Her agent said she wasn’t interested, but I mentioned it to her over a decade later, and she said, “No one ever told me!” MILLER I remember we were talking about Charlize even then. I was crossing the street in Los Angeles and this very simple idea popped in my head: “What if there was a ‘Mad Max’ movie that was one long chase, and the MacGuffin was human?” I was flying back to Australia a month later, ruminating on it, and by the time I landed, I called Doug Mitchell and said, “I think I’ve got an idea.” GEORGE MILLER (director) For so long, whenever the idea of another “Mad Max” movie came up, I thought there wasn’t much more I could do with it, but I specifically remember the moment that changed.

Here, in the cast and crew’s own words, is how a nearly impossible project managed to become an Oscar-winning action masterpiece.Īfter making three progressively bigger “Mad Max” movies - the 1979 original as well as “The Road Warrior” (1981) and “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” (1985) - Miller let the franchise he created lie dormant until 1998.

“It was one of the wildest, most intense experiences of my life,” said the actress Riley Keough, while her co-star Rosie Huntington-Whiteley added, “You could have made another movie on the making of it.” As for Hardy? “It left me irrevocably changed,” he said. There’s a level of ‘the body remembers’ trauma related to the shooting of this film that’s still there for me.” “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. “Like anything that has some worth to it, it comes with complicated feelings,” Theron said. Though its post-apocalyptic plot is deceptively simple - road warrior Max (Tom Hardy) and the fierce driver Furiosa (Charlize Theron) must race across the desert to escape the vengeful Immortan Joe and his fleet of kamikaze War Boys - filming the movie was anything but easy. So how did Miller and his cast pull it off and survive to tell the tale?įive years after “ Fury Road” was released, I asked 20 of its key players what making it was like. “Parasite” director Bong Joon Ho said last year that the scale of the movie brought him to tears, while Steven Soderbergh put it more bluntly: “I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film,” he said in a 2017 interview, “and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.” “ Mad Max: Fury Road” set a new high-water mark for action filmmaking when it came out in 2015, and no summer blockbuster since has been able to match its turbocharged ingenuity.Įven Oscar-winning auteurs have been awed by George Miller’s operatically staged spectacle. The characters were intriguing, the stunts were exhilarating, and every frame was bursting with incredible, how’d-they-do-that nerve.

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