level than just making a really arduous blockbuster.

When people get a taste of that work, it’s undeniable, because it’s like a good meal. Once you have handmade pasta, how can you go back?

Chapter 12

Oh, What a Lovely Day

On July 9, 2012, after the first day of filming was completed on Mad Max: Fury Road, a visual effects technician named Shyam “Toast” Yadav opened his journal and wrote the following first sentence:

I am about to relate to you a story you won’t believe.

That shoot day was a long time coming for many people involved with Fury Road, but few of them had taken as unlikely a path there as Yadav. As a shy child growing up in Haddon Heights, New Jersey, Yadav stumbled upon a VHS tape of The Road Warrior at the local library. The box promised muscle cars, outrageous warriors, and an R rating: Basically, it was irresistible contraband. The young Yadav brought The Road Warrior home, snuck it up to the TV room in the attic, and had his mind properly blown.

You never forget the first film that has that effect on you, and Yadav certainly didn’t: As an adult, whenever people asked him why he had come to Hollywood to work as a visual-effects data wrangler, he would say, “I’m doing this in case George Miller ever makes another Mad Max.” In 2005, while working on the film Ghost Rider, Yadav mentioned his goal to the first assistant director. That man just happened to be George Miller’s trusted lieutenant P. J. Voeten, and when Fury Road got back off the ground at Warner Bros., Voeten remembered the eager data wrangler and offered him a job.

On his way to Namibia for the shoot, Yadav spotted Miller in the airport, and though he was too nervous to speak to the director, security waved both men into a back room and demanded they open their suitcases. “It was really embarrassing because he was literally holding up his underwear in front of me,” Yadav recalls. “I didn’t want to introduce myself. I didn’t want him to remember me for this moment.”

But Yadav made an impression on the director anyway, since the data wrangler’s suitcases were filled with knives, spatulas, and Coleman stoves. The leader of a group called the French Toast and Hugs Gang, Yadav had brought his equipment to Namibia to hand out French toast to passersby as an unconditional gift. Miller was tickled by the idea, especially when he learned that it was how Yadav had gotten his nickname, “Toast.”

At that point, any light distraction was welcome, since Miller and Yadav were about to embark on one of the biggest adventures of their lives. Both men had been looking forward to that first day for a long time, but it’s one thing to anticipate a dream, and quite another to step into it.

* * *

Shyam “Toast” Yadav (VFX data wrangler) I was so scared on the first day. I mean, there’s a reason I get hired—because I’m good at my job—but I have a natural insecurity to think I’m not good. So, I show up on this set and I’m really scared, because this is the thing I’ve wanted to do for so long!

Robyn Glaser There’s an awe at the beginning: How are we going to make this work?

Tom Hardy Day one was, “This is a beast.” And how do you eat an elephant? I suppose, metaphorically speaking, it would be a mouthful at a time.

George Miller I said to myself, Everything else is theory and preparation, but now we have to execute it.

Riley Keough You can’t prepare for that kind of thing. On day one, you’re like, Holy shit, I’m here for seven more months.

Ricky Schamburg It’s one of those things: Once you’re committed to the roller coaster, you hang on.

George Miller I remember the day well, and I was happy to get to it. But also, I’m one of those people who has no sense of celebration at the beginning of something. It’s only at the very end, when you see that at least some of what you set out to do has some resonance with the audience—that’s when I allow myself to celebrate.

Shyam “Toast” Yadav It was the biggest crew I’ve ever seen in my life.

Robyn Glaser You’d be driving down toward the base camp, and it looked like a hovering spaceship of lights, like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It wasn’t just a little tent—it was huge, and the logistics of it were amazing.

Tom Hardy What you saw was some kind of Hells Angels, S&M, Cirque du Soleil fetish party. In the middle of the desert.

Chris deFaria It looked like Burning Man on a postapocalyptic movie set.

Doug Mitchell Basically, our whole lives became locked into this circus tent with a thousand people in the desert. You would drive over the hills of these sand dunes, over a little lip of sand, and look down at this fucking huge tent city with these vehicles that were massive and extraordinary. It reminds me a bit of Lord Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade”: “Cannons to the left, cannons to the right, into the valley of death rode the six hundred.” We were a thousand people in the middle of a desert doing this damn thing.

Shyam “Toast” Yadav When I went to set and saw those cars, I started laughing because I couldn’t believe I was there.

Michael Mekash (makeup) Even driving into Swakopmund, we passed a truck with a trailer and on the back was the Interceptor. I was like, Are you kidding? I’ve been in this business a long time and I’ve seen a lot of cool stuff. I’ll never see anything as cool as that.

George Miller I knew that that first day was the first day of 120, 130 shooting days. And I knew each one of those days was going to be incredibly difficult, because we were doing real-world stunts.

Samantha McGrady (key second assistant director) All these storyboards and spreadsheets of stunt players and the day-to-day of the vehicles was kind of overwhelming at the beginning. I was like, Right, okay. This is not going be like anything I’ve done before.

George Miller Look, the best analogy for making films is that it’s a military exercise. You’ve got to go in with the mentality that you don’t know where the land mines are, you don’t know where the snipers are, but you’ve got to execute it faithfully and you’ve got to bring it home as best you can.

Ricky Schamburg There was a scramble to get it done, basically. Someone had [misplaced] the keys to a cameraman pen and someone else was like, “Well, just smash the window.” That’s a typical day one: Everyone’s panicking to get that show happening.

Zeb Simpson (video assist operator) It was pretty chaotic. There was a lot of shit going on, a lot of moving pieces.

Shyam “Toast” Yadav And iOTA was there with an amp, playing speed-metal riffs.

P. J. Voeten George had heard a story on a Peter Weir film where he had music on set to set the mood and the tone, so our very first day we had iOTA, who played the Doof Warrior, riffing on his electric guitar. He wasn’t even scheduled to shoot yet, but poor iOTA was on for the whole run of show.

Brendan Smithers (construction manager) He was doing a solo as the sun was rising over the desert. It was truly a hair-standing-up-on-the-back-of-your-neck moment: The sun’s coming up on all this madness, these big tents and trucks, and George Miller is fixing someone’s scarf with this guy in the background playing a heavy rock solo. It was wild.

Shyam “Toast” Yadav The engines were revving, and it was so loud. To be surrounded by all of that at once was so overwhelming.

P. J. Voeten Our key grip Adam came up and says, “Is there any way we could turn the guitarist off? No one can hear what they’re saying to each other.”

Mark Goellnicht The very first day was the very first scene, where Tom stomps on the lizard.

Shyam “Toast” Yadav We shot the whole movie in screen order, which is unheard of because it’s so expensive.

Andrew AJ Johnson It probably added a month to the shoot, if not a month and a half or two months. Usually, when you’re shooting a film, if there’s a location you use three times throughout the story, you do it all there in the first week and then you go to the next location.

Ricky Schamburg To shoot in sequence takes time and money. It makes sense for the actors, because you’re doing the movie the way it plays out, but it’s an extravagance.

P. J. Voeten And even on the shoot days, we would shoot in order. So, it’s not as if you just shot two days of Charlize driving the truck that you would use for the whole film. We were constantly going back to setups we’d done two days before.

* * *

The first-day scenes would comprise the first minute or so of the movie, as Max contemplates the wasteland and is chased down by War Boys who drag him to Immortan Joe’s Citadel. The rest of the first-act scenes—mostly interior sequences that take place while Max is held prisoner at the Citadel—would all be saved for soundstages at the end of the Fury Road shoot, the only significant portion of the movie to be shot out of chronological order. That meant the first day of Fury Road would mark the start of one of the longest outdoor shoots a Hollywood production had ever attempted.

* * *

Petrina Hull It was quite thrilling to see George out in the field, literally down in the dirt in the Namibian soil and sand, to line up these shots with John Seale.

Shyam “Toast” Yadav John Seale, again, had the biggest crew I’ve ever worked with on this show. Usually, you have maybe two, maybe three camera teams. We had six camera teams and over twenty-two cameras.

John Seale George, with his storyboard artists, had worked out only one-camera coverage, but I was really into multiple cameras by then. I felt weird if I didn’t have six cameras shooting on a set, much to the chagrin of many people.

Zeb Simpson I’ve never done a job with that many cameras. John’s theory is, Why not? It’s not like we’re doing an intimate drama in a little hotel room and it’s two characters talking—these are huge set pieces, and if you throw five extra cameras at it and one of those cameras ends up being a great shot, it was worth it.

Ricky Schamburg And John Seale, he’s a hands-on guy. He is not going to sit in a caravan and watch. Day one, he’s got his shirt off and he’s hanging off a truck with a camera.

Mark Goellnicht I remember Tom coming on that first day and going, “Far out, I can’t believe all the War Boys are so fit and so ripped.” Honestly, I thought, You’re Mad Max, you’re meant to be ripped as well. He was fixated on how he hadn’t lost enough weight from the previous movie that he was on and how he was pissed that he was not more jacked like the other guys. They made sure that he kept more clothes on because he wasn’t in the shape that he wanted to be.

Mick Roughan The first day, when we had the big team meeting, Guy Norris put a list up on the board and he said, “There’s 120 mainline stunts we have to get through in this shoot.” And then he rolled out this other sheet with all these little bits of action here and there, over three hundred pieces of action. When you’re presented with that at the start of a show, and you’re already in a challenging situation in the middle of the Namibian desert—it’s blistering hot, next minute it was freezing cold—it’s like, Wow, how are we going to get through it? But you pick one, you make a start on it, and you chip away.

* * *

Though many film productions will schedule simple setups on the first day of shooting, day one on Fury Road grew to involve one of the film’s biggest stunts, a massive car chase that culminates in a takedown of Max’s iconic V-8 Interceptor, known to fans as the “Black on Black.”

* * *

Andrew Jackson The idea to do that as a CG crash was suggested early on and I argued passionately that this is Mad Max and it’s a film about real cars and real stunts. You cannot start this film with a CG event—it has to be practical; it has to be a real crash.

George Miller Our brains jump to conclusions very quickly. If the first central image they see is real, they will read everything else as real. If the first central image is false, then we read everything else as false.

Ricky Schamburg That sort of stuff’s exciting for me. I mean, I’ve spent months doing Marvel movies, which is the opposite of that. To me, it looks fake.

* * *

The task of figuring out the stunt fell to Guy Norris, the second-unit director and stunt coordinator on Fury Road who had once served as Mel Gibson’s driving double on The Road Warrior.

* * *

Guy Norris George also wanted a lot of other vehicles around it to tell the story that he’s been hunted down like a pack animal—it’s like the War Boys are surrounding a beast and bringing it down. And ultimately, a War Boy throws a thunderstick that blows out Max’s wheel and makes his car roll.

In normal events like that crash, you have no other vehicles around you and you’re just doing a spectacular crash to make the car flip over. But there wasn’t a traditional way that you could do a roll like that while you’re surrounded by other people on vehicles and bikes. So we designed what we called a flipper—basically, it was a paddle with an armature on it that would push the car up, then retract.

Petrina Hull The stunt was major, and it was breathtakingly exciting to watch. The stakes were really high every day, but because it was the first day of doing it, there was so much anticipation.

Matt Taylor Those sorts of days, they’re great energy days on set, because there is someone taking a huge risk in that one split second.

Jon Iles For those high-rollover speed crashes, you’ve got to be tight-trussed in there like you wouldn’t believe, because the centrifugal forces when you are spinning in a car like that, it’s way more than what a fighter pilot experiences when he’s flying a plane.

Guy Norris Because I did the testing and really understood the pressures and the timing, I decided, Look, I’ll just do it myself.

Mick Roughan It was nerve-racking. One, it’s your boss. Two, we’re good friends. And three, he’s not a young guy. We’ve got six months in the desert shooting all this, and this is probably one of the gnarlier gags in the film, first up.

Harrison Norris And he did it without brakes. That day, they said, “Oh, there’s a problem with the car, we need to reset. Something’s wrong with the brake line.” He goes, “Well, we’re not going to use the brakes to stop it, are we?” They go, “Nah.” And he goes, “Well, let’s go.”

Guy Norris That day seems so crazy. I remember going and sitting in the Black on Black and my memory flashed back to close to forty years ago. And it felt exactly the same.

Stuart Williamson I was driving behind and I saw the whole thing happen in front of me. That it was Guy Norris in that car at his age, for the legend he is—he’s incredible.

James Doherty (unit assistant) With these stunts, nothing before in your life had prepared you to see what you were going to see. A truck doing multiple rolls? People would be like, “I’m pretty sure that the guy in there is dead.”

Guy Norris For me, everything slows down whenever I’m in the middle of a situation like that, and you’re taking things in but so much slower. I just hang on for the ride.

Harrison Norris He actually rolled more times in the rehearsal. In the film, the car rolled nine and a half times, but in rehearsal, he cranked it to thirteen.

Richard Norton I believe that was a world record.

Guy Norris It’s basically being in the middle of a washing machine—well, a sixty-mile-an-hour washing machine that goes sideways.

Mick Roughan He got out of it obviously a little bit dazed and confused, when you get tumbled around at that speed. But he was fine.

Chris Patton That brought up the energy instantly. We knew, That’s the fucking boss. We’ve got to make sure we bring our A-game, because the boss is out there really setting the mood.

Georgina Selby (script supervisor, action unit) I was like, If that guy’s willing to do that and he’s running the stunt teams, then the stunt teams have something to live up to.

Mark Goellnicht We were probably more effective on that first day than we were on any other day. I thought, God, if this whole movie is going to be like this we’ll be done in, like, twenty days. Little did we know that it was going be a lot more complex.

Shyam “Toast” Yadav I was seeing it all through the eyes of this kid that had watched Mad Max on a really old RCA TV. There was so much time that had spanned from first seeing that car on TV to standing in front of the real car as it flipped, but at the same time, it felt like a dream.

* * *

But there was one more surprise yet to come for Yadav.

* * *

Shyam “Toast” Yadav There’s all that noise and engines, and someone calls my name: “Hey, Toast!” And I turned around, and it was George, and I was like, Oh, shit, he knows who I am. I’m going to get fired!

George walked up to me and said, “I was rehearsing with the actors over the weekend, and we were having a meal, and I told them about you.” This is all going too fast for me, because I’m like, How does he know who I am? I know him, because he was holding up his underwear in front of me, but he doesn’t know who I am.

George Miller Here is a guy who turns up and he’s got a cowboy hat and a beautiful soul. He was this presence in the town where we were shooting, and everyone was quite taken with it—including, as it turned out, Zoë.

Shyam “Toast” Yadav He’s like, “I told them about your French-toast gang, and Zoë really, really loved the idea.”

George Miller In the screenplay, the Wives were never given a name—they simply had an adjective to describe them, to differentiate them, and Zoë’s character was Knowing, the knowing one. But when we were working with the actors, we said, “What names do you want to call each other?” Everyone was coming up with names, and Zoë said, “I want to be called ‘Toast.’”

Shyam “Toast” Yadav Every Mad Max character has a weird name, right? There’s Toecutter, Master Blaster, Auntie Entity. And this is what George was telling me, “So, we’re going to rename Zoë’s character to Toast.” They turned her into Toast the Knowing.

I walked away and he was like, “Whoa, whoa, did you not hear what I said?” I turned around and I said, “George, I can’t handle this right now,” because it was too much. It’s too much for me right now, remembering it! I was like, “Thank you, I have to go.” It was such a magical thing. Like, you can’t write that story, because it’s not something that happens, right?

It literally couldn’t have been better, and that’s how that first day was for me. What was George doing that for? That was unconditional love, right? And for George, who’s been planning this movie for so many years, he’s got a lot of pressure, there’s a lot that was going on that day, but he still had the kindness to seek me out to tell me this. That’s a pretty special person, you know?

He probably doesn’t even remember it, because he had so much going on.

George Miller I love the name, mainly because it’s got that association with Toast.

* * *

Here is how Yadav finished his day-one journal entry:

Now, I can’t tell you if her character’s name will ever be said in the film, since Mad Max films have about 8 percent dialogue.

And I can’t tell you if they won’t change it again sometime during the shoot to a different name.

And I can’t tell you, even if they don’t change her name, if her credit will read “Zoë Kravitz—Toast.”

But what I can tell you is that was far and away the coolest day one I’ve ever had.

Love Toast (the original one).

Chapter 13

My Name Is Max

By the time Mel Gibson turned thirty, he was a world-famous superstar, with three Mad Max films already under his belt. But for the tempestuous actor who would supplant him, success would prove more elusive.

Tom Hardy was born on September 15, 1977, and grew up in the comfortable suburb of East Sheen, London. Though he was sent to prep school as a child, Hardy was not inclined to conform: He fell in with a rowdier crowd, started to drink and do drugs, and found himself nearly expelled from school. At age fifteen, a doctor diagnosed Hardy as “minor psychotic, schizophrenic with psychopathic tendencies,” and though the young man disputed those labels, an unconventional cure was about to come: He enrolled in drama school, a place where his wilder inclinations could be channeled into performance.

Hardy’s brooding good looks and untamed energy proved to be a potent calling card, and in 2001, he booked supporting parts in HBO’s Band of Brothers and the Ridley Scott film Black Hawk Down. But the film that was meant to be his big break—2002’s Star Trek: Nemesis, where he played the villain opposite Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard—was a franchise-snuffing flop, and the struggling Hardy went to rehab the next year. It wasn’t until 2009, when the director Nicolas Winding Refn cast Hardy in his crime drama Bronson, that his career began to heat up once again: Hardy had put on tons of muscle to play the title role of a wild-eyed, charismatic prisoner, and after seeing the film, George Miller decided to take a chance and cast him opposite the far more established Charlize Theron in Fury Road.

Then, in the three years between being cast as Max and the long-delayed start of filming in 2012, Hardy suddenly went from up-and-comer to hot Hollywood star. A scene-stealing part in Christopher Nolan’s 2010 sci-fi vehicle Inception quickly led to leading-man roles in movies like Warrior and Lawless, and just before flying to Namibia, Hardy filmed his biggest movie yet: The Dark Knight Rises, where Nolan had cast him as the villainous Bane. All of this wouldn’t normally present a problem: Miller’s early bet on Hardy had paid off, and now he had a newly minted A-lister toplining his movie.

But the Max we meet in Fury Road is not a conventional leading-man part. He barely talks, he’s often immobilized, and his face is covered with a mask for much of the movie’s running time. Everyone had an opinion on how the role could be changed to suit a hot new movie star like Hardy, while the fans who had hoped for Mel Gibson to return didn’t want him to play Max at all.

* * *

Lesley Vanderwalt It was very scary for Tom to take that role. It was so linked to Mel in many ways that it must have been nerve-racking.

Tom Hardy Initially, I was super jubilant, really excited to land the part, because it’s brilliant. And then I realized that the role of Mad Max is synonymous with Mel Gibson and there’s a large group of people who love Mel as Max. And if it’s not Mel, then it’s not Max. So, I was a little bit crestfallen for a second.

Sean Genders As an Australian, it was hard to see someone else as Max.

Tom Hardy I thought the right thing to do was go and meet Mel Gibson, because he’s part of the Mad Max family. It’s like I’m the new wife who has to go and meet the old wife.

* * *

Before production began, Hardy and Gibson made plans to have lunch at a Beverly Hills café, as an unofficial passing of the torch. A nervous Hardy showed up, but Gibson appeared to have blown their meeting off. Two hours later, after Hardy ate steak and carpaccio that he planned to put on Gibson’s bill, the older actor finally showed up. What was their conversation like?

* * *

Tom Hardy He was bored with me. He said, “All right, buddy, good luck with that.” Bless him. I made him a bracelet. We talked for a couple of hours about all kinds of stuff. I left, and then he called up my agent and said, “I think you found someone that’s crazier than I am.”

Drew McWeeny One of the big questions before anybody saw Fury Road footage was, “Will you be able to accept Mad Max if it’s not Mel Gibson?” Thankfully, with the Mad Max series, every movie feels like it was told by somebody totally different, like you’re wandering around the wasteland and different people step up and go, “Hey, I saw this dude, his name was Max. Here’s what happened.”

Patton Oswalt It was brilliant in the way it shows that maybe Max is remembered differently by whoever encounters him.

Tom Hardy What I understood from further conversations with George was that there was no need to step in or replace or try to do better. Ultimately, George and Mel went on a journey for three movies, and at this point, it was time for me to switch in. Max is led by George and was created by George, so I had to take comfort in George being the anchor of that.

George Miller Max is a universal archetype—the lone warrior in the wasteland looking for some sort of meaning.

Colin Gibson Mad Max 1, 2, and 3 had turned a man into a legend, and it was our duty to drag him ass-backwards through the apocalypse and turn him back into a man.

Tom Hardy Nothing really hurts Batman or Superman. Everything hurts in Mad Max. Remember Indiana Jones when he hated snakes? He was scared. Those kinds of heroes, they excite me because they are ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. They are fallible. And when they jump, they’re not sure if they’re going to make it to the other side.

Jasin Boland Max is MacGyver in complete survival mode, and he’s an animal. Most people wouldn’t want to live after the tragedy that he’s had.

Nico Lathouris If you look at the very first Mad Max, you have a guy whose family is killed. There’s a choice he has after the death of his wife where he could grieve, or he could project his feelings onto the perpetrators of the crime and seek revenge. He chooses revenge, and since then, he has been fighting this losing battle of trying to redeem himself through vengeance.

Mark Sexton Back in 1999, when we started storyboarding, there was the idea that Max had gone completely insane at the beginning. He was sitting there rocking backwards and forwards talking to himself—much more fidgety, much more hyperactive, the way that Mel Gibson is in real life. That got pulled back when Tom got involved and became a little bit more about stillness and sudden explosive action, but the idea is still the same, that Max was very, very broken and had to reintegrate into society through action.

Tom Hardy What’s interesting about lead acting in heroic sorts of movies is that they can actually be quite boring—not the actors themselves, but the heroes. The Greek version of a hero is somebody who sows the seeds of his own destruction, which ultimately means he has to die in order for wise men to tell his tale, and somebody who keeps surviving at the end of a movie is not really a hero.

So, when we watch movies that have a hero in them where there’s always a happy ending and a nice, tight bow at the end, they’re intrinsically boring. The heroes have no character—stuff just happens to them, and you know they’re gonna make it through and win at the end of the day. What George does is he gives you an antihero, a protagonist who has doubt, who is riddled with fear, who has existential angst. He’s not just a cardboard, cookie-cutter hero.

Nico Lathouris He starts as an animal and becomes a socialized human being. So, we see him initially as a caged animal, masked.

Lesley Vanderwalt I thought it was amazing that the mask covered a lot of his face and it’s all just in his eyes. What an incredible thing as an actor to be able to carry that off.

Jenny Beavan We took an ordinary garden fork and slapped it onto an iron muzzle and that had a really medieval sense to it.

Mark Sexton We always had this idea that he’s trying to get the bloody mask off every chance he gets, because it is this visual and metaphorical constraint on him. He’s not free until he gets away from it.

James Nicholas The studios were not entirely happy that the main star would have his face covered for the first fifteen minutes of the movie.

David White (sound designer) It was bugging me that Max has got this fucking thing in front of his face, and I said to George, “What the fuck is the story with this? Aren’t you concerned that it’s getting in the way of us relating to the character?” And he went, “No, no, no. It’s all about him being trapped. He’s a prisoner of his thoughts and he’s a prisoner again here. It’s meta everywhere with Max.”

It’s such a great basis to tell you where to go with the sound design: Every time he moves, there’s metal and chain sounds. There’s no way that his mask would make the sounds that it’s making, but it’s his perspective of life.

Tom Hardy I do like a mask, I’m not going to lie. It was nice to get a new one in the form of a garden fork stuck to my face.

Mark Goellnicht Tom’s an incredible actor, and so captivating to photograph—his eyes, lips, everything. When I framed him out for the first time, I went, “Fuck, you are so incredibly engaging.” He really is quite a movie star.

Jasin Boland He’s the greatest actor of my generation. He’s . . . I want to say “tricky,” but he has his process, and it’s my job not to be in the way of that process.

Mark Goellnicht He’s very, very Method, so he’s playing that character from the time he walks on set, taking on all the personality and idiosyncrasies. Which can sometimes be tricky because then he can be quite moody as a result.

Tom Clapham I was sitting next to him once and he did remark about how it was funny that he’s playing this totally macho Mad Max guy now and next he was supposed to go into Rocketman and play Elton John. Obviously, that didn’t happen, but he was like, “It’s such a shift for me to go from this to this.” He’s an actor that really gets into the headspace of his characters.

Lora Kennedy He’s misunderstood because he is so complicated and takes everything so seriously.

Ricky Schamburg He’s a provocative performer, and his character was crazy, so I personally believe that as an actor, he takes on that performance. Because it was constantly crazy shit that he would do.

Mark Goellnicht With a great actor like Tom, he will give you ten takes, and you might only get one or two that are usable—the other ones are just wacky or crazy. But then that might be what brings the genius out of it.

Tom Hardy To find characters, one has to always play. And you have to be open to rejection, to failure, to humiliation.

David Sims He’s such a great physical actor, and so unafraid of embarrassing himself.

Alison Willmore (film critic, New York magazine) He’s almost slapstick in some of the action sequences. There’s something very funny about the ways he gets tossed around in this world.

Richard Lawson (film critic, Vanity Fair) In the original Mad Max movies, Mel Gibson was doing one thing, and everyone else in those movies was a squirming weirdo. It’s so fun that in this one, Tom Hardy gets to be one of those weirdos.

Tom Hardy I always thought of him like Wile E. Coyote. Max has to get from here to there, without getting hit by that. There’s a lot of humor to play a character like that.

Margaret Sixel Even in the end chase, he was trying a bit of comedy, and we had to cut all that out and make it more serious.

Tom Hardy Through that, you can find breakthrough moments, which is quite cool! The precipice is on the edge of making a mistake, so when you fall and fail and fuck up, you pick yourself up and move forward, having learned something new: You know what it isn’t.

Margaret Sixel When he gets to the vehicle and starts grabbing all the guns from the girls, that was torture to cut. He was pretty crazy—all those performances were all over the place, so you couldn’t really use bits from different takes. It was so difficult to pull together, but I just rewatched that scene and I thought, It’s really kind of fun! He is a bit on the edge, isn’t he? I enjoyed watching it this morning . . . five years on, that’s how long it’s taken me.

Sean Genders The first time I met him, he was knitting. Nicholas Hoult started it—he was knitting all the time at the beginning of Fury Road. Tom didn’t keep it up for long, but that was strange for me: “Yeah, Tom’s knitting.”

Andrew AJ Johnson He’s like an introvert-extrovert. He’s very introverted but then when he does push himself to be around people, he pushes himself to become overly extroverted.

Mark Goellnicht He was so playful and even generous at times—like we’d be in the middle of the desert and this ice cream truck would turn up, serving soft serve and ice creams to the crew on his coin, obviously. He wanted to show his appreciation.

Shyam “Toast” Yadav The Dark Knight Rises was coming out, and he booked a movie theater in Swakopmund and had Warner Bros. bring out a print of The Dark Knight Rises and play it all weekend for the crew for free. You could get as much Coke and popcorn and go as many times as you wanted.

Doug Mitchell He came in eager and very, very keen. But it was a difficult shoot for the actors and, in his case, a long distance from where his family was back in England. He was sort of marooned in Namibia, so we’d find ways that he’d fly home and visit Louis, his son.

John Howard (“The People Eater”) He came out there once with Louis—I was all done up as the People Eater, and he was trying to get Louis to sit on my knee. Louis really wasn’t that keen, but he did eventually, and I told him to sit and smile and took the photo and then I whispered, “I’ll eat you!” And Louis just pissed off into the desert. Tom looked at me and he went, “Oh, fuck.” He ran off and got him.

Well, the next day Louis came back and they made him up like a War Boy and I was sitting in the tent, done up to the nines as usual. As soon as Louis walked around the corner, I screamed with fear, and he chased me out into the desert. He got his revenge.

* * *

As shooting wore on, Hardy expressed some misgivings about his role. Would Max still be compelling to watch if he doesn’t get to say or do much?

* * *

David White How many lines has Tom got? Sixteen is what I remember. I mean, he grunts a bit now and then, but dialogue-wise, he says very little.

Chris deFaria Tom Hardy’s character didn’t speak, and that was on the page, right? So when the filmmakers heard from the studio, “What is with this guy? He’s grunting and groaning?” You would say, “Well, that’s the script that was approved, and those are the storyboards.” So that became a huge cause célèbre. There were lots of conversations to try and give him things to say and do that were clear or audible. That was a consistent note coming back and forth, and we invented scenes.

Doug Mitchell In Tom’s case, there had been a degree of uncertainty which led him to offer up script changes.

Tom Hardy If I come in as an actor, I check the fragilities and the breaking points for the whole piece and the team, because that’s what I get paid to do. If I don’t do that, then I’m not doing you a service or me a service.

* * *

To assuage some of Hardy’s concerns, the production brought on the British screenwriter Kelly Marcel, who had previously worked with Hardy on Bronson. Marcel had been on her way to Los Angeles to begin prepping for her next movie, Saving Mr. Banks, but she agreed to come to Namibia for a week to help.

“I ended up being there for much, much, much, much longer,” laughed Marcel. In fact, she became a staple on the production, interfacing between Hardy, the other actors, and their busy director for nearly the entire length of the shoot.

* * *

Kelly Marcel Charlize and Tom had been working together for probably about a week or two at this point. I think they needed someone to come in and make it feel like a script for them so they could understand what George was looking for and how that translated into actual dialogue they were going to say on camera.

George Miller Kelly was a very necessary presence on the film to basically take away some of the disquiet. There weren’t scenes that you could really get your teeth into because they were just this series of action sequences, which you can’t play out in a great master shot.

Kelly Marcel Initially, it would be me, George, and Tom in a room where Tom had the freedom to improvise a little bit and George would walk him through scenes. Tom would take that in, and then be like, “Well, how about I say this?” Or “How about I grab a lizard and eat it?”

Tom’s a very active actor, he’s very physical—it’s why he’s brilliant in Venom. He very much wants to get on his feet and feel it in his body, and a lot of what we found in those sessions with Tom went into the movie, like little alts of dialogue that they could throw out here and there. “That’s bait,” for example, is one of those things that Tom came up with in an improvisation one day in his flat.

Iain Smith Tom trusted her for those points when he needed to say something, and I think George tolerated that rather than welcomed it. But he was respectful of the contribution that she was making. At the end of the day, it was very much George making the movie that he’d dreamed of.

Kelly Marcel It wasn’t like a rewriting gig at all—everything that I put on paper came from George or Tom, and it was basically a translation of the things that they were discovering in the room that felt understandable to Tom, because George was going to do whatever he was going to do anyway. I think I was there as an ear. When George is in the middle of making a movie, he doesn’t necessarily have the time to sit down and have daylong sessions with Tom, talking through it.

David White It’s probably true to say that Tom didn’t have the greatest idea of how to portray the Max character when he started. He had put an iPod thing in one of his ears, and he was playing into the earpiece other things while he was acting to distract him.

Shyam “Toast” Yadav The way I interpreted it was him listening to these voices in his head. In the beginning of the movie, he was crazy, and he was hearing all these voices, and that was his thing he was using to be able to hear the voices of the dead in his head.

Tom Hardy I imagined what kind of police officer would he be? I had him more coming from private risk management companies or from that territory—the military, special forces. So that’s why you’ve got the earpiece for his team.

Ricky Schamburg I remember thinking, surely George is going to tell him to take it out.

David White He used it as a tool to help him develop the character, but in the end George didn’t like the earpiece there, so that went.

Shyam “Toast” Yadav We had to paint it out of his ear for every shot, because no one would know what it was. It’s not like he tells anybody. Max is not a very talkative person.

Cory Watson George has spent days, weeks, months, and fucking years hashing out why everything is the way it is, and an actor who’s a little bit more Method would struggle with that.

Kelly Marcel At a certain point, I remember saying to Tom when things were getting particularly fraught, “Here’s a headline you don’t want: ‘You Killed George Miller.’” It’s so stressful out there, and you don’t want to be that guy.

Mark Goellnicht I remember the first week when George bore down on Tom after he wouldn’t do what George was asking. It was the shot where he’s on the front of the rig strapped up, and you have no idea how much of a process it was to get him to that point and get him to do the performance that George wanted. It took every single ounce of energy that George had in him to convince Tom to do it the way he did it.

Finally, he gets what George wants, and I remember this next part vividly: I’m walking back to the camera department and I said, “Are you okay, George?” He had his head down and he was walking by himself, which was rare, and he said, “I’m okay, I just don’t know if I’ve made the wrong decision.” That’s what happens to these directors—as much as they’re massively successful and brilliant geniuses, they still go through these periods of doubt. He said, “I can’t stop thinking about what it would have been like if Heath was there, and he was still alive.”

I suppose when you’re a director and you have that challenging first week with an actor that you’ve chosen and invested in, it would run through your head: What about those other people that were possibilities? Would I be going through the same pain? But at the end of it, I’m sure he’s glad that he got through it with Tom, and that’s George’s strength. He’s not the world’s best person at speaking to actors in an actor’s way, but he knows what he wants, he knows what he’s trying to get, and he will get there somehow.

Iain Smith A lot of Tom’s best moments have nothing to do with words, they’re almost a tribute to the great silent-movie tradition. And Tom, in that sense, was really well used in the movie by George. I think George got a great performance out of him.

Tom Hardy You don’t know what’s going to work and what isn’t, so you have to be brave. If you’re not failing, you’re not fucking doing the job properly.

Chapter 14

“It Was All in George’s Head”

For all its epic scope, Mad Max: Fury Road was planned out to the tiniest detail, and the movie had been running in a constant loop in George Miller’s mind for over a decade.

In some ways, that was both a blessing and a curse.

Miller was so specific about what he needed that he rarely shot anything that wasn’t in his storyboards. Without the ability to get an entire scene on its feet, it was hard for the actors to know what they were doing right or wrong or whether any of it would even make sense when it was ultimately cut together. Only Miller knew for sure, and the set was split between those who had faith in his vision and those who struggled.

* * *

Charlize Theron We didn’t have a script, let’s start with that. We had pictures.

Margaret Sixel 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.

Charlize Theron Literally seconds.

Andrew AJ Johnson A lot of the time, George would just want to shoot what was essential to the storyboards.

P. J. Voeten He shoots the edit, really.

Andrew AJ Johnson Usually with a movie, you block out the whole scene. But George’s way of filming, which annoyed the actors to no end—and a lot of camera staff as well until we got what the hell he was on about—was that he would just shoot the three-second shot. He’d call “action” and then, “Okay, cut.” And the actors would be like, “Oh hang on, what? Can’t we keep it going for a bit?” And George is like, “No, no. I don’t need that bit.” Because in his brain he only needed that bit and only that bit. So that made it difficult.

Dean Hood It was all in George’s head along the way. It was his creation, and everyone had to do what he said.

Charlize Theron You do this on movies, but this was at an extreme that I never experienced before or after Fury Road: We would shoot a five-minute sequence, and it would literally take three weeks. Literally three weeks!

George Miller Look, this is a very difficult film for actors. There’s nothing for them to get their teeth into for an extended period. If you’re an actor like Tom, who’s made movies like Locke and spent a lot of time in theater where it’s a continuous performance, or an actor like Charlize, who began her career as a dancer giving continuous performances, this is very, very difficult. You’re calling “action” and then five or ten seconds later, you’re calling “cut.” That’s kind of weird! And often it might just be a look, or very few words spoken.

Tom Hardy If he could’ve painted us and we didn’t have to have opinions, it would’ve been a lot easier for the poor guy. Because this is a man who can see it. We asked questions all the time. “What am I saying this for?” The irritant to a genius.

Lesley Vanderwalt He’s incredible in how he very much sticks to his storyboards. He’s one of the few directors I know that you can almost be sure that if you’re not going to see the back of the character’s head in the storyboard, you probably won’t in camera.

John Seale I said to George, “How gospel are the storyboards on this film?” And he thought for a while and he said, “At least 89 to 90 percent.” And I believe that’s exactly what happened.

Jacinta Leong It was refreshing and delightful. I love graphic novels, so it was like, Wow, why aren’t all movies made like this? It was the movie in print.

Mark Goellnicht He didn’t always pull them out and use them as a Bible. But funny enough, when you go back and review what we’d shot, you’d go, Oh my God. We virtually shot the storyboard.

Samantha McGrady Every day, I’d get all the heads of department together on set and call it “story time.” We would look at the boards for the next day and we would work out what that story is that we’re telling tomorrow.

Robyn Glaser It wasn’t the normal way of reading a script and seeing a breakdown. You’d see three little dots on the storyboard for tomorrow, and you’d say, “What’s this?” And they’d say, “That’s the full armada.” Those three little dots? That’s 150 stunties!

Tom Clapham What you’re seeing on set each day might only have been Furiosa getting into the car. You’d spend a whole day on little pickups like that.

Tate Van Oudtshoorn (set dresser) Out of twelve to fourteen hours a day, six days a week, they got roughly between twenty-four and thirty seconds of usable footage a day.

Edgar Wright You would hear these reports about the film being in trouble, and what you’d hear people say is, “Oh yeah, on Fury Road, some days they only shoot ten seconds.” And when you watch the film, you think, Yeah, that makes sense! Every single setup is its own little mini-movie and he’s sort of shooting live action like it’s animation.

Samantha McGrady The hardest part of that job was trying to get into the headspace of George and P.J. and Guy, because to them, everything was second nature.

Zoë Kravitz Everything was really abstract, even though it was very clear in George’s mind. Sometimes we would have to cross our fingers and hope that he really did know what he was talking about.

Tom Hardy You have to know your notes. “You’re just playing the trumpet on this track; you’re not playing the guitar on this one.” “This is all you have to do, so just know your position and play your position, young soldier.”

Kelly Marcel George’s brain works photographically. He can see everything in his head, but it’s hard for him to translate the images he has in his brain on to a page or to a person without it being confusing. And as you’ve seen in Mad Max, all of these things are so wild and so unimaginable that until you see them, you’re like, Oh no, he might actually be mad. Because people only had pictures to go by, that caused fear and tension.

Charlize Theron It was so nerve-racking, and every time I sat down with him, I would ask him, “Okay, but what happens here?” He’s the loveliest man, and he would go on these tangents explaining to me things that aren’t even part of the movie, since he’s sat for thirty years thinking about this. And at the end of it, I would come out of those meetings like, I still don’t know what happens.

George Miller When you’re an actor, you’re giving the best you can in the moment, but you don’t know how it’s going to come together.

Charlize Theron I was coming at it from such a practical place—“I need to know why this happens”—and he was coming at it from the place of, “I’ve got this.” Now, looking back on it, I should have trusted him a little bit more and it would have made the shoot easier.

Zoë Kravitz I really had no idea what to expect. The thing that really convinced me was George. Even if I couldn’t see his vision, he always thought so deeply about everything. I was happy to be led wherever he wanted to take me.

Kelly Marcel One of the execs at Warners told me that when George came in to pitch the movie, he came in with a board that had red strings pinned all over it and started talking mathematically about the movie, moving these red strings around like they were arcs or journeys. Everyone was trying to understand what he was pitching, but you know what? My hat’s off to them as well, because they were like, Okay, let’s make it. Which is bizarre. It should really have never got made.

Andrew AJ Johnson He was so particular, and after maybe two months, I went in to see Zeb Simpson, the video split operator, and he played me what they had so far of a three-minute sequence at the beginning of the film. I watched it with him and thought, Oh, far out. Now I get it. It clicked for me. Even John Seale as well, he was like, Okay, now I get what you’re doing.

Zeb Simpson That’s what was so great about doing those on-set assemblies, the immediacy of it. You get to see the rhythm.

Andrew AJ Johnson It would’ve helped the actors to see that, just to realize how quick the film was going to be. For some, like Tom, he didn’t understand until he saw the film at the very end.

Tom Hardy He was trying to explain to us a color we hadn’t seen yet.

P. J. Voeten I don’t know if Tom ever really understood. I don’t think anybody really could understand. It’s a leap of faith when you’re working with George.

Chapter 15

Figuring Out Furiosa

Even when Theron had trouble comprehending Miller’s vision for Fury Road, she never doubted her commitment to Furiosa as a character. “A lot of what motivates her in this movie are things that we don’t have to be in a postapocalyptic place to understand,” she said. “It’s that feeling you’re worth more.”

Born in South Africa, Theron was raised on a farm in Benoni, thirty miles outside Johannesburg. Theron’s coming-of-age in the early 1990s was hardly gilded: Her area led the world in homicides—“There was no value of life,” she has said—and many of her neighbors had their lives cut short. “There’s a resilience that you’re raised with there at a very young age that’s not necessarily from your mom or your dad—it’s the world that you’re living in,” she said. “It was just a tough world to grow up in. And then, on top of that, we were on a working farm, and you had to kill what you ate.”

Theron’s teenage years in Benoni were turbulent: When she was sixteen, Theron and her mother, Gerta, were attacked by her alcoholic father, and Gerta shot back and killed him in self-defense. But not long after, Theron finally found her path out. After she won a modeling competition, work took Theron to Milan, New York, and Miami before she made her way to Los Angeles at age nineteen, where she lived in a fleabag hotel while trying to make it as an actress.

For most of her twenties, Theron booked roles that capitalized on her exquisite beauty; it was not until 2003’s Monster, where she played the serial killer Aileen Wuornos, that she was able to demonstrate her ferocious strength as an actress in a way that proved transformative. Theron was more than just a pretty face: She possessed real grit and emotional insight, and if Fury Road could tap into that, Miller would have access to a formidable power that few actresses could match.

* * *

George Miller You can dress up as Furiosa, but to be Furiosa, you’ve got to be Charlize. She carries a lot of stature, and she always feels taller to me than she really is. And she’s unmistakably a great beauty, so she doesn’t have to protect that in any way. She’ll throw dust on herself and let tears stream down her face.

Drew McWeeny Thunderdome and Road Warrior are amazing movies. They do not have the subtextual heft of Fury Road. By centering on Furiosa, Fury Road is so much more interesting to me than just, “I’m a guy whose wife and kid died who wanders around and gets involved with people.”

Justin Chang (film critic, Los Angeles Times) The movie feels like to me very much a spiritual heir to Ripley and the Alien movies, and Charlize Theron is one of the few action stars, male or female, who can absolutely hold up to that comparison.

James Cameron (director, Aliens) I would concur with that. She’s a world-class actress, as Sigourney is. Even in the middle of an action scene, she’s acting.

Manohla Dargis Some actors are kind of playing to you. They want you to like them—whether that’s good or bad, whether it’s working for the role or not. Theron always feels somewhat defended to me, and that makes her very interesting for a woman. I’ve never felt where she said, “I need your love.”

Charlize Theron At the beginning, when you looked at this story, it felt very much like Furiosa was saving these women, and I couldn’t wrap my head around it because it seemed so earnest. I don’t know how you find an earnest character in a brutal landscape like that—there has to be something more from the gut. It’s very hard for me to play heroic characters. I feel so flawed as a human; I don’t think I could do that justice.

I talked to George a lot about the pain of what this character went through when she was kidnapped by the Immortan, and it has to be somewhat a story of revenge. She was somebody who has survived tremendous abuse. She was stolen from her family and the place that she knows, and she was placed into this world where she was owned, where she was a commodity.

Once she couldn’t produce babies, she was worthless, and she worked herself back into that community to get her revenge. I always felt like she took those girls not because she wanted to save them but initially because they were his prize possession. She wanted to fucking hurt him as much as he hurt her and ultimately, along the journey, they became closer.

Patton Oswalt The fact that I can surmise all of that about her character—that’s all in her performance, there’s no exposition. And it takes an artist like Charlize to bring that to life.

Charlize Theron My first baby was four months old when we went out to Namibia. When Jackson came into my life, the more nurturing side of me came into play. That made the performance feel more layered: It was going to either be a really bitter woman who was just saying, “Fuck you,” or it was going to just be a hero rescuing four beautiful girls, and somewhere in between all of that, circumstance brought me to this place where I could play both.

That’s how I looked at her: She has all these heroic qualities, but she can also be selfish, she can also be petty, she can have all these human qualities that we sometimes don’t want to give heroines. In a weird way, I feel like all those human flaws she has are the things that make her shine in the movie.

* * *

It’s hard to imagine Furiosa without her shaved head and face slicked with black greasepaint, but several other looks were originally mulled for the character, some of which were quite outrageous.

* * *

Charlize Theron When I look back at the hair and makeup tests when we first started, oh my God. It was nothing as grounded as what we ended up making.

Sean Genders In the original storyboards, Furiosa and a whole bunch of characters had these big, smiling jaws tattooed on them like on a Spitfire warplane. I was like, That’s iconic.

Mark Sexton We had this idea while we were storyboarding that there was a hierarchy within the Immortan’s society where the senior ones all had a tattoo across their face, and the higher the rank or the more kills you got, the more teeth you got tattooed.

Peter Pound I think it was one of Brendan McCarthy’s ideas, but the facial markings were too intrusive.

Charlize Theron We kind of played around with this idea that maybe through the years of living in the desert, instead of what you thought would happen—which is that everyone would have leathered skin—they actually became these sorts of vitiligoed people. So Furiosa at first was this very ethereal platinum blonde, with long hair and some African mud art on her face. It was a different costume designer, and the costume felt a little more Barbarella-y. When we came back three years later, and I tried to imagine us going back to that look, I worried about it.

Jenny Beavan (costume designer) What on earth would she do with her hair? It almost had to be dreadlocks or a ponytail or something kept very, very short.

Dayna Grant (stunt double, Charlize Theron) When I first got the job, they flew me over to Australia to do a wig fitting and it was these big, blond dreads.

Lesley Vanderwalt If she had long hair and she was fighting, those guys could grab her by the ponytail and swing her around. To me, there would have been nothing she would’ve done to accentuate her femininity. She was a warrior but had to be respected in that world of all men.

Charlize Theron George was really, really incredible in 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.”

George Miller I thought, Gee, wow. First of all, she’s got a great sense of the character. Second, this means she’s really committed to the role—which I sort of knew anyway, because she’s deeply professional. But thirdly, I thought, Oh, I hope she’s got a great-shaped head. So I texted her, “Brilliant, go for it.” And then an hour or so later, she sent me a picture of her buzz cut, and it was perfect.

Lesley Vanderwalt That became a thing that we continued onto the other Imperators.

Richard Norton When I got cast, I did everything I could to try and convince George that I should keep my hair. I said, “Oh God, George, I’m going to be traumatized. I haven’t had hair that short since I was born!” Later, I told Charlize, “By the way, this is your fault I don’t have hair.” And she grabbed me by the cheek and said, “Oh, but look at that cute little face.”

Nia DaCosta There’s something great about a woman who’s bald, who only has one arm, who isn’t tied up in all the usual trappings of femininity to make her strength acceptable.

Jenny Beavan It was so the right decision, and she looks stunningly beautiful with very, very short hair.

George Miller It meant to me that she understood the character, and she understood the process she was going to have to go through. It was a startling moment, but I love those moments.

Charlize Theron You know, he trusted me so much that it kind of makes me emotional. I could call him at two in the morning and say, “Hey, I want to shave my head and wear an outfit that is a little less sexy and a little more androgynous,” and he was so, so supportive.

George Miller Look, it’s very gracious for her to say that. She’s incredibly professional. She was always there first on the set and basically did anything to preserve the character. I think the results are up there on the screen.

Charlize Theron I felt really connected to her. I never questioned my commitment to her. It was more about how she fit into the story—I really struggled with that.

Margaret Sixel There is a kind of wacky comedy to it, and people like Tom and Charlize weren’t sure how they were fitting into that.

Tom Hardy There’s a sense of humor that George has got, a certain fearlessness in the enjoyment of that postapocalyptic world. Not like The Road or something like that, where everything’s devastatingly bleak.

Charlize Theron I didn’t always understand the narrative that we were telling, but I knew who she was at the core and I knew what she was fighting and what she was trying to overcome. Those are the things I leaned on the most, so whatever I was placed in that day, I went back to those core things that I felt very strongly about her.

Doug Mitchell Charlize is brilliant. But it was tough for her.

Charlize Theron I was incredibly scared because I’d never done anything like it. The hardest thing between me and George is that he had the movie in his head, and I was so desperate to understand it. It’s not easy for him to fully lay out what you want to know.

George Miller It’s a very difficult role, because you don’t know what the outcome’s going to be. It’s like composing a bit of music, and you’re taking each note and each chord and you’re putting them together in some way, but you don’t really hear the full piece until it’s all fine-tuned towards the end. You have to really trust your instincts and the instincts of those that you’re working with to make sure that we get there.

Margaret Sixel Charlize hated shooting most of it, let’s be honest. But she’s very professional and her performance was always there, right from the get-go. Thank God!

Charlize Theron I’m grateful to Margie, because she’s like me. She’s a tough South African, and there’s this unspoken thing between South African women. There were a lot of times on that movie when I was having a hard time and when Margie was on set, she was like a magnet.

Megan Gale Every single take we did, Charlize would cry at exactly the same time within the scene and a tear would come out of the same eye each time. I don’t know how she did it. I would be there watching her like, Oh my God, I’ve got to be in this scene and remember my lines! I’d be taken aback at how incredible she was.

Mark Goellnicht Charlize can turn it on and off like a tap. She could be telling a joke and swearing like a fisherman’s wife and the next thing you know, she’s Furiosa. She has that knack.

Adam Kuiper How do I explain Charlize? If there was a group of women talking and a group of men, Charlize would go to the men to talk. She loved to have a chat and be one of the boys—in a good way.

Mark Goellnicht She didn’t mind taking the piss out of people. She says a lot of things that these days on a set, you wouldn’t be able to get away with, but she can get away with it because of who she is. It helped with the morale that you had her setting the tone for the shoot.

George Miller Her humor was quite amazing. Shooting in Namibia, we had a lot of Afrikaans-speaking people, and when Charlize wants to say something that she doesn’t want us to understand, she’d say it in Afrikaans. The laughter of the Afrikaans people was always so raucous—you could sense by the body language that it was bawdy and wild.

A lovely guy who worked in the props department said, “You can take the girl out of Benoni, but you can’t take the Benoni out of the girl.” It’s my understanding that some of the best African boxers have come out of there, and that tells you a lot about the town.

Richard Norton I was supposed to head-butt Charlize in a scene, and I went to George and said, “George, I’m a little worried, because Charlize had a bad neck from a previous injury. Would you be okay if Charlize instead head-butted me?” And Charlize absolutely loved the idea because it brought her character to life. I always say to people, “Look, if you’re going to get head-butted by anyone, it may as well be Charlize Theron.”

Andrew AJ Johnson There was one time where I was harnessed into the War Rig and had my helmet on, and then Charlize looked over and said, “AJ, you fucking wimp, what the hell are you doing?”

Mark Goellnicht The funny thing is that Charlize picked up on the toughness of everyone on this shoot and she sarcastically used to call us the wimps. She would always say, “Here you go, the camera wimps are here.”

Andrew AJ Johnson There’s a burger chain in Africa called Wimpy. She made us these T-shirts that said, “Fury Road Camera Department Wimps.”

* * *

But Theron could still get dramatic when she needed to, never more so than in the iconic moment where Furiosa learns that her movie-long mission was all in vain: The Green Place she was escaping to no longer exists. Exhausted and demoralized, this warrior woman wanders into the desert, falls to pieces, and screams.

* * *

Nia DaCosta When Furiosa drops to her knees in the dunes, that’s something that has really stuck with me.

Charlize Theron So that was never in the storyboard. That scene was always supposed to end on her realization that the Green Place was gone, and the camera would start spinning around her while she was in utter shock. I said to George, “I feel like we need to have a moment where she’s completely lost, completely vulnerable. We’ve seen this woman be so capable, so let’s have a moment where she’s none of those things.” It’s a character at the cusp of, I’m done. I’m not going on.

Ziwe (comedian) There’s really something poignant about a promised land, right? To think that all of your problems will be solved once you reach this point, and then to get there and have it be a mirage—I could really relate to that moment of hopelessness. Even people who’ve never been in a postapocalyptic race through the desert can relate to thinking, Okay, now what? Do I give up?

Charlize Theron There’s a Mandela quote: “Don’t judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.” That was an important moment to me because then the stakes of her turning around and going back feel so much higher. Imagine the disappointment of doing all this to get to a place that doesn’t exist anymore, to have spent all this time thinking this thing would fix everything for you and then it doesn’t fix anything. I felt very strongly that we had to take her to her rock bottom.

Petrina Hull We may have wrapped some people early to try and give Charlize a bit of space around it. My memory of it was that she didn’t know what she was going to do, but she said to George, “Roll the camera and let me do something.” Everything else was painstakingly choreographed in detail, but not this moment.

Charlize Theron We shot the scene where the camera is turning around, and then we took one camera up on the dune as the sun was setting and the wind kind of picked up.

George Miller It was a windy day where there was so much dust about that Abbey Lee, who had blond hair, and the Keeper of the Seeds, played by Melissa Jaffer, she had white hair—their hair was now almost orange, and in post we had to restore the color of their hair. We were fighting against the wind, and then it suddenly became our friend because it was blowing over the sand dune in the right way and we grabbed the moment.

Mark Goellnicht John Seale knew that at the end of the day, if we could get up to the top of that sand dune by a certain time, there was going to be this incredible light. It was a real scramble because we were doing all the scenes of the Vuvalini down below. After it was over, we literally ran to the top of the sand dune because there was no way of getting up there with anything other than your own legs. We all picked up a piece of equipment and ran up to the top of this huge, boggy sand dune, plowed the tripod down, put the camera on, and literally five seconds after we turned on the cameras and framed it up, we were rolling because we were going to miss the light.

Petrina Hull There’s a thing about the desert: It’s so vast and so empty, and if you’re having an emotional experience at all, it can feel a bit otherworldly. That’s what Charlize was able to bring to that moment. It was an awe-inspiring thing, the depth of her anguish.

Chris O’Hara (on-set second assistant director) Watching her do that was like, Oh my God.

Jasin Boland I’ve never ever experienced an actor who quite gives everything like she does. There’s many, many actors I’ve worked with, and some that I call friends—Matty Damon, Hemsworth, people like that—but she’s in a league of her own.

Kelly Marcel She fought for that moment and she absolutely needed that moment. There’s a scene in the movie where she talks about Immortan Joe and her life back there and she wanted to say more and to really have a monologue about it, so we worked on that for her for a really long time, and it ended up being a two- or three-page epic speech. It helped her understand the character a bit more, but it ultimately didn’t work—it just isn’t a film for a monologue, since everything is told in little snippets. But with the scream in the sand, that monologue ended up being boiled down to a moment that says it all with no words.

Lora Kennedy Charlize went way beyond what I thought she was going to do. She was staggering.

Ziwe The movie snapped, and Charlize absolutely snapped. There’s so little dialogue, so you’re left to calculate what’s going on from these subtle looks—it’s a tremendous credit to her as an actor.

Tom Hardy Charlize arguably laid down the finest lead character in an action movie, and that credit is much deserved in my opinion; both to her as a phenomenal talent and to George for recognizing from the very start of the process that it was time to pass Mel’s shoes onto Furiosa, which was not only refreshing but incredibly smart.

Justin Chang There’s something very subversive about that in the context of it being Mad Max, where he is basically turned into a sidekick in his own movie. That’s one of the great, stealth surprises of the movie, that it’s all about Furiosa.

Chapter 16

Out Here, Everything Hurts

Whether the Avengers are fighting Thanos on a distant planet or Rey and Kylo Ren are crossing lightsabers atop the wave-battered wreckage of the Death Star, most large-scale action these days isn’t actually filmed on location. It isn’t even filmed outside: Megabudget movies are mostly shot on soundstages, and all those exotic environments are stitched together with a little bit of set dressing and a whole lot of CGI.

Not so Mad Max: Fury Road. Part of the reason the movie feels so visceral is because it was filmed in a very palpable physical location: the vast, desolate Namib Desert. For its filmmakers, those sand-swept vistas provided inspiration that simply couldn’t be created in a computer.

“A lot of camera operating isn’t so much about what you’re filming, it’s what you’re not filming,” said cameraman Andrew AJ Johnson. “If you were on some soundstage in Vancouver with blue screens, you wouldn’t be framing for the action—you’re framing to keep out the rest of the soundstage. But with Mad Max, it didn’t matter. You could shoot 360 degrees, and everything looked awesome.”

What was it like to spend the better part of a year in such a surreal place? For the people who worked on Fury Road, the Namib Desert could be both otherworldly and overwhelming.

* * *

Riley Keough The desert is strange. It does things to your sense of depth perception to be out there in the middle of nothing.

Harlan Norris You’d swear you’re on fucking planet Mars sometimes, mate.

Andrew AJ Johnson There was a place we shot in the desert called Blanky Flats, which is six square kilometers where you could close your eyes and drive for ten minutes and not hit anything.

Samantha McGrady It was this amazing landscape of nothingness.

Guy Norris It’s the only place I’ve ever stood in the world where 360 degrees around you, you don’t see a thing.

Mark Gatt (steelworker) There’s one place out there called Solitaire where you drive for miles. I stopped to go and have a pee and I said to my missus, “You’ve got to get out and have a look at this,” because it was just nothing. Flat nothing.

Mick Roughan Then the sandstorms would come rolling through.

Adam Kuiper It comes out of nowhere.

Georgina Selby If you weren’t prepared for those moments, it got pretty scary because instead of worrying about the film, then you start worrying about yourself.

Petrina Hull It was the most intense thing. Literally, sand whipping through the air, around you everywhere, and it’s hitting you and flying at you in all directions.

Natascha Hopkins (stunt double, Zoë Kravitz) It feels like a whole bunch of bees are attacking you at the same time. You could barely see, and the tents would be knocked over, so we’d have to all go in the vans and protect the cameras until the sandstorm ended.

Colin Gibson My feeling is, if you encounter a freak dust storm, you should be slapped if you don’t take advantage of it.

Dayna Grant They were filming it: “Is this usable?” And we couldn’t see anything!

Andy Williams (special effects supervisor) One of the first things I asked George Miller when he got to Namibia was, “George, are you going to need us to control the dust? Because the Namibian desert is 60 percent silica, which is not good to be breathing in.” He said, “No, dust is our friend.” Now, it isn’t very friendly at all. Apart from the fact that you shouldn’t be breathing it in, it gets into everything, it ruins every piece of equipment, it’s a nightmare. But he was actually correct. The end result, the cinematography, was fantastic.

Nadia Townsend And the mica—the shiny stuff in the dust—creates these illusions that occur in the middle of the day where the dust sparkles and you think you’re seeing ghosts.

Mark Goellnicht I still have dust that I find in my gear. It’s like that dust never goes away.

Andrew AJ Johnson Even the other day, I had a look in one of my Pelican cases and in the bottom there’s still whole particles of metal and sand, bits of tin and copper because the sand was metallic, which is the worst kind of sand for electrical equipment and cameras.

George Miller Charlize had this aversion to dust, so I said, “Well, why don’t we have tissues? You can wipe your hands all the time.” And she said, “No, no, no. I want to use that.” Indeed, she would walk out of makeup and wardrobe and would roll around in dust as a preparation every morning.

Abbey Lee The dust was unforgiving. It was constantly in your eyes, in your ears, in your mouth.

Petrina Hull You’d come home at the end of the day and feel like you had been camping for three days.

Eugene Arendsen (stunt driver) If you were ever in a scenario where you were driving in the armada, you could never see anything, because as soon as the cars in front of you start moving, it’s a wall of dust. And in the scene where I’m driving the Razor Cola, I’ve got no windscreen, no goggles, nothing. After every single take, both my eyes were completely full of sand, and I could barely see. Medics would come over and wash my eyes out with some saline, and we’d do that over and over and over again.

Lesley Vanderwalt The first day we got the War Boys ready, they got on their trucks and off they went into the desert—then, next thing you know, they come back looking like they’d been to St. Tropez for a holiday! All the desert dust was red and tan and it just covered them. We ended up with little bags of white dust and clay that we’d boof them with, and we gave it to them to take on the truck and keep doing it every time they had a break.

George Miller Early on in the shoot, it was winter going into spring and summer. And it was cold.

Abbey Lee The environment was really harsh. The first four months we were there, it was blisteringly freezing, and us girls weren’t wearing much. We also had to be sprayed down for a lot of it because it had to look hot, like we were sweating. Riley got hypothermia.

Natascha Hopkins This is kind of embarrassing, being black, but I was like, I’m going to Africa, so it’s going to be hot. Yeah, no. I cannot believe that I was going to be there six, seven months and I never checked the temperature, so when I got there, I had all these cute little crop tops and shorts and bathing suits, and it was freezing!

Mick Roughan The wind would near blow you off your feet some days, and then other times we had sun so hot it’d peel the skin off your back.

Joy Smithers (“Vuvalini”) For an hour in the middle of the day, it was so hot you would really want to tear all your clothes off. It was ridiculous.

Chris O’Hara In the morning, I would be dressed in winter gloves, winter hat, and a thick coat, and by noon I’d be literally in a Speedo. Then, at five o’clock at night, I’d be back in my parka.

Kelly Marcel And weird things would happen in the desert. Everybody’s choking on the dust, we’re fighting to get these shots before the sand kicks up again, and then a Rastafarian on a bicycle would cycle through set, giving people ice creams. Literally, he would appear in the middle of the desert, hundreds of miles from anywhere. It’s not possible that he was there, but he was!

* * *

Swakopmund, the small coastal town that housed the cast and crew, was equally remote. To fly there from Los Angeles would take thirty-six hours of continuous travel, including an overnight flight to London, another overnight flight to South Africa, a third flight to the port town of Walvis Bay, and then a drive out to the Skeleton Coast.

For actors or crew members used to a certain amount of freedom on their days off, Swakopmund was a rude awakening: The location was so far-flung that it was impossible to simply skip town when not needed on set, and the interplay between visitors and locals was often combustible.

* * *

Samantha McGrady I remember arriving in Swakopmund and being astounded by the fact that we’d taken over this whole town.

Eugene Arendsen It’s a German village right in the middle of Namibia. Cobblestone streets, German bars, and bratwurst everywhere.

Harrison Norris This was a two-of-everything town: There were two places to eat dinner, there were two places to get a drink, two places if you wanted to buy shoes. It was quite small, and we moved in, and it was like a traveling circus meets a traveling army.

Josh Helman They were houses that we all had in a row a little bit north of Swakopmund, by the water. Riley and Zoë were living together at the time, so we’d go to their house and we’d all have dinner, or they’d come over to mine and we’d cook or barbecue.

Courtney Eaton It was super isolated. The TVs barely worked, and I had only brought one DVD, Pirates of the Caribbean. I don’t know why. I watched that movie at least fifteen times because there was nothing else to do in that town. We had to entertain each other.

Joy Smithers I always felt like we were all in it together, because Sunday was the only day that everyone had off, and every single café was full of big, long tables of stuntmen with Australian surf labels printed across the front of their T-shirts.

Matt Taylor We all very much stood out. You could tell who the stunt performers were, because we were the only Aussie blokes with shaved heads running around.

Petrina Hull There had been this honeymoon period, and then, three, four weeks in, you run into the same people all the time. There’s nowhere to go. You’re worried about your safety, or you have to be mindful of it all the time. If you need a breath of fresh air, you can’t just walk around the block at eight at night.

Scotty Gregory You did have to carry pepper spray and a knife with you.

Adam Kuiper I’m six foot three and over a hundred kilos. I’m a big, strong guy. There are times where I felt a little bit nervous.

Kelly Marcel If you’re a woman, particularly, you couldn’t be out past six in the evening. If we went out for dinner with each other, you would have to go in groups, or have security or men with you.

Dayna Grant Because of my shaved head, people on the streets thought I was Charlize, so I got harassed quite a lot on the streets and my kids would get pulled aside. Production ended up making me a wig, and everything was so much better after I got it.

Matt Taylor We had targets on our backs as far as pickpocketers and muggings and things like that. If you thought it was a good idea to walk home after the pub late one night or early one morning, you were going to get beaten up for it. But I also know that the production hired a couple of ex-SAS soldiers, who kept an eye on things in the dark shadows.

Jon Iles We formed a bit of a security detail, myself and two other G4S guys. On the weekend, we’d go on patrol, because obviously the staff would go out and they want to go to the shebeens, which are the little local bars. You’d be taking crew members home at four o’clock in the morning, and the guy’s got a cut head. I said, “Mate, you need to leave because these people are going to take your shoes, they’re going to take everything, and just leave you in the gutter.”

Dayna Grant I got broken into three times. They gave me this beautiful big house on the beach, and it felt like it should have been amazing, but it was scary: All night, you could hear people trying to get in from downstairs. Out in the open, it felt so exposed. People walk along the beach and go up to your door at your house. I ended up bringing my kids upstairs and we slept in one room.

Jon Iles You get rolled up in a carpet and all of your worldly possessions get stolen because three guys walk in off the desert in through your front door. We had multiple crew members go, “I don’t want to be here anymore,” and go home.

David Burr (director of photography, second unit) This would happen on a daily basis. You’d go to work and talk around the breakfast table was, “Okay, who got burgled last night?” Eventually, we had some ex–Australian Special Air Service with us in the stunt department, and a couple of those guys and some locals formed a little committee and went out at night and eventually they tracked these burglars down.

Scotty Gregory We went out to one of the nightclubs there, and they smoke in the clubs. I had a jacket on that was all fleece-lined and really cool, so I said to the big bouncer at the door, “Can I leave my jacket somewhere, so I don’t get all this smoke in it?”

“Yeah, no worries. Just leave it here with me, I’ll take care of it.” Great. No problem. And we came to the end of the night, I went to leave, and I said, “Oh, can I have my jacket?” He goes, “No, that’s my jacket now. I’m keeping it.” And he’s a hundred percent serious. “Are you kidding me?” He goes, “No. Go.”

So, I went back upstairs, walked over to Nathan Jones, who played Rictus. I said, “Nathan, I’m sorry to ask you this, but you’re the biggest guy here. That big bouncer there is stealing my jacket.” And Nathan stood up and went to the bouncer and goes, “Give me the fucking jacket.” Then another bouncer walked up to us. I’m like, Oh fuck, I’m in trouble here. And then suddenly there were twenty-five War Boys standing around us, all shaved heads, going, “What’s wrong?” They go, “Oh no, no, no, nothing wrong. Nothing wrong. It’s okay.” So, Nathan Jones saved my jacket.

Lesley Vanderwalt One of our producers’ assistants, she got mugged and robbed walking home from dinner at the local pub down at the waterfront. It’s more rife because there’s such extreme poverty there. Those people are getting a dollar a day, a lot of them. We look like such incredibly wealthy people, the film crew splashing all your money around in per diems. You had to be a little bit careful and have common sense.

But we were using locals to do things that I never thought we would have been able to find there. The barbers all helped us doing the shavings and clippings, and we taught some of those kids in Namibia how to put on prosthetics—in our world, people go to school for a year or two to learn how to do that.

Harrison Norris For our blacked-out War Boy eyes, we used this really thick MAC eyeliner, and at the end of the day, we got to the point that we stopped trying to get it off the inside of our eyes. It was impossible, so we gave up and lived in guyliner for eight months, and the funniest thing was that as we got toward the last two or three months, we’d start seeing all the locals in town—the guys who had nothing to do with performing or being War Boys—were wearing guyliner as well. We accidentally glam-rocked the shit out of that place.

Chris O’Hara At wrap, they gave us all these nice wooden-framed pictures of the War Rig, and a lot of us on the crew got a joke going where we removed the picture above the toilet in our condos and put the War Rig up. That way, when tourists came later that year, they would see this picture and think maybe it was, like, the national War Rig.

In 2015, I saw an article on one of the clickbait websites where this guy was talking about how he found this picture of a War Rig in a bathroom in Swakopmund. One of these days, I’m going to go back there and see if there’s any of those pictures left.

Chapter 17

All Hail the Immortan

To play the villain in a movie as big as Mad Max, you’ve got to have a vast reserve of wicked charisma. Maybe that’s why Hugh Keays-Byrne is the only man able to have done it twice. The Kashmir-born actor was blessed with a sonorous voice, a pronounced sense of mischief, and an incredible head of long hair, and when Miller was looking for someone to play the gang leader Toecutter in the original Mad Max, he lucked out by discovering Keays-Byrne.

Many of the key players on the first film were neophytes, and to them, Keays-Byrne loomed incredibly large: Though warm, he was so committed to his role as a terrifying villain that the people around him were both intimidated and inspired. “The truth is, I learned acting from him,” Miller said.

Decades later, when Miller finally got Mad Max: Fury Road off the ground, there was no question who should play the film’s antagonist, Immortan Joe, a fearsome warlord who can inspire an army of War Boys to sacrifice themselves in his name. Since the Immortan wears a giant breathing apparatus as a mask, the performer would have to convey the charisma of this character through his eyes, voice, and bearing alone.

Miller didn’t even bother to audition other actors for the role. Instead, he returned to the man who showed him, all those years ago, how powerful screen acting could be.

* * *

George Miller When I made the first Mad Max, I learned so much from him. I knew nothing about acting, and here was someone who was highly collaborative. He’d done a famous production of Midsummer Night’s Dream that traveled the world in the early seventies and landed in Australia. A whole group of actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company decide to settle in Australia, and their leader was Hugh.

Hugh Keays-Byrne I wasn’t an inexperienced actor, but I was an inexperienced film actor, and that was George’s first film. There was one Panavision camera in the country and George Miller, at that time, was not a major director. He had been a doctor!

George Miller We cast him, and he cast his friends and associates as the biking gang. They lived together in a series of apartments at the same place, they rode to set on their bikes in their costumes, and they inhabited that. It infected the whole movie to the extent that there were moments on set where I was actually scared of them.

Tim Ridge He was doing a bit of the Method thing, so he was the Toecutter on and off the set.

P. J. Voeten They snuck into Mel’s room and wrote graffiti on his ceiling and freaked him out completely.

George Miller He was a very daring actor. Would try anything, was happy to improvise, always surprising. I always wanted to work with him again, but of course, the Toecutter died at the end of Mad Max. Then when it came to the Immortan, I thought, Oh, here’s our opportunity.

Mark Sexton Once Hugh Keays-Byrne came on to work on Justice League to play Martian Manhunter, that’s where they really reconnected. And then once Justice League fell over, George went, “Well, do you want to play Immortan Joe?”

Hugh Keays-Byrne I kept saying to myself, Oh, it’s not going to happen, just to try and protect my sort of excitement because I couldn’t believe it. I thought, How can this happen? How can the Toecutter go to Immortan Joe? And at that stage, it was about thirty-odd years between the two.

George Miller People would say, “Why don’t you cast Mel Gibson in Fury Road, but not as Max?” I thought that would pull people straight out of the movie, but it was completely different with Hugh, because he’d be wearing a mask, it was going to be a different aesthetic. So, it was no problem.

Tim Ridge I still read interviews where people say they didn’t realize the Immortan was the same actor!

George Miller That was a very easy decision, and I was so happy he was able to do it once again in that wasteland.

Hugh Keays-Byrne It felt like an entirely new ball game, of course, because it was a huge Hollywood-type movie, and the other one was a very scratchy little dirt-box movie done out of the back of various caravans. But it had that edge that Miller brings to things.

* * *

Like most of the key characters in the film, the look of Immortan Joe went through many evolutions on its way to the screen.

* * *

George Miller In the storyboards and concept drawings, Immortan Joe was bald, and he covered himself in cobalt blue.

Mark Sexton He was colored blue for water, which was a bit on the nose, perhaps.

Lesley Vanderwalt When he was blue, we started thinking, Well, what if we used the colors as rank? The boys from Bullet Farm and Gas Town or Immortan’s War Boys would be a different color, so you knew who they were apart from their cars.

P. J. Voeten They would smear blue stuff on him. I can’t recall if it was detergent or not.

Mark Sexton That was my fault, I’m afraid. I just threw it in the storyboards. At the beginning, there was this whole sequence of the “smelly ones” all desperately trying to give the Winchman offerings to buy favor to get up in the Citadel, and because the Immortan was colored blue, one day I went, Oh, I’m just going to give one of them a pack of Omo, which is one of the detergents we have here that happens to be blue. And for some reason or another, I don’t know why, everyone’s stuck on that as being the reason why he’s colored blue, which is hilarious. Anyway, it didn’t happen in the end. He became white.

P. J. Voeten We decided not to do that because James Cameron had already made all blue people in Avatar.

George Miller By then there were so many blue people in the movies—in X-Men, in Avatar, even in Braveheart there was blue. I thought, Okay, it’s become a trope. It’s become a cliché. We’re not going blue. So that went. The Immortan Joe was no longer blue, but on the day that we were about to cut off Hugh’s great mane—and he’d had that hair way back when he was with the Royal Shakespeare Company—I said, “We’re saying goodbye to your hair, how do you feel?”

He said, “I’m fine, it’s for the movie.” But he told me, “You know, my nephews would grab onto my hair, and I would swing them around as if they’re on a circus ride.” And I thought to myself, Then we can’t cut his hair! It’s so magnificent. And luckily it stayed.

Zeb Simpson It’s such an iconic vision of a villain, with that outfit, the chest piece and the codpiece, all the badges and the rebreather with the filters on his back.

Hugh Keays-Byrne That mask, that’s the most extraordinary thing. When I first saw that, that gave me the character.

Jen Yamato To me, Immortan Joe always had a Vader-like quality. Partly that’s because of the breathing mask and respirator that he has, but also, he’s such a vivid physical personification of humanity that is sick with its own ruin. It’s like the decay of the patriarchy.

Karen Han It’s also funny that he wears all these medals on his costume in a world where that’s essentially meaningless.

Patton Oswalt And the fact that flabby old Immortan Joe has to get into his armor and makeup in the morning in order to look manly is very relevant, of course.

Richard Lawson He’s like Harkonnen in Dune, this repulsive guy who’s powerful but is physically a complete wreck. There’s something kind of Trumpy about that, in a way.

Jenny Beavan I was reading an English newspaper, and they had photographs of American presidents—Clinton, Obama, and Trump—comparing what they looked like when they took office and when they left office. Clinton and Obama definitely aged in their eight years, but in Trump’s last photo, he was Immortan Joe!

Colin Gibson Would I have designed the Immortan to have a mop of ridiculous hair and given him an orange tan? Yeah, I’ve got that sort of sensibility, but George is far too into Joseph Campbell to stoop to such low and obvious politics.

Alison Willmore He sells himself so well as this grotesque but incredibly charismatic character. You believe that people would die for him constantly and find his gaze to be reward enough.

Hugh Keays-Byrne When I was shooting on Fury Road, there were people there that were children—well, less than children—when we did the first one. And they couldn’t believe I was still alive! It had a very strange feel, very surreal, very exciting.

Dean Hood They all worshipped him, really, as a person. Not as the Immortan, but just as a great guy.

Tim Ridge What he brought to the first film, he brought even more so to the making of Fury Road.

Zoë Kravitz Hugh wrote these notes to us from the Immortan in what looks like blood, and he passed it out to all of us at the table read.

Nicholas Hoult He would put photos of himself all around the stunt gym.

Josh Helman We were always looking at them whenever we were working out. He kept close watch on all of us.

Richard Norton He would come into the drama classes and sing nursery rhymes to the stunties. Because for him, they were his babies, and it just built this bond. When he walked out, it was like Jesus Christ walking out on set.

Ben Smith-Petersen Every time we saw him, we’d go, “We love you, Daddy.” The silliness of it kind of made it more accessible to a lot of people. A lot of the stunt performers were like, “I’m a stuntman, I am not going to call this dude my daddy,” but it was so ridiculous that you did it. And then by the end of it, everyone was into it.

Hugh Keays-Byrne When I was a spear carrier at the Royal Shakespeare Company, that was drummed into us: Your job is to give that man the power, so you keep your eyes on him. And that’s what they did for me, no question.

Josh Helman And of course, Hugh had this incredible gravitas. It was not really an effort to buy into that as our characters, because this enormous bear-man in this incredibly ornate outfit is standing before us in this booming voice, telling us to kneel and chant. We were like, “Absolutely!”

Mark Goellnicht Whenever he would turn up on set, it would be announced that he was ten minutes away or five minutes away. It was almost like, “Okay, the president’s coming,” and all the War Boys would get into formation, and they would do this whole chant when he arrived. Even though we weren’t shooting, and the camera’s not rolling, the War Boys were just going nuts.

Sean Genders The first time I saw it, he walked on set and grabbed the megaphone from P.J. and went, “Daddy’s here,” and off they went into this great big V-8 salute. It was mind-blowing.

Charlize Theron Even when you’d go to the grocery store and see all these shaved-head boys walking around, if Hugh would pass them on the street, they’d all do this weird bow and V-8 thing to him in the middle of Swakopmund.

Josh Helman We’ve been warned that Daddy was coming, and it was our job to receive him and be his disciples. It was quite remarkable, and makes you realize how huge this thing is that George created.

Tim Ridge All those War Boys absolutely doted on him by the end of the filming because they got it, they understood what he was trying to bring.

Charlize Theron There was something about him that didn’t make it feel pretentious. It was like a Goldilocks thing—the way he handled it and got everybody to be in that world with him the whole time, it felt just right.

Tim Ridge That was Hugh’s knack. He was able to get people to believe in it and understand that it would only make for a better film if they got 1,000 percent behind it. And they all did. Everyone understood what their role was, and that was to prop up the Immortan.

Nicholas Hoult The atmosphere that created was very liberating. The culture that Hugh Keays-Byrne and George created for the War Boys, that energy that all the stunt team would bring to it, and then the smell of the petrol and all the noise—it really heightened things.

Hugh Keays-Byrne It was a wonderful thing to feel, and it worked and that’s all one can say! Luckily, it came off.

Ben Smith-Petersen Hugh is an inspirational human in general. I think about how open and loving he is and his love for the film was so infectious. He was such a good dude. He made it easy.

George Miller Behind that scary exterior—which he likes to play with, of course—there was this lovely, warm man, incredibly playful, and he was still very playful all these years later.

P. J. Voeten You would never reconcile the two people. He was the sweetest man, totally the opposite of what he portrayed.

Charlize Theron When I watch that performance, it’s so not who he is. He was this very, very sweet man, kind of like a hippie. That’s what the conversations would feel like—they were always kind of not of this world. He was thinking outside of what we were living in.

* * *

In December 2020, just a few months after he was interviewed for this book, Keays-Byrne passed away. He was seventy-three years old, and Fury Road was his final film.

* * *

Henry Dray (transport manager) God rest his soul. Hugh Keays-Byrne, one of the loveliest human beings I’ve come across. He’d come to a couple of barbecues down at my place, and he loved to hear stories: “What happened on the weekend, boys? Tell us.”

Eugene Arendsen You could sit and have beers with him, and he would always have the time of day.

Tim Ridge When you’d see George and him together, the love in the room was palpable. They appreciated each other so much, and Hugh thought George was a genius. He’d say it blew his mind how in the whole maelstrom of filmmaking, George could be such a sweet and caring person.

Zeb Simpson It’s so sad that he passed away, but he’s left an incredible legacy.

Tim Ridge Everyone loved him. It’s a very big loss, but if it had to end somewhere, then Fury Road was perfect.

George Miller In a way, he was the glue for the film.

Tim Ridge He was justly proud of the fact that he was not only able to be successful in one Mad Max, but two. It was amazing to see him take on that role and be a standout again.

Hugh Keays-Byrne I can’t believe I’m part of it. I can’t believe I did Fury Road.

Chapter 18

“The Last Great Action Film”

How did they pull off all the wild stunts in Mad Max: Fury Road without anyone dying? Maybe it’s because the man in charge of all those action scenes, stunt coordinator Guy Norris, had learned firsthand on an earlier Mad Max movie how dangerous things can get when a stunt goes wrong.

An inveterate thrill-seeker who got his start performing in stunt shows across Australia, Norris began taking a course for film and television stunt work before he was even out of his teens. Back then, he said, safety was practically an afterthought. “It was all very physical, hard-knocks action, where you would do high falls on fire and you’d have actual raw fuel poured on you,” Norris remembered.

Even then, Norris had a stunt coordinator’s intuition for how to make those escapades a bit less dangerous. When one instructor ordered the young stuntmen to jump out of his moving truck and roll to safety, “Very quickly, you learned you wanted to be either one of the first or one of the last people to jump out,” Norris said, “because that’s when the car was either speeding up or slowing down.”

At twenty-one, Norris landed his first feature-film job, working on The Road Warrior. He was the youngest and most enthusiastic member of the crew, and he stunt-doubled for almost everybody: Not only did Norris do a lot of Mel Gibson’s driving himself, he wore seven different outfits to play each of the antagonists that Gibson goes up against during a tanker fight.

But the stunt Norris is best known for is the one that almost killed him, a femur-breaking flip where his bike collided with a wrecked car and sent him spinning into the air like a rag doll. Norris landed in a nearby pit of cardboard boxes meant to cushion his fall and was quickly rushed to the hospital. “At least the shot made it into the movie,” Norris now says with a laugh.

* * *

Guy Norris What happened is the bike hit the buggy and the buggy picked up in the air, so rather than clearing it, my legs clipped onto the edge of the buggy and sent me into the flip.

Jon Iles That flip he does rips his legs apart in real time.

Drew McWeeny It looks like whoever that is died. The first time I saw it, I stood up and yelled because I couldn’t believe what I had just seen.

Guy Norris I wish that I hadn’t broken my leg doing it, but it’s a fantastic shot. I was in hospital for a few days, but there was a three-week period before the bone starts to heal and I still hadn’t finished playing one of my characters that fights on the tanker. So, I remember going home for a couple of days, and then coming back to set on crutches and we did that whole sequence—literally, with my broken leg on a box.

Richard Norton The one thing I know about Guy is he’s fearless. He’s done world-record descenders, where you jump off a building and plummet and the cable will stop you ten feet above the ground. I said, “Guy, weren’t you scared shitless?” He said, “Well, you do your homework, you double-check everything, and you put your trust in the people around you.”

Ben Smith-Petersen He’s a soft-speaking kind of dude. He’s not a physically imposing guy, but he might be one of the most badass stuntmen I know.

* * *

Having participated in so many of those visceral Road Warrior stunts himself, Norris was determined to recapture that practical magic for Fury Road.

* * *

Guy Norris The overriding rule was that we wanted it to be real, we wanted everything to be as in-camera as possible, and we had to believe in that world.

Colin Gibson With Fury Road, if we were gonna make an action film, this was gonna be the last great action film.

Ben Smith-Petersen On most films like this, you’re working your way up to a stunt and maybe there’s one a week. But on this film, from the time your day starts, you’re already doing a stunt and then there’s another one on top of that. It was a stuntman’s dream, that film.

Nicholas Hoult On a lot of big productions, they don’t let actors do stunts, but I remember one day turning up and they strapped me under the War Rig in a harness. It’s not something you’re used to every day—hanging underneath a truck, five or six inches off the ground, driving in the desert. The stunt team involved in this, how they managed to keep everything real, it’s just incredible.

Colin Gibson All the action had to be real, the characters had to be able to perform, and they had to be their own stuntmen and -women. The hair can’t stand up on the back of your neck—not for me, anyway—watching Vin Diesel drag a three-ton, square-block safe down through miraculous right-angle turns on the street.

George Miller If two vehicles were to smash into each other, why simulate it digitally when you could make it real? Then you get all those random bits you can’t predict—the way that the dust reacts, and all that.

Tom Hardy I watch CGI superhero movies, and I get lost. I love playing Xbox games, and even some of those get to be too much to follow. I know that when I play my computer games with my son or my friends, I can immerse myself in that world and I’m actively participating in that game. But why would I go to the cinema to watch a computer game?

George Miller Through evolution, our survival has been based on reading things as accurately as possible—this is a big digression, but that’s why plastic surgery fails so often. It’s the uncanny valley. We’re reading something that’s not quite real.

Tom Hardy Your eye can immediately tell. Because these things actually have happened, there’s an immediate viscerality where you go, Oh shit, I felt that.

Mark Goellnicht You have that real sense of gravity, and the real sense of speed. When you’re doing it in a Marvel movie, you’re just guessing.

Tom Hardy What George has nailed and makes me so excited to be a part of it—and Chris Nolan does the same thing as well—is that he takes his audience and says, Right, here’s as close to it as you can possibly get. In order to do that, we are actually going to flip trucks, we are actually going to do these stunts.

Colin Gibson He had spent far too many years with pixels that did anything he wanted—tap-dancing penguins and pigs whose lips moved. This was a new and exciting experience to go back to his roots.

Brendan McCarthy To me, the sheer poetry of George Miller doing vehicular destruction, it’s a bit like Jackson Pollock doing his drip paintings or William Butler Yeats writing “Easter, 1916.” There’s something about George Miller doing vehicular destruction that rises to the level of art.

John Seale Guy Norris set up and choreographed those amazing stunts and the boys were trained on those for years.

Guy Norris I’ve chatted a lot with the stunt community about older films like Red River and Ben-Hur, or the John Wayne westerns. They’d all go out there and spend months just living it and riding it, and the amount of time they had was incredible. We had the luxury of time on our side that hasn’t happened since those eras, and other than maybe our next one, I don’t see it happening again.

When I talk to people that I know in the business, of course they would love the opportunity to have 150 stunt performers and over 100 vehicles in the desert for any amount of time. It’s just that it doesn’t happen because most of the time, studios will say, “Oh, you can fix that in CG.” The difference comes down to the fact that George created a world that gave us an opportunity to do way more, and Doug and the studio supported that.

Tom Hardy As we dug in, it was dangerous, or certainly could have been extremely so, if it weren’t for the methodical professionalism and planning and preparation of the experts: stunt coordination, stunt team, and riggers.

Colin Gibson George was a doctor, and he takes that Hippocratic oath seriously. He’s desperate to not cause harm. Apparently, that means you’re not meant to go out and hurt anybody on purpose, which was a little antithetical to the idea of three hundred stunts at high speed.

George Miller The biggest anxiety by far was safety. One hundred thirty-eight days, big stunt days every day, and I was thinking, What do we have to do today not to kill anybody?

Scotty Gregory I can say that pretty much every day, someone was in danger.

Richard Norton Every stunt that I witnessed, my heart was in my mouth. You know the stunties that are doing it and you love them, so you’re concerned that everything’s going to turn out okay, because there’s every chance that it mightn’t.

Tom Clapham No matter how much of those protocols you have in place before a crash, it’s still a big, heavy piece of metal colliding with something.

Georgina Selby You feel like if you breathe, you could screw something up.

Iain Smith For that kind of material, you can imagine it’s a health and safety nightmare. But we were helped hugely by George, who, of course, lost his producing partner [Byron Kennedy] in a helicopter accident. And so he was very, very strong about this with the crew, that no one should take risks, everything should be planned, and if anyone saw anything that was out of order or untoward, then they raise their hand and yell and we would stop production instantly. And that saved a few dangerous situations.

Ben Smith-Petersen We had no major injuries, really, which is kind of unheard of for any stunt team. Because of how dangerous that film is, nobody really wanted to take it for granted: “Let’s do all the preparation right.”

Guy Norris We’re not talking about doing CG War Boys on the tank. We’re not talking about doing simulated travel in a studio. We literally were out in the desert doing it at speed. What we had was another layer over the top of that, our safety cables and all that rigging equipment, which were then removed incredibly well by Andrew Jackson and his visual effects crew. That allowed us to really stretch the physical capabilities of all the performers.

Chris Patton I don’t know how Mick Roughan gets his head around to do these stunts safely on the rigging, but Guy will want to see a to-scale version of whatever we’re going to do, and that dude can whip up anything. Gets the welder out, and off you go.

Mick Roughan I care that, number one, our guy’s going to be safe. Number two, the action’s going to look exactly what the director wants to see. And number three, when an audience sees it, they go, “Ahh!”

* * *

Though much of Fury Road is made up of car chases and vehicular crashes, the hand-to-hand combat staged by fight coordinators Greg van Borssum and Richard Norton was just as thoroughly choreographed.

* * *

Chris Patton I tend to see movies where the fight scene’s just “insert cool fight here,” but both Guy Norris and George Miller constantly would stop us during the fight to be like, “Why is this character doing that?”

Richard Norton For us, when we put fights together, what’s not happening is just as important as what is happening. In between moments, if you’ve just been hit, what are you feeling? Are you suddenly pissed off? Are you scared? Does it take away a bit of your confidence? George made it very clear that every move had to be justified by story and by character.

* * *

The perfect example of that is the initial clash between Max and Furiosa by the tanker, a masterpiece of character-based escalation. But while shooting that sequence, Furiosa stunt double Dayna Grant had more on her mind than just nailing the fight choreography.

* * *

Dayna Grant I was violently ill during the entire filming of the fight scene, because I’d gone out to dinner, ordered these garlic snails, and had chronic food poisoning. More liquids were coming out of me than what I was putting in! I was dosed up on all these pills trying to stop me from vomiting midfight, and then I’d get home and I’d be vomiting all night.

I was vomiting nonstop for probably a good week, and at the end of the fight, we’d finished it all and then I literally collapsed. Charlize made sure that I got taken to the hospital—I got put on a drip, and I had major dehydration. They asked me if I was allergic to anything, and I said, “I’m allergic to penicillin.” The next nurse who came in pumped penicillin into me and put me into a seizure. So, I was in the hospital for about three or four days.

You can throw me off tracks or do whatever you want to me, I don’t care. But don’t feed me garlic snails.

* * *

Still, there was an upside to powering through the scene: It’s where she met and fell in love with Max stunt double Dane Grant, who Dayna married after Fury Road was finished shooting. (Though the two stunt performers have since divorced, they remain friendly and have a son together.)

* * *

Dane Grant The two of us were doing this—dare I say—very S&M-type fight; it’s a love/hate mixture between these characters. They’re very close, there’s chains, they’re holding each other in very intimate positions, and the longer we were doing it the more we’re kind of eyeing each other up. While we were punching each other we were falling for each other—quite rapidly.

Charlize Theron They got married! Think about that when you watch this movie.

Natascha Hopkins Isn’t that so wild? There were a lot of love connections.

Matt Taylor There was a lot of debauchery that you’ll never get full reports on.

Richard Norton It’s a bit like when I was on tour for twenty-five years with rock-and-roll bands. I worked with Linda Ronstadt for like fourteen years as her personal bodyguard, and she coined the phrase “roadmances.”

Michael Wannenmacher (production assistant) Especially when you get away on a location where everyone is locked up together, it’s going to happen.

Chris O’Hara Babies were born, marriages happened. It was because we’re all transplants to Swakopmund, basically. So, we all kind of stuck together.

Michael Wannenmacher Plus, all the stunties have great bodies. Because they’re stunties!

Guy Norris I was given the mandate to hire the best stunt people in the world. “Go wherever you need to find people, we just need it to be the best.”

Ben Smith-Petersen I was a circus performer teaching flying trapeze and Guy brought his sons, Harrison and Harlan, in to learn it. He was like, “Did you know you could be a stunt performer?” And I was like, “No, but that’s way better than what I’m doing.”

Guy Norris My youngest is Harlan and my oldest is Harrison. They both work with me now, and they were both War Boys on the tanker.

Harlan Norris I was thirteen, turning fourteen when I was leaving.

Harrison Norris I would have been sixteen, turning seventeen. He was a war pup; I was a War Boy.

Guy Norris It’s an incredible journey. Me starting on Road Warrior at twenty-one and going full circle to be able to do Fury Road, and then both my boys being involved, it was quite an amazing happenstance of events—a family affair.

Harrison Norris We desperately wanted to be a part of this really cool thing that was happening. He was like, “All right, boys, well, good luck. Audition.”

Georgina Selby That’s a dad with high expectations.

Guy Norris I’m responsible for their safety, the execution of what they’re doing, and their health in general. Clearly, as a parent, there is an extra attachment to the fact that it’s your own blood, and they learned very early that my philosophy is, “What can possibly go wrong?” as opposed to, “This would be great!”

Harlan Norris It’s my job now to stress the fuck out of Mum, and I do a pretty good job.

Harrison Norris We’re proud of every single gray hair that she has.

Harlan Norris As long as you give her a hug at the end of it, it’s all good.

Stuart Williamson And Tom Hardy, that guy’s a hard hitter. He did a lot of his own stuff.

Tom Hardy We play a game called “Not in the Face” a lot when we get bored. Basically, me and the armory, the stunt boys, fuck off and go play “Not in the Face.” It’s when you shoot each other, but not in the face, obviously. If you get a scar on your face, the makeup department has to deal with it.

* * *

Of course, this raises another question: What exactly did Hardy and the stunt boys shoot each other with?

* * *

Tom Hardy Whatever you want, mate. But nothing that’s gonna kill you or put you in hospital. There’s just one rule: Not in the face.

* * *

The final stunt that Norris staged for Fury Road was arguably the film’s most dangerous: Near the end of the movie, Nux crashes the War Rig to prevent the rest of Immortan Joe’s armada from advancing through a narrow canyon pass. Norris planned to drive the unwieldy Doof Wagon himself as it smashed into the overturned War Rig.

* * *

Michael Wannenmacher There was a lot of tension on the set that day, because it was such a dangerous stunt. In fact, he wouldn’t let any of the other stunties do it because the probability of injury was extremely high. And because the truck was going to get all smashed up, it was one take only, so they had to get it right.

Guy Norris The Doof Wagon is what’s called a cab-over, where there is no front of the truck to rig your safety inside of. The windscreen is literally right in front of where you’re sitting as a driver, so there wasn’t a way that you could actually drive that vehicle and crash it, because obviously you are the first point of impact. We’d spoken about remote-control driving it, but my concern with that was that you still had a fifteen- or sixteen-ton vehicle traveling sixty miles an hour with all these people around. I don’t want to put that in the hands of some electronics.

Andy Williams There’s a different number of methods where you can blind-drive a car, and a pod is one. You take the controls—the throttle, the brakes, the steering wheel—away from the cab of the vehicle and out to a pod.

Jon Iles Someone’s pretending to drive the truck, but the real truck driver is on the side, out of camera view in a pod.

Michael Wannenmacher They built this special cage just to the right of it, so Guy could drive the truck from that cage with a little monitor.

Eugene Arendsen Driving from a pod is a strange thing. There is no sense of connection to the vehicle, and it’s hard to judge depth. It’s almost like you’re playing a video game, which can be quite dangerous.

Guy Norris Also, impacts are all about deceleration. A classic example is you jump on your bed at home and because it’s soft and absorbed your weight, your speed has decelerated over the six inches of your mattress. Now, if you were to jump onto the floor the same way, it’s going to hurt because the deceleration is only in what your body can offer—it’s not in anything to do with the floor.

So, when you’re talking about g factors, it’s the prolonged g factor on a body that gives you the trauma or the damage. We had to get it down to basically twenty to twenty-five g’s, but it was something extraordinary, like fifty or seventy-five, if we were doing it for real. That’s unabsorbable.

Michael Wannenmacher He basically had to come to a dead stop, and apparently when that happens, your heart can literally rip away from your chest.

Richard Norton I mean, I wouldn’t do it. I’m a fighter, I want both feet on the ground. That would scare the shit out of me.

Guy Norris It was one of those things that I really didn’t want to put anybody else in. I thought, Look, I can’t ask anybody to do something if I don’t know what the outcome is going to be. I’m going to feel much more comfortable if I’m doing it. We literally had to design the system to be absorbable.

Michael Wannenmacher The cage he was driving from would crumple to absorb some of the g’s.

Guy Norris The whole Doof Wagon was cut to collapse and fly ahead, which it all did. It was literally like a lounge chair ride. The deceleration worked perfectly. And it just was a treat.

Michael Wannenmacher They crashed, they cleared, and then all of the medics raced in. Then when he popped out, everyone gathered around and cheered.

Mick Roughan That was a heavy hit, but he got out of there like he’d tapped someone in the arse in the traffic.

Guy Norris I felt incredible elation that we had pulled off what it was as safely as we had, and it was exactly what George wanted. It meant for me that I had a fantastic career as a performer as well, and there was really nothing else that I would ever want to do. It was a great stunt to say, Okay, I’ve finished doing the stunt work myself now. I’ll just supervise it and plan it and leave it to the young fellows to keep going.

Harrison Norris The effects team cut the crash seat out and used the wreckage to build it into a perfect old man’s rocking chair with an Immortan symbol carved in it. He still has it, and it’s the coolest shit you’ve ever seen.

Harlan Norris It’s his retirement chair.

Harrison Norris Not that he’s done much retiring.

Chapter 19

The War Party

Wouldn’t it be liberating to play a War Boy? Certainly, all those stunt performers thought so: In Nadia Townsend’s War Boy workshops, they would scream, cry, and beat their chests to coax each other into ever-escalating emotional extremes. But even for the more experienced actors in Immortan Joe’s army, that uninhibited spirit proved contagious.

British actor Nicholas Hoult had never taken a role quite like Nux, the War Boy who tries to chase down Furiosa and then, after an ignominious defeat, teams up with her instead. “It was a fun character to play because he was completely true and wholeheartedly committed to whatever he saw at that moment,” said Hoult, whose previous performances had been played in a far more muted register. Inhabiting Nux allowed Hoult to let loose, and in a film where most of our heroes are grim and taciturn, the War Boy’s wild jolt of talkative energy was more than welcome.

* * *

George Miller For me, the biggest character arc is Nux, because he goes from being a fanatic devotee of the Immortan, convinced that this is his day to die historic on the Fury Road, and then events disabuse him of his belief system. He makes the choice to make the most of what he’s got, and basically relinquishes his own self-interest in the cause of a greater good.

Nicholas Hoult He’s been brainwashed since he was a kid, growing up in Immortan Joe’s world where he completely believes that dying in battle is his ultimate path to Valhalla. I always viewed him a little bit as a puppy, because he completely believes that but when he starts to get his eyes opened to all these new ideas, thoughts, and people then he suddenly realizes there’s this greater cause to die for and things much bigger than what he’s been brought up to believe.

James Nicholas He had probably the largest journey, from sycophant to savior.

Nicholas Hoult Before we started shooting, George sent over hours of videos. You could log into this database that told Nux’s story from the moment he was conceived to the moment we see him in the film, basically every day of his life. It was this amazing in-depth backstory and a sense of the world as well.

Mark Sexton Because of the fact that the world was toxic, and humanity was essentially dying, almost all of the War Boys had leukemias and blood cancers or tumors.

Eric Blakeney When we started talking about the story, George had a big thing that a certain kind of cancer makes having sex incredibly painful for a man. We were talking about the development of Nux and his romance with this girl in the truck, and George wanted to do a scene where she wants to have sex with him, but it’s too painful and he can’t. And I said, “George, that’s not going to work. I don’t think we can show him whining that it hurts his winkie too much.”

Mark Sexton The idea was that most people didn’t last past the age of twenty to twenty-five—they all died. The War Boys were essentially child soldiers.

James Nicholas Obviously, African child soldiers was a big influence on that, where you have these kids sitting there with machine guns and cigarettes, and they’re six years old with this kind of glazed look in their eyes.

Mark Sexton There was a much more extreme idea where the War Boys were bloody scary kids, like the Waiting Ones from Mad Max 3 gone incredibly wrong. Within the storyboards, we’d drawn Nux as though he’s fourteen, and then obviously it became something that couldn’t be done in the end because you have to work with very, very, very skilled stuntmen, and not many of those were around fourteen.

George Miller If you look at Brendan’s original drawings of the War Boys, they’re much more decorated. We kept on paring it down. That was one thing I learned about this movie, as time went on: simplify, simplify, simplify. It’s a very spare world. You don’t want to clutter it. You don’t want to create visual noise, knowing that the movie was going to play so super-fast.

Mark Sexton Very quickly it became this idea that they all basically looked the same.

George Miller They’re designated half-lives, so they already are fashioning themselves like skeletons. They don’t tattoo themselves with living objects, they tattoo or scarify themselves with car parts, because car parts outlast them.

Mark Sexton Nux has the blueprint of an engine block on his chest. Part of the culture is the worship of the machine, worship of the car.

Sean Genders George said with the War Boys, they cut themselves, and then smeared grease and oil into those wounds as a form of tattoo.

George Miller If you’re a War Boy or a half-life, you’ll paint yourself white and you’ll form some sort of skeletal look. The Imperators mark themselves by putting black on their usually shaved skulls, and if they start to get sick, then they have to paint themselves in white.

Mark Sexton And if you’ve got all these people running around the Namibian desert in blazing sun all day, you can cover them in sunscreen and talcum powder so they can block out the sun and not get hideously sunburned.

Georgina Selby Half the men looked the same because they all had the shaved heads, and they were all cast with a similar look. For the six months I was there, I was like, “I don’t know which one you are.”

Robyn Glaser I’ve worked with some of the stuntmen since and I’m like, “But that’s not you!” Suddenly they have hair, or they’re not so skinny.

* * *

Hoult was only nineteen when he was cast in Fury Road, but he had started acting as a child, playing the young lead in About a Boy opposite Hugh Grant. After a growth spurt and a stint on the British teen series Skins, Hoult had begun to make the leap to the movies, appearing in A Single Man and X-Men: First Class.

* * *

Alison Willmore He had grown up into someone handsome that they kept trying out in roles like, Could he be the next hunky leading man?

Richard Lawson When I saw he was in this movie, I had this fear that it would be like Brad Pitt in Twelve Monkeys: “I know I’m beautiful but watch me be a weirdo!” That’s always so overdone and effortful and embarrassing, but I think this really redefined him as a presence. He wasn’t just the ugly-duckling-to-swan story: He was also an interesting actor capable of reaching outside of himself.

Alison Willmore He sells you on the deep kamikaze commitment of this death cult. He’s a true believer, and that’s a difficult thing, that deeply committed fervor.

Petrina Hull I get a lot of joy out of watching Nick’s performance as Nux. He’s such a lovely person as well, and he really got the spirit of Nux and brought something different to the dynamic of the group in the cast. I guess because he straddles allegiances in the film, he was on everyone’s side without being on anyone’s side.

Nicholas Hoult There were times on set when Tom or Charlize would say that they didn’t feel a line of dialogue was something their character would say at that moment, but George would feel it was something necessary for the story, so occasionally I would say some of those things that needed to be said.

Josh Helman You know immediately from meeting Nic that he’s one of the kindest people that exists. Probably within half an hour of meeting him, he was like, “You want to have a cup of tea?” We went and sat in his hotel room, and we made a little pot of tea, and Zoë came by and poked her head in, and she invited us to go hang out. When we got to Zoë’s door, I overheard her telling the other actresses that we were both sitting down drinking tea like a couple of nerds. But of course, Nic’s British, I’m Australian. It was a Commonwealth tradition for us!

Eugene Arendsen He’s really down to earth, a good bloke. He wanted to really immerse himself into being a driver, and he said, “Well, can you teach me a few things?” So, we took him out in a Nux car. We had a section of desert to play with, it was awesome. And he’d got all that sequencing really good so that in the film it’s realistic, exactly how you do it.

Petrina Hull I don’t know if anyone knew how well cast he was until he got in there and owned it. There was an allowing of the process, he wasn’t fighting it.

Nicholas Hoult I knew I’d really arrived as an actor when there was a scene where [Charlize] spat in my face. I asked politely, “Do you mind if I spit back?”

Charlize Theron And I said, “Yes! Go for it!”

* * *

The enthusiasm of the War Boys is almost always at an 11, but they are never more zealous than when spraying silver paint on their faces to psych themselves up for a kamikaze attack.

* * *

Nicholas Hoult That was quite a lot of pressure! I had all that scarification on my face, all those prosthetic pieces, and the silver spray didn’t come off those very well. It would be quite a long reset time each time we shot it—twenty or thirty minutes—so it was one of those weird performance moments where you sense you’ve got a finite amount of time and the sun’s setting.

Lesley Vanderwalt It was cake decorating mixed with a little bit of makeup. It took us ages to get the right silver.

Chris Patton That stuff tasted so bad!

* * *

Though Nux eventually sees the light and helps our heroes, the War Boy named Slit (Josh Helman) stays squarely on the side of the Immortan. Already prone to taunting Nux as they head off in pursuit of Furiosa, Slit remains a hissing threat to his young rival until the bitter end of the movie.

* * *

Josh Helman My most comfortable place as an actor is naturalism. When I got this role, I was freaking out a bit because I was like, How am I going to play a character that exists in such a huge world? At some point, I realized that it was like opera. The world was enlarged, and it was like I had been given permission to really make a performance that was larger than normal, at least for me.

And there was something so weirdly childlike about Slit. He desperately wanted the approval of Immortan Joe, so I was like, I’m going to do it like I want a pat on the back from my deadbeat alcoholic dad who doesn’t give a shit about me.

Sean Genders Josh was the biggest prosthetic character in the film. The makeup was three and a half hours, and then you do a twelve-hour shoot day.

Josh Helman I tried to get as lean as possible. I kept thinking, There’s no protein powder in the apocalyptic wasteland. What do I do?

Tom Clapham There was a lot of skin. A lot of body complexes.

Robyn Glaser The War Boys had very, very strict eating regimes, to the level that they had their own section of the catering tent. It was one big boot camp for them: If they weren’t on set, they were in the gym.

Stuart Williamson The sucky thing is the War Boys could not wear shirts, so every single time they would say, “Okay, guys, we’re going for one, take your jackets off,” we’d go, “No, fuck you.” We were freezing our butts off!

Tom Clapham I bought a shitload of space heaters for the War Boys.

Harlan Norris It might be freezing on top of the truck, and we’d start singing a song. It was one of the many preorganized things from the workshops, but it would come out naturally.

Harrison Norris It’d start out with “Itsy-Bitsy Spider.” Fuck, how do I remember that? But yeah, really low and slow, and then as everyone’s doing it, the energy builds, and then someone will scream over here, or someone will shove and tumble, then all of a sudden everyone’s shouting these nursery rhymes and bouncing off each other and it’s incredible. A month later, you might hear one guy down at the end of the spiked car, he’s going, “Itsy-bitsy . . .” and the second you hear that, everyone on the Rig’s like, Oh, fuck, let’s go. It was fascinating.

Ben Smith-Petersen I often was asked to run through the armada singing this stuff and trying to get everyone to do it, because I’m such a dork for this kind of thing. They were like, “Ben’ll do it,” and I did. I have such great memories of yelling this fucking song at people, screaming my lungs out. I’d go, “We are . . .” and they’d all go, “War Boys!” I’d go, “Fukushima, kami-krazee . . .” and they’d go, “War Boys!”

Lesley Vanderwalt Little kids would come up and go, “Les, can I be a War Boy, can I be a War Boy?” And these children would shave their heads. Already, as little kids, they were seeing these War Boys as legends.

Harrison Norris When some of my War Boys died, it was weirdly emotional! You’re used to showing up as a stunt performer and you’re going to roll off these stairs and that’s it, so it was interesting to find myself trying to rationalize where these different characters were at, and then even more surprising to find the other guys doing exactly the same.

* * *

One of the most memorable War Boy deaths comes during the first major chase, as Morsov (Chris Patton) is shot through the chest with an arrow while he stands atop the War Rig. Aware that he has mere moments left before he will die, Morsov sprays his face silver, yells, “Witness me!” to his fellow War Boys, and makes a flying leap at his attackers’ spike-covered car, spearing the hood and setting off an explosion.

* * *

Chris Patton I was going to stunt-double for Morsov and there was meant to be a real actor coming in, but because everyone was doing so well in all these little acting classes, George was like, “Hey, maybe we don’t need to bring in an actor from the States. You can just do the stunts and act, right?” And I was like, “Right. Sure.” I nodded my head and went home for the night, thinking, Oh shit, hope I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew!

The day we filmed it was the first day I’d even been in that rig to do the stunt, so it was a crash course. I was like, “Cool, they’re fake spikes, right?” And they were like, “Oh no, they’re real spikes.” It was rigged to stop short six inches from the spikes and obviously, I felt 100 percent safe, and I was in the best hands, but nonetheless, you’re still human, and that part in the back of your head goes, What are you doing?

Harrison Norris I had a death that got cut for pacing. I swung in and grabbed Zoë Kravitz to pull her out of the War Rig, but one of the Wives pulled my gun off my hip, shot me with it, and my mask falls off. It’s revealed I’m just this young guy, and we have this nod—we’re both young, we both don’t belong here—and then I swing away dead. But when they were cutting it, it lined up at the exact same time as they were killing the Seed Carrier, and they thought, Oh, we can’t do two deaths back-to-back.

Harlan Norris I died a couple of times.

Harrison Norris We’re fodder! Some of us died as many as eight times in this thing.

Chapter 20

Shiny and Chrome

After serving our hero well in the first two Mad Max movies, Max’s iconic Black on Black V-8 Interceptor is wrecked in the very first sequence of Mad Max: Fury Road, clearing the decks for a mighty menagerie of monstrous vehicles to come. Nearly every scene of Fury Road is staged on, near, or inside these twisted hot rods, which were dreamed up by principal vehicle designer Peter Pound and built by production designer Colin Gibson with a vast crew of petrol heads who pitched in.

Imagine a collaboration between H. R. Giger and Henry Ford and you might land somewhere in Fury Road’s parking lot. These organic, hulking creatures were so important to the success of Fury Road that they might as well have been listed at the top of the call sheet.

* * *

Samantha McGrady To me, the cars were the cast.

Richard Hobbs In fact, they were probably better behaved than some of the cast members.

Colin Gibson There were 88 separate vehicles that all had stories and character arcs, but there were probably 130, 135 altogether: three War Rigs, two Gigahorses, doubles and triples, exploding objects, et cetera.

Shira Hockman (art director) The set-dressing crew were amazing at making sure every single car had a character and had a backstory. Who had owned it before? What modifications had they done? Why had they decorated it in a certain way?

Dayna Grant And the details are incredible. You had all these tiny little trinkets and things hanging everywhere in places that you would never even see in the movie.

Jacinta Leong Even if you don’t see it, it’s part of the design. And an actor would appreciate it, I reckon.

Hugh Keays-Byrne I was overawed with the degree of specialization. I mean, the attention to detail, the immense amount of work!

Richard Hobbs They all had personalized interiors in them, and hood ornaments like eight balls with little bird beaks on them. The Bullet Farmer’s steering wheel was made out of shell cartridges. One of the cars had a chain-mail curtain running all the way around the windscreen—someone actually joined up all these intricate pieces of the chain.

Tim Ridge Even in the vehicle build stage, I don’t know what the budget topped out at, but it felt like there was no expense spared, like Richard Attenborough in Jurassic Park.

Jacinta Leong They’re unthought-of fantasy vehicles, but they still need to be believable. As you’re drawing these things up, you’re like, Have we gone too far? It was all uncharted territory.

Peter Pound A big lesson that I learned during that film was that even though it’s a science fiction action film, as long as it looks like it’s real and it works, the audience will believe it.

Colin Gibson It’s the end of the earth. If you’re going to bother to drag a hunk of steel back across the burning sands, lift it up into a cave, and try to put it together to make something, then you probably weren’t going to choose a Camry. And given that your vehicle had to be ready for battle, you probably weren’t going to choose anything fairly modern, either. Carbon fiber doesn’t take an artillery shell quite the same way as good old Detroit steel.

* * *

Foremost among all the vehicles is Furiosa’s War Rig, a seventy-eight-foot eighteen-wheeler modeled on a Tatra T815. Transporting fuel, mother’s milk, and five freed sex slaves, the War Rig is a fearsome beast capable of withstanding nearly anything that’s thrown at it.

* * *

Charlize Theron I know every corner of that War Rig still so well—I don’t think it will ever leave me. It’s like my first apartment.

Colin Gibson The War Rig is somewhere between eighteen-wheel Leviathan and hot rod. It needed to have its own defense unit, and that defense unit needed gun turrets. And given that we’re a car-based society, the choice of bombardier turret at the far end of the tanker was a Volkswagen.

David White The Rig itself is bloody huge. It’s like a jumbo jet. You can’t tell when you look at it on film, but it is such a big vehicle—ridiculous and long.

Chris O’Hara They called the front piece of the War Rig the prime mover, and then they had the tanker, which is like the back piece, and then we had the fuel pod, which was the little ball at the end.

Jacinta Leong It’s like an insect body—a head, a thorax, and a butt.

Peter Pound George wanted it to be like an animal with a hump in the middle of its back.

P. J. Voeten When we were doing it in 2003, we had a product placement deal with Ford. This time around, they went to the countryside and picked up whole vehicles out of farms that were sitting there rusted.

Jacinta Leong This Cadillac front came in via a container from the States and there was a hornet’s nest and clumps of grass in it, but I was thrilled that it didn’t stay forgotten on someone’s farm. It was immortalized on film, and what a second life those cars got! I reckon the people who had those vehicles had no idea what would happen to them.

Richard Hobbs Some of the cars that we bought were quite rare. If the owners of those cars knew what was going to happen, they probably wouldn’t have sold them.

Dane Hallett With one guy, Colin had to trick him into thinking that the car was going to go to a beautiful place and be restored. Soon as they got it into the workshop, we fucking cannibalized it.

Charlize Theron I sometimes fondly think of the detail that Colin came up with, the gear shifts in that car, the push buttons to start it. The ball in the steering wheel, I remember that so well, and getting comfortable with that, so I could drive with the prosthetic hand.

Colin Gibson Why do these people invest so much of their love in turning it almost fetishistically into a thing of art? Well, it’s the only thing they done got.

Dane Hallett I have a huge collection of animal remains—like, my own private collection. They wanted some skulls and bones at some point, and I said, “I’ve got heaps!” On pretty much every car where there ended up being an animal skull, it was one of my skulls. My uncle even had a pet wombat that he loved like it was a dog, and on the Razor Cola, it’s got the actual wombat skull on the steering wheel.

Colin Gibson Of those skulls, some of them are animals, some of them are human. They’re there, again, as a fetish, as a “beware,” as a standoff. If you look closer, they’re also mixed with the heads of baby dolls, things that have no context anymore but that appear to be humanlike.

Shira Hockman All the crazy dolls’ heads stuck on the underside of it! It was a very special moment when all those dolls arrived. We had to behead them.

Peter Pound You have one War Rig for first unit, you have another one for second unit, and you have a third one to roll and blow up.

Chris O’Hara The A version was the one the cast could go in, with an interior set inside the tanker. The B version was the stunt version with a souped-up engine, meant for fast driving. And then the C version was kind of an amalgamation of the two.

Colin Gibson For all those who thought there was only one Babe pig, I hate to break it to you, but pigs don’t stay cute for very long. We bred and trained a large number of pigs to come up with the perfect pig. This time, we just had one or two of each car that we built . . . and then destroyed.

David White Each car has to have its own voice, its own character.

Mark Mangini (sound editor) For the sound of the War Rig, we wanted to make it almost feel anthropomorphic, to make it feel alive. To that end, I had this notion that the truck itself was an allegory for Moby Dick, so we designed whale sounds to play underneath all those truck sounds to give it a living quality. And every time it’s struck with a harpoon, you hear these deep, whalelike groans to say it’s been hurt and wounded.

Our final coup de grâce is at the end of the film when Nux throws the War Rig into a T-bone maneuver to sacrifice himself and block the pass so that Immortan Joe’s party can’t get through. We go into a beautiful, balletlike slow-motion sequence as the War Rig turns on its side and crashes, and there are no realistic sounds there. Those are all whale sounds and slowed-down bear sounds. What we wanted to say to the audience was this is the final death rattle of a dying creature.

Mark Gatt It’s a day-to-day thing while you’re working on it, but when you take a step back and have a look at the whole picture from start to finish, you think, Wow, did we build that? The War Rig was my baby, and to see her going across the desert for the first time was wow. Oh, mate, it was crazy to be on this massive plain, and here she comes straight across. Beautiful! Wonderful!

* * *

Immortan Joe needed his own signature vehicle, a car that would awe any passerby lucky enough to witness him. Enter the Gigahorse, a ten-ton monstrosity with seventy-inch tractor tires and a carriage comprised of two vintage Cadillacs that were welded together.

* * *

Matt Taylor The Gigahorse is just ridiculous.

Dean Hood My favorite car was the Gigahorse. Just seeing that, I wanted to borrow it to take my kids to school.

Peter Pound Each day, George would walk past and have a look at what I’d been drawing, and there was one moment, February 2001, where I’d drawn two different pictures of the Gigahorse, and he said, “Join those two together and make one.”

Colin Gibson I remember telling a few people that the Gigahorse was meant to be a pair of 1959 Cadillac Coupe de Villes in flagrante delicto. Nobody speaks Latin anymore, so I got away with it with quite a few places. They are definitely hooking up.

Mark Natoli People might think that we’re criminals for cutting up Cadillacs and Chevs!

Colin Gibson The idea was always that in a world where there was barely one of everything, the only one who would have a pair—if you pardon the expression—would be the lead villain. So he has a pair of V-8 big-block Chev crate engines, slung in a W-16 format, and a pair of Cadillacs, one atop the other.

Anthony Natoli I made the main gearbox and motor assembly for that, and it was supposed to be impossible to do. They said, “We’ve tried everywhere,” and I said, “Well, you haven’t asked me.” So, I went home and designed one, and when it was delivered to Villawood, it was like the guard of honor: As it was coming through on the pallet, sixty blokes all stood there saluting it as it was going past.

Shira Hockman The moment where I realized how big and crazy all the vehicles were was when I got to Namibia and the art department was in this warehouse workshop. Whilst I was setting up my desk and unpacking all my kit, they had rolled the Gigahorse into the warehouse space, and when they switched it on, literally, the entire building started to shake. I was like, Holy crap.

Dean Hood The Gigahorse, you had to refuel it every thirty miles.

Henry Dray We did about 1.8 million U.S. dollars. The amount of fuel was ridiculous. A full-sized tanker would come to set pretty much every day.

* * *

Smaller but no less flashy was Nux’s car, a heavily customized 1934 Chevrolet 5-Window Coupe with Max strapped to its front like a hood ornament.

* * *

Peter Pound For the Nux car, I drew a deuce coupe with the engine sticking out the front of it, an homage to the little yellow deuce coupe in American Graffiti. I was trying to put in as many of these references to American hot rod culture as I could. It was all about trying to trigger all of the hot rod fans, so they’d see something in there that they’d like.

Scotty Gregory Everyone wanted to drive Nux’s car, and Eugene got to.

Eugene Arendsen The attention to detail was amazing. In the Nux vehicle alone, I had my water container that was made out of leather, and I had food rations all wrapped up in a little sleeve. I was self-sufficient for a couple of hours, if I wanted to be.

Richard Hobbs I don’t recall favorite cars, but there were some I hated. One of the ones that was really difficult to drive was the Bullet Farmer’s vehicle, the Ripsaw, the one with the tracks on it. That thing was a beast! It had so much power that you would accelerate, and it would stand up on the end. A lot of people were scared of it.

Richard Hobbs There are various cars still left, and we’ve still got one Max car—the black Interceptor. I think it’s the last one because unfortunately, they’ve become so collectible. There was one at the end of last year that was found in a chicken coop, covered in chicken poop and dirt. It hadn’t been driven in ten years, and it went for a quarter of a million at auction. And at the time when they first did Mad Max, those cars were worth nothing. You couldn’t give them away!

* * *

Of course, all that attention to detail begs the question: What does it feel like to build something so elaborate, only to see it be destroyed in such spectacular fashion?

* * *

Colin Gibson Absolute joy. That’s what it was created for. We’re a temporary gallery, not the Smithsonian.

Chapter 21

We Are Not Things

Who are the five women that Furiosa frees from Immortan Joe? Like most of the characters in Mad Max: Fury Road, all we learn about them is what we can pick up on the fly. Miller and his co-writers conceived the quintet with a set of simple characteristics—“funny,” “brainy,” “fragile,” “seductive,” and “leader”—and began to flesh them out based on how those characters might react to the changing circumstances of the chase.

Cheedo the Fragile (Courtney Eaton) is the youngest of the sex slaves and the most tempted to return to her captor, Immortan Joe. The Dag (Abbey Lee) contributes cracked, funny observations, while Toast the Knowing (Zoë Kravitz) is practical and grim. Capable (Riley Keough) is still innocent enough to form a tentative romance with the War Boy turncoat Nux, but Splendid (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), pregnant with the Immortan’s child, is willing to risk the baby’s life—as well as her own—if it will help them all escape.

After drawing up the storyboards, Miller and his writers had a vague sense of who the five Wives were, but the director was still eager for more authentic input. “The things about blokes writing stories with women in them is that it’s always the man’s point of view,” said Peter Pound, the film’s lead storyboard artist. “George was very good at getting a female opinion.”

Miller gave the actresses playing the Wives an unusual freedom to develop their own backstories, and to help them better understand the stakes of the movie, he also engaged a surprising recruit: the Vagina Monologues playwright and activist Eve Ensler, who was working with Congolese survivors of gender violence.

* * *

Eve Ensler (consultant) It was surprising for me, too! I had been a Mad Max fan, and when I was younger, I was kind of obsessed with dystopian films because I always felt like we were moving towards that state. Sometimes I fear they were actually preparation! But I was still pretty surprised to be contacted, because I didn’t see huge feminist overtones in the original movie.

I had given a talk in Sydney, a peace lecture about violence against women around the world, and George had heard about my lecture. He reached out to me directly—George sends voice memos, that’s how he communicates—and he sent me a voice memo introducing himself, telling me about the movie, asking me if I had any interest in participating.

George Miller It occurred to me that we needed somebody to really help the female actors find a way into their characters and their world because everybody in this story, except Immortan Joe, is in some way a commodity. As it happened, I was listening to the radio down in Australia and Eve, who is extraordinary in the work she does for human rights in Africa, happened to be in the Republic of Congo around the time we were in Namibia.

Eve Ensler George is a deeply thoughtful, intellectually engaged person, so I think he was very interested to hear my thoughts. He would send me pieces of the script for feedback, and we began to get into a dialogue about the women who were going to play the sex slaves and how they could embody those parts and know what that lived experience was. How could they be true to it as actors? Eventually, he invited me to Namibia to spend time with them.

George Miller She gave us a week in the middle of a very busy schedule and she came down and ran wonderful workshops. A lot of them were quite intimate with the five girls, and by osmosis it crept into the movie. I’m quite certain of that.

Zoë Kravitz Even if a lot of the women’s history wasn’t in the dialogue, it was important to George that we understood what we were running from.

Eve Ensler George prepares for these things for years and years and years, so that microscopic attention to detail was mind-blowing. It was really a privilege to be asked to bring my own experience of having been an activist over the last twenty years, traveling to war zones and being with women in those situations.

Abbey Lee To give a bunch of girls, who had only just met, this time with someone as powerful and open and ferocious as Eve was quite a spectacular experience. She really created a safe space for us to ask her questions and explore things we’d experienced in our own lives as women growing up in a world dominated by men.

Zoë Kravitz We’d meet with Eve all day for seven days, and she told us about what she’d seen and heard and the women that she’s come to know.

Eve Ensler We talked broadly about the use of rape and sexual violence as a systematic tool of war throughout the world, and my experiences in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Haiti, and more recently working in the Congo. If you’ve been somebody’s sex slave for years, what would your relationship be to your enslaver? It’s very complicated, obviously.

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley The workshopping process was really emotional. I went places that I’d never been before, and it was particularly dark at times. Having grown up with a very pleasant childhood in a middle-class family in the UK, it was a big shock to the system.

Zoë Kravitz We would read the script and do exercises like writing letters to our captor. It was interesting stuff and it created deep empathy.

Eve Ensler We talked about how damaged your body would be after all these years. Where would your level of agency be in your body? Have you ever tried to fight back? And what happened if you rebelled? We would map out all these stories based on those characters.

Riley Keough By the time we were done, we knew our characters so well. We didn’t have to think about it, ever.

Abbey Lee She challenged us to go deep within our own lives. There was something blessed about it. It was very sacred, I suppose.

Riley Keough It was amazing that George cared so much. It could have just been like, “This is a big Hollywood movie, now put on your bathing suits and get outside.”

Eve Ensler It was a radical thing that George asked me to do that. To me, it’s another indication of the depths of his exploration and his desire to really get things right and true and intricate.

George Miller I wondered why I was always attracted, despite my better instincts, towards making Mad Max movies, and then I realized it’s a wonderful world to play in. Even though it’s set in a dystopian future, the stories allow you to go back into the past—in the case of this film, almost as a medieval world, really. The behaviors are much more elemental, the dominance hierarchies are much more obvious in the way that the few control the many, which is the constant in human history. Ultimately these films are really about who we are today, referencing the past. Their first aim is not to be cautionary tales or speculative. They basically look at who we are.

Nadia Townsend With the stunt guys, it didn’t sit well with them that we kept talking about the masculine being violence and destruction, and the feminine being nurturing. So, I organized a night where I said, “We should have a meeting with Eve where we talk to her about it.” George heard about it. He was like, “I want to go to that.”

So it was this beautiful night with about ten of the stunt guys, George, and a couple of other people, and we sat on a floor with Eve in a circle. She spoke about her take on the allegory of the story and about this idea that the feminine is about nurturing. She talked about the Green Place and about how the only way that we can turn things around is to move into the feminine space.

It was beautiful to watch George on the floor, on his stomach, looking up to Eve. He was taking in this woman who he had flown over to imbue the film with some of those ideas, and going, “Yes. Yes. I want to hear that.”

Zoë Kravitz I’m glad we had that, because it was such a crazy experience, so long and hectic and chaotic in so many ways, that it would be easy to forget what we were doing if we didn’t have this great foundation that we could return to. I felt like that was a saving grace.

Courtney Eaton We really became sisters from that process.

Abbey Lee It worked perfectly because by the time we did sit in that truck, all of us girls formed relationships, whether it was in a group or in pairs or threes, and you could feel it in the work. Me and Courtney Eaton were joined at the hip. We’re ten years apart, and she became like my little sister. She felt somehow like a mini version of me, and stuff started to happen: Our characters were always holding hands or putting our heads on each other’s shoulders. It was very intimate.

Courtney Eaton I was the youngest on set, fifteen or sixteen, so that whole world was super new to me. I grew up with my dad and my brother, a very male-oriented upbringing, so it was new to be with a bunch of girls. We all took on our roles, and I was the baby of the group. Everyone really helped me through it and looked after me on set. They’re like real-life sisters.

Abbey Lee George was adamant on us five girls moving as symbiotically as possible. He wanted us like a five-headed hydra.

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley All the girls, we all lived on a beach in houses next to each other.

Riley Keough Zoë and I had been friends since we were fourteen, and it was going to be such a crazy experience that we were like, “Let’s just live together.” Abbey ended up on our first flight to Namibia, and we’d never met her. We were staring at her from across the airport, knowing who she was, because she’s so clearly Abbey—six feet tall, looks kind of like an alien, and stunningly, shockingly gorgeous.

Zoë Kravitz You become family. There were times you wanted to kill each other, times you laughed together, times where we’d all show up really hungover. It was like a strange summer-camp experience.

Riley Keough We did a lot of hanging out at home. A lot of Truth or Dare, a lot of drinking. It was very isolated: We were either in our houses or on set.

Mark Goellnicht All the Wives got on really well and they were all beautiful to each other, very considerate. They needed to be, because it was not always pleasant out there and they were in this veil-y, white costume that was so nothing.

Jenny Beavan George had seen a German ballet and he sent me a little clip where the women were wrapped in bandages. The Wives were kept in a very sheltered accommodation in the Citadel, and since they were there as breeders, they probably wouldn’t be wearing a lot. The production designer, Colin, said, “Oh, it’s like they’re wearing shrouds.”

George Miller The chastity belt that the women wear, I saw in the museum in Venice—not exactly like that, but probably fifteenth-century and very, very similar to that. It was one of the most brutal things I’ve ever seen, and it stuck in my mind. And the idea was with just one image, one prop, you can tell a lot of story. You get a lot of bang for your buck. No one has to explain.

Jenny Beavan When each girl came in, we’d make a pair of knickers and a sort of bra. We wound it on them individually, and then pinned it so they could get into it as a garment. They wouldn’t have needed much more.

Lesley Vanderwalt I kept looking at Riley and saying to George, “Why don’t we have her as a redhead,” because she’s got this beautiful, almost Irish-heritage skin and green eyes.

Riley Keough When I landed, someone said, “You’re dying your hair red.” I was like, “What? That is gonna look so bad, but okay.” But it was so great for that world and for that character, and George could see things I couldn’t see.

Lesley Vanderwalt So she became the redhead and Abbey became the blonde and then Zoe’s character was feisty, so we went, “Let’s go with the short hair on her.”

Jenny Beavan They were meant to be a set of very similarly dressed women, but we tried to give them their own individuality. And of course, they pick up little bits and pieces when they get to the Vuvalini to add it to their wardrobe.

Colin Gibson We had a meeting with the five lovely girls who played the Wives and I had a bag for each of them and five tables of props. I said they were about to make a choice: When you exit the biodome and make a run for it, what are the things you’re going to take with you? All you’re going to be able to take is what fits in one bag, so choose a bag, and choose the objects.

Riley Keough [George] creates this world in such an intricate, amazing way where everything is figured out, but he leaves room for us to figure out our characters ourselves, which was so much fun.

Courtney Eaton George was pretty open to our opinions. For instance, Abbey and I were incredibly close while we were making the film, and part of our costumes is that I’m wearing one glove and she’s wearing the other. George really liked us to find our own bits and pieces within each other that made sense, and he nurtured that.

Riley Keough We’d spend hours going through backstories. We had full stories of who these girls were, where they came from, why they were given to the Immortan. Some of us decided that we’d chosen to go with him, some of us decided we were given by our parents. From the best of my memory, my backstory was that Capable’s father worked for the Immortan and had passed away.

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley There was talk at the time of there almost being a separate film, a prequel to Mad Max, that told the circumstances of the five Wives and how they’d come to live under Immortan Joe. We workshopped a whole movie, almost.

Manohla Dargis If we think about one of the most important contemporary female action heroes, Ripley does have allies along the various Alien movies, but you always feel like Ripley’s alone in some way, and that aloneness is part existential and sometimes just material: She’s by herself. Fury Road is a movie that is, by contrast, arguing for this radical sisterhood, which is such great second-wave feminist flag-waving.

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley Feminism is very much the backbone of the movie. Even with the Wives, there may be a sense that they’re damsels in distress, but they’re not, really. They find their strength. The most special thing that came out of working on the movie is that backbone really resonated with the audience, and I wasn’t sure if people were going to pick up on it or not.

David Sims Even in the few years since this movie, studios and producers have zeroed in on that and they’re like, “We need these moments! We need to do what that movie has done! We need to trumpet things!”

Alison Willmore Like all the female Marvel characters walking out in Avengers.

David Sims They’re banging a gong, right? “Look at what we did!” But what’s admirable and much more compelling about Fury Road is that it’s not doing that. The movie is not pleased with itself, is the best way to put it.

Mark Sexton There was one thing that George said back towards the end of storyboarding that gave me an absolute cold chill. He was looking at the final storyboards and went, “Gee, I’m a bit worried.”

Splendid Angharad had died, and Fragile didn’t quite have the arc that she ended up having in the film where she renounced Immortan Joe. At that point, Knowing was trying to take on the mantle of Immortan Joe, so it left two other Wives, Furiosa, and Max. And George goes, “Not many people are going up in that elevator who are actually going to make a positive difference in the future. So, I think I’m going to have to add a sixth Wife.”

And I looked at the nearly four thousand storyboards we had just drawn and how many of them involved the Wives, and went, “George, no. If you absolutely have to do it, she’s agoraphobic, so she lives in a box under the backseat the entire time and doesn’t come out. Is that all right?” So, he resolved it, obviously, by having the Vuvalini.

Chapter 22

The Many Mothers

Mad Max: Fury Road doesn’t play by conventional Hollywood rules, and the Vuvalini are certainly proof of that. Can you think of another action movie where a group of middle-aged and older women get to brandish shotguns, ride motorcycles, and save the day?

Near the end of our heroes’ adventure, Furiosa is reunited with her tribe, a group of gray-haired biker women that she was snatched away from as a young girl. The Vuvalini are tough and unsentimental. Still, one of them—the elderly Keeper of the Seeds—holds a pouch of potential that could create another Green Place.

The Vuvalini integrate seamlessly with Max and Furiosa’s motley crew, which is something of a shocker in itself: Though most action movies struggle to find room for even one significant female character, our party of protagonists numbers over a dozen women as we hurtle toward the film’s final act.

* * *

Jenny Beavan They were a great tribe of extremely interesting older actors from South Africa and Australia. We already had the people who were young and beautiful, so here we were doing the reality of weather-beaten women who were survivors.

Lesley Vanderwalt They were actresses who never got to play anything like that—they’d play mothers or grandmothers. To have those roles, they were sensational for their age, and they loved being dirty.

Melissa Jaffer (“The Keeper of the Seeds”) The roles that one is offered at this age, quite frankly, you’re in a nursing home, you’re in a hospital bed dying, you’re suffering from dementia. So, when this role came along, I thought, Well, I won’t get another chance like this before I die, and that’s why I took it.

Melita Jurisic (“Vuvalini”) Learning to be a kick-ass middle-aged warrior woman riding a motorbike, it’s a fantasy come true.

Joy Smithers We’re like Amazons, fierce warriors who would defend our borders. Over time, our land became poisoned, and we had to become nomadic, but we were always looking for a place to resettle, almost like sand pirates. And even though we had these seeds with us that were the hope for the future, we were defending ourselves against robbery and rape, and we would gather things from killing and stealing.

Eric Blakeney One of the concepts I had come up with was “Gynotopia,” which was the Green Place at the end of the Fury Road where the women had this community.

Joy Smithers Originally, we were going to be the Vulva-lini, but there was a bit of pushback from the studio. The “vulva” was not good. So, then it was Vuvalini.

* * *

Several of the actresses cast as the Vuvalini already had a history with Miller. One was Joy Smithers, who was nearly cast in the first Mad Max after the original female lead was hurt in a motorcycle accident during the first week of production.

* * *

Joy Smithers The girl that they ended up casting broke her leg the day before filming, and then my agent arrived with a contract and a script to my parents’ home and said, “You must read this, and if you like it, she has to be in Adelaide on Monday.”

My parents are not in the industry, and my mother read the script and cried all weekend saying, “I don’t want my baby to be run over at the end!” So, they didn’t allow it, and my dad apologized to me for that on my mother’s deathbed, actually: “I’m so sorry, love. We never knew that it was going to be like that.”

I’ve heard George is very loyal, and my agent rang eventually and said, “George wants you to come in for a chat about Fury Road.” I thought, Oh, wow. Well, maybe they want me to do some acting workshops with kids or make ceramics. It never occurred to me in a million years that he would consider casting me.

Megan Gale I’d met George Miller after he cast me as Wonder Woman when he was doing Justice League. And when that didn’t happen, he was very apologetic and said to me, “I’d still love to work with you one day.” I thought he was being nice, and then I got a call out of the blue.

George said, “Look, I really would love you to work on Fury Road. However, you’re physically not quite right for one of the Wives, and you’re not old enough to be a Vuvalini. I’m just letting you know that the existing roles, I don’t think you’re right for, but I want to find something.”

Then he went away again and came back and said, “I think I’ve got a role for you. I’ve just created it.” In his mind, he had figured that my character, Valkyrie, would have been Furiosa’s friend as girls. I’m the same age as Charlize, to the date—August 7, 1975, which is a fun little fact that I don’t think George even knew. But that’s why in the movie, when I run up to her, there’s this reunion because she was my best friend.

I felt really blessed that he wasn’t paying me a bit of lip service like, “Oh, yeah. We’ll work together one day.” He genuinely wanted to. It wasn’t lost on me how unique and special that is.

* * *

Like the War Boys and Wives before them, the actresses who played the Vuvalini were coaxed into creative exercises that would bond them to one another.

* * *

Melita Jurisic I’d had no experience of working on anything of that epic nature on film, so I had no idea that it would be the intricate and massive adventure that it was.

Megan Gale He wanted it to really come across that we were this tight-knit tribe of women who’d been living and surviving together for decades, and that’s not easy to achieve as an ensemble when you’re all strangers and you’ve never met, and you’ve been dumped in this really isolated corner of the world. So, we got there quite a few weeks in advance before filming so that we could hang out together, do a lot of workshops, and start to collectively build our tribe culture.

Joy Smithers One of the first things we did as a bonding experience was, we were taken into the desert by a whole lot of Australian Special Forces and taught how to fire guns. So, these elderly women and Megan Gale and myself, we tried out every kind of gun. It was so much fun. The Uzi was my favorite.

Megan Gale The arms department said, “Here’s your rifle. Do you want anything carved into it?” Because I saw Valkyrie as like a raven, I said, “Let’s put a raven’s head on it!” And so we put crows’ feathers throughout the costume and in my hair, and my bike was covered with black feathers in the front of it. That creative collaborative approach to his filmmaking is what makes it special.

Melissa Jaffer The most notable character suggestion for me was, “Make her more Aussie.” More Aussie . . . music to my ears!

Megan Gale The first time you see me in the film, I look naked, but I had on the world’s smallest G-string. George talked to me about it about a month before I got there, and he said, “There’s a scene where you’re going to be nude, but it is in context.” The Vuvalini would put Valkyrie up there and she’d pretend to be bait so that then she could lure in men, and that the women could then come in and ransack their vehicles and then take whatever they needed.

I said, “Can we cover me somehow?” And that’s how I got really long hair, because he said, “Maybe that can cover your chest as modesty.” Of course, then I got up on the tower and it couldn’t have been a windier day and the hair blew away.

Petrina Hull That was a wonderful day on the set, when the Vuvalini showed up.

Abbey Lee We’d been with each other for such a long time, so one part of you was curious and excited and looking forward to having new people coming in, and another part of you was territorial: “Who are these people turning up?”

Mark Goellnicht They were so dialed in and so well-rehearsed and so prepared. And actually, the scene where they meet the Vuvalini was one of the only scenes in the movie where we did long takes on the Steadicam—which is quite unlike Mad Max. George really wanted it to have that feel of calmness, like these women move slowly and are very spiritual and wise. So those shots were quite languid.

Charlize Theron It’s always refreshing when there’s some new meat on the hook, and some of them were South African, so that was really amazing.

Antoinette Kellerman (“Vuvalini”) The day I met Charlize on the set, she held out her hand and I instinctively introduced myself in Afrikaans: “Ek is Antoinette Kellerman.” She replied, “Ek weet wie jy is.” I was blown away. We spoke Afrikaans with each other on set. In the one scene I’m hanging from the side of the truck with a harness holding a gun while we’re moving; every now and again Charlize would look to her left and shout at me, “Hey! Is jy nog okay?”

Charlize Theron We were exhausted by then, and this beautiful thing happened: I don’t know if it was because they were women or because they were older, but they were so understanding of our exhaustion. That’s the thing I remember the most, feeling like I was around nurturers.

Chris O’Hara They had that motherly instinct automatically, and they cared for the other girls even just as regular humans, not as the Vuvalini.

Eve Ensler They gave us such a range of women in all their complexities, like the Vuvalini who kept the plants and kept that part of her feminine self alive. And yet she was a tough-ass broad, right?

Melissa Jaffer I loved the stunts and action scenes. Having been a dancer in my youth, it was thrilling to learn that the little old muscles could still respond and enjoy the experience!

Megan Gale The only regret I have is that once George asked me to do the role and I accepted, I had planned quite a long trip with my partner, who’s now the father of two of my children. It was to be our last trip as a couple before we had kids, and when George gave me the schedule, I realized I’d have to cancel that. So, I said to George, “Look, I’m in a bit of a pickle. Do I choose career, or do I choose something personal?”

And he came back and said, “I’ve figured out a way that you can do the film and go on your trip, but there’s a catch: Your character has to die.” Originally, Valkyrie wasn’t meant to get hit by a truck and killed, she was meant to continue and be at the Citadel at the end. George said, “It’s totally your call.” It’s obvious what I chose, but I often wonder, did I make the right decision? What if there’s a sequel?

Richard Lawson Normally, our heroes would visit this world, then leave it, and that would be the end of the Vuvalini. It was so satisfying, watching the movie for the first time, to realize, Oh, they’re going to go with them! They’re going to be in it, doing things! They become an integral part of the story and though they’re not in it for very long, when any of them die, it’s crushing. It feels like a violation of the only good thing left in the world.

David Sims They supercharge the last big set piece of the movie.

Joy Smithers I was on the stunt set and there was someone dressed like me doing a whole lot of stunts. I went up to the first AD and said, “Well, why wouldn’t I do the stunt? I’m here, I’m dressed, I’m fit.” That was an absolute game-changer because they got me up there on the War Rig to straddle Tom Hardy and squeeze him with my legs to make sure that he didn’t fall off as we were followed by the armada. I was terrified I was going to kill the leading man!

But oh my God, it was fabulous, one of the highlights of my life. It gave me enormous confidence, because I got cast in that film when I was forty-nine, and for me to be able to do stunts at my age and not be questioned about that was true to the Vuvalini ethos that you can do anything and that you are relevant and fit and formidable. They didn’t put me in cotton gloves and say, “Oh, don’t do that.” They’re like, “Yeah, she wants to do stunts. Let’s go for it.”

Melissa Jaffer The reactions of people to the Vuvalini have not ceased to astonish me. The impression they made continues: Whilst appearing at the National Theatre in London months ago I was amazed to find, after each performance, a long line of autograph hunters waiting for me. None had seen the play but were all Fury Road fans applauding the Vuvalini.

Eve Ensler To see the Vuvalini have that solidarity and fight with each other was amazing. When do we ever see that? There was something really moving about them, because so often, older women are discarded at their ripest moment—when they’re at their smartest, their wisest, and sometimes even physically at their strongest. I feel much stronger in my sixties than I ever have in my life, but it’s at that moment that we get abandoned and made invisible and disposed of. For me, to see those women and know they had formed their own tribe and been these badass bike riders, that was fantastic. It was a huge lift for those of us over fifty.

Joy Smithers I agree, because now I’m fifty-seven and I feel more in my skin and more capable and able to do whatever I want than I did when I was twenty-five. It’s like I was being fed this lie before. I have the tools now, and the emotional stability. I feel empowered.

Megan Gale George is very much a fan of women being strong and independent and tough, but he does it in a way that’s not contrived, without trying to make some kind of political statement or point. Maybe in those kinds of circumstances, in a postapocalyptic world, women would survive really well.

Jen Yamato Tina Turner said we don’t need another hero. And she’s right! We need new heroines.

Chapter 23

“Dudes Were Coming in Through the Roof”

At the beginning of Mad Max: Fury Road’s final act, our heroes have an awfully difficult dilemma ahead of them—and so did the film’s director.

By that time, Furiosa has led her group a long way in pursuit of the fabled Green Place, only to learn from the Vuvalini that it no longer exists. It’s a devastating reveal, but what comes next is even more momentous: At Max’s urging, everybody decides to retrace their journey back to the Citadel, in the hopes of retaking the undefended stronghold while Immortan Joe and his armada are still out in the wasteland.

Of course, one final chase ensues, and that presented a problem for George Miller: How do you up the ante on another vehicles-in-pursuit sequence when the entire movie has already been comprised of them?

Enter the polecats. These masked adversaries join the fray in the third-act chase, swinging from poles that are fixed to moving cars. As they fence in our heroes, the polecats present a surreal, overwhelming threat capable of breaking through the War Rig’s best defenses. To bring that swaying vision to life proved just as dangerous as what’s on the screen.

* * *

Peter Ramsey (director, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) The minute I realized the polecats are done practically, I was like, Wait a minute, that’s real? That’s really Tom Hardy sitting up there? I don’t trust my senses anymore. This is beyond my ability to comprehend.

Doug Mitchell It’s an extraordinary piece without CG interplay. There was a little bit of wire here and there, but it was basically done with humans rather than computer graphics.

George Miller The whole movie is set around this War Rig, which is under siege all the time. It’s got spikes on it, and it’s defended, so people have to board it like they would a ship. I remember seeing some street performers on flexible poles swaying in the breeze at a festival in Australia. I thought, Oh, it’d be great if we could put those on vehicles.

Guy Norris That was the elephant in the room. Literally everything else on the storyboards was doable.

George Miller I never imagined we could do it for real. It was one of the advantages of the delays. I was going to shoot them on the poles and then CG those poles onto moving vehicles.

Guy Norris It would have been really easy then to say, “You’re right. Let’s just make them CG.” But for me, it would have changed the whole feeling of how we were approaching the film. I was always saying, “Let me play with it. I think we can work this out.”

Jon Iles That’s Guy Norris in a nutshell: “Let’s give it a crack, see what’s physically possible.”

Steve Bland (adviser) I got a call from Guy. I’m an acrobat, and I left Australia twenty-two years ago to come to the U.S. to join Cirque du Soleil. It was fun because they were asking us to create something, but nobody quite knew how.

Guy Norris We started getting into material physics for the pole very early: initially, carbon fiber from the yacht-racing world—super light, incredibly strong—then natural fibers like bamboo because you see bamboo bending all the time in nature.

Steve Bland And if you make it flexible, the higher up you go on it, the more you can actually make it bend.

Guy Norris Ultimately, it was a very high-quality steel, because we wanted the rigidity with a little bit of movement.

Steve Bland We started with sway poles, and we realized that they’re just too fast. So, they took the sway poles and added a counterweight to the end of it, so you could slow down the entire process and have a suspended pause at the end of each arc.

Guy Norris The technical issue was you could not get a return on the polecat because of the weight and where it was from the hinge point. And then we thought about this creature you’d see on people’s desks—it was a bird drinking water—where rather than having the pivot point at the very base, they picked the pivot point up. And the counterweight became an engine block.

Chris Patton In 2009, I got asked in to test some equipment with the poles on the back of the cars: “Climb up this pole and let’s see if this idea works.” And I was like, “All right. Anyone else climbed up that pole yet?” And they’re like, “No, you’re the first one to climb up there.” Okay!

Guy Norris George was doing Happy Feet at this stage, and at the end of each day, I would do a talk to camera and say, “This is what we did today, George,” and cut together our test footage. I remember saying, “I’ve got a surprise for you,” and that was the very first time that we had done a shot where we had all the polecats lined up and swinging on the vehicles.

George Miller After all this time, they’d figured out a way to actually put those people on poles and have those vehicles working. It brought tears to my eyes. I never imagined that it could be done for real.

Mark Sexton It was one of those moments where you sit there and go, Oh, fuck. They’ve figured it out. That’s kind of why you do film, to see that stuff come to life. You draw this original little concept art, and then a whole raft of people tries to figure out how to solve it, and then someone comes up with this solution, which is elegant, exciting, and beautiful to look at.

Josh Helman They had the pendulum poles in the stunt gym for people to practice on, and I was like, Holy shit, that looks tough even when it’s stationary in a gym with foam on the floor. What’s it going to be like when it’s mounted to a moving vehicle?

Harrison Norris You couldn’t get on it until you were strong enough to climb up and down it three times, freehand, without stopping. We were all busting to prove that we could handle this thing.

Robyn Glaser How do you get up those polecats, and how do you stay there? The ability of these boys was amazing.

Stuart Williamson The amount of rehearsals those guys went through was insane.

Ben Smith-Petersen It was the coolest thing ever and I couldn’t wait to get turns on it, just for the fun of doing it.

Tom Hardy I’m not very good with heights. There’s a photograph of Doug, almost had to hold my hand. I was like, “I really don’t want to go up the scaffolding pole. I really, really don’t.”

Charlize Theron The first time any of those things happened, we couldn’t believe that they were really happening. We didn’t really rehearse a lot of that stuff on set, so once we got there, shit was just happening and dudes were coming in through the roof as I’m driving this fucking truck in the desert at forty miles per hour, like, What’s going on? Are we on drugs?

Josh Helman You just can’t fathom it! There was this forest of poles moving in sequence across the desert, with all these stunties at the top floating down and up and across. It was this insane ballet like nothing I’d ever seen. And that’s when I was like, If no one falls off and gets seriously injured on this, it’s going to be a miracle.

Joy Smithers We were terrified for the stuntmen, who we were all friends with by that stage. So, there was a real element of, Don’t die in this stunt.

Tom Hardy There was only like seven inches on either side of the scaffolding pole to put your feet and then balance up there. And it’s quite lonely because when the scaffolding pole goes that way, you naturally fall that way as well. Then when it comes back up to middle, you have to roll around and fall the other way, otherwise your face mallets the side of the scaffolding pole. That really hurts and there’s no one up there to complain to.

Stuart Williamson There was an incident where one of the polecat stunt performers ended up taking a bit of a fall. It scared the hell out of me.

* * *

The accident happened during a sequence later cut from the film, where the Bullet Farm, Gas Town, and Citadel crews converge for a rally and then peel off in their vehicles at top speed. As the cars streaked through the desert, leaving dust clouds in their wake, stunt performer Chris Patton tumbled from the top of his pole.

* * *

Stuart Williamson All of a sudden, you see this little dot, which is a human on top of the polecats, just fall, fall, fall into the dust amongst all the cars and he disappears.

Matt Taylor I was following Chris’s car with the pole, and because there were about ten cars in front of me, the dust was worst-case scenario. I was looking up at the pole as my reference and I saw Chris fall, which in hindsight is probably what saved his life, because I wasn’t reacting to something I’m seeing on the ground. I picked up that he had fallen as it happened.

That gave me another three, maybe four seconds of reaction time, and the car I happened to be driving at that time was once a race car, so it turned quite well. I was able to steer away from him, dodge him, then I called, “abort, abort, abort,” on the radio. And then I circled around him and then used my car as a blocker, because I wasn’t sure if I was the last car. By then, he was coming to. I think he was initially unconscious.

Stuart Williamson Luckily, he survived.

Chris Patton I was back up and running in no time, but I guess that’s the way of the job. Some jobs you get on and walk away with nothing, and sometimes you tear a ligament or get bruised.

Mick Roughan We’re doing stunts, we’re not playing cricket or playing squash. Sometimes you’ve just got to take a knock and get up and keep going.

Mark Goellnicht We had a full investigation. “Why did this happen? How can we avoid this happening?”

Matt Taylor It turned out that once those poles got over that seventy-kilometer-per-hour mark, they started getting a harmonic vibration through them and it literally shook him off the pole. And of course, we never rehearsed in the actual scene much faster than sixty Ks, so we never experienced this harmonic problem until then.

Chris Patton Looking back on that, how the fuck did everyone walk away from that job? It’s unreal to see other films out there that you do hear these horror stories of performers being hospitalized for some major injuries, and you watch those films, and you try to figure out where it maybe happened, and then you watch Mad Max, and you’re like, Oh, dude, all of them were okay?

* * *

In perhaps the most memorable stunt of the sequence, a masked polecat operator swings toward the War Rig while the heroes are distracted and snatches Toast (Zoë Kravitz). Though the other Wives try to grab onto her, the polecat manages to break away with his struggling hostage, pulling Toast twenty feet into the air as she screams.

* * *

Mark Goellnicht It was a super complex shot. Here we are having this polecat vehicle that’s coming alongside the War Rig at speed, and a War Boy trying to drag one of our actors out of the sunroof, right? And I go, Are you kidding me? Surely, we’re going to just do this stationary, and they’ll put in the effects later? No, no, no: We’re going to do it all moving and for real. And we did it, and it is full on, and when I saw that shot in the movie, it is crazy.

Jon Iles When you’re actually out there watching it, you know how close it is to disaster every single time. It doesn’t take much to miss, because the platform they’re aiming for was only about a foot and a half wide, and they had to have perfect timing

Zoë Kravitz Everything you see is real. We were in those rigs, we were in the desert, moving, and I’m being pulled out of the truck and going super high. And I’m pretty sure that’s Riley’s husband, Ben, who grabbed me and pulled me out of the truck. That was crazy. They met on the movie.

Riley Keough With Ben, we had one or two conversations the whole time we were shooting. He was twenty-one and seemed like a teenager, and I was not really looking at men in that way because I was in a relationship. But then a year later, we did reshoots for the end of the movie in Sydney with a much smaller crew. I’d broken up with my boyfriend and been single for a minute, and he was part of the small stunt team and was so much different than I remembered him. He seemed more mature, older and more calm.

Ben Smith-Petersen I was with Riley, and I was like, “Hey, do you want to hear this music I made?” Which is ridiculous music, by the way—I feel so embarrassed by it now. She was like, “Yeah, cool, send me an email.” So, I sent her an email and that’s where our relationship started.

Riley Keough I wasn’t thinking anything would happen, but I stayed in Australia for two more months and he said, “I’ll teach you to surf.” We ended up falling in love. So, my husband’s a War Boy.

Guy Norris He and Riley, they’re a fantastic couple.

Harrison Norris Best stunt he ever pulled.

Chapter 24

Fire and Blood

Alliances are hard to come by in the wasteland, and the uneasy partnership between Max and Furiosa can only be earned over time. “It’s in their best interest at the outset that they dispose of each other—indeed, kill each other,” says George Miller.

It wasn’t difficult for the actors to get in that headspace. Tensions ran high during the production, and the longer the movie went on, the more entrenched those attitudes became. Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron have made no secret of the fact that they clashed on the set of Fury Road, but theirs was more than just a headline-grabbing story of A-listers who didn’t get along. The more they lived in that fraught wasteland, the more they began to take on the fear, frustration, and desperation of their characters.

* * *

Riley Keough We kept it together pretty well for the first five months. Your morale couldn’t go down at all, or else it would be disastrous. You were pumping yourself up every day.

Zoë Kravitz It definitely got dark at times. Being so far away and having a really gnarly experience where you don’t have the comfort of going home . . . it can get weird. We were living in this strange small town where there was nothing around.

Abbey Lee There were moments where we thought we were going completely mad. A lot of six-day weeks. It was a grueling shoot.

Riley Keough There were days that were fucking hard. There were night shoots that were fucking brutal. And there was so much dust that your face would be covered with three inches of sand by the end of the day.

John Seale It was tough for the actors. The crew can be protected from the elements, the cold and wind and sand, but they can’t: They’re wearing a wardrobe that is very specific, and they can’t suddenly put on a thermal jacket just because it’s close to zero in the desert. So, they suffer a lot, and that’s why I have a great respect for them. It was a very hard one for them, particularly for the Wives, because they were very skimpily dressed.

Zoë 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 actually in that environment you’re seeing in the movie, with nothing around. You really do start to lose your mind a little bit.

John Seale I love actors, but they may have found it a little problematic that there was no script, really—or no deep and meaningful script they could latch on to and nurture.

Charlize Theron The biggest thing that was driving that entire production was fear. Ultimately, when people are scared, you behave in a way that’s about your self-survival, and we all functioned from that place.

Mark Goellnicht So often the frustration for the actors was, “George, why can’t we play the whole scene out? Let us finish the scene.” He’d say, “No, I don’t need that whole scene shot. I just need this bit.” But the actors want it, right? There was always that conflict of George going, “I just need to have the hand touching the steering wheel, and then tilt up to her face, then cut. Okay, moving on.” Whereas Charlize might want to let that play out because then she can have the feel of the scene.

Tom Hardy He carved every performance with a scalpel.

Charlize Theron There was very little for us to go on. There were days we were shooting where we didn’t even have pages. I remember days when the AD meeting us would say, “What unit do you want to go shoot today?” Literally, they’re like, “Pick a unit.” It was a little scattered, and that scared all of us a bit. We all felt a little unsafe in that—or, speaking for myself, I did. When you come from a place of fear, you put up walls, and it should have been different.

Zoë Kravitz You needed to trust George in order to get through this situation. We all had moments of going, What the fuck is going on? What are we making? Why are we spending nine months of our life on this thing? It was hard to watch with Tom. He 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 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.

Charlize Theron All of those young girls kind of turned to me as someone who would problem-solve for them, and this is not anybody’s fault. I only say this now because I know George and I’ve experienced this with George, so I’d fully trust him, but I’ve also trusted directors fully when I didn’t comprehend what they were trying to do, and it turned into a mess.

George Miller There was a high degree of difficulty. We were in a remote location, there were real-world stunts, and every day was a big day. And unless you’re entirely rigorous, unless you’re obsessed about safety, something is going to go wrong. That was my biggest anxiety. It was something I experienced before, and it’s something that gnaws at you. And I guess the actual working process of the actors I probably should’ve paid more attention to.

Josh Helman I heard that Tom saw his character like a stray dog that didn’t trust yet the people he was with, and it took time for him to warm to them. That was part of the reason why he wanted to talk as little as possible.

Mark Goellnicht We all went, “Why is he so moody?” It’s because he’s staying in character. That’s partly why the tension was so tough between him and Charlize.

John Seale Actors are often in their character to the point where they’re not in our world. That can make them feel fairly distant to some people. I learned very early that when you sense they’re in that bubble, leave them alone. Only they can break through that bubble if they want to talk to you.

Tom Hardy All I care about is getting George what he wants, and if I can’t understand it, I’ve got to identify what he needs without slowing up progress. He’s got a lot on his plate. It’s like, I’m not keeping up. I have to get this right.

Mark Goellnicht The penny hadn’t dropped for him. There was this distrust all the time. He was always questioning George. You wanted to shake him at times and say, “Trust him. He knows what he’s doing. He’s a genius.”

Tom Hardy Because of how much detail we were having to process and how little control one had in each new situation, and how fast the takes were—tiny snippets of story needed to be captured to make the final cut work—we moved fast, and it was at times overwhelming. One had to trust that the bigger picture was being held together.

Kelly Marcel The enormity of them feeling like, We’re here for a really long time and we’re not quite sure if we’re working for a madman or not, was starting to sink in at that point.

Courtney Eaton It had a wear on everyone. The storyline, the stakes of things, the physicality of it, and being stuck together all the time in the truck all day, every day.

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley There was us five girls, Nic, and then Tom and Charlize in the front. Tempers would rise at some points.

Riley Keough When you’re with that many people in a car all day, you feed off each other’s energy. If someone was in a silly mood, then we were all in a silly mood. If someone was irritated, we were all irritated. And if someone was tired, we were all tired—because we’d all been up drinking.

Abbey Lee Like any road trip with a family, once it’s been too long, you start to get bored, you start to get frustrated. Because of the nature of the shoot, there were sometimes hours and hours and hours when we were sitting in the back of that truck doing nothing. The shot would be so damn wide you could barely see anyone, but they still had to use us because the stunt girls would be away shooting something for second unit. You had to exercise patience, but there were some days when we got sick of each other.

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley Moods were always different. Sometimes it was a laugh and sometimes it wasn’t.

Mark Goellnicht Zoë probably had the most struggle out of all the girls. She was very obviously uncomfortable a lot of the time.

Zoë Kravitz If you’re not super engaged in a dialogue-heavy scene, you’re just in the back of the car. It kind of feels like you’re in this situation where your real life is being in a War Rig in the middle of the desert. You’re not in touch with actual reality in any way.

Charlize Theron I wish I sat back and enjoyed the ride a little bit more instead of freaking myself out. And I think that was a big thing between me and Tom.

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley It was very interesting to sit in a truck for four months with Tom and Charlize, who have completely different approaches to their craft.

Kelly Marcel Tom is very physical and all over the place and would try very different things. Charlize is cerebral and very consistent in the way that she approaches a character. They’re both powerhouses, but in their very different ways of working. Which, weirdly, is why the film works: It’s all pouring out on the screen.

George Miller The story is all about self-preservation: If it’s an advantage to you to kill another character, then you should do it and you don’t think twice about it. I think that crept into the actors.

P. J. Voeten It seemed to implode in preproduction. We weren’t even shooting and there seemed to be this animosity.

Petrina Hull And as we got into the shoot, those things became difficult.

P. J. Voeten At some stage, the Wives didn’t like Tom, and one day, they didn’t even disguise it: They were just yelling at each other in front of us.

Nicholas Hoult It was a tense atmosphere at times. It was kind of like you’re on your summer holidays and the adults in the front of the car are arguing. You’d sit back, like, I’m just gonna keep quiet . . .

Charlize Theron He’s right, it was like two parents in the front of the car. We were either fighting or we were icing each other—I don’t know which one is worse—and they had to deal with it in the back. It was horrible! It was not a conducive working environment. We should not have done that; we should have been better. I can own up to that. I apologize profusely.

Nicholas Hoult I had a really lovely time, though. I thrive in that environment, for some reason.

Ricky Schamburg Tom is very provocative. Charlize isn’t. And it was a clash.

Richard Norton Tom would want justification for every bit of choreography, not just in the actual action but in the pre-setup of the action and everything else. Charlize, her basic want is simple: I just want to fucking kill him. Let’s shoot it.

P. J. Voeten The day that we were rehearsing the fight scene when they first meet, you could see the tension in the air. It was unbelievable.

J. Houston Yang (marketing) We get dailies sometimes for specific sequences if we need to cut a shot longer, and some of that was the chain-wrench fight by the tanker. And boy fucking howdy, was it clear that those two people hated each other. They didn’t want to touch each other, they didn’t want to look at each other, they wouldn’t face each other if the camera wasn’t actively rolling.

Petrina Hull It was a pressure-cooker situation, so everything was fuel for the fire.

Charlize Theron In retrospect, I didn’t have enough empathy to really, truly understand what he must have felt like to step into Mel Gibson’s shoes. That is fucking frightening!

Dean Hood He knew he had big boots to fill, and it was kind of intimidating for him.

Andrew AJ Johnson The film’s called Mad Max. Maybe he thought the film was about his character where essentially it was about both of them equally. But there was probably some tension there between who was going to be the number-one actor on the film.

Charlize Theron I don’t want to make excuses for bad behavior, but it was a tough shoot. Now I have a very clear perspective on what went down. I don’t think I had that clarity when we were making the movie. I was in survival mode; I was really scared shitless.

George Miller Many years ago, I had the privilege of working with Jack Nicholson on Witches of Eastwick, where he was playing the devil. And he said, “You know, we think as actors that we don’t bring it home at night. We think we just leave it in the trailer when we walk off set. But the truth is, if you’re doing your job properly, you do bring it home.” And that was one of the dynamics that was happening in the film.

Charlize Theron Because of my own fear, we were putting up walls to protect ourselves instead of saying to each other, “Fuck, this is scary for you and it’s scary for me, too. Let’s be nice to each other.” We were functioning, in a weird way, like our characters: Everything was about survival.

Mark Goellnicht Between Tom and Charlize, it was literally the most contrast I’ve ever seen between two actors.

Samantha McGrady Charlize is the easiest person to deal with in terms of, Okay, we’re ready. Sometimes I would just call her and say, “We’re going to be ready in an hour,” and I knew she would always get in the car, get her makeup on, and get on set.

Matt Taylor And when you’ve got someone like Tom who’s a larrikin and is late and very Method in his performances, just in sheer personality, there was always going to be a clash.

Tom Clapham Tom was more in his trailer a lot of the time and would come out for the takes—and sometimes not on time, either. You’re like, Come on, it’s midnight and we want to go home.

P. J. Voeten He made us wait a lot for him on set. He took a lot to get there. I think it was because he didn’t understand the process or what George was going through.

Jasin Boland Sometimes it could make for a difficult day. I could spend nine hours and fifty minutes on set and not get an image some days. A lot of it was patience.

* * *

Eventually, veteran producer Denise Di Novi was dispatched to Namibia to mediate the conflict between the film’s two stars.

* * *

Charlize Theron I don’t want to rehash things, but it came out of a really bad moment where things kind of came to blows between me and Tom.

Mark Goellnicht I remember vividly the day. The call on set was eight o’clock. Charlize got there right at eight o’clock, sat in the War Rig, knowing that Tom’s never going to be there at eight even though they made a special request for him to be there on time. He was notorious for never being on time in the morning. If the call time was in the morning, forget it—he didn’t show up.

Ricky Schamburg Whether that was some kind of power play or not, I don’t know, but it felt deliberately provocative. If you ask me, he kind of knew that it was really pissing Charlize off, because she’s professional and she turns up really early.

Mark Goellnicht Gets to nine o’clock, still no Tom. “Charlize, do you want to get out of the War Rig and walk around, or do you want to . . .” “No, I’m going to stay here.” She was really going to make a point. She didn’t go to the bathroom, didn’t do anything. She just sat in the War Rig.

Natascha Hopkins She was a new mom, and she just wanted to get to set, work, and take care of her kid.

Mark Goellnicht Eleven o’clock. She’s now in the War Rig, sitting there with her makeup on and a full costume for three hours. Tom turns up, and he walks casually across the desert. She jumps out of the War Rig, and she starts swearing her head off at him, saying, “Fine the fucking cunt a hundred thousand dollars for every minute that he’s held up this crew,” and “How disrespectful you are!” She was right. Full rant. She screams it out. It’s so loud, it’s so windy—he might’ve heard some of it, but he charged up to her up and went, “What did you say to me?”

He was quite aggressive. She really felt threatened, and that was the turning point, because then she said, “I want someone as protection.” She then had a producer that was assigned to be with her all the time.

Charlize Theron It got to a place where it was kind of out of hand, and there was a sense that maybe sending a woman producer down could maybe equalize some of it, because a lot of what I felt was coming my way from Doug was . . . oh, fuck it. I’ll just say it. It was a man forgiving another man for really bad behavior, and I didn’t feel safe.

Tom Hardy Charlize is an intense woman. Very intense, actually. In a good way. I mean, look at her in Monster—that’s not somebody walking in the park. You don’t just summon up that kind of authenticity without bringing a tremendous wealth of artistic ability. She’s a very serious actor. So, I don’t see why she would ever be intimidated by me or in any way feel frightened. I think that was more bollocks.

Kelly Marcel There’s something that you can’t put your finger on unless you are inside it and you know what went on there. It was a really intense, intense, intense period in an intense, intense place. Family was made there, and family loves and hates each other. Family’s not perfect, and this was very much that. Everybody there was going through something they had never been through before, and while we all needed each other in the way that family needs each other, everybody fell out.

Charlize Theron George was kind of hoping that Doug would deal with this, and Doug couldn’t deal with it. Doug really wasn’t helpful in mending any kind of relationship with me and Tom, and I kind of put my foot down. George then said, “Okay, well, if Denise comes . . .” He was open to it and that kind of made me breathe a little bit, because it felt like I would have another woman understanding what I was up against.

P. J. Voeten She was sent out to help try and smooth that relationship out. As nice a lady as she was, nobody could really turn it around because it was that entrenched. Whatever it was that they were going through wasn’t going to get fixed easily.

Charlize Theron She was parked in the production office, and she was checking in with me and we would talk. I think she was maybe being a mediator between everybody, but when I was on set, I still felt pretty naked and alone.

Kelly Marcel Doug wouldn’t let Denise actually be on the set. He’s a bulldog, he’s going to protect George no matter what, at all costs. And you can send your producer, you can do whatever you want, but if you’ve got Doug standing there, there’s absolutely no point unless he wants you there. He was never going to allow anybody to interrupt this world, no matter how fraught the world was.

Charlize Theron Looking back on where we are in the world now, given what happened between me and Tom, it would have been smart for us to bring a female producer in. There’s something that comes with that, and it would have maybe made people a little bit more aware of what was really happening. But this is unfortunately where we are in our business, right? You understand the needs of a director who wants to protect his set, but when push comes to shove and things get out of hand, you have to be able to think about that in a bigger sense.

That’s where we could have done better, if George trusted that nobody was going to come and fuck with his vision but was just going to come and help mediate situations. I think he didn’t want any interference, and there were several weeks on that movie where I wouldn’t know what was going to come my way, and that’s not necessarily a nice thing to feel when you’re on your job. It was a little bit like walking on thin ice.

George Miller There are things that I feel disappointment with about the process. Looking back, if I had to do it again, I would probably be more mindful.

Tom Hardy I would agree. 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. That’s something that can’t be faked. I’d like to think that now that I’m older and uglier, I could rise to that occasion.

Mark Goellnicht That scene where you see Tom with Charlize on the bike and all the Vuvalini and the Wives behind, intermingled—that scene was probably the biggest change in seeing Tom really soften to Charlize in real life. We were all unprepared for how he performed that, and then I walked off and Charlize was walking back, and I said, “Geez, Charlize, that was amazing. Did a light switch go off? He was great.”

She was quite taken aback by it, too. But it was great because that’s when you can see that Max and Furiosa really are a team. The day we shot that, I got such goose bumps. You really felt this change in their mood. Just the way that they were talking to each other when they were off camera, I went, What the fuck? Who gave them molly? They were really civil and nice. He was a different person by the end—a lot easier to deal with, a lot more cooperative, more compassionate. He’s such a Method actor that I think he took the arc in the literal sense.

Petrina Hull Overall, the feeling of their relationship did mirror the arc of the characters, and that they had that prickly thing of two people trying to understand each other and clashing and then somehow learning a mutual sort of respect, ultimately. That’s what Max and Furiosa come to in the end: It’s a version of love where you can only really get to regard. It’s not touchy-feely.

Iain Smith I think that the tension between them actually underscored the love that existed between the two of them within the movie, and that sometimes happens. The worst thing is indifference, and believe you me, there was no indifference between the two of them.

Kelly Marcel I don’t know anyone that didn’t lose their temper on that set, including myself. It was fraught and frantic, and you had this overbearing pressure the whole time that you were going to get shut down. You had a studio out in L.A. who did not understand what was being made, and the people who were there on the ground couldn’t really tell them what was being made, either.

Chris O’Hara People have written things about Tom and Charlize’s relationship. It was just two people trying to do the best job they could.

Chapter 25

Some Furious Vexation

For all the dramatic conflicts happening on the remote set of Fury Road, things were plenty fraught back in Hollywood.

While Warner Bros. executives were overseeing production on one of the wildest and most expensive projects to ever appear on their slate, they were also wrapped up in a very public battle of succession. The top spot at the studio was supposed to become available in 2013, and in order to groom a successor to outgoing chairman Barry Meyer, Time Warner chief executive Jeff Bewkes pitted three powerful executives against each other.

The men in waiting were Kevin Tsujihara, president of the studio’s home-entertainment group, Bruce Rosenblum, who ran the television group, and Jeff Robinov, president of the studio’s film division. Tensions ran high as the men jockeyed for the post, and Robinov knew that any significant issues with his film slate would be heavily scrutinized. If the Fury Road situation became an out-of-control disaster, it would almost certainly thwart his bid to rule Warner Bros.

Several arduous months into filming in Namibia, the cast and crew of Fury Road found themselves beset by worried studio executives, and then Robinov himself . . .

* * *

Cory Watson They were dealing with the stress of compressing the entire production schedule, every day they’re filming potentially dangerous stunts, and at the same time, they have this financial vise tightening on them. And then, of course, clearly there were some bumps amongst the cast. I’m quite sure I would have gone batshit insane and run screaming into the night after day five, because it sounds an excruciating crucible to put yourself in.

Charlize Theron George is the one who really worked himself to the bone on this thing.

Kelly Marcel This really took it out of him, and it was tough out there. I’m not in my seventies, and I found it grueling even walking through that sand for ages.

Doug Mitchell I was very, very worried about George. You’re in a desert, you’re getting up at the crack of dawn, and you’ve got to make damn sure you’ve got your brain properly switched on. I could peel off during the day and clear my head, but George couldn’t. He had to sit in the middle of the set and everybody’s problems would be run by him.

Zeb Simpson George was fucked. He was burnt out by the end because for one man, it’s relentless. It’s like being bombarded by twenty questions every minute: “What’s this? What’s this? What’s this?”

iOTA I saw him deteriorate over that six months. He looked so shattered by the end.

George Miller Look, I have this thing that’s probably masochistic: Unless you’re spent, you know you haven’t put all yourself into the film. So, there’s no question, I was spent.

Margaret Sixel I was worried about him. You wouldn’t even know the half of it, let me tell you. You should have seen him by the time he got to Cape Town, he was so thin. He couldn’t wait to get home. He said, “I’m never going anywhere, ever again.” The incredible prep and the years he had spent on it got him through it, and there were key people who had his back—P.J., Guy Norris, Johnny Seale. But George is so tenacious.

Doug Mitchell He has that ability to somehow work through exhaustion with the precision of a surgeon. He has the will to hang on.

George Miller One of the things that got me through it was the fact that I had first trained as a doctor. I’d forgotten how much of that work I was able to transfer into filmmaking—in particular, the problem-solving. I did a number of rotations through emergency, and there you are in a highly unpredictable situation where you’re seeing human beings in extremis, and you have to respond in a way that is going to be beneficial. You can’t succumb to the chaos and panic of your own anxieties.

Doug Mitchell With George, there was a fear. He’s not twenty-five, and exhaustion could take you to a desperate place.

Andrew AJ Johnson He had his seventieth birthday on the film, as did John Seale. But I don’t think a younger director could have done that film—they would have sold out and done it the easy way. Even the other day, I had some director say to me while we were setting up a shot, “Just do whatever is easiest.” And that’s the one main thing I learned from George, that you don’t just do what’s easiest. You do what’s best for the film.

Petrina Hull George has a certain degree of robustness in his thinking that affords him the ability to hold the reins in something as chaotic and risky and out there as this. And George has a constitution that is formidable.

Hutch Parker George couldn’t be a more gentle or lovely soul, but his gentle nature is sort of deceptive. He is incredibly focused and determined, and he does not give up. I’ve seen more than a few films go down with the kind of challenges they were facing, and George was indomitable in his commitment and his drive to get that one done, and to fulfill what had been a very, very long gestation process. It’s part of what makes him so unique and so special as an artist: With everything he’s done, he’s faced serious headwinds and managed to push through them.

George Miller Another way of explaining this is that I have a good friend, a younger filmmaker, who’s done very well. Before his first feature, he called me and said, “Any tips?” And I said, “Look, you know everything you need to know, but the one thing I will tell you is that the day will come on the shoot when you think what you’re doing is completely crazy. It will make no sense, but you can’t succumb to that feeling. Just keep going, because it gets quite surreal.”

Anyway, he finished the film, and I said, “How did it go?” He said, “It was great. But you know what you said about the day coming where I will feel that what we’re doing is completely crazy, and I’m completely crazy? What you didn’t tell me is that’s going to happen every day.”

Doug Mitchell There was a lot of friction with the studio because people were in the middle of the desert, it was a big, expensive film, and there was a lot depending on it.

Zoë Kravitz We were behind schedule, and we heard the studio was freaking out about how we were over budget.

Adam Kuiper We’d burned a bit of time with the fights in the truck.

Nicholas Hoult In my mind, when you do those films, you kind of expect to go a week or two or three over. Particularly when you’re trying to make a film like that in the middle of the desert.

Colin Gibson We did go a little over budget and a little over schedule, but (a) not my department, and (b) if anyone had hired George to do this job and didn’t think it would go over schedule, then they were probably in the wrong job anyway.

Matt Taylor The way George shoots, they would’ve known in the preliminary shooting that it was going to go overtime. He has a crystal-clear image of what he wants in his mind, and until he gets it, you shoot it again, you shoot it again, you shoot it again. And then, once it’s right, you wait for five o’clock to use the golden hour and then you actually shoot the one that goes in the tin.

George Miller All through that process, there was no consistency from the studio because they didn’t understand what we were doing. They didn’t understand the coverage because it was so piecemeal.

David White Imagine being at Warner Bros. and you’ve got this fucking crew that’s costing you a fortune out in the desert somewhere in Africa, and you’re looking at the dailies and it’s a bunch of people not talking! They’re going, “What the fuck is this film about?” It’s really very difficult for someone to grasp it.

Dean Hood In the olden days, people used to work at the studios for twenty or thirty years, whereas now, you live and die by the sword, so people don’t want to take risks—and Fury Road was a big risk.

Kelly Marcel Doug fought that studio off really hard. His trailer would be rocking all day with him shouting on the phone in there to keep George’s vision alive.

Iain Smith George and Doug play hardball with the studio, and so I’d find myself in the piggy-in-the-middle situation of having to talk every night to Warners, and to try to reassure them that in spite of all the cost reports and daily diaries and so on, they would have to trust me if I said we were on target. And that was a very unusual and difficult thing.

Guy Norris They were so used to being able to go around the corner and see what somebody is doing. Whereas here we were, halfway across the world.

Colin Gibson There’s a lack of control you have when you’re sitting in Los Angeles and six hundred people are wandering the desert with what’s left of your money.

Chris deFaria It became evident from the paperwork that the movie was falling behind, and the reasons for it falling behind its schedule were manifold—some in control of the filmmakers, some not in control of the filmmakers. The problem was: If the movie’s falling behind, who pays for that? That conversation was not resolved.

Joy Smithers The gossip that went around was that the studio was filming Superman and The Great Gatsby at that time and those films had gone over budget. They were concerned that they were going to lose a whole stack of money, so the only way that they could claw it back was through this.

Shyam “Toast” Yadav The studio would send someone out about once a month to see how we were doing.

John Howard I’d see them come in on their jet, and they’re all really obvious. Do they all have to wear the same suit or something? They’d come in, determined looks on their faces—and as far as I know, George always made them go into the desert where he was. And I don’t know what he did to them, but they would come back with their tail between their legs and then off they’d go.

Shyam “Toast” Yadav We were shooting the chase sequence over a period of months, and the guy from the studio would get in the car with me and the safety guy because it was the only car with an extra seat. He would talk to me and go, “Toast, how are we doing? How’s the movie going?” What I think he meant was, “Are we on schedule? Are we on budget?” But I didn’t care about that.

I’d be like, “How’re we doing?” And I’d point out the window and there’d be the Doof Wagon with the guys playing the drums and the flamethrower guitar, and I’d go, “We’re doing amazing! This is the most incredible thing that I’ve ever done and it couldn’t possibly be going any better!” The safety guy, Sean, would go, “It’s so funny. You’re the worst person he could ask, because you don’t even care if we’re on budget. You don’t care if we’re here forever!”

John Howard They would leave ragged, and then they’d be replaced about a month later and the same thing would happen. The People Eater would have eaten them alive.

Richard Norton It’s a bit like suddenly you’re being a naughty boy, and so the teacher’s going to send somebody to check on you. Maybe I shouldn’t say that, but it was a little insulting to me. Studios always have a way of wanting to put their thumbprints on everything, probably to justify the fact that they’re even there.

George Miller Ultimately, a filmmaker worth their salt knows their film far better than any studio executive can.

Hugh Keays-Byrne I got worried for George and I thought, Oh God, what are these guys going to do?

* * *

At the end of September 2012, with three months left to go on the Fury Road shoot, Jeff Robinov finally flew to Namibia to intercede. There were still several crucial sequences left to shoot, including the final desert chase and all the scenes set in the Citadel, the stronghold lorded over by Immortan Joe. A significant amount of the film’s opening and closing sequences were supposed to take place at the Citadel, and Miller had planned for those scenes to be shot over several weeks once the production segued to a final leg in Cape Town. But Robinov was ready to rein in the shoot by any means necessary.

* * *

John Seale The president of Warner Bros. flew to Namibia and had a gold-plated fit.

Colin Gibson The people playing poker got worried about the amount of money in the kitty.

Mark Sexton Robinov did not like Fury Road. When Happy Feet Two didn’t go well, I think he was not particularly fond of Fury Road as a result of that.

Doug Mitchell For whatever reason, after having helped get the film going—maybe it was the competition with Tsujihara—there was a peculiarity from Jeff that came out toward us in the desert, which was disturbing.

George Miller He had to assert himself to show that he was a strong executive. He had to come and show his superiors at Warner Bros. that he was in command. I knew what he was going through, but it wasn’t going to do anybody any good at all to go through these half-thought ideas.

Josh Helman Once I heard that he had got on a plane in Los Angeles and flown to Namibia to meet with George, I was like, Well, we’re fucked. If someone’s flying halfway across the world, there’s serious trouble.

Mark Goellnicht We shut down for four days.

Andrew AJ Johnson I was walking to breakfast and P.J. was walking the other way toward me with his iPad and I said, “Hey, P.J., how’s it going?” And P.J. said, “We’re not filming today. Just go and have breakfast and then have a day of maintenance.”

Joy Smithers We were told pretty much everyone can have the day off, but all the cast and the heads of department were going to go out to a location to do some photos and Warners were going to have a look at us. So, we didn’t do any acting. We were put into position for photographic purposes and there were teams of people walking around with worried expressions on their faces.

Chris O’Hara P.J. told me to take John Seale and a War Rig and go shoot a bunch of shots while Jeff Robinov was in a meeting. He said, “If anybody asks you, you were at the hotel all day.” I was like, “Yeah, cool, I was at the pool!” And I got ahold of John and the shadow unit went out at the cover of dawn.

I got a call on the walkie saying that Robinov and those guys were driving by us, and I was like, “Oh, crap. We’ve got to hide. Where do we go?” And then someone says, “What about that dune over there?” I’m like, “The War Rig’s not going to fit!” And they’re like, “Yeah, just pull it in!” And so, I’m like, “Hey guys, move the War Rig! Move the War Rig!”

So, we go and hide and we’re looking out over the little bridge and we see some cars drive by. I’m like, “I think that’s them.” We drove twenty miles down the road to get away, and we shot a full six, seven hours that day of the War Rig driving around the desert while we were dark and not supposed to be shooting. Oops! And some of that actually made it to the final cut of the film.

Doug Mitchell Jeff was throwing a bit of angst and panic our way, and I was getting a lot of phone calls. He said, “The camera will stop on December 8, no matter what you’ve got, and that’s the end of it.”

George Miller He said, “You can choose to do the end chase, but you can’t have the beginning and the end.” Now, I knew that the day would come when the film would be incoherent unless it was framed by the two Citadel scenes.

P. J. Voeten I told Jeff, “Give us two more weeks and we’ll finish the whole film completely. The whole film will be done and dusted, and you won’t hear from us. Otherwise, you’re going to come back next year and it’s going to cost you twice as much. But I know you can’t do that—or you won’t do that.” And they didn’t give us the two weeks. We cut the Citadel.

Lesley Vanderwalt Finding out that they’ve all flown down on this jet, I was going, Oh my God, how much would that have cost? You could have funded us to stay here! And how dare they, with all these poor people around who are on a dollar a day and can’t even eat. I was infuriated, not just because of what they were doing to us, but this blatant show of millions of dollars that they had.

Shira Hockman The producers came in and told us that the Cape Town stuff was massively reduced, and that people were going to have to let their crews go. There were quite a few people who had never been to Namibia and were just hired in Cape Town and those people were really shocked that suddenly, they had no jobs.

Joy Smithers You could tell from the ADs and George and Nico that it was troubling for them. I mean, Jenny Beavan was told, “Stop making a thousand costumes for the end scene. We’re not doing that flyover shot anymore.” It’s like, “What?”

Tate Van Oudtshoorn Out of the eight sets we had done in Cape Town, they left us with three.

Shira Hockman Some of them were three days away from completion! Like the biodome, they were literally putting the moss on the walls, and we pulled the whole thing down.

Lesley Vanderwalt And they were magnificent. It was sad that all that work had gone into them, and they had to be torn down.

Sean Genders I did hear at one point, Colin Gibson threw his own credit card on the table, and said, “Keep those sets up.” Thus was the nature of Colin, being so invested in trying to get it done.

Joy Smithers Colin was like, “I’m not going to tell them to pull it down. They can get fucked! They’ll change their mind, and they’ll want it again.”

Shira Hockman The only things that we shot out of those were the blood bank, the altar, and the hydroponic room. Literally, that was it.

Jon Iles All of us were going, Well, that’s a horrible ending to what we’re trying to achieve up here.

George Miller I knew that there was no film without the beginning and the end. The problem is, when someone’s committed to making a film, they’re thinking about it every waking hour and even processing it in their dreams. If you’re a studio executive, you tend to think about it for ten minutes on a Wednesday.

Chapter 26

“Spent and Enriched”

While George Miller and his producing partner Doug Mitchell weighed how to salvage a movie that would now have no beginning or ending, a significant portion of the film still needed to be shot. From November 19 to December 8, 2012, the production moved from the deserts of Namibia to a final leg in the soundstages of Cape Town. There, Miller would try to cram in as much interior shooting as possible, even as Robinov ordered most of his sets to be stricken.

It was a hectic time, but the exhausted cast and crew were at least eager for a change of scenery. The end of an arduous production began to draw closer.

* * *

Courtney Eaton By the last month of being in the desert, everyone was very over it and very excited to go to Cape Town and be in a city and go to bars.

Riley Keough We would talk about it all the time: “Oh my God, we’re going to Cape Town in two months!” We would count down the months and weeks until we got there, kind of like the characters do in the film with the Green Place.

Dayna Grant Near the end of it, everyone was so shattered. We had all gone a little bit delirious and punch-drunk.

Brendan Smithers We ended up really living it, because we were there for so long.

iOTA The day we flew out of Namibia heading to Cape Town, the plane was filled with hundreds of cast and crew and stunt people. Everyone was so relieved to be getting out of the desert and back to some kind of civilization.

Chris O’Hara They put a 350-person jet plane together. Even George was on the plane.

iOTA As we left the ground, the captain announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, the War Rig has taken off,” and the entire plane erupted with the loudest cheer. It was beautiful.

Adam Kuiper It was a really nice way to finish. Nice hotels, ocean views, proper shopping centers, not going home covered in shit every day.

Sean Genders People stopped talking about the film and started talking about restaurants. Because we’ve been in this small town, and all of a sudden, we’re at Nobu!

Charlize Theron We all were like, Civilization, oh my God! This is not who I am at all, but we were going to Lady Gaga concerts in Cape Town. I was like, Oh my God, I’m back in real life!

Adam Kuiper To come back to what most people would class as normal was an odd feeling. It felt surreal because we’d been doing it in the desert for so long.

Chris O’Hara Once we got to Cape Town, it was like, Oh, we’re back in movie mode again with stages and air-conditioning. But nobody knew what to do with it. Everybody stood outside most of the time.

Cory Watson I myself was not sent down there until late in the game in Cape Town, and as they started to come over, you got this impression that they were literally and figuratively walking out of the desert. They had come out of an experience that was transformative for them, that had left a deep impact, and that they were still trying to process. But they were all a bit shell-shocked, it seemed like.

Zoë Kravitz Me, Abbey, and Riley got tattoos when we got to Cape Town: Three little dots, like a little pyramid that we’ve climbed. Did Nic get a tattoo?

Nicholas Hoult I didn’t! They went to get it done and I was shooting that day. I was like, “You guys go, I’ll go get it tomorrow.” And then I went to the tattoo shop they had gone to and it was closed, so I never ended up getting it.

Sean Genders We only spent a month or five weeks in Cape Town. It was meant to be much longer, and it was getting cut back.

Josh Helman I was worried that they were going to take something out that was vital to the film. That film is lean, and you need every piece of it for it to work properly.

Charlize Theron We were all talking about whether we should stay until George could figure out the end of the movie, but everybody was so tired that we didn’t push hard. I think George realized we should all go and figure out the end later, so they said, “No, we’re going to let you guys go,” and wrapped.

* * *

On December 8, Mad Max: Fury Road reached the stopping point that had been mandated by Jeff Robinov. This would be the final day of filming.

* * *

P. J. Voeten On that day, I hugged Charlize and said, “Thank you for hanging in there.” And then we went inside, and we were shooting Max and Nux in the car for the storm.

George Miller We were shooting on a soundstage with a little unit which we often call a fantasy unit—usually a cameraman and a props person picking up little shots here and there. And there was this little bird made out of bolts, a bit of found-object art on a spring, that was an ornament on Nux’s dashboard. During the storm, you see that little bird on a spring moving up and down as Nux is calling out, “Oh, what a lovely day!” It’s almost nodding in agreement.

Andrew AJ Johnson I was doing this shot of the little bird on the dashboard, and it took us two hours to shoot that three-second moment. It ended up with George sitting next to me with a bit of fishing wire, because he wanted to control how it was bobbing. P.J. walked up to us and went, “George, I will not let this shot be the last shot of our film! This is ridiculous, you’ve got two hours of that fucking bird.”

George Miller P.J. was saying, “We have to wrap,” and I remember the crew insisting, “No, we want to get it perfectly.” I thought, Gee, they still have the energy to do it! We’re still pushing hard, right to the end. I was so happy, and it’s one of my favorite little incidental shots in the movie.

Andrew AJ Johnson You could’ve just done it for ten minutes and moved on, but that’s essentially what makes his films so good. He’s so particular and so driven.

Zeb Simpson The last night we finished, George was very, very tired. He probably needed to go sleep for a week. There’s not enough hours in the day when you’re shooting a movie that big.

Shyam “Toast” Yadav I wanted to take my storyboards home so I would have a hardbound copy of this thing, so I was like, “You know, I’d really like George to sign this—kind of like a yearbook, as if I were graduating from high school.” And I guess I kind of was. And so, the last day we were shooting, I went to George and said, “George, would you mind signing this?” He’s like, “Oh yeah, sure.” Later in the day, he’s like, “Hey, Toast!” And he hands it to me, my storyboards, and he’s like, “I’ve signed it.”

Toast!

You are an exemplar, an inspiration, a JOY! So glad P.J. brought you onto the FURY ROAD!

—George Miller

Shyam “Toast” Yadav And when I started walking away, he put a hand on me and turned me around. He’s like, “You know, what I wrote . . . it doesn’t really cover how I feel.” And then he started bawling: “I’m just so glad that you were on the show.” He’s such a beautiful person, he’s so connected, and that’s kind of how the last couple days were. Like we’d gone through something.

Zoë Kravitz I don’t think we realized until it was almost over how far down the rabbit hole we had all gone. Just returning to normal life after was bizarre. None of us knew how to do it.

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley It took me a long while to shake the experience and get back to feeling like myself. To even put on my own clothes and jewelry again felt bizarre.

Charlize Theron I wasn’t sick one day on that movie, and then I got on the plane and by the time I landed in Los Angeles, I had bronchitis, and then it turned into pneumonia. It was like my body crashed. Every part of me went, Okay, you don’t have to survive anymore. You can rest now.

Mark Goellnicht This huge undertaking had finally come to an end. You felt like you’ve been through hell and back and you’d survived. It was almost like we were War Boys.

Kelly Marcel When I had to leave, I was absolutely devastated. Everyone became so close and so tight and so much like a family, more so than on any other film I’ve ever been on, because you were surviving as well, right? My first day on Saving Mr. Banks, there was this huge bouquet of flowers from “Your family on the Fury Road.” And I cried. I loved Saving Mr. Banks, and everybody involved in it, but I just didn’t want to be there—I desperately wanted to be back on Fury Road, because you just knew you would never ever have another experience like this again in your life.

Eugene Arendsen You’re doing the most fun things every single day in this awesome make-believe world with really good mates, then all of a sudden, you’ve got to come home to work a nine-to-five. They call it stunt blues.

Petrina Hull I felt spent and enriched. It was a bit bittersweet. I knew I’d had an experience that would stay with me for a lifetime, even if I didn’t quite know what it meant yet professionally or personally.

Josh Helman I knew it was going to be either a spectacular success or a spectacular failure.

P. J. Voeten And it felt weird because we knew we hadn’t finished the film.

Chris O’Hara When I came back, I went to my wife’s parents’ house for Christmas, and they were like, “Are you okay? You seem distant.” And I’m like, “Oh, I’m sorry. I just made this movie and I absolutely have no idea if it’s going to be good or not.” After about eight months, my wife looked at me and she said, “You know, you think about this movie an awful lot and you haven’t been there in months. I don’t think you understand that you actually made something great.” You cross your fingers, and you hope, and you pray, but you never know.

George Miller And you may think it finishes on the last day of the shoot, but then it’s the beginning of the next campaign, which is postproduction. That’s a whole other story.

Part III

End of the Road

Chapter 27

If You Can’t Fix What’s Broken

After waging war in the sand for the better part of 2012, George Miller returned to Sydney and prepared to fight a new set of battles. These skirmishes would take place in studio-executive suites and screening rooms, but they were no less fundamental to the making of Mad Max: Fury Road than all those high-stakes days in Namibia. If Miller couldn’t see his vision through in the editing room and protect it from baffled executives, then the immense amount of work that he had put into this project for so long would all be for naught.

Foremost among Miller’s collaborators at this stage was his wife, Margaret Sixel, the editor of Fury Road. As personalities and professional partners, the two balanced each other well—where Miller is happy to pontificate at length, the South African Sixel is wry and blunt—and she had previously edited his films Babe: Pig in the City and Happy Feet. But one thing Sixel had never cut before was an action blockbuster.

* * *

George Miller This is where my judgment is good: I was fortunate enough to ask Margaret to edit the film. First of all, she’s not interested in action movies—she has a different sensibility—but I knew how she thinks, and I knew she would bring a rigor to it. Not a technical rigor, because anybody can string a number of shots together, but an intellectual and an emotional rigor that no other editor that I know of could do.

Margaret Sixel They shot in Namibia for nine or ten months, and I was in Sydney putting the assembly cut together.

Iain Smith And it took approximately two to three months just to get through looking at that stuff.

John Seale We shot four hundred hours of film. Poor Margie, she had to cut that down to two hours, and she probably still complains about it.

Doug Mitchell There’s a massive amount of footage and lots of cameras to go through. It was bigger than Ben-Hur.

John Seale Is that the most hours I’ve ever shot on a film? Could be. Spanglish, with James L. Brooks, that came close. We did well over two million feet of film on that, and I got two bottles of champagne from Kodak.

Matt Town (postproduction supervisor) I love Margie to death, absolutely love her to death. She is probably one of the most pragmatic people I’ve ever met in that she’s incredibly down-to-earth, and more than anything else, she can just get to the emotional heart of a scene. Because she was so pragmatic, she was a good foil to George. It’s an amazing advantage that they’re married, but I also don’t want to take anything away from her editorially because she’s so amazingly talented.

Kento Watanabe (visual effects editor) I asked George and Margie about being married, because being a director and an editor is quite tough: You work together, and you go home together. And they really had things put in place where they would say after the film’s done, they put it down for the day.

George Miller I’m very grateful to her. She happens to be the love of my life, my partner, and my editor. I’m probably the only person in the world who’d know she could do it, but I know how she does everything else.

Margaret Sixel A lot of this stuff, you might think, Ah, it looks so simple and easy to put together, but in fact when you look at even something like a two-shot, Tom will be from a different take and Charlize will be from a different take. We really worked those moments in every single scene.

George Miller She’s a real stickler for that, and it takes a lot of effort! It’s not just lining up all the best shots and stringing them together. She’s also looking for a thematic connection from one shot to the next. And she has a very low boredom threshold, so there’s no repetition.

David White You know the geography of where you are in that film all the time, even though there’s a gazillion cuts in it and a nightmare number of shots.

Tom Hardy It’s a relentless barrage and orchestration of design and a very clear narrative, considering the organized chaos.

George Miller There’s a cliché that you tend to see in action films, that sort of quick cutting without any causality between one shot or the other. Just as in music, there has to be one note or one chord to the other, otherwise it becomes sort of annoying.

Peter Ramsey It’s not just setting up a stunt and saying, “Hey, let’s put twenty-four cameras on it and we’ll throw it in the salad shooter to edit it and give you the impression that something is happening.” Miller and Margaret Sixel, they’re crafting every single moment to make things as clear and visceral as possible. They’re not trying to fool the audience.

David White And George was absolutely focused on the idea of cutting it sequentially, which is a very different way of working than any other project. In fact, when we started doing the sound mix, he wanted to get spool one completely right before moving on to spool two—which, from a sound perspective, is fucking impossible. But his expectations are so giant that everybody does that extra 10 percent on top of their best ever, because you can’t help it. You rise to the occasion.

Margaret Sixel It was difficult to spend a year cutting a film that didn’t have an opening or closing. I kept thinking, How am I going to make this work? Are we going to write voice-over and try to fill in all the gaps during the opening chase?

Doug Mitchell Without the opening and closing bookends of the film, it was almost incomprehensible.

Matt Town We did cuts that started with Furiosa on the road as she was leaving, but you needed something that said, “She’s coming from that big place over there.” You know she’s running from something, but what was the threat?

* * *

Still, Miller and Sixel were on the hook to present an early cut to Warner Bros. executives almost immediately after returning from Africa. Without any time to truly refine their vision, they had begun a mad scramble to assemble something that was even coherent, let alone magnificent.

* * *

Petrina Hull We did the first director’s-cut screening for the studio probably eight to ten weeks after the shoot. That was a big moment, really nerve-racking.

George Miller Margaret said to me, “Are you sure that you want to show it? It’s in such a nascent stage that they can’t help but get a false reading.” But we had an obligation to show it to them, and we said, “Well, let’s do it.”

Matt Town It was probably the most stressful screening I’ve ever done, that first one in Sydney with Jeff Robinov and Chris deFaria and [executive producer] Courtenay Valenti. We finished the cut maybe an hour or two before they walked in the door, so I’m literally playing it out of the Avid [editing system], waiting for George to give me his little indications of, Turn it up, turn it down. I was like, This could be the end of us.

* * *

That rushed early cut of Fury Road earned a mixed reaction from the executives and producers who had flown down to Sydney.

* * *

Chris deFaria Look, at the first screening of the film, the studio’s worst fears were absolutely confirmed. In a sense, it threw up a fog for which it was very hard to see what the final product was going to be, and it became very emotional for a lot of people who had really either gone out on a limb or come under such incredible scrutiny or attack for making this movie—whether it was Jeff’s green light, Courtenay supporting the filmmakers, or my helping with facilitation.

George said, “I’m showing you the movie on this date. I’m nowhere near done.” As is often the case with the studio, there was an adherence to a schedule that was unrealistic—he needed much longer to cut the film. But he did what he was asked to, and he showed the movie very early, perhaps too early. And yeah, that was a bit alarming.

Kelly Marcel Warners called me in and asked me to come in and have a look at the cut that they had. It was only two-thirds of the movie, and I remember watching it and being like, I don’t know what this is. And Tom hadn’t seen it yet, and he called me, and he was like, “What did you think?” And I was like, “It’s so good!” Because I just couldn’t say it. And thinking, Oh God, Warners was right. It’s a fucking mess.

Eugene Fillios (trailer editor) It was a rudderless art piece, is what it felt like at that time. Everyone who watched that had no idea what the hell this movie was. A three-and-a-half-hour rough cut with no sound—imagine watching that movie with how little dialogue there is, and really no tone to carry it.

George Miller probably had a unique, specific, fleshed-out vision in his head, and when you look at the finished product, you could say, “Oh yeah, this is a great movie, it really came together amazingly.” But when you saw basically the first working draft of what this film was, it was like “Warner Bros. gives George Miller $250 million to go shoot some hot girls in the desert and Tom Hardy comes along for the ride.” It genuinely looked like a hot mess when we started on it. Most people on the vendor side thought it would bomb.

Courtenay Valenti (executive producer) His process is different than most other filmmakers’. While others will come to the director’s cut with the movie roughly in the shape it will remain and then begin fine-cutting after the director’s cut, George is fine-cutting the entire time. It’s later in the post process that you will experience the fully realized film.

Andrew Jackson If you give him time, he’ll come up with something amazing. And if you try and constrain him into a really tight deadline, then it’s not as effective.

Chris deFaria George continued to edit and mold the film, and there were honest, sober conversations about story, and about whether the characters—for instance, Tom—needed more dialogue.

Margaret Sixel We added the “little girl” element to flesh out Max’s backstory. We experimented with flash or subliminal cuts to hint at past trauma. Interestingly, a relatively simple scene where they all decide to turn back needed to be adjusted. The first cuts of this scene gave more weight to Capable and Nux and not enough to Max. With some careful rewriting and editing, I managed to shift the focus back onto Max. This was done without reshoots, only audio rerecords.

Eugene Fillios With most filmmakers, when you see the studio get their hooks into a movie, they ruin it. And for that movie to have come out the way that it did from what you saw in its rawest form, either it was luck, or he had a very, very specific vision and only he knew how to execute it.

Jon Iles With George, his grand plan was in his brain.

Margaret Sixel The composer Tom Holkenborg came on quite early and started to give us temp music, and for me it was incredible. It helped me read the film better.

Tom Holkenborg (score) I was involved for almost two years, which is exceptionally long. The average time that the composer spends on a movie can be anywhere between three and five months, unless you work with a director that has an incredible visionary idea of where to take things.

Margaret Sixel You’ve got the high-octane chases and the quiet moments, and it felt like two different films. To knit those two things together so they felt like one film, I always felt anxious about it: Was it going to work? When we found the music and found that flow, the sections of the film became so clear. Often, composers are brought in too late, really. I was so grateful that Tom was around.

Tom Holkenborg When I started, George didn’t think the movie needed all that much music. He wanted a little bit of the guitar and a little bit of the drums, and then the rest should just be cars.

George Miller I thought the guitarist—the Doof Warrior—and the drummers and vehicles would be enough of a soundscape to basically tell the story. There would be music once the characters started to find some affiliation.

Chris Jenkins (rerecording mixer) There was a version that had no music, there was a version that had no dialogue.

David White One of the most fun days that I had with George was the dialogue-nuking day, where we went through the film and we went, “Don’t need that. Don’t need that.”

George Miller Bottom line, I’m still trying to grapple with the silent cinema, where the language was first defined. When people first saw a close-up of a head turning in the cinema, they screamed, because they thought it was a disembodied head. Now a little kid can read a movie or moving image before they can read a book.

Tom Holkenborg Bit by bit, I started attacking scenes and saying to George, “Well, what do you think about this?” And before we knew it, except for one or two moments, there was music in the whole film.

* * *

Still, it isn’t easy to write music for a movie that’s essentially one long chase sequence. The biggest challenge for Holkenborg, who recorded the score under his stage name Junkie XL, was to craft a sensory experience that was propulsive but never repetitive.

* * *

Tom Holkenborg One of the most sought-after things in film scoring is how to score an action movie where you continuously build on that anticipation of what comes next. Two very important experiences in my life have led to finding some sort of a solution for that.

One is from my previous career as an electronic musician doing live shows: Every time the DJ drops a new track, it feels louder than anything else that you’ve heard before, which is actually not the case! What happens is you drop a new track, and then over the course of three to five minutes, you make it ever so slightly quieter. And then the new track comes in and it’s back at the level where the original one started, and then everything feels so loud.

So, that is one solution. The other one has something to do with my biggest hobby, cooking. With a ten-course meal, you start somewhere, and you leave a palate behind in your mouth that wants to go to the next step. The same with wine tasting, where you start with a certain wine, and you build your way up to the bolder ones. That knowledge really comes into play when you want to create an arc over an action score with almost continuous music: In the first twenty minutes, you set a palate.

For example, there is a cue that is called “The Escape,” when Max is being taken by the War Boys and they want to brand him on his back, and even though it’s a very exciting action scene and the music really gets you amped up, the only thing you’re hearing is a weird string riff that is processed over and over and over again. It’s not until the War Boys really start chasing Furiosa down with her big truck that the big drums and the guitars get introduced, too, because once you introduce them, you can’t get rid of them.

Margaret Sixel Almost the whole opening sequence was never scripted. The voice-over, Max’s past life . . . we made that in the cutting room.

Charlize Theron Pretty much 95 percent of the movie is dubbed. It’s us redoing almost the entire movie on a soundstage.

Victoria Mielewska (dialect coach) When they came back and cut the film, they realized that there was a high percentage of additional dialogue recording that was required, because so much was filmed outside with a great number of vehicles. We had to clean it all up and refresh it. That process took several months.

Chris Jenkins Charlize looped and looped and looped. It was brutal for her. She worked endlessly with George, and she was super giving, because a lot of actresses would’ve said, “Not doing this.”

Alison Ingram (visual effects coordinator) There were also like two thousand VFX shots, which is a lot for a “non-VFX” movie.

Kento Watanabe Mad Max was the hardest film in visual effects that I’ve had to work on. We ended up with the equivalent of over three million feet of film in digital practical hours.

* * *

Many of those visual effects were used in subtle ways, like erasing the wires on a stunt performer or cleaning up the number of clouds in the sky. But one centerpiece sequence, the toxic storm that ends the first-act armada chase, would require massive amounts of computer-generated imagery from beginning to end.

* * *

Andrew Jackson I’m a visual effects supervisor who loves a practical solution. The worst thing in the world is to have to make a 100 percent CG shot—even if you end up replacing everything, it still inherits something from that real shot at its core, and that really does make a big difference. It’s the randomness and chaos of nature that’s so often missing from anything CG.

When we were in the midst of postproduction, we were trying to get the toxic storm to feel as real as the rest of the film, and it just didn’t feel as gritty as we wanted it to. So, we set up a camera with black curtains and really bright lights around it, and then threw dust at the camera. We had all these plates of dust blowing past the camera, really gritty close-up detail of dust elements, and we did that for three days and shot a ton of this material.

I gave that to the compositors who were working on the toxic storm, and they added it to all of the shots. From that moment on, it completely shifted from being this CG event to being something that you were inside and part of.

* * *

Even as Fury Road began to successfully take shape in the editing room, the film still lacked the crucial beginning and ending sequences at the Citadel. But after so many years of terrible luck, the production was finally blessed with a miracle.

On January 28, 2013, after the prolonged bake-off at Warner Bros., home-entertainment executive Kevin Tsujihara won the three-way race to become the studio’s new CEO. Jeff Robinov, the film-division president who had curtailed the Fury Road shoot the year before, now found his path forward blocked. A few months later, with Tsujihara likely eager to eject his bake-off rival, Robinov left Warner Bros. for good.

* * *

George Miller Jeff had moved on and was no longer responsible for the film.

P. J. Voeten Kevin came in, like, “All this mess was the last guy’s fault. I have to clean it up.”

George Miller And of course, when he saw the film, he said, “Well, it doesn’t make any sense.” We had to shoot the beginning and the end.

Dean Hood They agreed to do it and then sent the money, but there was no official sign-off to do it. They kind of wanted the film out of the way so it wasn’t on their watch in case it did bomb.

Doug Mitchell So we brought back all these vehicles from Namibia, reassembled the team in late 2013, and brought Tom and Charlize to Australia.

P. J. Voeten That we got the cast back out was a miracle, the way that all lined up.

George Miller Look, you’ve got to acknowledge that the most unlikely things are going to happen, and you’ve got to be agile enough and resilient enough to adapt to those things.

John Howard Think about what it took for George to get the money to keep going to finish the fucking thing. I mean, eighteen years says a lot about his determination.

David White George, as always, just sat them out and won. George will always win.

Chapter 28

“That’s Not a Mad Max Ending”

On November 14, 2013, nearly a full year after the original shoot had been cut short, all of Fury Road’s major players reassembled in Sydney to finish the film. But this would be no simple pickup shoot.

In Namibia, Jeff Robinov had nixed two crucial sequences set at the cliffside Citadel lorded over by Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). Now that those scenes could be filmed in Sydney, an enormous number of extras would be needed for an early sequence where the wretched masses gather at the Citadel, hoping for a taste of the Immortan’s hoarded water. The ending, where Max and Furiosa return to the fortress and reveal the warlord’s corpse to a shocked crowd, would prove even more complicated to execute.

Miller had a slim window to give Fury Road the scenes it had long needed. He soon found that it isn’t easy to end a movie this mammoth.

* * *

Michael Wannenmacher It was a hard shoot—we were trying to get a lot done in as short a time as possible.

Charlize Theron My hair was growing, and I was like, Oh my God, am I going to have to shave my head again?

Lesley Vanderwalt Basically, we had to bald-cap her and stick a wig on. We had to use a wig on Zoë, too. It was a nightmare, really: Oh no, we were nearly there and now we have to try and re-create all this! But it was lovely to see everybody again.

James Doherty The heat was unbearable, and we must have had two or three hundred extras on these really hot days. You’d open a box of waters and within fifteen seconds, they’d all be gone. It was like you were living it in real life, that desperate need for water.

Michael Wannenmacher I had to direct the extras as they race towards the water plunging down, being a bit terrified as three hundred very fired-up people swept towards me.

Shane Kavanagh (extra) I thought I was going in to be an extra in Unbroken, and the agency said, “Unbroken? We’re doing Mad Max.” I was like, Fuck yeah, that’s so much better! It’s my right as an Australian to be in a Mad Max movie!

Ryan Osmond (additional assistant director) A lot of those people came out of agencies, but they also drove a couple of coaches into the city and would pick up homeless guys.

Shane Kavanagh In Sydney, there’s a central station in the city and a lot of homeless people live around there. They would take a bus in every day and fill it up with these homeless people and bring them to set. Most of them were just happy to be working.

Ryan Osmond They were the best behaved and the most excited. We would feed them for breakfast, lunch, dinner, give them a shower before they went home, and those guys got paid for it, too. A lot of them would come up and shake your hand and thank you for the day, every single day over, because they felt like they had a purpose.

* * *

The most hotly debated part of the shoot was the ending: What should happen once Max, Furiosa, and the other survivors return to the Citadel? Would they all board the platform elevator into the fortress and become its new rulers? Or was there a bittersweet ending that felt more fitting for Max?

* * *

Charlize Theron We never had an ending. There was a sketched-out idea of an end that we all knew wouldn’t be the end, and we made the whole movie fully aware of that. Everybody thought that while we were making the movie, someone would figure it out.

Brendan McCarthy I kept on saying to George, “George, what’s the ending, though? Should we know where we’re going?” And he’d say, “No, relax. There’ll come a point when the characters will start to live and they’ll take us where they’re going, if we’re doing our job properly.”

Mark Sexton In the storyboarding phase, it was all of them going up on the platform, and Max is there supporting Furiosa. This was in the iteration where it was supposed to be Mel Gibson, and so it was really considered to be the end of Max’s story: He’s now become reintegrated into society and regained his humanity. He wants to become part of a greater thing, as opposed to being a loner, and he is going up towards ultimate salvation.

Mark Goellnicht They went back and created this Green Place together, these amazing tiers of huge, almost rainforest-style greenhouse gardens in the Citadel, super lush, with all different types of vegetables and plants. Then they can have offspring of their own and provide food for the family and everyone else. How corny. Can you imagine? No. Totally dumb.

George Miller We tried, but it would have been very cheesy had he gone up there and they lived happily ever after.

Shira Hockman We never shot that ending. We got to the point when they arrived all together, where Max is carrying Furiosa, and they go back into the hydroponics set. We shot that without sound because George already knew that it wasn’t going in, but we had spent so much money on those rigs that we just shot it anyway.

Mark Goellnicht Yeah, they spent a lot on that set. It was fucking awesome, but George was so not interested. The studio wanted us to shoot it, but you could tell he wasn’t interested in doing a Disney ending. It just didn’t match the essence of this film at all.

Shira Hockman The stuff that did get shot got shot badly, almost on purpose, so that it could get reshot again.

P. J. Voeten It’s the only time I’ve ever seen George do one take, because he said, “This is never going to be in the film.”

* * *

A year later in Sydney, Miller decided to go in a different direction: The women would ascend into the Citadel while Max leaves them to roam the wasteland once more. Having gained back his humanity by helping the women fight for theirs, Max shares a final, freighted look with Furiosa before he disappears into the crowd below.

* * *

George Miller All the way through the shoot, I thought, Max will go up there with Furiosa and the remaining Wives, and there will be a new disposition. But it was much better for Max to go off into the wasteland in search of himself, just as he always did. It’s an ending that fits with the rest of the movie much better.

Sean Genders Max has to be left alone. That’s the beauty of it, it’s such a flip on the happy ending. He gives everything in movies one and two and even three, and he ends up left alone at the end.

Shira Hockman It was a much better ending than the storybook “Oh, they’ve fallen in love and live happily ever after” thing. That’s not a Mad Max ending.

Mark Sexton It’s a new Max, he’s younger, and there’s an option of making more of these, so therefore more continued story. It works for that younger iteration of Max, and it was a great way of helping shift the focus of that story towards Furiosa and what she achieved with the Wives.

Peter Pound I still think that it would have been better if Max went up with her into the Citadel.

Brendan McCarthy In the original version I wrote with George, he goes up on the platform with her. And when I saw the film, I had purposely kept away from looking at too much because I wanted to experience it as if I hadn’t seen it before. So, I experienced it as a punter, paid my ten dollars, here’s Fury Road. And I thought, What the hell? I was honestly confused and annoyed and felt, What’s he doing? Why is he going back out there? I totally expected him to be with her going up. He’s going to take part in this new society.

George Miller Nico and I decided that Max hadn’t earned the right to go there. It’s only been three days and he’s not yet resolved at all. He’s on the step to resolution.

Nico Lathouris He was not ready to love somebody. It almost happens with Furiosa, but he’s not ready for that kind of life. He hasn’t learned the lesson yet about grieving.

Richard Lawson Even though Max goes off into the desert at the end of the movie, he at least knows that there are still decent people out there. And maybe it’s enough to know, Children of Men style, that the human experiment has not completely ended. At the very least, helping those people exist has helped him exist.

Nico Lathouris He’s still driven by his desire to find some kind of redemption, which he won’t find until he confronts the original problem, the death of his wife and child. He will be doing that forever until he goes back to the grave of his wife and his kid and sits there for a while and really grieves. That’s my feeling about it.

Charlize Theron When we shot that end, everyone felt really good about it: “Oh yeah. This is the end to our movie.”

George Miller Perhaps, had Jeff Robinov said, “Oh, go and shoot the bookends of the film at the Citadel,” and had there not been the kind of disruption of changing personnel at the studio, we would not have had the hiatus which allowed us to shape the film to that degree.

Margaret Sixel In the end, it was fantastic that it happened, because it did allow me to look at the footage that we had and think, What do we need, actually? It was a luxury, to some extent.

Petrina Hull George got to make the film that he always wanted to make, and it wasn’t compromised and no doubt it’s a better film because of it. And the right thing happened in the end.

Chapter 29

The Final Battle

In 2014, after the additional Sydney shoot on Mad Max: Fury Road had wrapped, art director Shira Hockman moved to London to look for more work. She was coming off the biggest project of her life, but you’d never know that by how people reacted to its place on her résumé. “I’d have Fury Road in my portfolio during these interviews, and absolutely no one was interested in it,” Hockman recalls. “People just paged past it: ‘Oh, new Mad Max. Whatever. Carry on.’”

The world had mostly forgotten about Max in the decades since 1985’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and the few people who knew there was a new film coming might have also heard the rumors that it was a troubled production. Even at Warner Bros., plenty of executives were convinced that after all the time and money that had been sunk into Fury Road, there simply wouldn’t be an audience for it.

But not Massey Rafani. The executive vice president of creative advertising at Warner Bros., Rafani was tasked with marketing Fury Road, and would go on to become a crucial advocate for the movie. “By and large, what I do is one of the most anonymous jobs in Hollywood, and rightfully so,” Rafani says. “It’s just understood that we’re like the Wizard of Oz.”

* * *

Massey Rafani (marketing) When they were starting to let some of us executives see George’s rough cut, I was a little worried. I mean, thirty-five years had passed since the original, and he hadn’t done anything like this in many, many years. He’s a genius, he’s lovely, he’s all these things, but that’s a tall order.

So, when I saw this rough cut, I could see why some people might have been nervous, because he was still working things out. He had a lot of sketches, and a temp narration and things were kind of piecemeal in the first ten minutes, which looked a lot more like a Buñuel/Dalí collaboration than it did a feature film the way the studio is going to want to see it.

But then I started getting into it, taking in the visuals, the dust storm sequence, the production design, the costume design, the characters. And I just thought to myself, Oh my fucking God, he’s done it. As an advertiser, I’m absorbing the fact that I can put this footage against anything, from hip-hop to symphony to heavy metal. I walked out of there thinking, I don’t know what we’re going to do, but there’s way more than anybody knows here.

I learned pretty early on in the business to express your opinion quickly and freely, so people know you’re not full of shit. So, I called George because I was thankful that I got to see the movie, but I also wanted to tell him, warts and all, what my experience was. I was like, “George, there’s genius in this movie. It’s kind of fucked up in all these cool ways, and we’re just going to have to embrace how fucked up it is because if you take that away, you got nothing.”

And he’s very quiet, listening, and he said, “I really appreciate that, Massey, because I’m really in the weeds right now.” I could tell he and Margaret were trying to figure out what they had. And it was really heartening for him to hear someone so genuinely get excited about what they’d been toiling for so long to do.

J. Houston Yang Massey Rafani is as good as it gets. He is an absolute savant. He did every Warner Bros. release you could think of that’s great, from Dark Knight through Interstellar. We have two award shows a year, the Clios and the Golden Trailers—they’re an hour and a half long, there’s a terrible comedian, everyone gets drunk. When they announce anything done by Massey, the entire auditorium goes crazy. And that doesn’t happen for anybody else.

Massey Rafani I knew the trailer needs to be structured in the way that a song affects you. It should basically creep its way into you. You know you’ve gotten there when everybody goes, “Well, of course that’s the trailer they cut. What else would they have cut?” That’s when you know you achieved it, when people think you didn’t lift a finger.

When I’m watching a movie, I’ve got this larger overview: What is the thematic? And the notion of madness in a world that’s possibly madder than you . . . well, we all have a tendency to feel overwhelmed. The other part you look at is, What are the shots? The dust storm definitely grabbed me. There’s an aerial shot of these flares being fired, orange and red, that I was obsessed with. One of the War Boys on the hood of a vehicle. Even Furiosa falling to her knees and then slowly building up to a wail.

* * *

Set to the “Dies Irae” of Verdi’s Requiem, Rafani’s first teaser trailer was a symphonic blast that leaned into everything gonzo about the movie—the stunts, the characters, the wild lines—while also grounding it in more intimate moments like Furiosa’s scream, which played out nearly in its entirety.

For a trailer selling a summer action movie, those kinds of decisions were practically avant-garde. But then, so was Fury Road.

* * *

George Miller He was the first to sense that the film had something about it, and he was able to reflect it in the early work he did. That was the first time I was able to see from someone else’s perspective that the film had something, and I’m so glad.

Margaret Sixel The time he came to the cutting room to show us that first trailer, I almost cried. I was like, Oh my God. I think we’ve got a film here.

Massey Rafani When she said that, it’s what I work for, really.

* * *

The movie’s big public debut would come July 26, 2014, at San Diego Comic-Con, where Miller would present a first look at footage from Fury Road to a huge crowd of influential fans and journalists. What would this audience of thousands make of Miller’s passion project?

* * *

Eugene Fillios I cut the Comic-Con piece that played at Hall H, and one of the ideas they had at the time was, “We’re going to write a poem and we’re going to have Charlize Theron’s character read it.” I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to be stressed out by the trailer. There was something that the movie had naturally in its DNA that I was trying to grab.

Massey Rafani Depending on where that piece is going to be viewed and what it’s initially being built for, there’s a different execution on it. You have a pretty savvy audience at Comic-Con—they’re going to analyze a movie and its wares in a totally different way than the average movie consumer would. You want to do that room justice and let them feel like they saw something special, and then also give something to share with the rest of the world, especially when you’re trying to put a movie on the map. I mean, the movie had been fairly quiet for a while because nobody knew what to make of it. Nobody walked in there thinking they were going to get blown away by Mad Max.

Jen Yamato Seven thousand people are packed into Hall H for this presentation. And Comic-Con can be a grind—it’s panel after panel, and studios tease whatever they have and try to razzle-dazzle the crowd.

Massey Rafani I crossed my fingers. I had so many butterflies.

Drew McWeeny Because the buzz had been so bad for so long, I don’t think a lot of people were prepared for what they saw. I was super, super anxious.

Massey Rafani When we got to it, the piece played, and the room got dead quiet. This is where my stomach is churning: The room was so much quieter than I expected. Usually it’s loud, and people lose their minds. I thought, Oh my God, I’m not sure what happened here! I looked over to someone next to me who was in our digital group, and they could tell I was so concerned, and they reassured me, “Massey, it’s completely exploding online.” Basically, so much of that editorial crowd I was sitting amongst was busy texting and writing and releasing the hype about it, and it was a success in a way I hadn’t expected.

Drew McWeeny That’s one of those cases where the buzz went from largely mixed to negative to, Holy shit, everybody in the world has to see this movie! in one moment. They got exactly what they wanted out of Comic-Con.

Edgar Wright When I saw that first teaser, I was like, Fuck me, that looks amazing.

Massey Rafani When you’re trying to build the fan base and a broad base at the same time, this allowed the fans to go out there and be evangelical for a few minutes about a cut they’d just seen to prep a more uninitiated audience to be dying to see what they just saw.

Ben Smith-Petersen It was so cool, I fucking cried. I was like, What have we been a part of? Because this thing is amazing. With nothing I’ve done since do I remotely feel that way.

Matt Town Once Comic-Con landed, we definitely felt the pressure, but also the excitement: Oh, people really are going to go for this. And that was palpable.

George Miller It was a sigh of relief.

* * *

The hard-core fans were now convinced, but many Warner Bros. executives remained skeptical of the film’s ability to find a mass audience.

* * *

Drew McWeeny The stories started mounting up about the back-and-forth between Warners and Miller. There were pro–Fury Road camps and anti–Fury Road camps in the studio, and the anti–Fury Road camps could not have been more adamant.

Edgar Wright I put Fury Road in the same bracket as Gravity—another film that was a technical “wow,” an audience favorite, and an awards nominee—and what I find hilarious is that in both cases, I had heard beforehand that both movies were a disaster. “Oh, Fury Road’s a disaster!” “Oh, I hear Gravity’s a disaster!” And then you see the movie, and of course it’s fucking amazing! It’s like, Oh wait, when they say that it’s a disaster, do they mean it’s a masterpiece?

Drew McWeeny The people at Warner Bros. who didn’t get that movie . . . not only did they not get it, but they hated it, and they were actively against it. And it was fascinating, because I heard from both camps, and I would hear, “We’re making this unflushable turd. This fucking crazy person has taken control of our company, and we are going to go down with the ship.” And then I heard from the other side, “They just don’t know what they’re looking at. They don’t get it, but it’s awesome and he’s awesome.”

Chris deFaria Yes, there were two camps. But the more important thing was the conversation about whether the Hollywood movie business could support something this ambitious and singular, with filmmakers who weren’t out to just please their bosses. They were out to make an incredible movie, no matter what it cost them in money or relationships or politics.

And so, within the studio, the two camps were more about, “Do we support people like that? Isn’t that what this business is about?” Or “Does that represent a level of risk that makes no sense in this day and age? What these filmmakers are asking of us is almost unprecedented, in terms of autonomy and resources and experimentation.”

Doug Mitchell I have a great, great gratitude to Chris deFaria and Courtenay Valenti for having the guts to interplay between us, the filmmakers, and their own backyard, which might have cost them their careers back then.

Courtenay Valenti When George needed support, I would point to what was special, iconic, and truly original in what he was creating and that we wanted to be a part of this movie and not abandon what we committed to. Making movies is always a hard process, and great movies tend to push the boundaries of what audiences and studios are used to experiencing.

Matt Town We were doing screenings once a month to executives. People flying in, flying out, problems with this scene, problems with that scene. “It’s too long.” “It’s too short.”

Margaret Sixel It was an incredibly painful film to cut, I have to say. The studio didn’t believe in it, so it was difficult to keep going.

Matt Town It was confusing to the studio because it just didn’t look like you would expect. It’s pretty gonzo-looking, and if you really sort of step back for a second, you might go, Is this all too wacky and Australian and weird?

Shyam “Toast” Yadav If you’re doing a movie and there’s one weird scene, the studio might be like, “No, you have to cut that scene out.” But if every single scene is weird, that’s just the movie.

Margaret Sixel They were just afraid of it. I mean, it is pretty wacky and out there—it’s kind of dark, with a strange humor. They didn’t like the scene with the stillborn baby and the umbilical cord, and they didn’t like all these weird, ugly people: “No ugly people allowed!” Even the scene with Nux where he eats the bug, they were like, “Nooooo! He can’t eat the bug!” It was a struggle, totally.

Peter Ramsey Even somebody like George Miller has to go up against these money guys and deal with these ridiculous arbitrary limitations imposed by people who know the craft a hundredth as well as you do.

J. Houston Yang It’s utterly to be expected with something like this. There are a lot of people at the top of the pyramid that don’t have a creative bone in their body—literally, they do not. They don’t think about movies as creative things, they think of them as products that they order. You put the product in their hand and then they sell the product to people, and when this showed up in their hand, they were losing their shit.

Margaret Sixel They would love to have fired George and me. But they were stuck with us.

Doug Mitchell George assembled fourteen versions of the film that we tested.

Cory Watson The idea with the test-screening process is for both the filmmakers and the studio to understand what parts of the film are working and not working while there’s still an opportunity to do something about it. Used in its best way, it’s about fine-tuning and optimizing your movie. But George and Margaret felt like they were rushing to get versions of the cut ready for test screenings without really having even had the chance to get their own best cut of what they had together.

George Miller I tried to persuade the studio it was stupid to do the first test screening because we were going to get false readings.

Doug Mitchell If you screen a film without most of the effects properly up to speed, you’re going to get bizarre reviews, and they won’t be kind to you.

George Miller The Doof Warrior tested badly because we had temp music and he always played the same riff and people found it annoying. A couple of people at the studio said, “Oh, we’ve got to drop the Doof Warrior!” I said, “No, no. It’s way too early to even think of that.” Now, what I knew and no one else knew is that his music was going to evolve and eventually that would become part of the full orchestration of the story. Of course, by the time the film was finished, he became probably one of the most popular characters.

Cory Watson The Doof Warrior has become this iconic cult symbol of the film—you can’t even count the number of articles on the Doof Warrior that came out in a year or two after this film was released, right? So, if he was getting notes to cut out the Doof Warrior, that’s obviously an example of how the screening process, if not done properly, has the potential for great damage.

Drew McWeeny There were so many test screenings. I talked to a person who saw the film five times before it came out—he went every single time they test-screened it—and what he was fascinated by was how radically different cuts would be. It was clear that they were trying to cut it down to a super-short length.

Margaret Sixel There was this constant thing from the studio: “How much shorter is it?” That’s all they wanted to know. “Just cut it shorter.” I got so sick of it. They were obsessed with getting the film under one hundred minutes, for some weird reason. I knew it could never, ever be a hundred minutes. It was impossible. I look at some of it now and I’m like, Oh, that could have been longer. Not my fault!

Mark Sexton The studio wanted it to be PG-13.

P. J. Voeten And not for violence, for intensity. Imagine what it would have been if we had to cut a PG-13 version.

George Miller I thought it was a PG-13 film! I honestly did, because there was no nudity, there’re no curse words, there was no overt violence on humans, there was no blood. There were two or three films that ended up PG-13 that were on the border, and I thought we’d cover that.

Mark Sexton The feedback I heard from George was, “The main problem they have is the masks are scary. They want to cut out most of the characters in masks, so if we can do that, we can get a PG rating.” And Doug was going, “But George, that’s all the bad guys.”

Peter Pound You’ve got to remember, when Mad Max came out, it shocked everyone. The Road Warrior really threw everyone on their ass and said, This is grown-up stuff, this is not fart-assing about with happy little kiddie stories. To do another Mad Max film all these years later and not have it as an R rating, it would have been criminal.

Dean Hood There were a lot of moments along the way where it was boom or bust for the film. We just kept soldiering on to the point where the studio didn’t like the cut. So, they made two versions.

Mark Goellnicht Warner Bros. had put together their studio version.

Chris deFaria Yeah, so that was a crazy thing. I sat with Bill Hoy, a wonderful editor, and we tried to shorten the movie.

George Miller Oh, that was a watershed moment. They came to me and said, “George, do you mind if we run an alternate cut in Los Angeles of Fury Road?” I said, “Yes, of course I mind. I’ve got final cut.” That was the fortunate thing of the success of the first Mad Max, I’ve always had final cut on every film. Then they made the argument, “Look, we’re trying to manage the higher-ups in the studio, and there’s a lot of dysfunction. It will help us argue why something should be there or not.”

I thought about it, I talked to Margaret about it, and she said, “Gee, that’s pretty insulting, George. I’m not going to agree with it at all, as the editor of the film.” Anyway, they came back again and said, “Look, we do it with a lot of films—we’ve been doing it with The Great Gatsby with Baz Luhrmann, and he’s been there for six months.” So, they persuaded me because it was going to give them ammunition to basically be an advocate for the film on our behalf.

Mark Sexton They had no faith in an audience being able to put up with that much action, so they were obviously trying to figure out how to solve the problems in their own particular ways. And because it’s so finely nuanced and pieced together, by doing so, they would make the film possibly incoherent.

Doug Mitchell If you pick out too many threads, the thing collapses and becomes incomprehensible.

George Miller I said, “Look, no editor, whoever they are, is going to be able to overtake the film. There’s too much footage and it won’t make any sense—they won’t understand what the strategies are. Even if you’ve got all the greatest editors in history and put them together in the time they had, it’s not going to work.”

J. Houston Yang Give somebody the fucking footage for this and tell them to make something other than the marble statue that is planned. You’d be so fucked. I cannot fathom ever getting that footage and trying to make it make sense.

Chris Jenkins They did it on a stage right next to us. They brought in a mix team, and I think they even used a different score. Hell no.

George Miller They wanted it shorter, and they wanted to take out anything that was too dubious. For instance, they took out the Milking Maids at the beginning of the film. Morsov, the War Boy who commits suicide and says, “Witness me,” they wanted that out. I know they wanted the death of the Keeper of the Seeds out, when she’s been hit by a chain saw and she slowly dies through the rest of the chase. There were several things like that.

Doug Mitchell When they hacked bits and pieces of it out to try and compress it, they sort of blew a massive hole in it.

Mark Sexton I was there when they did their famous two-cut test screening where George and Margie had their version and Warners had their version.

Chris Jenkins Two cuts, two screenings, fifteen minutes apart. And the whole idea was that whoever won that night, their version would win.

* * *

The final battle for the soul of Fury Road took place on December 8, 2014, in Alhambra, California, in a multiplex just a few miles east of Dodger Stadium.

* * *

George Miller We fly all the way from Australia, we turn up in Alhambra, and when we arrive, we’re told that simultaneously they’ve got two theaters running parallel screenings. I had a choice to say, “Under no circumstances. If you do that, you’ve basically gone against your word.” I really came to that moment, and I threatened to go public with this sense of betrayal.

Luckily, my hubris didn’t get in the way, and I said to Margaret and Doug, “Let it happen, because there’s no way that that version of the film can test better than our version. We’ve crafted it so carefully, and I can’t believe that whoever edited it and did these cuts could have done a better job than Margaret has done. So, I’m going to bet on that.” That was probably one of the wisest things, because I just could not imagine where it could test better. It didn’t make any sense.

Mark Sexton Basically, the feedback was that everybody hated the studio cut. It was loud, it was noisy, it wasn’t very satisfying, it was incoherent. And George and Margie’s cut was greeted with, Oh my God, it’s fantastic!

Dean Hood It was outrageously in George’s favor.

George Miller In a sense, that final screening should have almost been the first screening, because the only time when you can get a true reading is when it’s edited, when it’s got most of its visual effects in there and most of the music.

Mark Sexton The vindication that came out of that one!

George Miller It was a wonderful experiment, as it turns out, because it confirms your instincts and your intuition. It scored way higher, and much more importantly, both Furiosa and Max tested ridiculously lower in their truncated version. It stands to reason that if you take away the adversaries, then the protagonists don’t have anything to work against, so there’s no reason to feel angry against Immortan Joe. They’re just going on a chase which has got a lot of action, but you don’t understand what they’re up against.

There’s only direct contact between Immortan Joe and Furiosa at the very climax of the movie, where they come face-to-face for that last time—before that, it’s all done through surrogates. You’ve got to feel a sense of outrage against Immortan Joe that he’s using women, to milk them like cows, as a metaphor that the audience can grab onto. He’s got the War Boys believing that he’s some sort of religious figure, for whom they’re willing to be martyrs. Those things were gone from their movie, so there’s nothing to engage you with Furiosa’s mission and Max’s involvement with it.

They took one look at the figures and said, “We want to release your cut, and we release you from the obligation to make it a PG-13 movie.” They didn’t have to caucus, there wasn’t a meeting the next day, it was simply so evident.

Chris deFaria But then George went back and said, “There’s a couple of cuts in the one you guys did that I want to do.” And that’s it in a nutshell, right? Everybody’s so emotionally invested in the outcome here, and George is watching the second cut and going, “Ah, that worked. That didn’t.” And he actually adjusted his cut.

George Miller From that moment on, there were no real issues with the studio, and they got behind it. It was purely on those scores. Then we were led to basically polish the movie, and we took what we learned from that screening, and we made those adjustments.

Coco Jack Gillies (“Glory the Child”) I went back in November 2014 to film some extra pickups for George at his office in Potts Point. He was constantly working on the film, literally up to its release, always adding new things.

Margaret Sixel There was a certain point in the last four months of the edit where the studio decided, “Let them do what they want to do.” It was eventually just George and me in the cutting room and we decided, You know, we’re just going to make the film we want to make, and if no one else likes it, that’s fine. And that last four months is when the film really came together.

George Miller We basically had to avoid listening to what the studio was saying or what the test screenings were saying or what even other colleagues were saying. We had to make the film the best film we could.

Peter Pound I truly believe that the edit was what gave it that incredible pace and that relentless energy that kept going and going.

Doug Mitchell Ultimately, it really needed George to be given the space and support to pull out the film that was always on the page. And that might never have happened if there hadn’t been that change at Warner Bros. Coincidences abound with the making of this film! It could have been completely different had the gods not been shining down on this particular work.

Chris deFaria One of the frustrations of some of the executives was, “We need you to work at a different pace because we need to know that we have this movie, we need to know that it’s going to be successful, we need to plan marketing, we need to commit to dates. We need to justify the expense of the film, and we need to do it now.” And I think unconsciously, George was saying, “I’m doing this as fast as I can.” And in the end, he was right.

Iain Smith The movie is a victory of filmmaking over studio expediency.

Kelly Marcel They did the reshoots in Australia, and then the next cut I saw, I cried because it was so brilliant. I was like, How has that become this? And how did I not see that this is what it was?

Charlize Theron When I saw the cut closer to this one, I realized there was something really special about this film. I felt like for the first time in my career, I was part of something where you could truly say, “This feels original.” And listen, I had moments of feeling that while I made the movie, and it was a huge part of the reason why I wanted to make it in the first place, but when you finally see it, George had elevated it. I mean, the final cut of that film? The way it looks? That’s what makes him so brilliant.

Chris deFaria What I learned on the whole movie and in the editorial process particularly is that we make movies in a system that has so many driving forces and so many stakeholders, but in the end, these big, ambitious films are really driven by a filmmaker with a singular vision. If you find a way to just back that vision, even when it doesn’t seem smart to do so, you have a better chance of getting to a great ending than if you intervene and bring in all the different forces that Hollywood has relied on over the years to get the films to be complete.

I know that sounds kind of Pollyannaish, like, Gosh, we should all support the artists! But in this case, a tremendous amount of effort was exerted in trying to effect change on a filmmaker and a process that really had its own pace and its own integrity. And in the end, it produced something extraordinary.

Chapter 30

What Was Lost

By the time they locked their final cut, George Miller and Margaret Sixel had managed to trim Fury Road down to an ultra-lean two hours. Over the two decades it had taken to dream up, shoot, and refine the film, plenty of wild ideas and superfluous scenes fell by the wayside.

* * *

George Miller The deleted scenes had a good reason to be deleted. There were one or two well-shot scenes, but Margaret said, “Look, you’re holding up the story by putting these in.” And the moment I saw it without those scenes, I had a tremendous sense of relief, because she was right.

Brendan McCarthy We came up with heaps of stuff that never made it into the final movie. There were so many crazy ideas and concept sketches done in those early years before the story really locked down and the editing process began.

Mark Sexton Like at some point during their initial fight, Furiosa was supposed to have taken a swipe at Max with one of the chastity belts. Because they’ve got this little vagina dentata on the chastity belt, he was going to have this vagina scar on his forehead throughout the entire film—even to the point where, later on when Max got shot with the crossbow bolt and put his hand up, the bolt went through his hand and straight through the vagina.

George Miller And initially, we had another device for Immortan Joe: What he was giving to the people, which we called the Wretched below him, was basically produce.

P. J. Voeten Instead of water, it used to be potatoes.

Peter Pound They dropped potatoes from their garden, which doesn’t make sense because they’d all splatter by the time they hit the bottom. But there was a blue potato, and if you were the one that got the blue potato, then you were able to go up into the Citadel and benefit from the water and the food and the shelter.

P. J. Voeten We kind of wanted it to be water. Colin and I had a conversation on one of our tours in the outback going, “It’s a shame it’s potatoes.” Wouldn’t water be the more valued thing that everybody considers a basic necessity of life?

George Miller I remember being in India at the Lake Palace, in Udaipur. It’s now a hotel, but it was a palace in the middle of a lake, and that lake was entirely dry—there were elephants at the bottom of the lake, and people playing soccer. I was talking to the person we were with, and I said, “Gee, how often does that happen?” He said, “We’re fighting the water wars.” A lot of what was going on between Pakistan and India was basically fighting over water.

And, of course, we’re doing exactly the same thing in Australia. People aren’t dying over it, but Australia is essentially a desert with a couple of big river systems. And with one of them, the main river system, various states were fighting over it. So, we changed it from being produce to water.

Peter Pound There was also an idea of a shopping mall covered by sand that they discovered, where they were able to find unscavenged or uninterrupted resources. It was meant to be outside of the Citadel, outside of the Bullet Farm and the Gas Town, just another area that they could go to scavenge their clothing—all of those things that aren’t car-related but you still need to show that they come from somewhere.

P. J. Voeten After the night shoot, there was supposed to be a whole aerial attack sequence with these Roto-Raiders, like helicopter hang gliders. We cut that out before we went to Africa, because even George went, “Oh, enough’s enough. We need a little bit of breathing space.”

Brendan McCarthy The Vuvalini were once considered a “flying tribe,” with helicopter and gyrocopter contraptions. There was an aerial battle we messed around with where Immortan Joe takes them down with harpoons. They were meant to be like the Harpies, from Greek mythology, vengeful females. Again, it didn’t fit the flow of the story, so it got the elbow.

P. J. Voeten Another one of the scenes we cut, because to this day, I don’t even know how we would do it, was a beat before the end chase where the War Rig used to slalom down a giant sand dune.

Mark Sexton It was the whole introduction into the final chase, where Max and Furiosa and the wives and the Vuvalini are all trying to sneak through the landscape and they’re having to take out scouts and destroy the Immortan’s vehicles. Then there was this big vertiginous thing where they were forced into driving straight down this enormous slope and going straight into this huge chase. So originally, the energy was much higher at the beginning of the final chase.

P. J. Voeten We just didn’t know how to do it because the way it was drawn isn’t what would happen—the War Rig was drawn like a skier, like it was zigzagging across, but a truck in the sand wouldn’t ever do that. We resolved that we might be able to get the prime mover to do it, but we’d never get the tanker, so we might have to CG the tanker. Once we had to cut four weeks out of the movie, I was very happy to cut that sequence.

Mark Goellnicht There was also a cut scene where Max has a premonition that he’s pregnant.

P. J. Voeten And he gives birth to himself.

Lesley Vanderwalt I never quite understood that scene.

P. J. Voeten It was like a hallucination or something. Yeah, yeah. I don’t even know.

Mark Sexton It was supposed to be him sleeping and nodding off asleep in the War Rig—the first time he’s had a moment of quietude, I suppose, in a very long time. And of course, he’s still being haunted by visions on top of that. That dream was almost like the last gasp of the insanity of Max, in a weird way.

P. J. Voeten So he looks down there, he’s born, and then all these hands wrap around him.

Mark Goellnicht George wanted this shot where the camera was taken from the baby’s point of view coming out at him. It was one of the hardest shots technically I had to do on the movie: We had this camera completely stripped down to the smallest pack we could get, a very small lens, and I’m in this fucking War Rig, basically between Tom’s legs, trying to do the shot. And Tom’s going to be giving this performance that he’s having this baby.

Mark Sexton I’m really hoping someday we’ll see pictures of Tom Hardy with his female body, giving birth to himself.

Mark Goellnicht He did it about two or three times and we weren’t quite getting it. He said, “That’s it, I’m not doing any more. It’s fucking stupid. You’ve got enough, I’m done.” And he walked out. We didn’t see him for the rest of the day. George got him into a place that was pretty full-on, and Tom goes there psychologically. That could have been quite disturbing for him, and that’s probably why he couldn’t do much more than a few takes.

* * *

Many of the film’s deleted scenes involved confrontations between Immortan Joe and the tattooed history woman Miss Giddy, who had helped to free his Wives.

* * *

Jennifer Hagan (“Miss Giddy”) I was to play Miss Giddy as a very wise old woman, the receptacle of all human knowledge which had been tattooed onto my body. When the film was done and dusted and the movie released, most of my role was left on the cutting room floor. This was mainly, I think, to get the film into an acceptable screening time.

I went on location to parched Namibia three times. The first time, George was busy shooting the core of the film with his two stars. To keep me busy, he asked me to school up the many young women in the cast, most of whom were models from England and America, to help standardize their English. The next time, when I returned for my “second tour,” I spent a great deal of time being covered with tattoos.

Sean Genders Miss Giddy’s tattoos up close were all stories, they weren’t just scrawl. They talked about the Holocaust, World Wars, whatever was recorded from people’s memory of history and things that happened. She would come in the day before the shoot, because it took about eight hours to put her tattoos on.

Lesley Vanderwalt She was one of the longest makeups on the whole job. Such a trouper.

Michael Mekash Very gracious woman. Let me glue things to her.

Sean Genders And she’d sleep in them, because it was easier to spend a couple of hours fixing the tattoos that came off than it was to do eight hours and then shoot.

Jennifer Hagan One day, I wasn’t called and spent it in my room. When one of the local staff came to service the room, she took one look at me and fled. I was told that she thought I was possessed by some evil spirit and wouldn’t return without a guard to protect her.

* * *

And before the decision was made to end the film by sending Max back into the wasteland, Miller had envisioned a final twist where Zoë Kravitz’s character, Toast the Knowing, would make a grab for power.

* * *

Mark Sexton One of the Wives tries to take on the mantle of Immortan Joe in a very cynical move.

George Miller Initially, whenever the Immortan arrived, the crowd would point to him and start chanting, “He. He. He.” What Knowing did at the end of our original story was push her way to the front of the platform, cover herself in cobalt blue, and raise her hand as if she was going to be the new leader. The crowd below, as the platform rises, is calling out, “She. She. She.”

Mark Sexton George had this idea of “what goes around comes around,” that what you intend as a noble line of pursuit can easily turn into the thing that you’ve tried to get rid of. And then the very last shot was Max on the platform supporting Furiosa, who’s still pretty banged up, and he looks towards the viewer and breaks the fourth wall as if to say, Watch out. Watch out for the snake in the grass.

George Miller I thought, Oh, that’s going to work great, that’s a neat idea. But by the time we edited the movie and saw it, it was a false note. It made sense that Furiosa alone ascends to the top of a dominant hierarchy. The question becomes, What is she going to do with it?

Chapter 31

Some Kind of Redemption

If you had the right sequel hitting theaters in 2015, there seemed to be no limit on how well it could do. Furious 7, Jurassic World, and Avengers: Age of Ultron all grossed well over a billion dollars worldwide that year, while Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens topped out with a staggering gross north of two billion dollars. Even long-dead franchises seemed ripe for rediscovery, and the upside was enormous.

In the spring, as the May 15 release date of Mad Max: Fury Road drew closer, Warner Bros. executives harbored no such illusions: They were just hoping the movie wouldn’t flop, leaving behind the sort of crater that could capsize careers. Well over $200 million dollars had been spent on this lengthy production, and the result was a movie that didn’t look anything like a play-it-safe corporate blockbuster. Would audiences flock to see something so wild? At first, even critics were skeptical.

* * *

Justin Chang The movie looked like it might be this Olympian folly on one hand, based on everything we’d heard about it and the extraordinarily troubled production that it was.

Tom Holkenborg Because we took so many turns and twists in the process of making it and we were so knee-deep into this project, we couldn’t say anymore whether people were going to like it or not. The only thing I know is the emotion I felt leading up to that first screening, because I had so befriended George and I wanted people to like it for him.

* * *

In late April of that year, Fury Road began to screen for critics and journalists. Though reviews about the movie were embargoed for several weeks, the press was secretly going wild for the film.

* * *

Alison Willmore You know how sometimes when you see something, you feel a little drunk on it? This was one of those experiences, and for those of us who watch as many movies as we do, that was rare and treasured.

Justin Chang It’s incredibly propulsive filmmaking that pulls you into this world immediately. I don’t think I breathed for two hours.

Richard Lawson I left the theater rattling with excitement.

David Sims I walked out and thought, I have to tell everybody about this. Like I’d learned some incredible secret.

Charlize Theron You have this sense when you sit across from a journalist of whether they really like it or not, and it’s brutal when you go to a press junket and they’re like, “So what are you doing for Thanksgiving?” But none of that was happening with this movie. You could feel that people were so intrigued.

Ultimately, when I knew we had something great was when the movie surpassed all of those stories about Tom Hardy and me not getting along. The articles coming out of the junket were more like, “Wow, this movie taps into something we’ve never seen before.” That’s when you know you’ve accomplished something beyond all that other bullshit.

* * *

In early May, as the film enjoyed a series of glitzy premieres in Los Angeles and Sydney, the cast and crew finally got to take in what they had made in the desert all those years ago. For some, it was the first time they could truly say they understood George Miller’s vision.

* * *

Hugh Keays-Byrne I was nervous because I thought, How is this going to get pulled off? And there I was in the cinema, absolutely gobsmacked. I couldn’t fucking believe it.

Chris O’Hara Actually seeing that was this epiphany moment of, Oh my God, I was right. This whole time I knew this was going to be something, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.

Nicholas Hoult It blew me away. Obviously, it brings back all these visceral moments of being there, but also George is such an incredible storyteller and has a mind like no one else, so to see how he managed to edit it . . . even having been there, it was better than what my imagination could create.

Josh Helman As I was watching it, I thought that if I’m lucky enough to have kids one day, this will be the film where I’m like, Hey, check it out, your dad was cool in his life.

Georgina Selby I burst into tears, and I’m not much for crying. I was like, What the hell is this about? And I realized I was so exhausted and so emotional from the memories.

Abbey Lee I cried when I saw it. I mean, I made some of my best friends there. I have all those girls from the back of that truck on speed dial. That film literally changed the trajectory of my life, so watching it was almost too much.

Zoë Kravitz I had forgotten what a dramatic and traumatic experience it was, and how badly I needed the movie to be something good. When the movie ended, I realized I hadn’t exhaled the entire time, and I felt very emotional.

If it was a piece of shit, I would have been devastated. 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, it would have been a real heartbreak.

To walk out of the theater and actually be able to say that was worth it was an amazing experience. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life, but it was absolutely worth it, and I would do it again if George asked me to.

Brendan McCarthy A personal high point in my life was going to the premiere on Hollywood Boulevard and who sat down behind me? Mel Gibson and George Miller. We watched the film together and at the end, I turned round, and George put his hand down and said, “Thanks, Brendan. That was fantastic.” And Mel said, “Good job, mate.”

Edgar Wright That was very big and good of Mel Gibson to turn up for the premiere. Surely that must’ve been a tough thing.

George Miller The thing I most remember about that is Mel doing that laugh I talked about, where I know that he enjoys something—it’s a kind of a chuckle and he can’t help himself. At one time, he was slapping my knee while he laughed, so I knew that he was engaged. The other thing was him whispering, “This is not R, is it?” And I said, “Yes.” He said, “No, it’s PG.” I said, “No, it’s R.” As you know, Mel doesn’t mind getting an R.

* * *

On May 11, 2015, the Mad Max: Fury Road review embargo finally lifted. Critics responded with unqualified raves.

Thirty years after Miller gave the world “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,” he’s returned to his own post-apocalyptic world and created an exceptional, fearless and poetic masterpiece that’s primed to become a modern classic.

Lindsey Bahr, Associated Press

It’s a work of almost religious horror and beauty—the Sistine Chapel of action filmmaking.

Bilge Ebiri, Nashville Scene

In an age of weightless movie spectacles, here’s a movie that feels like it was made by kidnapping $150 million of studio money, fleeing with it to the Namibian desert, and sending footage back to Hollywood like the amputated body parts of a ransomed hostage.

David Ehrlich, Time Out (five stars)

“Mad Max: Fury Road” exists in a different league. It lies way, way beyond Thunderdome, and marks one of the few occasions on which a late sequel outdoes what came before. . . . “Mad Max: Fury Road” gathers up all that we seem to crave, right now, from our movies, and yanks it to the limit.

Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

It’s enough to renew your faith in movies.

Ty Burr, Boston Globe

* * *

George Miller When you make the film, you’re working on it in a very granular fashion. You’re not really sure if you’ve pulled off the things you attempt to do. Then you start to get these reviews.

Margaret Sixel It’s like that thing Hunter S. Thompson said: Fury Road was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool of mermaids. It was the best feeling ever, seriously.

Doug Mitchell Getting a film made is a fucking war zone, but to get one made that actually resonates is massive.

Nico Lathouris I kind of can’t believe it, really. At the time we did all that work on the story, I was thinking, This is so intellectual. How do we get this across? But I think we did.

George Miller You don’t really know what your film is until a long way down the track, and in the pre-internet past, it took many years before a world audience saw your film and made any sense of it. It took a long time, for instance, with my first film, Mad Max, to understand what it was. And now that process is accelerated, and what was happening very, very quickly was that the responses of people were very clear. They read all the subtext—the iceberg under the tip. It was in what the critics wrote. It was in the Q and A’s at screenings. That’s one of the great delights of having made a film, what audiences respond to.

Margaret Sixel When we finished the film and it was a success, that was the best year we ever had. We went traveling, and we’d repeat the stories of making the film to each other over and over again: How did we get to the other side? We still kind of marvel at it.

* * *

The last stop on the Fury Road global press tour was a significant one: The day before the film’s May 15 release, Fury Road would receive a massive red-carpet premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. Miller and his cast and crew reunited in the South of France for their most high-profile, glamorous screening yet.

* * *

Anne Thompson (editor-at-large, IndieWire) At first, it was perceived in Cannes as Oh, here’s one of the big Hollywood studios launching in Europe, and this isn’t really an art-film auteur.

Manohla Dargis But it wasn’t just some terrible French movie with a lot of powdered wigs. This was the real deal.

Gregory Ellwood (journalist, The Playlist) The movie had already gotten great reviews in the U.S., but I don’t think they were expecting this euphoric response from everyone at Cannes.

Pete Hammond (awards columnist, Deadline) It blew the roof off Cannes.

Manohla Dargis It played like a house on fire. The moment I watched that movie, I was like, This is one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen, and I still believe this. It’s pure cinema—you could almost watch this movie without subtitles, and you would understand it. That’s the reason it deserved to be at Cannes.

Kelly Marcel It got a standing ovation at Cannes, and everyone was crying because they saw in it what we saw. That was also the first time Tom and Charlize had seen each other in a very long time.

Tom Hardy I was speechless to witness the colossal undertaking we had been involved in. We all sat in a long silence at the end before the room erupted into applause and whistles. George Miller blew us away. The result was way more incredible than I could possibly have ever imagined.

George Miller They realized that when all the pieces came together, the tune played well.

Kelly Marcel It felt like everyone was getting on, and then Tom made his apologies that he felt he needed to make.

* * *

At the film’s Cannes press conference, as the leads of the film sat next to Miller on the dais, Hardy was asked how he felt while watching the movie for the first time. As he answered, Hardy turned to his director to make amends.

“For seven months, the most frustrating thing for me was trying to know what George wanted me to do at any given minute on a minute-by-minute basis so that I could fully transmute his vision,” Hardy said. “I really feel I have to apologize to you, because I got frustrated. There is no way that George could have explained what he could see in the sand when we were out there. I mean, I knew he was brilliant, but I didn’t quite know how brilliant until I saw that. That’s what my first reaction was: Oh my God, I owe George an apology for being so myopic.”

* * *

Tom Hardy As the reality of his accomplishment soaked in for me, I felt it was the right thing to say in the moment.

Doug Mitchell The proof of the pudding’s in the eating, and that was what we saw at Cannes.

Gregory Ellwood It’s one of the moments from Cannes press conferences that I will never forget. Everyone found it surprising.

Mark Goellnicht Tom had no clue of what he was in, and all the way through it, he was constantly questioning George, constantly questioning his reasoning, his vision. So then for Tom to come back and realize that, I think that’s great, that he could be strong enough to say, “I got it wrong. I should’ve seen it at the time.”

Iain Smith That was a very endearing thing for him to say, and it also gives a hint to the way he works. I hesitate to use the word “Method” because I don’t think it is as simple as that, but it comes right down to his viscera in terms of what he is and why he is, and George had the instinct and the intelligence to use that.

Tom Hardy Afterwards, I felt clean.

George Miller Look, by then I’d processed all of that. I was happy that Tom had the good grace to say that, but it didn’t leave me with a feeling of, Oh, okay. It was worth it at the time. It meant something, but it wasn’t an end point to anything—the main interest was to see what the film meant to the audiences out there.

* * *

On May 15, 2015, nearly twenty years after Miller started putting the pieces in place for Mad Max: Fury Road, the movie finally came out in theaters.

* * *

Lora Kennedy I had been to the premiere, but then I wanted to take my son, so we went opening night at seven o’clock to the Arclight in L.A., because that’s where everybody who loves movies will go on that first Friday. It was packed, sold out weeks in advance, and afterwards, people stood around in the lobby and no one would leave. Everybody was talking about the movie, and they couldn’t believe what they had seen. The energy in the room was fantastic—it’s the sort of thing that makes you want to go to the movies.

James Nicholas At the end of the buzzard sequence, this one guy next to me went, “Holy shit!” really loud. And we used to talk about that when they were storyboarding it. Brendan would say, “Our goal is to have someone yell a curse word!”

Iain Smith I went eight times to see the movie in the cinema with a real audience. And I was amazed at how the audience glommed on it, right from start to finish.

Chris O’Hara That weekend, my phone blew up: “You didn’t tell me you worked on that movie.” “Oh my God, you need to tell me all of the stories.” “Holy shit!” “What the hell?” People I hadn’t talked to in years.

Edgar Wright Quentin Tarantino initially refused to see it because it didn’t have Mel Gibson in it, and we had a heated discussion about it. He goes, “I love George, but I can’t see it, not without Mel Gibson.” Then the next time I spoke to him, I said, “Have you seen Fury Road yet?” He goes, “Oh, yeah, yeah. It’s a masterpiece.” He had completely 180’d on it.

* * *

Fury Road opened to $45 million that weekend, second to Pitch Perfect 2 at the U.S. box office. It would finish its run with a solid (though not exceptional) $374 million haul worldwide.

* * *

Jen Yamato In my mind, it made a lot more money than that.

P. J. Voeten All the reviews coming out were unbelievable, and then that opening weekend, we got beaten by Pitch Perfect 2. I’m not begrudging that film at all. But it still surprises me we didn’t do bigger box office.

Massey Rafani It was a rough season to go into and we had a direct competitor that really outperformed and took away part of an audience that we had a good handle on.

Drew McWeeny It had been so long since there had been a Mad Max movie, and because it wasn’t Mel Gibson and it was starting from zero, I feel like Fury Road was greeted by the audience like an original.

Alison Willmore Look, this movie resembles nothing on the current blockbuster circuit, at all. I just hoped it wouldn’t flop horribly, and it didn’t! To me, those numbers were a pleasant surprise.

Justin Chang It didn’t break tons of box-office records, and by Hollywood’s estimation, it is perhaps more of a modest success than Avengers. And yet, look at the movie that will have the lasting cultural imprint. It’s a reminder that, yes, there are things more important and more lasting than how much money it makes.

George Miller When the ideas that you start off with are then comprehended by an audience at large out there, that’s ultimately what redeems the process for you. That’s ultimately what allows you to give yourself a little pat on the back.

J. Houston Yang There really is no correlation between box-office return and pop-culture footprint. Which would you say has a bigger pop-culture footprint, Avatar or fucking Fury Road? I think that its impact is undeniable, and it is 1,000 percent the kind of thing that inspires young filmmakers and blows them away. And that is a powerful, powerful thing.

Drew McWeeny Of all the films that Miller has ever made, this is the one where it feels like he bled for it to exist. For him to have been the age he was, for him to have come back into the studio system the way it is now, and to have navigated that system and come through it with this movie, it’s pure win. You’re going to see young filmmakers who are doing press and when people ask, “What got you interested in directing?” They’ll say, “I was nine, and my dad took me to see Fury Road.”

George Miller There was a moment when I was in Japan and a critic who was very articulate in English was telling me about the film. I was astonished by the degree to which he read all the subtext, all that stuff that you hope is there. I said, “Oh, how many times did you see the film?” And he said, “Only once.” I said, “You read all that from one screening?” He said, “Yes. Can I show you something?”

And he opened up his shirt and, on his sternum, he had the steering-wheel logo of the Immortan tattooed in red. He said, “I went out of the cinema, and I had a friend draw that up.” I thought, Oh my God, I hope this movie lasts long enough to justify the tattoo!

Chapter 32

Awaited in Valhalla

Though Mad Max: Fury Road hadn’t made Marvel-type money, it was still hailed by journalists as a masterpiece and continued to linger in the zeitgeist months after its release. Near the end of 2015, as Fury Road popped up on almost every critic’s list of the best films of the year, eyebrows were raised all over Hollywood: Could this gonzo action movie somehow crash the awards race?

The 2015 Oscar season was already packed with prestigious films vying for Best Picture, including the fact-based journalism drama Spotlight, the financial satire The Big Short, and the Leonardo DiCaprio wilderness epic The Revenant, from director Alejandro González Iñárritu, whose previous film, Birdman, had won Best Picture. With all those heavyweights in the mix, there didn’t appear to be room for an unconventional pick like Fury Road. Even Miller wasn’t expecting much.

* * *

George Miller Look, not for a moment did we think that Fury Road would be anything like an Oscar movie. It had come out in May, long before the award season, and it’s the fourth of a series of films. In mid-May, I thought we were done. I really did!

Margaret Sixel I used to joke in the cutting room, “If we don’t win an Oscar for this . . .” But I was kidding around! George would say, “No, Margie, this kind of stuff is not Oscar stuff.” He dampened all our expectations.

Pete Hammond I dismissed it completely as an Oscar movie when I saw it. I never would have guessed at that point what would happen.

Dave Karger (TCM host and Oscar pundit for Today) Let’s remember that the only major award season attention that the entire Mad Max franchise had ever gotten was a Golden Globe nomination for best song, “We Don’t Need Another Hero”—which, by the way, is one of the best movie songs of the eighties. But Mad Max as a franchise was not an awards magnet. It took some brain-bending for some people to even look at Fury Road as an “Oscar movie.”

John Horn (journalist) It was a movie that a lot of people loved, but it was an action film, and action films are never taken that seriously by the Academy and its voters. They aren’t considered important.

Gregory Ellwood If you were to go back and look at the special award-season issues that started coming out in September from Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and The Envelope, it’s not really mentioned as a Best Picture player.

Scott Feinberg (awards columnist, The Hollywood Reporter) It came out in May, and it’s very hard to sustain awards momentum for more than a half year because newer, potentially more exciting things come along. Another thing is that it did not seem to have the sort of pedigree that the Academy goes for. And then the last thing I’ll say, which I may take some heat for, is that Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron are not exactly known as warm and fuzzy people. He barely does any press and is not the most approachable person, and she’s not necessarily interested in doing the kind of glad-handing that is required usually for Oscar season.

Gregory Ellwood The priority for Warner Bros. was Black Mass, with Johnny Depp. That’s all they wanted to talk about, that was their number-one film. I would bring up Mad Max and it was like, “Oh, we’ll return to that down the road.” But it didn’t happen until way too late.

Michele Robertson (awards publicist) When I knew on the awards side that we had something special was around September, October. George came back to town to accept an environmental award for the movie, and that’s when we came to journalists and we were kind of checking in to say, “Hey, do you want to talk about the movie?” And I saw this outpouring of enthusiasm and love. I was like, Hmm, we’ve got something here, because people keep talking about it.

Anne Thompson It was a crafts achievement of a major order. You could see that the rank-and-file membership of the different craft branches of the Academy were going to run towards it with open arms.

Scott Feinberg I started to believe it was real as we got into December, and suddenly there was this cascade of accolades, one on top of the other.

* * *

First up was the National Board of Review, the earliest major group to weigh in during awards season. On December 1, 2015, its members announced that their best-film trophy would go to Fury Road.

* * *

Gregory Ellwood When the NBR announced that Mad Max: Fury Road was Best Picture, it was sort of akin to how people reacted to Parasite winning major awards: Cinephiles and critics were over the moon, and everyone else in the awards game who worked for studios or publicists was going, “What the fuck?”

Anne Thompson The National Board of Review tends to go for socially conscious uplift—something like Spotlight.

Scott Feinberg It isn’t the edgiest crowd in the business. But it’s very rare that a movie voted Best Picture by the National Board of Review doesn’t factor into the overall Oscar season in some way.

Michele Robertson I got an email from a journalist friend that said, “NBR WTF.” That was a lot of the sentiment that day from various folks.

George Miller You work very hard in the tunnel of the movie you’re making and then you emerge and put some effort out there, but when you get home and now there’s all this new stuff coming back at you, it’s one of the greatest delights.

Gregory Ellwood That NBR win gave the green light to anyone who was hedging in the critics’ groups to be like, Yeah, I can vote for this.

* * *

The next major lift came from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, which gave Fury Road wins for Best Cinematography, Best Production Design, and Best Director. It was also the runner-up for LAFCA’s Best Picture prize, which went to Spotlight.

* * *

Justin Chang LAFCA, among critics’ groups, doesn’t usually suffer from anti-genre snobbery: We are the group that actually gave Best Picture to Star Wars over Annie Hall, and voted Wall-E and The Dark Knight the two best films of 2008. I love this about LAFCA. They think great action filmmaking is great filmmaking, period.

Michele Robertson When everybody saw we won the L.A. Film Critics it was like, Okay, this is real now. This is really happening.

Pete Hammond The critics really helped. This is an example of critics really making a movie in a big way and carrying through with their own awards.

Kris Tapley (former awards editor, Variety) George by far had the most wins from critics’ groups as the year went on. He had twenty-four critics’ prizes for Best Director, and Mad Max was second to Spotlight with eleven Best Picture prizes. That’s a big deal!

Pete Hammond Once you hit that point, the studio becomes convinced that they’ve got something and they’re going to put more money and enthusiasm behind it than they might have.

Petrina Hull It was a bit like we were going back into a mini-production, and it kept the excitement for the film alive for the remainder of the year.

Pete Hammond I started doing Q and A’s and George Miller was around a lot.

Michele Robertson There’s no better spokesman for the movie than George, who’s so warm and so gracious. It was all about putting him out there: Here is this audacious, meaningful, auteur filmmaker who really pushed the genre. And he had been out here a couple years before around Happy Feet, which we won the Oscar for, so it wasn’t starting from nowhere.

George Miller It’s a very enjoyable party. It’s like a political primary, without all the malevolence.

Anne Thompson I was telling people to see the movie, and I was encountering some resistance from Academy members.

Dave Karger People really fell into two camps when it came to Fury Road. There were many people who revered George Miller and the entire Mad Max franchise, but then there was also a large group of people that thought, Fun movie, but not an Oscar film, and never even considered voting for it in anything outside of the technical categories.

Scott Feinberg The narrative of Fury Road, in a way, was not dissimilar to what I suspect it was for Apocalypse Now a few decades earlier: “Can you believe the shit that these people went through to make this movie happen at all?” The backstory of the movie is something that campaigns usually struggle to make sound interesting and exciting and dramatic, but in the case of Fury Road, you didn’t have to stretch very far.

* * *

Industry accolades kept pouring in for Fury Road, including major guild nominations from the Producers Guild and Directors Guild, as well as key nominations for Best Drama and Best Director from the Golden Globes.

* * *

Scott Feinberg Having been included in the top tier at the Golden Globes probably legitimized Fury Road in the minds of Academy members as something that they could credibly support on their ballots.

Pete Hammond That’s not a typical way that the Globes go. So, the fact that they did that, that was a signal right there, and that was a big boost.

George Miller The big thing to do is to be very careful with your expectations.

* * *

It was all leading up to the morning of January 14, 2016, when the Oscar nominations were read at the crack of dawn in Los Angeles. Fury Road earned an astonishing ten nominations in a wide variety of categories, including editing, production design, cinematography, visual effects, sound editing and mixing, hair and makeup, and costume design.

Crucially, the film also made it into the top two races: George Miller was nominated for Best Director and Fury Road was nominated for Best Picture.

* * *

Chris deFaria The nominations were a jaw-dropper.

P. J. Voeten I got up to watch the livestream, and I was going, My God. They just kept coming.

Petrina Hull Ten nominations! Nobody could have predicted that.

Margaret Sixel We couldn’t believe it. We had just been through such hell on the whole thing.

Edgar Wright In previous years, there’d be those films that are technically amazing and astounding, but they don’t get recognized by the Academy, and it always becomes a controversial point when something like The Dark Knight doesn’t get as many nominations as maybe it should have. But Mad Max is so brilliantly executed, and the sheer brio of that could not be ignored.

Anne Thompson But I was really mad Charlize didn’t get a nomination! Leonardo DiCaprio did a lot of action in the elements and was rewarded for that hardship, but poor Charlize as the fabulous Furiosa was shut out.

Kris Tapley I think she was number six. She was right there.

Dave Karger You can make the argument that Charlize deserved it over Jennifer Lawrence for Joy, which was a movie that was largely blanked all awards season. I think that there still is a bias against action films, whether conscious or not.

Scott Feinberg But to get nominations in the double digits is so rare, and in this case, the only film that did any better was The Revenant with twelve. So, at that point, you had to say this is a very real thing across the board.

Michele Robertson We were all saying, Oh my God, who’s going to talk to George when he wakes up?

George Miller Well, this is what happens with Oscar nominations, particularly if you’re on a different time zone—you’re usually asleep!

Michele Robertson Because of the time difference, we got a statement. It was very George.

Wowie Zowie! So many talented people labored mightily to bring this movie to the screen. It’s lovely that the Academy has acknowledged our work in this way.

George Miller When it got the nominations, I thought, Oh, this is good. I’ve learned, of course, that glittering prizes can give you gratification. But the real thing is to see what the story means to people.

Kris Tapley It started feeling like George could take Director.

Scott Feinberg There’s a sense in the directing category in recent years that you want to reward the guy who had the hardest job. That was probably not going to be Tom McCarthy for Spotlight or Adam McKay for The Big Short, but a strong argument could be made for either Iñárritu for The Revenant, which looked like a grueling ordeal to make, or George Miller with Fury Road.

Michele Robertson You’d continue to hear from people who would reach out and say how much they love the movie. Other filmmakers were asking, “How can I support it? What can I do?”

Patton Oswalt A friend of mine said, “I don’t know if he should win Best Director, but he should definitely win Most Director.”

John Seale We had a lovely guy in England come up to us and say, “I voted for you guys, and I’ll tell you why: I look at a film and think, ‘In twenty years’ time, will I remember that film? And in twenty years’ time, my God, I know I’ll remember Fury Road.”

Anne Thompson This was not an Oscar season where there was an obvious front-runner.

Michele Robertson I knew it was going to be close for Best Picture, but we were definitely in the conversation.

Kris Tapley Revenant won DGA, Big Short won PGA, and SAG went to Spotlight. That’s the kind of race that can allow for a dare-to-dream movie like Mad Max, frankly.

* * *

On February 28, 2016, the Oscars were held at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles. It was the glitzy capper to so many years of hard work, but no one involved with Fury Road was quite sure how the night would go.

* * *

Margaret Sixel We had such a crazy time in L.A., all of us.

Andy Williams To see all the ceremony and the pomp and the atmosphere is amazing. The whole place becomes the Oscars, doesn’t it? It’s incredible.

Lesley Vanderwalt I woke up that morning and opened the curtains of the room and there was a dust storm. This is in L.A., but it was like waking up in Namibia! And I said from that moment on, I think we’re going to win. Wow, talk about a sign.

George Miller Margaret is someone who never wears makeup, but she decided a makeup person should come along. She only bought her dress the day before. I said, “Margaret, why don’t you wear the same dress you wore to the BAFTAs?” And she said, “People will have seen me.”

Lesley Vanderwalt There were wonderful people that I’ve worked with on other shows, like Chadwick Boseman, that were coming up to congratulate us. And when we got out of the limo arriving, Chaddy was the first person we saw—he was like, “Girls!” He introduced us to all the people he was with and made us feel good.

David White What people don’t realize is that the red-carpet business is a fucking ordeal. It’s three and a half hours, and you can’t get a drink of alcohol.

* * *

Hosted by Chris Rock, the awards ceremony quickly flipped toward Fury Road. The fourth category of the night was for costume design and the winner was Jenny Beavan, who had brought the wild costumes of the wasteland to life. As she made her way to the stage, attendees marveled at Beavan’s unconventional awards-show attire: Instead of wearing an expensive frock, she had donned a leather jacket emblazoned with the Immortan’s skull symbol.

* * *

Jenny Beavan My sister said to me, “What you going to wear for the awards?” Obviously, if you’re a film star you can go to a designer and they’ll lend you some gorgeous gown, but I am short and fat and would look ridiculous in a dress—that just isn’t my thing. And quite often when you get to the Oscars, I’ve always been quite hard-up. I brought up a daughter single-handed, I pay for everything, and often don’t have that kind of money.

And I was like, “You know what? I’ve been thinking I could do a bit of an homage to the film, and wear something a bit biker-ish.” So, I got a pleather jacket from Marks & Spencer. The costume maker for Furiosa, Jane Law, said she’d put the Immortan Joe symbol on the back, which she actually did with Sandy Powell’s leftovers from a sequined dress in Cinderella—we put some Swarovski crystals on it.

It felt really comfortable, and it got a ridiculous amount of attention. Like, “What’s she wearing?”

Michele Robertson Iñárritu kind of gave her a look.

* * *

Fury Road also won the next two Oscars, which were awarded to Colin Gibson and Lisa Thompson for the film’s production design and Lesley Vanderwalt, Elka Wardega, and Damian Martin for achievement in makeup and hairstyling.

* * *

Colin Gibson I was talking to the designer of The Revenant, who was sitting in front of me, and we were both telling each other that the other was going to win. He kept saying, “No, no, no, you’ll win,” but as it drew closer, I kept watching him reach into his pocket for notes and wishing that maybe I had some.

Lesley Vanderwalt I remember being onstage and looking down, and it was all of these famous people—Leo and all the guys from The Revenant and all that sort—and you go, Oh my God, what am I doing onstage in front of these people? I felt like I was on a reality television show.

Kris Tapley You’d hear the score every time a movie wins something, and we heard Mad Max all night long.

Joy Smithers You’d see all these crazy people running down—like, Who are these wacky Australians?

Michele Robertson I had a good seat, and every time we would win something, the woman next to me was like, “Well, you seem excited.” And with the way the wins were going, I was!

* * *

The night’s next winner was Margaret Sixel, who took the Oscar for Best Editing.

* * *

Margaret Sixel I mean, how about that? Half the time I thought I was going to get fired off the film, and then you win an Oscar. It’s such a brilliant feeling. I have to be honest: I didn’t mind if I didn’t win. In fact, I was hoping I wouldn’t win, because there would be so much fuss and I’d have to get up. I’d prepared myself so either way I was okay with it, but George was so happy for me!

John Horn When you win the editing Oscar, that’s a really good sign for Best Picture. At that point, I thought, It’s going to pull it off. This is the movie that excited the most voters, and it ticks so many boxes—it’s important, it has a woman at the forefront, it’s practical effects when the world is drowning in CG, and it’s original storytelling.

* * *

The film also won in the sound-editing and sound-mixing categories. Supervising sound editor Mark Mangini was bleeped as he and David White took the stage and Mangini exclaimed, “Fucking Mad Maxers, let’s hear it!”

* * *

David White No Australian ever expects to win an Oscar. It is on the mind of the American crews that they might, whereas for the Aussies, it was, Fuck, really, do you think we’re going to get one? When I got back to Australia with it, I took the Oscar to all the pubs that I go to and let all the locals take photos with it and hold it and everything. It’s the most damaged Oscar in history.

Petrina Hull It really felt like a winning streak. It wasn’t an award or two: It was literally award after award after award after award. When you hear the film’s name again and again, it’s an incredible feeling.

Pete Hammond I’ll tell you the truth: On the night of the Oscars, as it was winning everything, I went, Oh my God, this thing could really pull off an upset. It’s clearly sweeping, we’re all going to be wrong.

Scott Feinberg Six wins were more than twice as many as any other film that night, and only two movies had ever won more Oscars without winning Best Picture—Cabaret and Gravity, and they had both won Best Director. So as the night went on, it seemed more plausible than ever that it might pull a shocker in one of those top two categories.

Massey Rafani We’re thinking, This could happen, this could happen, this could happen. And we got so close.

Gregory Ellwood If George had won, I would’ve thrown all the rules out the window.

Kris Tapley I’m sure he was very close to winning. Up until the envelope was read, I wasn’t sure.

* * *

The Oscar for Best Director, presented near the end of the long ceremony, went to Iñárritu for The Revenant.

* * *

George Miller I knew, having been before, to really temper expectations. People say, “You’re going to win!” and you don’t.

Pete Hammond Had The Revenant not been involved, George Miller would have pulled off Best Director. I’m almost certain of that. They would never have given Best Director to Spotlight.

Justin Chang Did Iñárritu need that award again, a year after he had already won, when George Miller has never really gotten his due and this was clearly the moment to honor him? As a pure feat of direction, Fury Road is one of the things that has not really been paralleled since, so that feels like a missed opportunity.

* * *

And the final Oscar of the night, the award for Best Picture, went to Spotlight.

* * *

Dave Karger Spotlight won Best Picture with only one other award that night, and that’s very, very rare in the modern age. That almost never happens.

John Horn I bet you if we could see the final ballot, Fury Road was within fifty votes of winning Best Picture.

Dave Karger When it comes to voting for Best Picture, Academy members rank all the contenders from their favorite to their least favorite. For many voters, even if Spotlight was not their number-one choice, it was more likely their number-two or number-three. A movie like Fury Road, I would argue, got many, many number-one votes, but probably fewer number-two or -three votes overall.

Michele Robertson At the end of the evening, we had the most wins. And seeing the look on George’s face was worth it.

Margaret Sixel We were disappointed that George didn’t win, but basically, they were all his Oscars in a way.

Dean Hood The morning after, everyone met up at this coffee shop. There were something like ten Academy Awards, and they lined them up on the coffee bench. And George was behind the coffee machine as a barista—seeing as how he couldn’t win an Academy Award, he thought he’d better get another job doing coffees.

George Miller I knew by then not to take it too seriously, but enjoy the ride. Another thing that I learned from Jack Nicholson on Witches of Eastwick was Jack said, “Don’t make the mistake of not celebrating success, because it comes around so rarely.”

Dave Karger Fury Road’s overall Oscar performance exactly matches Star Wars: six technical wins.

Justin Chang Six Oscars is nothing to sneeze at. The industry clearly loved the movie and respected the movie deeply. George Miller got more thank-yous and shout-outs from the stage probably than anyone else.

P. J. Voeten He owns each and every one of those awards, because his films are all so handmade. His fingerprints are over everything.

Michele Robertson It was the little engine that could, this special movie that stood out with people.

Kris Tapley It’s such a weird movie in terms of recent Oscar history or even ninety years of Oscar history. You can’t point to another movie that did that. Ten nominations and six wins for such an unflinchingly genre movie?

Dave Karger It should be credited as a film that widened the scope of what an Oscar movie can and should be.

Mark Goellnicht It’s probably going to be remembered more than . . . what won?

Chapter 33

“Nothing Good Comes Easy”

Over a thousand people labored for two decades to bring Mad Max: Fury Road to life, though many of them weren’t certain what George Miller’s vision would look like or whether something so hard, dangerous, and expensive would be worth it in the end. Could a world weaned on safe corporate blockbusters embrace a movie that was this out-there, this uncompromised, this . . . well, mad?

It didn’t take long to learn the enthusiastic answer. Fury Road has become a permanent part of the pop-cultural canon and is referenced on a daily basis, whether it’s Stephen Colbert naming his election segment “Fury Road to the White House,” Megan Thee Stallion riding motorcycles in the desert for a Fury Road–inspired music video, or Rihanna dressing up as a Prada-clad Furiosa for a high-fashion photo shoot in W magazine. Social media is still awash in GIFs from Fury Road, and any new action movie is immediately measured against Miller’s high-water mark.

Filmmakers revere Fury Road. Movie fans can’t get enough of its wild imagination. And in 2019, as publications put together their lists of the best movies of the decade, every major newspaper and magazine mentioned Miller’s modern classic. From Vulture to the New York Times, Rolling Stone to the A.V. Club, Fury Road was heralded as a landmark achievement.

We go to the movies to be transported, and Fury Road takes us to the outer reaches of our imaginations: Just look at the fans who are still inspired by Max, Furiosa, and their long-shot battle against the Immortan. (You may especially want to look at them on Halloween or at Comic-Con, when they pay tribute by constructing face masks and mechanical arms.) But the epic journey of Fury Road proved even more meaningful for the people who made it. What they had all accomplished by the skin of their teeth was a very rare thing indeed.

* * *

John Horn When the original Mad Max came out, the New York Times called it ugly and incoherent and aimed at the most uncritical of moviegoers. And two decades later, they put Fury Road on the list of the best movies ever made.

Manohla Dargis It’s beautifully done on every single level, and it’s pure cinema.

Richard Lawson I listed it for Vanity Fair as the best movie of the decade, and the reason I did that was because it felt like a hope for where Hollywood, with its franchise obsession, could take us. I just hope we get more blockbusters with a real authorial voice.

George Miller You’re sort of humbled by it. You say, Oh God, this has way more meaning than I ever anticipated it would have. Those sorts of things are the moments of satisfaction that you get, and basically wash away all those times where I’m sitting there responsible for somehow holding the central story experience together for what you think will be the ultimate audience.

Justin Chang It has very quickly taken on the feel of something permanent and has absolutely become this exemplar of this kind of filmmaking where you just can’t fuck with a single thing about this movie. I can’t put it more elegantly than that.

Patton Oswalt In my opinion, it’s the best action movie ever made. I don’t know what you could argue would be better. I don’t, I’m sorry!

Justin Chang It does feel like the action movie distilled to its purest essence. Even though it’s this great maximalist endeavor, there’s a conceptual simplicity to it.

Manohla Dargis It’s one of the great action movies, but I would also say, “Let’s not even have a qualifier.” It’s one of the great movies that’s been made in my lifetime. It’s my new Wizard of Oz. It hasn’t used itself up and I don’t think it ever will.

Charlize Theron People love this movie. When I talk to other filmmakers who I really admire, people like David Fincher, they talk about this movie in a technical way that’s so interconnected to emotional narrative. That’s when I feel like I don’t necessarily maybe have another movie in my repertoire that does that. There’s a real admiration, a real respect shown towards that film when it comes to my peers.

Tom Holkenborg It doesn’t matter whether I talk to Zack Snyder or James Cameron or Peter Jackson or Tim Miller. A lot of the directors I work with, like Robert Rodriguez, they were like, “When I saw Fury Road, my heart dropped in my stomach.”

Tom Hardy I agree with them. For George, I am proud for him, of him, and extremely pleased for him. He deserves the accolades, as do his team, his supporters, and the design and stunt departments. They pulled off a monumental feat, masterfully.

Patty Jenkins I still think it’s amazing that so much time passed in between the Mad Max movies and yet George is as edgy as ever. And edgier than anybody else!

Drew McWeeny Thirty-five-year-old filmmakers, twenty-five-year-old filmmakers look at it and go, “Yeah, I don’t have the energy for that. I couldn’t begin to do that.” I heard Steven Soderbergh say, “I look at that movie, and I want to quit the business.”

Tom Hardy It’s a thinking man’s action movie. Or even a wise man’s action movie, because George was pushing seventy years of age when he made it, and he’s turned in what is arguably one of the most youthful things I’ve seen in my life.

Gina Prince-Bythewood It so obliterated the ageism that is so prevalent in Hollywood. There’s always this focus on, “What is the next person going to bring?” Yet he proves so beautifully that with age comes genius.

John Seale Between George and me, we’ve got 150 years of experience. But I think film is ageless. It’s all in the mind.

Gina Prince-Bythewood You have to give George credit for creating something with this amount of longevity. It’s so indelible, both the characters and the world, and that’s what has sustained it. The fact that he’s going to continue it now with this amazing woman coming in to play the younger Furiosa, he can do that because we as an audience want to keep going back to that world and learning more about it.

* * *

Miller intends to make at least one more trip to the wasteland. He will next shoot Furiosa, with a 2024 release in mind. Though it was once mulled as an animated film, Furiosa will be a live-action prequel starring Anya Taylor-Joy as a younger version of the iconic warrior. To flesh out Furiosa’s backstory, she’ll be joined by actors Chris Hemsworth and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, as well as a significant number of returning crew members from Fury Road.

* * *

John Seale I’ve had wonderful opportunities to work after Fury Road, as you can imagine, but I’ve passed on all of them. I’ve grown strong, and I know how to say “no” now. But on Fury Road, I told George, “If anybody else rings, I’m retired, but if you ring, we’ll have lunch.” And he rang.

P. J. Voeten Furiosa is more of a traditional three-act drama. If people are expecting to see another chase movie, it’s not going to be that.

Tim Ridge I remember people on Fury Road going, “I can’t wait to make Furiosa, because I think it’s an even better film.”

Dean Hood When I started reading it, I couldn’t put it down. It is going to be really, really good. You get to see Gas Town. You get to see the Bullet Farm. It’s exciting to be able to build that stuff.

Dane Hallett I’ve been doing a bunch of work on it and I’ve got to tell you as a movie fan, when I’m Skyping with George, Guy Norris, and Colin Gibson, I’m screenshotting the fuck out of it: “He’s talking to me!”

George Miller For the longest time, I thought we could use CG de-aging on Charlize, but I don’t think we’re nearly there yet. Despite the valiant attempts on The Irishman, there’s still an uncanny valley. Everyone is on the verge of solving it, particularly Japanese video-game designers, but there’s still a pretty wide valley.

Charlize Theron Listen, I fully respect George, if not more so in the aftermath of making Fury Road with him. He’s a master, and I wish him nothing but the best. It’s a little heartbreaking, for sure. I really love that character, and I’m so grateful that I had a small part in creating her. She will forever be someone I think of and reflect on fondly.

Edgar Wright The last dinner that I had in London before the lockdown was with George in London. I had just shown him Last Night in Soho, and he was like, “What was Anya Taylor-Joy like to work with? Oh my God, she’s astonishing.” The next day, he had a meeting with Anya, and that was the start of her being in Furiosa.

George Miller I’d seen a couple of other things she did, and I’m so in admiration of Edgar and his instincts that when he flat-out said, “Do yourself a favor and grab the opportunity to work with her,” I didn’t have to hear much more than that endorsement. That basically confirmed my own instinct.

Anya Taylor-Joy (actress) I fell in love with Furiosa the way Charlize presented her. She did such an incredible job, and it was so beautiful. I’ve already started dreaming about her—she’s coming in pretty strong. I’m so committed to working as hard as I possibly can because I’ve always said that I wanted a role that I would have to give everything to, and I’m excited for that because I hope to push myself past the limits of what my brain once told me was possible.

P. J. Voeten George saw Chris [Hemsworth] initially as a courtesy and then fell in love with the idea. He’s going to play totally against type, the lead baddie. Unfortunately, we’ve got to find all of our other characters that aren’t around anymore: a new Immortan, a new Bullet Farmer, and a few others.

Guy Norris All I can say is it is an amazing story. And I am as excited for the world to see this story as I was for them to see Fury Road.

Tim Ridge Who’d want to go back and try and top Fury Road? George Miller. So that’s what he’s going to do, and I have no doubt he’ll do it.

Jon Iles Guy said, “Let me show you what we’re going to do for the next Mad Max film,” and I looked at the model that’s on the ground—he’s got Lego and Mattel bikes and cars and trucks and all that sort of stuff, because we want to put bodies to bike numbers so that we can get an absolute picture of what’s going on. I said, “Mate, that’s a lot of Lego.” And he goes, “The more Lego the better, Jon.”

If they pull off what they’re planning to pull off, it’s going to be an absolute visual feast beyond what Fury Road was. It’ll be an epic evolution of the Mad Max series.

* * *

What is it that makes this world, and Fury Road in particular, so compelling to revisit? It isn’t just the incredible visuals or those one-of-a-kind action sequences, though they clearly play a large part. It has to do with the themes that run through the movie like a river, and the potent metaphors we’re reminded of again and again.

* * *

Nicholas Hoult George’s storytelling is all embedded in believable truths and realities, things that do happen and can happen.

Charlize Theron That world that’s been abandoned and not looked after? I see so much of that. There’s so much human behavior in this film that right now feels like a mirror to me.

Hugh Keays-Byrne I mean, it’s obvious we’re fucking the planet. When you come to Australia, you can see beautiful virgin bush and right next to it, the fucking bulldozer track.

Zoë Kravitz The storyline is so simple: We’re trying to get to the Green Place, and if that doesn’t exist, then we have nothing. George’s connection to that story really was the thing that got us through this shoot. He is so tuned in to humans’ destruction of the earth and what that means and will lead to.

Ziwe I recently read about how for the first time in American history, water is being traded as a commodity on the market. And of course, that reminded me of Fury Road!

Chris deFaria People have said to me, “Oh, that’s straight out of Mad Max,” or, “That’s totally like Fury Road,” having no idea that I had anything to do with the movie.

Charlize Theron When you think about the whole saga of Mad Max and where he started, forty-plus years back, there’s a prophecy about it, I swear to God. What’s going to happen feels so real to him.

Eve Ensler It’s a neofascist moment in this country, verging on authoritarianism, which was certainly a major theme in Mad Max. I thought we were moving away from that insane patriarchy, the worshipping of the father and the surrendering of the will to him, and to see some of these young men who follow Trump, I find it chilling.

Richard Norton I look at the emotion of the Trump base, and they’re fucking War Boys. They don’t care what he does, what he says, whether he lies. They’re like War Boys in that they will do anything for him.

Colin Gibson There’s plenty of references to foolishness, to fundamentalism, to the folly of believing in stupid things. It may seem ludicrous that the reaction to the end of days is to build a V-8 and fill a tin can with shrapnel, but at the moment, it doesn’t seem any stupider than the other options we appear to be coming up with.

Kelly Marcel Every time I think George’s film can’t be more pertinent, it’s more pertinent.

Charlize Theron What’s scary is this movie was trying to be a cautionary tale, and now look at us. We spent months looking like Tom Hardy does in this movie, wearing muzzles to protect ourselves.

Nia DaCosta I watched Fury Road two months into the pandemic and I was like, That’s where we’re heading. It definitely shows you a world where the people in charge have succumbed to their worst natures, and those who historically have no power have to fight the system.

Tom Hardy When push comes to shove, the bottom falls out of the market, there’s no money left, and we do end up in an apocalyptic world, no fame’s going to save you from being eaten or having to eat, is it?

Charlize Theron What’s so sad is that we keep repeating it, and we’re going to get to a place where it will be too late, and we won’t have the luxury of repeating it again. I always felt the story was a cautionary tale, and the thing that people connected with and still connect with when they watch this film is how relevant all those issues are. It doesn’t feel foreign or far off. It feels so imminent.

George Miller The interesting thing about Mad Max is some people joke and say, “Before long it will become a documentary.” But even though you can argue there’s a degree of speculating what the future might be, it’s mainly about who we are today. And we’re following the same behavioral patterns collectively as we always have.

Megan Gale We haven’t gone through an apocalypse, but we’ve gone through a pandemic. We’ve gone through something that changes life as we know it and has forced us to adapt to a new way of being.

Kelly Marcel As the #MeToo movement happened, I thought of Fury Road and Furiosa, and I know that more things will happen that will make us go, Oh my God, it’s just like Fury Road. It’s not datable, that movie. I think it will stand the test of time in a way that movies don’t anymore.

* * *

And so, at the end our long journey, we return to our original question: Did Fury Road become a masterpiece despite all its hardships, or because of them?

* * *

Chris deFaria Stories give meaning to our suffering, and that suffering can give meaning to the movies as well. All the pain you’re hearing is really simply about the ambition of the movie, and ambition like that is going to always meet with some kind of resistance from conforming influences. That’s what the movie is—more than anything else, it’s insanely ambitious.

Jasin Boland It was a hard film, there’s no denying that. But the harvest was amazing.

Zoë Kravitz It was a pyramid we all had to climb, and the fact that it’s appreciated in this way is really beautiful. I’m very, very proud to be able to have been a part of it.

Nicholas Hoult I never like to validate the work because of the result that it has, because when you do what we do, you can never really tell what the outcome’s going to be. But at the same time, it’s amazing for the film to go on and have a life like it has, particularly with what made it so stressful and difficult at the time. The human memory has a great way of fading those memories a bit and turning up the great memories.

Charlize Theron Does it?

Nicholas Hoult Well, mine does. But it’s amazing when something lives on in the way this has.

Georgina Selby I haven’t watched that film since. I love it so much, but it’s like my home videos of a really, really, really tough time.

Abbey Lee But I also think the grueling nature of the shoot served it, as well. The characters are supposed to be exhausted; they’re supposed to be searching for strength. I don’t think that any of the performances would have been the same had it all been green screen and we did it in a controlled environment. The fact that it was a huge mess is why it’s so brilliant.

Colin Gibson Was it harder? Maybe, but I would always elect to go out there and keep as many of the elements real as possible. You always come up with a good response if you’ve got one arm tied behind your back—you come up with a better way to punch, hit, or kill with the one you’ve got left than if you’d had two to start with.

Charlize Theron It was a really difficult shoot, but looking back on it years later, the effort that was made to make this movie was so extraordinary. I don’t think any of us have really encountered that ever again. The undertaking of this was enormous.

John Seale George takes you to the boundaries of what people say is the right way to do it, and then he cuts the wires.

Ben Smith-Petersen If people put half of the attention to detail and the care and the genuine love for the story that George put into that film, a lot of films would be a lot better. Probably 80 percent of the stuff that they truly worked on for this—the details of things and backstories and books and bibles—so much of it doesn’t get seen in the movie, but it comes across.

Petrina Hull There was real heart and soul in every step of that process. It deserves to be understood and recognized.

Ben Smith-Petersen And a lot of the time we’ve gotten lazy with filmmaking, because we go, It doesn’t matter, they’re not going to know the difference. Sometimes that’s fine, and sometimes you don’t need to know the backstory of a character that doesn’t have any lines and pops on the screen for ten seconds. But if you want to make something that is going to stand the test of time and blow people’s minds when they watch it, then the more of that work that you can put in, the better. But I don’t know, I’m a stunt guy. I let people set me on fire.

Mark Sexton At some point you want to tell stories that mean something to people, and I’ll be very surprised if I ever have a more satisfying film experience. The doing of the film was extremely hard—it was definitely not all wine and roses, but at the end of it this film came out where, five years on, we’re still talking about it. And I hope in fifteen years, we’re still talking about it.

Kelly Marcel I’ve been on some crazy sets and been involved in some fraught movies, but this is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in terms of sheer determination and grit and scraped knees and bloody injuries and tears and frustration. There isn’t a person that didn’t cry but stayed anyway to get this man’s vision onto a screen. And I know that sounds dramatic, and a little bit like, Oh, fucking champagne problems. We’re all crying because we’re making a movie. But it was different than that, it really was. It was an endurance test, and everybody came out alive. And the movie came out alive, too, which is the most magical thing.

Petrina Hull A lot of people felt that it was a career highlight. And I don’t know if anyone’s topped it with any of the work that they’ve done since then, but many of us are striving and trying.

Zeb Simpson This was a once-in-a-lifetime job. I’ve done some incredible movies since then and worked with some of my idols, but nothing stands up to Fury Road.

Josh Helman I’ll never have another experience as fulfilling as that. Anytime that I feel like I’m not happy with the work I’m doing personally, or I wish that I was maybe in a better position and working more, it’s immediately quieted by the fact that I got to be in this one special thing.

George Miller As Guy Norris says, we’d still be there if we could, except they took away the cameras and we’ve wrecked all the cars.

Guy Norris That was the most fantastic time and incredible experience in Namibia, and yeah, I’d happily still be there.

Shyam “Toast” Yadav If I even had expectations, this superseded them by a billion times. It wasn’t just a good time or a good job. It was the most amazing, transformational experience of my life.

Abbey Lee It was six months of my life, and it changed the course of my life forever. It opened a world of passion that I had no idea existed within me.

Tom Hardy Words cannot describe how grateful I am to have had the privilege to have been a part of this cinematic experience.

Charlize Theron The movie comes with its own little suitcase of baggage, but I have no regrets. We survived; we came out of it. We made something really beautiful. It was hard, but then again, part of my brain functions on the philosophy that nothing good comes easy, so I can live with it. I’m proud of it, and I love that it resonates with people the way it does.

Doug Mitchell What an extraordinary experience to have a film that was so difficult, that might never have been made, and at the end of the day it’s Academy-awarded, called one of the best films of the decade, and will stand the test of time.

George Miller The Swahili storytellers have this quote, “The story has been told. If it was bad, it was my fault, because I’m the storyteller. But if it was good, it belongs to everybody.” And that feeling of the story belonging to everybody is really the reward.

Hugh Keays-Byrne The other night, it came up on the telly and my partner and I watched the final chase sequence and both of us were sitting there gobsmacked. And how many times have we seen it? But we were still going, “I can’t believe it! Fuck, it’s such a good film.” That’s amazing, isn’t it?

Acknowledgments

In April 2020, as the pandemic swept the planet and the movie-release calendar fell apart, I began writing an oral history of Mad Max: Fury Road for the New York Times. Without any new titles to cover, why not dive deeply into a modern classic on the verge of its fifth anniversary?

Every rewatch over those five years had confirmed to me that Fury Road is one of the all-time cinematic greats, an action movie with so much going on thematically that there’d be no shortage of things to talk about. I had also heard incredible rumors about the film’s wild making, the sort of stories that you can only tell on the record once the dust has long settled.

That initial oral history, guided by my wonderful Times editor Stephanie Goodman, proved to be something of a sensation: I talked to around two dozen of the people involved with making the movie, and they were eager to confirm some of the amazing tales I had heard over the years as well as add some stunning new ones to the mix. The article was a big hit, but even with four thousand words of real estate in the Times, I still felt like I was only scratching the surface. From readers and friends, I kept hearing the same question: Couldn’t this be expanded into a book?

Fortunately, I got an email weeks later from Rick Richter, a literary agent who was proposing that very thing. We brought the idea to Mauro DiPreta at William Morrow, a terrific, patient editor and superfan of the franchise, and I went to work, ultimately interviewing well over 130 people for this book.

I will now take a deep breath before thanking everyone who submitted to my questions over hundreds of hours of Zoom sessions, phone calls, and socially distanced conversations. They are Eugene Arendsen, Jenny Beavan, Eric Blakeney, Steve Bland, Jasin Boland, Matt Boug, David Burr, Scott Carlin, Justin Chang, Tom Clapham, John Collee, Nia DaCosta, Manohla Dargis, Chris deFaria, James Doherty, Henry Dray, Courtney Eaton, Greg Ellwood, Eve Ensler, Barbara Fawcett, Scott Feinberg, Eugene Fillios, Megan Gale, Mark Gatt, Sean Genders, Colin Gibson, Coco Jack Gillies, Robyn Glaser, Mark Goellnicht, Dayna Grant, Scotty Gregory, Todd Matthew Grossman, Jennifer Hagan, Dane Hallett, Pete Hammond, Karen Han, Tom Hardy, Ron Hayes, Josh Helman, Richard Hobbs, Shira Hockman, Tom Holkenborg, Dean Hood, Natascha Hopkins, John Horn, Joshua Horowitz, Nicholas Hoult, John Howard, Petrina Hull, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Jon Iles, Alison Ingram, iOTA, Andrew Jackson, Melissa Jaffer, Chris Jenkins, Patty Jenkins, Belinda Johns, Andrew AJ Johnson, Dave Karger, Shane Kavanagh, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Lora Kennedy, Riley Keough, Zoë Kravitz, Ronna Kress, Adam Kuiper, Nico Lathouris, Richard Lawson, Abbey Lee, Jacinta Leong, Gregg Maday, Kelly Marcel, Brendan McCarthy, Sammi McGrady, Drew McWeeny, Michael Mekash, Victoria Mielewska, George Miller, Doug Mitchell, Anthony Natoli, Mark Natoli, James Nicholas, Amy Nicholson, Guy Norris, Harlan Norris, Harrison Norris, Richard Norton, Chris O’Hara, Ryan Osmond, Patton Oswalt, Hutch Parker, Chris Patton, Peter Pound, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Massey Rafani, Peter Ramsey, Tim Ridge, Michele Robertson, Dan Romanelli, Mick Roughan, Ricky Schamburg, John Seale, Georgina Selby, Mark Sexton, Zeb Simpson, David Sims, Margaret Sixel, Iain Smith, Brendan Smithers, Joy Smithers, Ben Smith-Petersen, Kris Tapley, Matt Taylor, Charlize Theron, Anne Thompson, Lisa Thompson, Matt Town, Nadia Townsend, Michael Ulman, Tate Van Oudtshoorn, Courtenay Valenti, Lesley Vanderwalt, P. J. Voeten, Michael Wannenmacher, Kento Watanabe, Cory Watson, David White, Andy Williams, Stuart Williamson, Alison Willmore, Edgar Wright, Shyam “Toast” Yadav, Jen Yamato, J. Houston Yang, and Ziwe.

It wasn’t easy for all of those people to make time for me during a pandemic, especially since Miller and many of his crew members were also busy working on his film Three Thousand Years of Longing. I’d also like to offer a very special thanks to Miller’s assistant Sharon Williams for all her help in scheduling his interviews, as well as to the directors Tim Ridge and Cory Watson, whose films about Mad Max were an invaluable aid while writing and are an essential watch for any fan of the franchise.

I was blessed with a first batch of readers who provided insightful comments and support: Kyle Patrick Alvarez, Oliver Daly, Lewaa Nasserdeen, Thad Nurski, Anna Scott, and Adam Shazar. It helped, too, that I could take breaks to text E. Alex Jung and Hunter Harris, who are some of the best writers (and friends) in the business. And a lot of lovely people in my life kept me motivated while writing, most of all Hale Appleman, Brett Bumgarner, David Davis, Sergio Garcia-Pina, Daniel Markbreiter, Lucas Paul, Jerome Rousseau, and Khaled Sadiyyah.

Lastly, I couldn’t have done any of this without the support and love of my family. This book is dedicated to my parents, Kirk and Linda Buchanan, and to Heather and Mike, Leah and Ted, Lynn, Terry, and John, and all of the kids: Annie, James, Liam, and Harper.

Sources

EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS OF THOSE WHO SURVIVED

Author interviews with Jasin Boland, Nia DaCosta, Sean Genders, Robyn Glaser, Dane Hallett, Josh Helman, Nicholas Hoult, Patty Jenkins, Riley Keough, Abbey Lee, Kelly Marcel, Doug Mitchell, Patton Oswalt, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Charlize Theron, Cory Watson, Edgar Wright, Jen Yamato.

Archival author interviews with Tom Hardy (2015) and George Miller (2016).

THE MAD MASTERMIND

Author interviews with Manohla Dargis, Courtney Eaton, Sean Genders, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Nico Lathouris, Drew McWeeny, George Miller, Amy Nicholson, Guy Norris, Patton Oswalt, Peter Pound, Tim Ridge, Charlize Theron, Anne Thompson, Cory Watson, Edgar Wright, Jen Yamato.

Archival author interview with George Miller: “George Miller and His Wild Mad Max: Fury Road Trip,” The Awards Show Show, January 9, 2016.

Additional quotes from George Miller: The Madness of Max, directed by Tim Ridge, 2015. “George Miller Interviewed by Paul Byrnes,” aso.gov.au, 2006. “Mad Max Director George Miller Is Way Too Sane to Be a Mad Genius,” Stephen Galloway, Hollywood Reporter, May 10, 2016. “Mad Max 4: The Film You Couldn’t Kill With a Stick,” Donald Clarke, Irish Times, May 13, 2015. “Mad Max: Fury Road: Q&A with George Miller,” DirectorsUK, September 30, 2015.

Quote from Colin Gibson: “Interview—Colin Gibson and Jacinta Leong,” Australian Production Design Guild, July 2015.

EVERYONE IN THE OLD WORLD HAD A SHOW

Author interviews with Eric Blakeney, Scott Carlin, Ron Hayes, Gregg Maday, George Miller, Doug Mitchell, James Nicholas, Dan Romanelli, Peter Pound, Mark Sexton.

Additional quotes from George Miller: “Mad Max: Fury Road in Conversation with George Miller,” Sydney Opera House, November 30, 2015. “Mad Max: Fury Road: Q&A with George Miller,” DirectorsUK, September 30, 2015.

Quotes from Brendan McCarthy: “Screenwriting Mad Max: Fury Road with Brendan McCarthy,” Indie Film Academy Podcast, July 16, 2020.

THE HISTORY MEN

Author interviews with Eric Blakeney, Manohla Dargis, Chris deFaria, Belinda Johns, Nico Lathouris, Drew McWeeny, George Miller, Doug Mitchell, James Nicholas, Peter Pound, Mark Sexton, Nadia Townsend, P. J. Voeten, Cory Watson.

Additional quotes from George Miller: “Mad Max: Fury Road in Conversation with George Miller,” Sydney Opera House, November 30, 2015. “Mad Max: Fury Road: Q&A with George Miller,” DirectorsUK, September 30, 2015. “Mad Max: Fury Road: George Miller’s Dystopian Action Epic Aims to Blow Your Mind,” KPCC, May 12, 2015.

Quotes from Brendan McCarthy: “Episode 51: From Fan to Writer, Mad Max: Fury Road,” UK Scriptwriters, January 12, 2016. “Screenwriting Mad Max: Fury Road with Brendan McCarthy,” Indie Film Academy Podcast, July 16, 2020. “Cineworld: Brendan McCarthy on Co-Writing/Designing Mad Max: Fury Road,” Cineworld, 2015.

WHO KILLED THE WORLD?

Author interviews with Eric Blakeney, Manohla Dargis, Colin Gibson, Belinda Johns, George Miller, Doug Mitchell, James Nicholas, Guy Norris, Hutch Parker, Peter Pound, Mark Sexton, Lesley Vanderwalt, P. J. Voeten.

Additional quotes from George Miller: “Mad Max: Fury Road: Q&A with George Miller,” DirectorsUK, September 30, 2015. “Ultimate Summer Movie Showdown: Mad Max: Fury Road,” Los Angeles Times, May 21, 2020.

Quotes from Brendan McCarthy: “Screenwriting Mad Max: Fury Road with Brendan McCarthy,” Indie Film Academy Podcast, July 16, 2020.

I LIVE, I DIE, I LIVE AGAIN

Author interviews with Chris deFaria, Colin Gibson, Petrina Hull, Belinda Johns, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Nico Lathouris, Drew McWeeny, George Miller, Doug Mitchell, James Nicholas, Mark Sexton, David Sims, Margaret Sixel, Nadia Townsend, P. J. Voeten.

Additional quotes from George Miller: “Mad Max: Fury Road in Conversation with George Miller,” Sydney Opera House, November 30, 2015. “Mad Max: Fury Road: Q&A with George Miller,” DirectorsUK, September 30, 2015. “Mad Max: Fury Road: George Miller’s Dystopian Action Epic Aims to Blow Your Mind,” KPCC, May 12, 2015. “Mad Max Director George Miller Is Way Too Sane to Be a Mad Genius,” Stephen Galloway, Hollywood Reporter, May 10, 2016.

Quotes from Brendan McCarthy: “Episode 51: From Fan to Writer, Mad Max: Fury Road,” UK Scriptwriters, January 12, 2016.

WHERE ARE YOU, MAX?

Author interviews with Courtney Eaton, Megan Gale, Todd Matthew Grossman, Josh Helman, Nicholas Hoult, Petrina Hull, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Belinda Johns, Lora Kennedy, Riley Keough, Zoë Kravitz, Ronna Kress, Nico Lathouris, Abbey Lee, George Miller, Mark Sexton, Charlize Theron, P. J. Voeten.

Archival author interview with George Miller (2015). “Director George Miller Explains Why His Mad Max: Fury Road Deserves These Oscar Nominations,” Vulture, December 9, 2015.

Quotes from Tom Hardy: “Tom Hardy: ‘Acting Saved Me from the Madness,’” John Hiscock, Telegraph, May 14, 2015. “Mad Max Interview: Tom Hardy on Mel Gibson and Scaffolding Poles,” Guff.com, 2015.

Quote from Gal Gadot: “‘Awards Chatter’ Podcast—Gal Gadot,” Scott Feinberg, Hollywood Reporter, September 6, 2017.

PICK UP WHAT YOU CAN AND RUN

Author interviews with Matt Boug, Chris deFaria, Colin Gibson, Dane Hallett, Karen Han, Dean Hood, Joshua Horowitz, Jacinta Leong, George Miller, Anthony Natoli, Mark Natoli, Peter Pound, Tim Ridge, Mark Sexton, Charlize Theron, Michael Ulman, P. J. Voeten.

Additional quotes from George Miller: “Mad Max: Fury Road: George Miller’s Dystopian Action Epic Aims to Blow Your Mind,” KPCC, May 12, 2015.

Additional quotes from Colin Gibson: “Mad Max: Fury Road: How 15 Years of Design Made ‘the Last Real Action Film,’” KPCC, May 19, 2015. “Mad Max: Fury Road: Q&A with Production Designer and Set Decorator,” Viva Videography, March 3, 2016.

Quote from Tom Hardy: “Tom Hardy Talks Mad Max: Fury Road, The Revenant, Suicide Squad, and More,” Steven Weintraub, Collider, May 13, 2015.

Quote from Lisa Thompson: “Mad Max: Fury Road: Q&A with Production Designer and Set Decorator,” Viva Videography, March 3, 2016.

Quote from iOTA: “The Art of Mad Max: Fury Road,” Abbie Bernstein, London: Titan Books, 2015.

WITNESS ME

Author interviews with Colin Gibson, Mark Goellnicht, Petrina Hull, Andrew Jackson, Andrew AJ Johnson, George Miller, Doug Mitchell, Ricky Schamburg, John Seale, Mark Sexton, Iain Smith, P. J. Voeten.

Additional quote from George Miller: “Mad Max: Fury Road: Q&A with George Miller,” DirectorsUK, September 30, 2015.

“WE WERE BASICALLY DEFEATED”

Author interviews with Chris deFaria, Colin Gibson, Richard Hobbs, Dean Hood, Petrina Hull, Jon Iles, Belinda Johns, Riley Keough, Adam Kuiper, Kelly Marcel, George Miller, Doug Mitchell, Guy Norris, Mark Sexton, Margaret Sixel, Iain Smith, Charlize Theron, P. J. Voeten, Cory Watson.

Additional quotes from George Miller: “Mad Max: Fury Road in Conversation with George Miller,” Sydney Opera House, November 30, 2015. “George Miller on Mad Max Sequels, His Secret Talks with Stanley Kubrick,” Stephen Galloway, Hollywood Reporter, February 2, 2016.

PREPARING FOR WAR

Author interviews with Courtney Eaton, Scotty Gregory, Josh Helman, Petrina Hull, Zoë Kravitz, Nico Lathouris, Abbey Lee, George Miller, Harrison Norris, Richard Norton, Chris Patton, Mick Roughan, Ben Smith-Petersen, Matt Taylor, Nadia Townsend, Stuart Williamson.

OH, WHAT A LOVELY DAY

Author interviews with Chris deFaria, James Doherty, Robyn Glaser, Mark Goellnicht, Petrina Hull, Andrew Jackson, Andrew AJ Johnson, Riley Keough, Samantha McGrady, Michael Mekash, George Miller, Doug Mitchell, Guy Norris, Harrison Norris, Richard Norton, Chris Patton, Mick Roughan, Ricky Schamburg, John Seale, Georgina Selby, Zeb Simpson, Brendan Smithers, Matt Taylor, P. J. Voeten, Stuart Williamson, Shyam “Toast” Yadav.

Archival author interview with George Miller: “Director George Miller Explains Why His Mad Max: Fury Road Deserves These Oscar Nominations,” Vulture, December 9, 2015.

Quotes from Tom Hardy: “Tom Hardy Talks Mad Max: Fury Road, The Revenant, Suicide Squad, and More,” Steven Weintraub, Collider, May 13, 2015.

MY NAME IS MAX

Author interviews with Jasin Boland, Tom Clapham, Chris deFaria, Sean Genders, Colin Gibson, Mark Goellnicht, John Howard, Andrew AJ Johnson, Lora Kennedy, Nico Lathouris, Richard Lawson, Kelly Marcel, Drew McWeeny, George Miller, Doug Mitchell, James Nicholas, Patton Oswalt, Ricky Schamburg, Mark Sexton, David Sims, Margaret Sixel, Iain Smith, Matt Taylor, Lesley Vanderwalt, Cory Watson, David White, Alison Willmore, Shyam “Toast” Yadav.

Archival author interview with Tom Hardy: “Tom Hardy, Your New Mad Max, Is Only Frightened of Getting Famous,” Vulture, May 11, 2015.

Additional quotes from Tom Hardy: “Tom Hardy Lets His Guard Down,” Daniel Peres, GQ, April 22, 2015. “Mad Max Interview: Tom Hardy on Mel Gibson and Scaffolding Poles,” Guff.com, 2015. “Mad Max Conference,” Festival de Cannes, May 14, 2015. “The Making of Mad Max: Fury Road: ‘We Shot One Scene for 138 Days,’” Meredith Woerner, io9.com, May 12, 2015. “Tom Hardy Blows Up,” Miranda Collinge, Esquire, May 12, 2016.

Quote from Jenny Beavan: “The Art of Mad Max: Fury Road,” Abbie Bernstein, London: Titan Books, 2015.

“IT WAS ALL IN GEORGE’S HEAD”

Author interviews with Tom Clapham, Mark Goellnicht, Robyn Glaser, Dean Hood, Andrew AJ Johnson, Zoë Kravitz, Jacinta Leong, Kelly Marcel, Samantha McGrady, George Miller, John Seale, Zeb Simpson, Margaret Sixel, Charlize Theron, Lesley Vanderwalt, Tate Van Oudtshoorn, P. J. Voeten, Edgar Wright.

Archival author interview with George Miller: “George Miller and His Wild Mad Max: Fury Road Trip,” The Awards Show Show, January 9, 2016.

Archival author interview with Tom Hardy: “Tom Hardy, Your New Mad Max, Is Only Frightened of Getting Famous,” Vulture, May 11, 2015.

Additional quotes from Tom Hardy: “Tom Hardy Lets His Guard Down,” Daniel Peres, GQ, April 22, 2015. “Tom Hardy Talks Mad Max: Fury Road, The Revenant, Suicide Squad, and More,” Steven Weintraub, Collider, May 13, 2015.

FIGURING OUT FURIOSA

Author interviews with Jenny Beavan, Jasin Boland, Justin Chang, Nia DaCosta, Manohla Dargis, Megan Gale, Sean Genders, Mark Goellnicht, Dayna Grant, Petrina Hull, Andrew AJ Johnson, Lora Kennedy, Adam Kuiper, Kelly Marcel, Drew McWeeny, George Miller, Doug Mitchell, Richard Norton, Chris O’Hara, Patton Oswalt, Peter Pound, Mark Sexton, Margaret Sixel, Charlize Theron, Lesley Vanderwalt, Ziwe.

Archival author interview with George Miller: “Director George Miller Explains Why His Mad Max: Fury Road Deserves These Oscar Nominations,” Vulture, December 9, 2015.

Archival author interview with James Cameron: “Comic-Con: James Cameron on Mad Max’s Furiosa and His Own Iconic Female Characters,” Vulture, July 23, 2016.

Additional quotes from George Miller: “Ultimate Summer Movie Showdown: Mad Max: Fury Road,” Los Angeles Times, May 21, 2020.

Quotes from Tom Hardy: “Tom Hardy Talks the Secret Feminism of Mad Max,” Ned Ehrbar, Metro, May 12, 2015.

OUT HERE, EVERYTHING HURTS

Author interviews with Eugene Arendsen, David Burr, Courtney Eaton, Mark Gatt, Colin Gibson, Mark Goellnicht, Dayna Grant, Scotty Gregory, Josh Helman, Natascha Hopkins, Petrina Hull, Jon Iles, Andrew AJ Johnson, Riley Keough, Adam Kuiper, Abbey Lee, Kelly Marcel, Samantha McGrady, George Miller, Harlan Norris, Harrison Norris, Chris O’Hara, Mick Roughan, Georgina Selby, Joy Smithers, Matt Taylor, Nadia Townsend, Lesley Vanderwalt, Andy Williams.

ALL HAIL THE IMMORTAN

Author interviews with Eugene Arendsen, Jenny Beavan, Henry Dray, Sean Genders, Colin Gibson, Mark Goellnicht, Josh Helman, Dean Hood, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Zoë Kravitz, Richard Lawson, George Miller, Richard Norton, Patton Oswalt, Tim Ridge, Mark Sexton, Zeb Simpson, Ben Smith-Petersen, Charlize Theron, Lesley Vanderwalt, P. J. Voeten, Alison Willmore, Jen Yamato.

“THE LAST GREAT ACTION FILM”

Author interviews with Eugene Arendsen, Tom Clapham, Colin Gibson, Dayna Grant, Scotty Gregory, Tom Hardy, Nicholas Hoult, Jon Iles, Drew McWeeny, Guy Norris, Harlan Norris, Harrison Norris, Richard Norton, Chris O’Hara, Chris Patton, Mick Roughan, John Seale, Georgina Selby, Iain Smith, Ben Smith-Petersen, Matt Taylor, Charlize Theron, Michael Wannenmacher, Andy Williams, Stuart Williamson.

Archival author interview with George Miller: “Director George Miller Explains Why His Mad Max: Fury Road Deserves These Oscar Nominations,” Vulture, December 9, 2015.

Archival author interview with Tom Hardy: “Tom Hardy, Your New Mad Max, Is Only Frightened of Getting Famous,” Vulture, May 11, 2015.

Additional quote from George Miller: “Mad Max: Fury Road: Q&A with George Miller,” DirectorsUK, September 30, 2015.

Additional quotes from Colin Gibson: “Mad Max: Fury Road: How 15 Years of Design Made ‘the Last Real Action Film,’” KPCC, May 19, 2015.

Quote from Brendan McCarthy: “Screenwriting Mad Max: Fury Road with Brendan McCarthy,” Indie Film Academy Podcast, July 16, 2020.

Quote from Dane Grant: “Kiwi Stunt Doubles Find Love on Mad Max,” Siena Yates, Stuff, May 17, 2015.

THE WAR PARTY

Author interviews with Eugene Arendsen, Eric Blakeney, Tom Clapham, Sean Genders, Robyn Glaser, Josh Helman, Nicholas Hoult, Petrina Hull, Richard Lawson, James Nicholas, Harlan Norris, Harrison Norris, Chris Patton, Georgina Selby, Mark Sexton, Ben Smith-Petersen, Charlize Theron, Lesley Vanderwalt, Stuart Williamson, Alison Willmore.

Additional quotes from George Miller: “Mad Max: Fury Road in Conversation with George Miller,” Sydney Opera House, November 30, 2015.

SHINY AND CHROME

Author interviews with Eugene Arendsen, Henry Dray, Mark Gatt, Colin Gibson, Dayna Grant, Scotty Gregory, Dane Hallett, Richard Hobbs, Shira Hockman, Dean Hood, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Jacinta Leong, Samantha McGrady, Anthony Natoli, Mark Natoli, Chris O’Hara, Peter Pound, Tim Ridge, Matt Taylor, Charlize Theron, P. J. Voeten, David White.

Additional quotes from Colin Gibson: “Mad Max: Fury Road: How 15 Years of Design Made ‘the Last Real Action Film,’” KPCC, May 19, 2015.

Quotes from Mark Mangini: “Mad Max Sound Designer Mark Mangini Was Inspired by Moby Dick,” KPCC, February 2, 2016.

WE ARE NOT THINGS

Author interviews with Jenny Beavan, Manohla Dargis, Courtney Eaton, Eve Ensler, Colin Gibson, Mark Goellnicht, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, Zoë Kravitz, Abbey Lee, Mark Sexton, David Sims, Nadia Townsend, Alison Willmore.

Quotes from George Miller: “Mad Max Director George Miller: The Audience Tells You ‘What Your Film Is,’” Fresh Air, NPR, February 8, 2016. “Ultimate Summer Movie Showdown: Mad Max: Fury Road,” Los Angeles Times, May 21, 2020. “Mad Max: Fury Road in Conversation with George Miller,” Sydney Opera House, November 30, 2015.

THE MANY MOTHERS

Author interviews with Jenny Beavan, Eric Blakeney, Eve Ensler, Megan Gale, Mark Goellnicht, Petrina Hull, Melissa Jaffer, Richard Lawson, Abbey Lee, Chris O’Hara, David Sims, Joy Smithers, Charlize Theron, Lesley Vanderwalt, Jen Yamato.

Additional quote from Melissa Jaffer: “The Women Pull No Punches in Fiery, Feminist Mad Max,” Mandalit del Barco, NPR, May 15, 2015.

Quotes from Melita Jurisic: “Melita Jurisic: From Mad Max to Macbeth, This Versatile Actor Continues to Impress,” Phillipa Hawker, Sydney Morning Herald, July 10, 2015.

Quote from Antoinette Kellerman: “Veteran SA Actress Shares Fascinating Stories from the Set of Mad Max: Fury Road,” News24.com, May 22, 2015.

“DUDES WERE COMING IN THROUGH THE ROOF”

Author interviews with Steve Bland, Robyn Glaser, Mark Goellnicht, Josh Helman, Jon Iles, Riley Keough, Zoë Kravitz, Doug Mitchell, George Miller, Guy Norris, Harrison Norris, Chris Patton, Peter Ramsey, Nick Roughan, Mark Sexton, Joy Smithers, Ben Smith-Petersen, Matt Taylor, Charlize Theron, Stuart Williamson,

Additional quotes from George Miller: “Mad Max: Fury Road: George Miller’s Dystopian Action Epic Aims to Blow Your Mind,” KPCC, May 12, 2015.

Quote from Tom Hardy: “Mad Max Interview: Tom Hardy on Mel Gibson and Scaffolding Poles,” Guff.com, 2015.

FIRE AND BLOOD

Author interviews with Jasin Boland, Tom Clapham, Courtney Eaton, Mark Goellnicht, Tom Hardy, Dean Hood, Natascha Hopkins, Nicholas Hoult, Petrina Hull, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Andrew AJ Johnson, Riley Keough, Zoë Kravitz, Abbey Lee, Kelly Marcel, Samantha McGrady, George Miller, Doug Mitchell, Richard Norton, Chris O’Hara, Ricky Schamburg, John Seale, Iain Smith, Matt Taylor, Charlize Theron, P. J. Voeten, J. Houston Yang.

Archival author interview with Tom Hardy: “Tom Hardy, Your New Mad Max, Is Only Frightened of Getting Famous,” Vulture, May 11, 2015.

Additional quotes from Tom Hardy: “Tom Hardy Lets His Guard Down,” Daniel Peres, GQ, April 22, 2015.

SOME FURIOUS VEXATION

Author interviews with Chris deFaria, Sean Genders, Colin Gibson, Mark Goellnicht, Shira Hockman, Dean Hood, Nicholas Hoult, John Howard, Petrina Hull, Jon Iles, iOTA, Andrew AJ Johnson, Zoë Kravitz, Adam Kuiper, Kelly Marcel, George Miller, Doug Mitchell, Guy Norris, Richard Norton, Chris O’Hara, Hutch Parker, John Seale, Mark Sexton, Zeb Simpson, Margaret Sixel, Iain Smith, Joy Smithers, Matt Taylor, Charlize Theron, Lesley Vanderwalt, Tate Van Oudtshoorn, P. J. Voeten, Cory Watson, Shyam “Toast” Yadav.

“SPENT AND ENRICHED”

Author interviews with Eugene Arendsen, Courtney Eaton, Sean Genders, Mark Goellnicht, Dayna Grant, Josh Helman, Nicholas Hoult, Petrina Hull, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, iOTA, Andrew AJ Johnson, Riley Keough, Zoë Kravitz, Adam Kuiper, Kelly Marcel, George Miller, Chris O’Hara, Zeb Simpson, Charlize Theron, P. J. Voeten, Cory Watson, Shyam “Toast” Yadav.

IF YOU CAN’T FIX WHAT’S BROKEN

Author interviews with Chris deFaria, Eugene Fillios, Tom Hardy, Tom Holkenborg, Dean Hood, John Howard, Petrina Hull, Alison Ingram, Andrew Jackson, Chris Jenkins, Kelly Marcel, Victoria Mielewska, George Miller, Doug Mitchell, Peter Ramsey, John Seale, Margaret Sixel, Iain Smith, Charlize Theron, Matt Town, Courtenay Valenti, P. J. Voeten, Kento Watanabe, David White.

Archival author interviews with George Miller: “Director George Miller Explains Why His Mad Max: Fury Road Deserves These Oscar Nominations,” Vulture, December 9, 2015. “George Miller and His Wild Mad Max: Fury Road Trip,” The Awards Show Show, January 9, 2016.

Additional quotes from George Miller: “George Miller on Mad Max Sequels, His Secret Talks with Stanley Kubrick,” Stephen Galloway, Hollywood Reporter, February 2, 2016. “Mad Max: Fury Road in Conversation with George Miller,” Sydney Opera House, November 30, 2015.

Additional quote from Margaret Sixel: “Art of the Cut with Margaret Sixel,” ProVideo Coalition, March 13, 2016.

“THAT’S NOT A MAD MAX ENDING”

Author interviews with James Doherty, Sean Genders, Mark Goellnicht, Shira Hockman, Petrina Hull, Shane Kavanagh, Nico Lathouris, Richard Lawson, George Miller, Ryan Osmond, Peter Pound, Mark Sexton, Margaret Sixel, Charlize Theron, Lesley Vanderwalt, P. J. Voeten, Michael Wannenmacher.

Additional quote from George Miller and quotes from Brendan McCarthy: “Mad Max: Fury Road in Conversation with George Miller,” Sydney Opera House, November 30, 2015.

THE FINAL BATTLE

Author interviews with Chris deFaria, Eugene Fillios, Mark Goellnicht, Dean Hood, Andrew Jackson, Chris Jenkins, Kelly Marcel, Drew McWeeny, George Miller, Doug Mitchell, Peter Pound, Massey Rafani, Peter Ramsey, Mark Sexton, Margaret Sixel, Iain Smith, Ben Smith-Petersen, Matt Town, Courtenay Valenti, P. J. Voeten, Cory Watson, Edgar Wright, Shyam “Toast” Yadav, Jen Yamato, J. Houston Yang.

WHAT WAS LOST

Author interviews with Sean Genders, Mark Goellnicht, Jennifer Hagan, Michael Mekash, George Miller, Peter Pound, Mark Sexton, Lesley Vanderwalt, P. J. Voeten.

Additional quotes from George Miller: “Ultimate Summer Movie Showdown: Mad Max: Fury Road,” Los Angeles Times, May 21, 2020.

Quotes from Brendan McCarthy: “Brendan McCarthy Rides Historic into Mad Max: Fury Road,” Karl Keily, CBR.com, December 29, 2015.

SOME KIND OF REDEMPTION

Author interviews with Justin Chang, Manohla Dargis, Greg Ellwood, Mark Goellnicht, Pete Hammond, Tom Hardy, Josh Helman, Tom Holkenborg, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Lora Kennedy, Zoë Kravitz, Nico Lathouris, Richard Lawson, Abbey Lee, Kelly Marcel, Drew McWeeny, George Miller, Doug Mitchell, James Nicholas, Chris O’Hara, Massey Rafani, Georgina Selby, David Sims, Margaret Sixel, Iain Smith, Charlize Theron, Anne Thompson, P. J. Voeten, Alison Willmore, Edgar Wright, Jen Yamato, J. Houston Yang.

Archival author interview with George Miller (2016).

Quote from Brendan McCarthy: “Screenwriting Mad Max: Fury Road with Brendan McCarthy,” Indie Film Academy Podcast, July 16, 2020.

AWAITED IN VALHALLA

Author interviews with Jenny Beavan, Justin Chang, Chris deFaria, Greg Ellwood, Scott Feinberg, Colin Gibson, Mark Goellnicht, Pete Hammond, Dean Hood, John Horn, Petrina Hull, Dave Karger, George Miller, Guy Norris, Patton Oswalt, Massey Rafani, Michele Robertson, John Seale, Margaret Sixel, Joy Smithers, Kris Tapley, Anne Thompson, Lesley Vanderwalt, P. J. Voeten, David White, Andy Williams, Edgar Wright.

Archival author interviews with George Miller: “Director George Miller Explains Why His Mad Max: Fury Road Deserves These Oscar Nominations,” Vulture, December 9, 2015. “George Miller and His Wild Mad Max: Fury Road Trip,” The Awards Show Show, January 9, 2016.

Additional quotes from George Miller: “Mad Max Director George Miller Is Way Too Sane to Be a Mad Genius,” Stephen Galloway, Hollywood Reporter, May 10, 2016.

“NOTHING GOOD COMES EASY”

Author interviews with Jasin Boland, Justin Chang, Nia DaCosta, Manohla Dargis, Chris deFaria, Eve Ensler, Megan Gale, Colin Gibson, Dane Hallett, Tom Hardy, Josh Helman, Tom Holkenborg, Dean Hood, John Horn, Nicholas Hoult, Petrina Hull, Jon Iles, Patty Jenkins, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Zoë Kravitz, Richard Lawson, Abbey Lee, Kelly Marcel, Drew McWeeny, George Miller, Doug Mitchell, Guy Norris, Richard Norton, Patton Oswalt, Peter Pound, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Tom Ridge, John Seale, Georgina Selby, Mark Sexton, Zeb Simpson, Ben Smith-Petersen, Charlize Theron, P. J. Voeten, Edgar Wright, Shyam “Toast” Yadav, Ziwe.

Archival author interview with Tom Hardy: “Tom Hardy, Your New Mad Max, Is Only Frightened of Getting Famous,” Vulture, May 11, 2015.

Additional quote from George Miller: “Mad Max: Fury Road: George Miller’s Dystopian Action Epic Aims to Blow Your Mind,” KPCC, May 12, 2015.

Additional quote from Charlize Theron: “Charlize Theron on ‘The Old Guard’ and Her Heartbreak over the Furiosa Prequel,” Brian Davids, Hollywood Reporter, July 6, 2020.

Quote from Anya Taylor-Joy: Josh Horowitz, Happy Sad Confused podcast, October 14, 2020.

Index

A specific form of pagination for this digital edition has been developed to match the print edition from which the index was created. If the application you are reading this on supports this feature, the page references noted in this index should align. At this time, however, not all digital devices support this functionality. Therefore, we encourage you to please use your device’s search capabilities to locate a specific entry.

Abdul-Mateen II, Yahya, 326

About a Boy (movie), 80, 194

Aliens (movie), 154, 214

Amblin Entertainment, 19

American Film Institute Awards, 58

Annie Hall (movie), 312

Apocalypse Now (movie), 9, 85, 313

Arendsen, Eugene, quoted, 165–166, 167, 178, 189, 195, 206, 255

Armstrong, Gillian, 12

Arri Alexa camera, 93, 100

Associated Press, 302

Atlantic, The, 64

Australia, 10–12, 15, 17, 19, 26, 51–52, 57–59, 64, 66, 75, 82, 84, 103, 110, 111, 293, 329

Australian Special Air Service, 169

Australian Special Forces, 219

Avatar (movie), 99, 174

Avengers: Age of Ultron (movie), 298

Babe (movie), 34, 41, 42, 47, 49

Babe: Pig in the City (movie), 11, 34, 39, 41–42, 49, 63, 112, 113, 261

Babylon 5 (science fiction series), 25

Bahr, Lindsey, quoted, 301–302

Bailey, Rosie, 14

Bana, Eric, 69

Band of Brothers (television show), 29

Bay, Michael, 83

Beavan, Jenny, 249

quoted, 141, 156, 157, 175, 213, 214, 217, 317–318

Ben-Hur (movie), 182, 262

Beresford, Bruce, 12

Berman, Bruce, 66

Bewkes, Jeff, 241

Big Short, The (movie), 309, 316

Birdman (movie), 309

Black Hawk Down (movie), 137

Black Mass (movie), 310–311

Blakeney, Eric, quoted, 27–28, 35–40, 47–48, 192, 217

Bland, Steve, quoted, 224, 225

Boland, Jasin, quoted, 9, 162, 236, 331

Borssum, Greg van, 184

Boseman, Chadwick, 317

Boston Globe, 302

Boug, Matt, quoted, 84–90, 91, 92

Bounty, The (movie), 46

Braveheart (movie), 47, 174

Brody, Adam, 64

Broken Hill, Australia, 17, 103, 104–106, 109, 113

Bronson (movie), 70, 145

Brooks, James L., 262

Burning Plain, The (movie), 73

Burr, David, quoted, 169

Burr, Ty, quoted, 302

Cabaret (movie), 320

Cameron, James, 154, 174, 325

Campbell, Joseph, 16, 17

Canby, Vincent, 17

Candyman (movie), 8

Cannes Film Festival, 303–305

Canon, The, 12

Cape Town, South Africa, 249, 251–253

Carlin, Scott, 31

quoted, 26–27

Chang, Justin, quoted, 154, 162, 299, 307, 312, 321, 322, 324–325

“Charge of the Light Brigade” (Tennyson), 128

Chastain, Jessica, 73

Chastity belts, 213, 293

Cher, 21

Children of Men (movie), 276

Chinchilla, Australia, 10

Cinderella (movie), 318

Citadel, 247–249, 270, 272, 274–276, 293

Clapham, Tom, quoted, 142, 150, 183, 197, 236

Clinton, Bill, 175

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (movie), 128

Colbert, Stephen, 323

Comic-Con, 281–282, 324

Contact (movie), 22–23, 28, 34, 56

Coober Pedy, Australia, 51

Cotrona, D. J., 64

Creative Artists Agency, 74

Cristofer, Michael, 59

DaCosta, Nia, quoted, 8, 157, 160, 330

Damon, Matt, 162

Dances with Wolves (movie), 93

Dante, Joe, 18

Dargis, Manohla

on Gibson, Mel, 46

quoted, 41–42, 46, 119, 154–155, 214, 304, 324, 325

Dark Knight Rises, The (movie), 109, 143, 280, 312, 315

Dead Poets Society (movie), 12, 96

Deadline, 304

Death Wish (movie), 16

deFaria, Chris, 264

quoted, 45, 65, 85–86, 104, 105, 110, 111, 115, 128, 144, 245, 265, 266, 283, 286, 289–291, 314, 329, 331

Dennings, Kat, 71

Depp, Johnny, 27, 47, 311

DiCaprio, Leonardo, 309, 318

Diesel, Vin, 181

DiNovi, Denise, 237–239

Directors Guild, 313

Doherty, James, quoted, 133–134, 273

Doof Wagon, 188–190, 246

Doof Warrior, 267, 285

Dray, Henry, quoted, 178

Driving Miss Daisy (movie), 12

Dune (movie), 175

Eaton, Courtney (“Cheedo the Fragile”), 208, 215

audition for Fury Road and, 82, 83

quoted, 11, 82, 123, 124, 167, 212, 214, 233, 251

Ebert, Roger, 17

Ebiri, Bilge, quoted, 302

Eck, Gary, 112

Ehrlich, David, quoted, 302

8 Mile (movie), 70

Ellwood, George, quoted, 304, 305, 310–312, 320

Eminem, 69–70

English Patient, The (movie), 97

Enright, Nick, 59

Ensler, Eve, 209

quoted, 209–211, 221, 222, 329

Entertainment Weekly, 23

Envelope, The, 310

Erin Brockovich (movie), 77

Fassbender, Michael, 69

Fast and the Furious, The (movie), 68, 73

Feinberg, Scott, quoted, 310, 311, 313–316, 320

Fillios, Eugene, quoted, 265, 266, 281

Fincher, David, 325

Formerly Dangerous (McWeeny), 11

Foster, Jodie, 22

quoted, 23

Freak Wave (comic strip), 29

French Toast and Hugs Gang, 127

Furiosa (movie), 65, 325–328

Furious 7 (movie), 298

Gadot, Gal, quoted, 73

Gaga, Lady, 252

Gale, Megan (“The Valkyrie”), 64

Miller, George and, 218–221

quoted, 69, 159, 218, 219–222, 330

Gallipoli clause, 110

Gatt, Mark, quoted, 164, 204

Genders, Sean, 246

quoted, 9, 16, 138–139, 143, 156, 176, 196, 249, 252, 253, 275, 296

Ghost Rider (movie), 127

Gibson, Colin, 52, 85–87, 90, 200, 249, 293, 327

quoted, 20, 53–55, 57, 86–88, 91–92, 99, 106, 109, 112, 164, 175, 181–183, 201–205, 207, 213, 214, 244, 245, 247, 318, 329, 331–332

Gibson, Mel, 6, 69, 132, 162, 172, 173, 180, 235, 274, 306

arrest of, 66

domestic violence accusations and, 66–67

at Fury Road premiere, 301

Hardy, Tom and, 139, 235

Mad Max movies and, 13, 16–18, 20, 37, 41, 47–53, 137

Miller, George and, 49, 67, 72, 301

success of, 46–47

Gigahorse, 204–205

Gillies, Coco Jack (“Glory the Child”), quoted, 290

Glaser, Robyn, quoted, 8, 127, 128, 150, 194, 197, 226

Goellnicht, Mark, quoted, 94–96, 98, 101–102, 130, 131, 134, 145, 147, 150, 159, 160, 161, 165, 176, 182, 213, 220, 228, 231–234, 236–240, 247, 255, 274, 275, 286, 294, 295, 305, 322

Going Mad: The Battle of Fury Road (documentary), 12

Golden Globe Awards, 310, 314

Grant, Dane, 185–186

quoted, 186

Grant, Dayna, quoted, 156, 165, 168–169, 185, 201, 252

Grant, Hugh, 194

Gravity (movie), 283, 320

Great Gatsby, The (movie), 100, 245, 287

Green Place, 37, 62, 160, 211, 216, 217, 223, 274, 329

Gregory, Scotty, quoted, 123, 124, 168, 169, 183, 206

Grigorieva, Oksana, 66–67

Grossman, Todd Matthew, quoted, 72, 79

Guber, Peter, 21

Guiness Book of Records, The, 16

Gynotopia, 217

Hagan, Jennifer (“Miss Giddy”), quoted, 296

Hallett, Dane, quoted, 9, 88, 203, 327

Hammer, Armie, 64, 69, 71–72

Hammond, Pete, quoted, 304, 310, 312–314, 320

Han, Karen, quoted, 91, 175

Happy Feet (movie), 11, 42, 43, 56–58, 62, 63, 66, 70, 104, 105, 225, 261, 313

Happy Feet Two (movie), 65, 104, 105, 108, 109, 112–113, 115, 247

Hardy, Louis, 143–144

Hardy, Tom (“Max”), 5, 51, 109, 149, 194, 221–222, 263, 265, 270, 295, 310

acting style of, 142, 145, 232–233, 305

birth and childhood of, 137

in Bronson, 70

career of, 137–138

casting for Fury Road and, 70–72, 75, 83, 138–139

in The Dark Knight Rises, 109, 143

Gibson, Mel and, 139, 235

lateness of, 236, 237

Miller, George and, 138, 139, 147, 232, 233, 304–305

personality of, 142, 143

physical appearance of, 131, 137

quoted, 8, 9, 70, 72, 89, 128, 138–142, 144, 146, 147, 149, 151, 152, 158, 182, 183, 187, 188, 226–227, 232, 233, 238, 263, 304, 325–326, 330, 333

role of Max and, 138–147

stunts and, 183, 187–188, 226–227

Theron, Charlize and, 3, 162, 230, 233–240, 299

Harry Potter franchise, 65, 96, 97

Hayes, Ron, quoted, 26, 30

HBO (Home Box Office), 29

Heartbreak High (television show), 58

Helman, Josh (“Slit”), quoted, 9, 69, 122, 124, 167, 176, 177, 195–197, 226, 232, 247, 253, 255, 300, 333

Hemsworth, Chris, 326, 328

Hepburn, Katherine, 75

Hercules (television series), 29

Hero With a Thousand Faces, The (Campbell), 17

Hitchcock, Alfred, 43

Ho, Bong Joon, 7–8

Hobbs, Richard, quoted, 111, 200, 201, 203, 206

Hockman, Shira, quoted, 201, 203, 205, 249, 274–275, 278

Holkenborg, Tom (Junkie XL), quoted, 266–268, 299, 325

Hollywood Reporter, The, 310

Hood, Dean, quoted, 85, 86, 110, 111, 114, 149, 175, 205, 235, 245, 270, 286, 289, 321, 327

Hopkins, Natascha, quoted, 164, 166, 186, 237

Horn, Alan, 56

Horn, John, quoted, 310, 319, 321, 324

Horowitz, Joshua, 91

Hoult, Nicholas (“Nux”), 5, 109, 143, 191

audition for Fury Road and, 80–81

career of, 194

personality of, 195

quoted, 9, 80–81, 176, 177, 181, 235, 244, 253, 300, 328, 331

role of Nux and, 192, 194–196

Howard, John (“The People Eater”), quoted, 143–144, 245–246, 271

Hoy, Bill, 286

Hull, Petrina, quoted, 59, 62–65, 69, 71, 77, 81, 82, 100, 108, 110, 121, 123, 131, 133, 161–162, 164, 165, 168, 194, 195, 220, 235, 240, 243, 255, 264, 277, 313, 314, 320, 332, 333

Huntington-Whiteley, Rosie (“Splendid Angharad”), 208

audition for Fury Road and, 82–83

quoted, 82–83, 210, 212, 214, 215, 233, 234, 255

Iles, Jon (“Ace”), 106, 133, 168, 169, 180, 189, 224, 229, 250, 266, 328

IMAX camera, 93

Immortan Joe, preliminary design of, 32

Iñárritu, Alejandro González, 309, 318, 320, 321

Inception (movie), 70

Indiana Jones (movie), 140

IndieWire, 303

Ingram, Alison, quoted, 269

Interstellar (movie), 280

iOTA (“Coma, the Doof Warrior”), 124, 129, 242, 252

quoted, 92

Iraq War, 53

Irishman, The (movie), 327

Jackson, Andrew, 184

quoted, 100, 101, 132, 266, 269–270

Jackson, Peter, 325

Jaffer, Melissa (“The Keeper of the Seeds”), 161, 216

quoted, 217, 219, 221, 222

Jenkins, Chris, quoted, 267, 269, 287

Jenkins, Patty, quoted, 8, 325

John, Elton, 142

Johns, Belinda, quoted, 35, 38, 39, 43, 48–50, 57, 69, 110

Johnson, Andrew AJ, quoted, 94–96, 98, 130, 145, 149, 151, 159–160, 163–165, 235–236, 243, 247, 254

Jolie, Angelina, 47

Jones, Nathan, 169

Joy (movie), 315

Jurassic World (movie), 298

Jurisic, Melita (“Vuvalini”), quoted, 217, 219

Justice League (movie), 64–65, 172–173, 218

Karger, Dave, quoted, 310, 313, 315, 321, 322

Kavanagh, Shane, quoted, 273

Keays-Byrne, Hugh (“Immortan Joe”), 5, 13, 171, 272

death of, 178

Miller, George and, 171–173, 177, 178

quoted, 16, 64, 172–178, 201, 246, 300, 329, 334

role of Immortan Joe and, 174–177

Kellerman, Antoinette (“Vuvalini”), quoted, 220

Kennedy, Byron, 12–15, 19–20, 183

Kennedy, Lora, quoted, 71, 74–76, 77, 78, 81, 83, 162, 306

Kennedy Miller Mitchell, 19, 31, 42, 96

Keough, Riley (“Capable”), 167, 208, 253

audition for Fury Road and, 82

quoted, 9, 82, 128, 164, 211–214, 229–231, 233, 251–252

Kinnaman, Joel, 69

Kravitz, Zoë (“Toast the Knowing”), 109, 135, 136, 167, 175–176, 195, 198, 208, 215, 228, 273, 296, 297

audition for Fury Road and, 79

quoted, 75–76, 124, 150–151, 210, 212–213, 229, 231, 232, 234, 244, 253, 255, 300–301, 329, 331

Kress, Ronna, 68

casting of Fury Road and, 68–69, 71–83

quoted, 69, 71–83

Kuiper, Adam, 130

quoted, 111, 159, 164, 168, 244, 252

Lake Burragorang, Australia, 20

Lane, Anthony, quoted, 302

Last Night in Soho (movie), 8, 327

Lathouris, Nico, 108, 119, 120, 249

casting of Fury Road and, 77, 78, 81

dramaturgical analysis of Fury Road by, 60–63

Miller, George and, 58–60, 62, 63

quoted, 24, 38, 58–63, 76, 81, 120–121, 276, 303

Law, Jane, 318

Lawless (movie), 138

Lawrence, Jennifer, 81, 315

Lawson, Richard, quoted, 142, 175, 194, 221, 276, 299, 324

Ledger, Heath, 69, 147

Lee, Abbey (“The Dag”), 161, 208, 253

quoted, 9, 77–78, 124–125, 165, 166, 210–212, 220, 231, 233–234, 300, 331, 333

Lee, Ang, 64

Leong, Jacinta, quoted, 85, 150, 201, 202–203

Lethal Weapon franchise, 41, 46

Little Women (movie), 12

Locke (movie), 149

Lorenzo’s Oil (movie), 11, 22, 59, 97

Los Angeles Film Critics Association, 312

Los Angeles Times, 7, 8, 154

Lourd, Byron, 74

Luhrmann, Baz, 83, 100, 287

Mad Max, 11, 13, 29, 57, 58, 171, 172, 206, 217, 287, 303, 324

audience and critics reaction to, 16, 17

filming of, 13–15

Miller, George and, 13–17, 23, 30–31, 57

rerelease of, 18

success of, 299

Mad Max: Fury Road, 29–31

animated prequel to, 108–109

awards and nominations, 7, 312–322, 314

backstories, 62, 209

box-office receipts of, 7, 306, 307

budget, 50–53, 115

camera crew, 93–102, 131

casting and auditions for, 38–39, 47–50, 66–83, 67, 138, 173

collapse of filming (2003), 53–56, 63, 103

deleted scenes, 292–296

development of, 34–39, 42–45

dramaturgical analysis of, 60–63

dubbing, 268–269

early drawings of, 32

editing of, 261–268, 277, 284, 286, 288, 290–291, 292, 300

electric guitar, 90–92

as feminist film, 38, 70, 209, 214–215

final day of shooting, 253–256

finishing (beginning and ending sequences), 270–277, 296, 297

first day of shooting, 126–136

first screening of, 264–266

interior sequences, 130, 251–253, 274–275

legacy of, 323–330

length of, 286, 287, 292

location scouting for, 51–52

location shooting (see also Namibia), 3, 6, 106–107, 110, 114, 163

marketing of, 278–281

morale on set, 230–236, 240

music in, 266–268, 285, 289, 310, 318

Oscar nominations for, 312–322

Oscar season (2015) and, 309–314

PG rating issue, 286, 289

polecat stunts, 223–229

postproduction, 256

premieres of, 300, 301, 303–304

prosthetic arm, 89, 90

public debut of, 281–282

rain delays, 104, 106–108

release of, 305–306

reviews of, 298, 299, 301–302, 304, 307

scope and scale of, 5–7

shot in sequence, 130

storyboarding and, 4, 43–45, 48–49, 60, 70, 98, 115, 129, 148–151, 156, 160, 173, 174, 193, 208, 209, 215, 254, 274, 306

studio, relationship with, 3–5, 56, 66, 86, 101, 104, 110, 111, 114, 127, 151–152, 183, 241, 242, 244–249, 270, 282–284, 286–290, 298

stunt tests, 105–106

stuntmen (War Boys), 119–125, 131, 132, 166, 168–170, 176–177, 185–187, 191–199, 255, 280, 287

stunts, 132–134, 179–189, 223–229

test screenings of, 281–282, 285–286, 288–290, 303

3-D issue, 100–102

trailer of, 280, 281

travel to Namibia, 111

two-cut test screening of, 288–289

vehicle tests, 105–106

vehicles, weapons and props, 84–92, 200–207

visual effects, 91, 101, 132, 184, 269–270

Vuvalini, 214–222, 239

Wives, 5, 37, 48, 208–215, 228, 231, 239, 275, 276, 294–296

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, 31, 35, 93, 154, 193, 278, 301, 302

Miller, George and, 19–20, 30–31

PG-13 rating of, 19

reviews of, 19

Mad Max proposed television series, 25–31, 34

Mad Max Road Warrior, 93, 103, 126, 132, 154, 180, 286

Miller, George and, 16–18, 23, 28, 30–31, 35

success of, 17–18

Mad Max toys, 26, 30

Maday, Gregg, quoted, 26, 27

Madness of Max, The (documentary), 12

Maeda, Mahiro, 108

Mandela, Nelson, 161

Mangini, Mark, quoted, 204, 319

Marcel, Kelly, 145

quoted, 9, 110, 111, 145–147, 151–152, 162, 166, 168, 233, 234, 238–240, 242, 245, 255, 265, 290, 304, 329, 332–333

Marshall, Frank, 19

Martin, Damian, 318

Maverick (movie), 46

May, Brian, 92

Mbatha-Raw, Gugu, 73

McCarthy, Brendan, 28–30, 49, 156, 193, 306

quoted, 29, 35–37, 40, 44–45, 48, 63, 69, 182, 274, 276, 292, 294, 301

McCarthy, Tom, 315

McGrady, Samantha, quoted, 129, 150, 164, 167, 200, 236

McKay, Adam, 315

McWeeny, Drew, quoted, 11, 18–23, 41, 42, 65, 154, 180, 282, 283, 285–286, 307, 325

Megan Thee Stallion, 323

Meisner, Sanford, 82

Mekash, Michael, quoted, 128–129, 296

Meyer, Barry, 241

Mielewska, Victoria, quoted, 268

Milking Maids, 287

Miller, Angela, 10

Miller, Bill, 42, 43

Miller, Chris, 12

Miller, George

Babe and, 34, 41, 42, 47

Babe: Pig in the City and, 34, 39, 41–42, 63, 112, 113

casting and auditions and, 77–83

childhood of, 10, 38

collaborative style of, 35, 36, 40

Contact and, 22–23, 28, 34, 56

as doctor, 11–13, 22, 172, 183, 243

education of, 11, 12, 38

Ensler, Eve and, 209–211

Foster, Jodie on, 23

Furiosa and, 326–328

Gale, Megan and, 218–221

Gibson, Mel and, 49, 67, 72, 301

Happy Feet and, 56–58, 62, 63, 66, 70, 104, 105, 225

Happy Feet Two and, 65, 104, 105, 109, 112–113, 115, 247

Hardy, Tom and, 138, 139, 147, 232, 233, 304–305

heart stent operation and, 113

Justice League and, 64–65, 218

Keays-Byrne, Hugh and, 171–173, 177, 178

Kennedy, Byron and, 12–15, 19–20

Kravitz, Zoë and, 151

Lathouris, Nico and, 58–60, 62, 63

lawsuit against Warner Bros. of, 23

Lorenzo’s Oil and, 22, 97

Mad Max: Fury Road and see Mad Max: Fury Road

Mad Max and, 13–17, 23, 30–31, 57

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and, 19–20, 30–31

Mad Max proposed television series and, 25–31, 34

Mad Max Road Warrior and, 16–18, 23, 28, 30–31, 35

Mad Max toys and, 30

Marcel, Kelly and, 145–146

McCarthy, Brendan and, 40, 44

Mitchell, Doug and, 110

Nicholson, Jack and, 236, 322

Ogilvie, George and, 20

personality and character of, 9, 11, 27–28, 57, 83, 158, 178, 243, 313

physical appearance of, 4, 9

quoted, 8, 12, 13, 15, 17, 19–24, 26–31, 33, 35–40, 43–45, 47, 49, 51–55, 57, 59, 63, 65, 67, 69–79, 81, 88, 89, 91, 94, 97–99, 101, 102, 104–107, 109, 110, 113, 115, 122, 129, 132, 135, 136, 139, 141, 145, 149, 151, 154, 157, 158, 161, 165, 166, 172–174, 177, 178, 181–183, 192, 193, 209–211, 213, 215, 224, 225, 232, 234, 236, 239, 242–244, 246–248, 250, 253–254, 256, 262–264, 267, 270–271, 274–276, 285–290, 292, 293, 297, 301–305, 307, 308, 310, 312–315, 317, 320–322, 324, 327, 330, 333, 334

Rafani, Massey and, 279–282

rights to Mad Max franchise returned to, 23

Seale, John and, 97–98

Sixel, Margaret and, 261–264

Smithers, Joy and, 217–218

stamina of, 242–243

studio, relationship with, 21–23, 27–28, 46, 284, 286–288, 290

stunts and fights and, 182–185, 190

style of filming of, 148–152

Theron, Charlize and, 10, 74, 151, 154, 157–160, 162, 232, 242

Twilight Zone: The Movie segment by, 18

The Witches of Eastwick and, 21, 28

Yadav, Shyam “Toast” and, 127, 135–136, 254–255

Miller, Jim, 10

Miller, John, 11, 35

Miller, Peter, 29

Miller, Tim, 325

Miss Giddy, 295–296

Mitchell, Doug, 26, 28, 35, 98, 105, 109, 111, 183, 238

on Gibson, Mel, 67

Happy Feet and, 56, 63, 66

Miller, George and, 110

quoted, 9, 27, 28, 31, 36, 39, 40, 41, 47, 49, 50, 53, 55, 65, 67, 96, 97, 106, 110, 128, 143, 144, 158, 224, 242–244, 247, 248, 262, 264, 283–285, 287, 288, 290, 303, 305, 334

Monster (movie), 73, 154, 238

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (movie), 76–77

Moriceau, Norma, 35

Moynahan, Bridget, 39

MTV News, 91

Muller, David, 113

Murphy, Brittany, 70

Namibia (Namib Desert), 3, 4, 6, 103, 104, 110, 111, 114, 115, 119, 127, 131, 159, 161, 163–170, 251, 252, 261, 262, 270, 296

Nashville Scene, 302

National Board of Review, 311, 312

Natoli, Anthony, quoted, 85, 87, 205

Natoli, Mark, quoted, 205

Negga, Ruth, 73

Network (movie), 76, 77

New York magazine, 142

New York Times, 7, 17, 46, 324

New Yorker, The, 302

Nicholas, James, quoted, 29, 33, 37–39, 42–44, 47, 48, 50, 51, 53, 54, 57, 65, 192, 193, 306

Nicholson, Amy, quoted, 12–13, 18

Nicholson, Jack, 21, 28

quoted, 236, 322

“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (Twilight Zone), 18

9/11 terrorist attacks, 53, 122

Nolan, Christopher, 64, 70, 182

Nolte, Nick, 22

Noonan, Chris, 34, 41

Norris, Guy, 131, 179, 243, 327

quoted, 13, 109, 132–134, 164, 179–184, 186–190, 224–225, 229, 245, 328, 333

Norris, Harlan, quoted, 122, 164, 187, 190, 197, 199

Norris, Harrison, quoted, 121, 122, 124, 133, 134, 167, 170, 187, 190, 197–199, 226, 229

Norton, Richard (“The Prime Imperator”), quoted, 120, 123, 124, 134, 157, 159, 176, 180, 183–186, 189, 235, 246, 329

Noyce, Phil, 17

Obama, Barack, 175

Ogilvie, George, 19, 20

O’Hara, Chris, quoted, 162, 166, 170, 186, 202, 203, 221, 240, 248, 252, 256, 300, 306

Old Guard, The (movie), 8

Oscar Awards, 7, 22, 47, 63, 73, 93, 96

Osmond, Ryan, quoted, 273

Oswalt, Patton, quoted, 8, 18, 19, 155, 175, 316, 325

Page, Grant, 14

Pan Am (television show), 81

Parasite (movie), 7, 311

Parker, Hutch, quoted, 50, 51, 53, 54, 243

Passion of the Christ, The (movie), 48

Patriot, The (movie), 46

Patton, Chris (“Morsov”), quoted, 122–123, 125, 134, 184, 196, 198, 225, 227, 228

Peers, David, 112

Penny, Ron, 113

People magazine, 46

Peters, Jon, 21

Pfeiffer, Michelle, 21

Pirates of the Caribbean (movie), 68, 167

Pitch Perfect 2 (movie), 306, 307

Pitt, Brad, 47, 194

Planet Terror (movie), 90

Playlist, The, 304

Pollock, Jackson, 182

Pound, Peter, 31, 42, 89, 200

quoted, 18, 32–33, 36, 39, 40, 43–45, 47–49, 54, 85, 89, 156, 201–203, 205, 206, 209, 276, 286, 290, 293–294

Powell, Sandy, 318

Prince-Bythewood, Gina, quoted, 8, 326

Producers Guild, 313

Queen, 92

Rafani, Massey, quoted, 278–281, 307, 320

Rain Man (movie), 96

Ramsey, Peter, quoted, 224, 263, 284

Razor Cola, 203

ReBoot (television series), 29

Red River (movie), 182

Refn, Nicolas Winding, 138

Renner, Jeremy, 69, 71, 72, 79

Requiem (Verdi), 280

Revenant, The (movie), 309, 315, 316, 318, 320

Ridge, Tim, quoted, 12, 13, 15, 16, 20, 84, 172, 173, 175, 177, 178, 201, 327, 328

Rihanna, 81, 323

Ripsaw, 206

Road, The (movie), 73, 158

Robbie, Margot, 81

Robertson, Michele, quoted, 311–313, 315, 316, 318–319, 321, 322

Robinov, Jeff, 4–5, 241, 242, 246–248, 251, 253, 264, 265, 270, 272, 276

Rock, Chris, 317

Rocketman (movie), 142

Rodriguez, Robert, 325

Rolling Stone, 7, 324

Romanelli, Dan, quoted, 26, 30, 31

Rosenblum, Bruce, 241

Roto-Raiders, 294

Roughan, Mick, quoted, 120, 121, 125, 131, 133, 134, 164, 166, 184, 190, 228

Royal Shakespeare Company, 172, 174, 176

Sagan, Carl, 22

St. Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney, 12, 13

Sarandon, Susan, 21, 22, 75

Saving Mr. Banks (movie), 145, 255

Schamburg, Ricky, 99–100

quoted, 100–102, 128, 129–132, 146, 235, 237

Schamburg, Ricky, quoted, 95

Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 40

Scott, Ridley, 137

Screen Australia, 110

Seale, John, 96–97, 102, 131, 161, 182, 243, 247, 248

quoted, 97–99, 101, 131, 150, 231, 233, 262, 316, 326, 332

Seale, Louise, 97

Selby, Georgina, quoted, 134, 164, 183, 187, 194, 300, 331

Semler, Dean, 93, 95, 96, 98

Sexton, Mark, 42

quoted, 29, 37–39, 42–44, 49, 53, 57, 65, 69, 70, 89, 99, 104, 105, 108, 109, 112–113, 156, 172–174, 192, 193, 215, 225, 247, 274–276, 286–289, 293–295, 332

Shyamalan, M. Night, 50

Signs (movie), 50

Simpson, Zeb, quoted, 129, 131, 152, 174, 178, 242, 254, 333

Sims, David, quoted, 64, 215, 221, 299

Single Man, A (movie), 194

Siskel, Gene, 41

Sixel, Margaret, 38, 103, 261–262, 279, 281, 317

as editor, 261–264, 266, 277, 284, 286–288, 290, 292, 310, 319

Miller, George and, 261–264

quoted, 57, 65, 106, 111, 142, 143, 148–149, 158, 242–243, 262, 263, 266–268, 277, 284–287, 290, 302, 303, 310, 314, 316, 319, 321

Skeleton Coast, 167

Skins (television show), 80, 194

Slate, 92

Smith, Iain, quoted, 99, 101, 105, 114, 115, 145–147, 183–184, 240, 245, 262, 290, 305, 306

Smith-Petersen, Ben, quoted, 122, 124, 176, 177, 180–181, 184, 186–187, 197, 226, 229, 282, 332

Smithers, Brendan, quoted, 129, 252

Smithers, Joy (“Vuvalini”), 217

quoted, 166–168, 217–219, 221–222, 226, 245, 248, 249, 318

Snow White and the Huntsman (movie), 109

Snyder, Zack, 325

Soderbergh, Steven, 8

Spanglish (movie), 262

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (movie), 224

Spielberg, Steven, 18–19, 104

Spotlight (movie), 309, 311, 312, 315, 316, 320, 321

Star Trek: Nemesis (movie), 137–138

Star Wars: Episode VII-The Force Awakens (movie), 298

Star Wars (movie), 312, 322

Stewart, Patrick, 138

Sullivan, Mick, 71

Superman (movie), 245

Swakopmund, Namibia, 119, 120, 128, 143, 167–170, 176, 186

Sydney, Australia, 35, 48, 82, 84, 86, 94, 264, 272, 273, 275

Tapley, Kris, quoted, 312, 315, 316, 318, 320, 322

Tarantino, Quentiin, 306

Taylor, Matt, quoted, 120, 133, 168, 186, 205, 227, 228, 236, 244

Taylor-Joy, Anya, 326

quoted, 327–328

Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 128

Terminator 2 (movie), 18

Theron, Charlize (“Furiosa”), 5, 62, 86, 108, 109, 130, 149, 168, 185, 194, 263, 270, 304, 310, 315

birth and childhood of, 153–154

career of, 154

casting for Fury Road and, 38–39, 73, 83

children of, 114, 155

dubbing by, 268, 269

on Furiosa, 327

hair and makeup and, 156–157

Hardy, Tom and, 3, 162, 230, 233–240, 299

Keays-Byrne, Hugh and, 177

Miller, George and, 10, 74, 151, 154, 157–160, 162, 232, 242

in Monster, 73, 154, 238

prosthetic arm and, 89–90

quoted, 8, 9, 73–74, 89, 104, 114, 148, 149, 151, 153, 155–161, 176, 177, 186, 195, 202, 220, 226, 231, 232, 234–239, 242, 252, 253, 255, 268, 273, 274, 276, 291, 299–300, 325, 327–334

role of Furiosa and, 153, 155–162, 165

Sixel, Margaret and, 158–159

War Rig and, 202, 203

Theron, Gerta, 153

Theron, Jackson, 114, 155

Thompson, Anne, quoted, 303, 311, 313, 315, 316

Thompson, Hunter S., 302

Thompson, Lisa, 318

Thompson, Lisa, quoted, 86

3-D camera, 93, 99–102

Thurman, Uma, 22, 39

Time Out, 302

Time Trax (science fiction series), 25

Today (television show), 310

Town, Matt, quoted, 262, 264, 282, 284

Townsend, Nadia, 119–120, 191

quoted, 35, 58–60, 62–63, 120–125, 165, 211–212

Tracy, Spencer, 75

Trump, Donald, 175, 329

Tsujihara, Kevin, 241, 247, 270

Turner, Tina, 19, 222

20th Century Fox, 50–51, 53, 54, 56, 62, 94, 96

21 Jump Street (television show), 27

Twilight Zone: The Movie, 18

Twelve Monkeys (movie), 194

Udaipur, India, 293

Ulman, Michael, quoted, 85–88, 91, 92

Unbroken (movie), 273

Universal Pictures, 40–41, 49–50

University of Melbourne, 12

University of New South Wales, 11, 12

Updike, Jon, 21

USA Today, 7

V-8 Interceptor (“Black on Black”), 132, 133, 200, 206

V-8 symbol, 124, 176

Vagina Monologues (Ensler), 209

Valenti, Courtenay, 264, 283

quoted, 265–266, 284

Van Oudtshoorn, Tate, quoted, 150, 249

Vanderwalt, Lesley, quoted, 53, 149–150, 157, 166, 170, 173–174, 196, 197, 213, 217, 249, 273, 294, 296, 316–318

Vanity Fair, 142, 324

Variety, 27, 40–41, 310, 312

Venom (movie), 145

Verdi, Giuseppe, 280

Video games, 65

Villawood, Australia, 84, 87, 90

Violence in the Cinema, Part 1 (short), 12

Voeten, P. J., 4, 80, 100, 127, 243, 254

quoted, 43, 51, 52, 59, 62, 73, 74, 77, 81, 82, 85, 90, 94, 96, 98, 99, 101, 104–106, 108, 109, 113–114, 129, 130, 149, 152, 172, 174, 177, 202, 234–236, 238, 247–249, 253, 256, 270, 275, 286, 293–295, 307, 314, 322, 326, 328

Vulture, 324

Vuvalini, 214–222, 223, 239, 294

Wall-E (movie), 312

Walvis Bay, 167

Wannenmacher, Michael, quoted, 186, 188–190, 273

War Boys, 119–125, 131, 132, 166, 168–170, 176–177, 185–187, 191–199, 255, 280, 287

War Rig, 188, 198, 202–204, 221, 223, 224, 228, 237, 248, 252, 264–265, 294, 295

Wardega, Elka, 318

Warner Bros. Pictures, 3–5, 17, 22, 23, 25–27, 56, 57, 65–66, 71, 73, 75, 86, 101, 104, 110, 111, 114, 127, 143, 151–152, 183, 240–242, 244–249, 270, 276, 278–280, 282–283, 298, 310–311

Warner Consumer Products, 26

Warrior (movie), 138

Warrior Woman, preliminary design of, 32, 33

Watanabe, Kento, quoted, 262, 269

Watson, Cory, quoted, 12, 44, 114–115, 146, 242, 252–253, 285

Wayne, John, 182

“We Don’t Need Another Hero,” 310

Weaver, Sigourney, 154

Weir, Peter, 12, 17, 129

What Women Want (movie), 46

When Harry Met Sally (movie), 77

White, David, quoted, 141, 144, 146, 202, 204, 244–245, 263, 267, 271, 317, 319–320

Williams, Andy, quoted, 165, 188–189, 316

Williamson, Stuart, quoted, 121, 122, 124, 133, 187, 197, 226, 227

Willmore, Alison, quoted, 142, 175, 194, 215, 299, 307

Wire, The (television show), 29

Witches of Eastwick, The (movie), 11, 21, 28, 59, 236, 322

Wives, 5, 37, 48, 208–215, 228, 231, 239, 275, 276, 294–296

Wolf of Wall Street (movie), 81

Wonder Woman (movie), 8

Worthington, Sam, 69

Wretched, the, 293

Wright, Edgar, quoted, 8, 9, 11, 13, 16, 18, 19, 150, 282, 283, 301, 306, 314–315, 327

X-Men (movie), 174

X-Men: First Class (movie), 109, 194

Xena (television series), 29

Yadav, Shyam “Toast,” 126–127

Miller, George and, 127, 135–136, 254–255

quoted, 127–131, 134–136, 143, 146, 245, 246, 254–255, 284, 333

Yamato, Jen, quoted, 8, 14, 174–175, 222, 281, 307

Yang, J. Houston, quoted, 235, 280, 284–285, 287, 307

Yeats, William Butler, 182

Zemeckis, Robert, 23

Ziwe, quoted, 160, 162, 329

About the Author

KYLE BUCHANAN is a pop culture reporter for the New York Times, where he writes a column about awards season called The Projectionist. He has been named Journalist of the Year by the National Arts & Entertainment Awards and previously served as a senior editor at New York magazine’s Vulture. He lives in Los Angeles.

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Copyright

BLOOD, SWEAT & CHROME. Copyright © 2022 by Kyle Buchanan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Cover design by Gregg Kulick

Art by Adobe Stock, Inc.

FIRST EDITION

Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2022 ISBN: 978-0-06-308436-0

Version 12292021

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-308434-6

About the Publisher

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Contents

1. Cover

2. Title Page

3. Dedication

5. Author’s Note

6. Cast of Characters

7. Part I: Building a World Gone Mad

1. Introduction

2. Chapter 1: Eyewitness Accounts of Those Who Survived

3. Chapter 2: The Mad Mastermind

4. Chapter 3: Everyone in the Old World Had a Show

5. Chapter 4: The History Men

6. Chapter 5: Who Killed the World?

7. Chapter 6: I Live, I Die, I Live Again

8. Chapter 7: Where Are You, Max?

9. Chapter 8: Pick Up What You Can and Run

10. Chapter 9: Witness Me

11. Chapter 10: “We Were Basically Defeated”

8. Part II: Shoot to Thrill

1. Chapter 11: Preparing for War

2. Chapter 12: Oh, What a Lovely Day

3. Chapter 13: My Name Is Max

4. Chapter 14: “It Was All in George’s Head”

5. Chapter 15: Figuring Out Furiosa

6. Chapter 16: Out Here, Everything Hurts

7. Chapter 17: All Hail the Immortan

8. Chapter 18: “The Last Great Action Film”

9. Chapter 19: The War Party

10. Chapter 20: Shiny and Chrome

11. Chapter 21: We Are Not Things

12. Chapter 22: The Many Mothers

13. Chapter 23: “Dudes Were Coming in Through the Roof”

14. Chapter 24: Fire and Blood

15. Chapter 25: Some Furious Vexation

16. Chapter 26: “Spent and Enriched”

9. Part III: End of the Road

1. Chapter 27: If You Can’t Fix What’s Broken

2. Chapter 28: “That’s Not a Mad Max Ending”

3. Chapter 29: The Final Battle

4. Chapter 30: What Was Lost

5. Chapter 31: Some Kind of Redemption

6. Chapter 32: Awaited in Valhalla

7. Chapter 33: “Nothing Good Comes Easy”

10. Acknowledgments

11. Sources

12. Index

13. About the Author

14. Copyright

15. About the Publisher