Three and a half decades is a long time for a fever dream – but that's how long the brutal, desolate post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max has been percolating, at desert-hot temperatures, in the mind of director George Miller.
In 1979, Mad Max, starring Mel Gibson in the title role, was his first film. It spawned two sequels: 1981's The Road Warrior and 1985's Beyond Thunderdome. Today, with the release of Fury Road – which is both a sequel and a reboot – audiences can finally see his return to the harsh dystopian world of Mad Max.
“Once you create characters, the imaginary world is following you – stalking you, as it were – in the deep recesses of your unconscious,” says Miller, who celebrated his 70th birthday in March. “Shooting the film was in many ways very familiar – but in the three decades that had passed since the last one, everything has changed. The world has changed. We have, as film audiences, changed. Cinema has changed. Film language has changed. And, I dare say, I’ve changed.”
Mad Max: Fury Road replaces Mel Gibson with Tom Hardy in the title role and welcomes Charlize Theron as Furiosa, a woman who drives a lorry called the War Rig.
Miller had spent the years since Beyond Thunderdome mainly making family films – including Babe and Happy Feet – while trying to get a fourth Mad Max off the ground. It almost happened in 2001 with Gibson, and an animated film was considered. Finally, it all came together.
“It’s both a wise man’s action movie, coming from the wisdom of a wise elder, and at the same time has the youthful recklessness and anarchy of a young spirit who’s prepared to challenge himself,” says Hardy. “If Obi-Wan Kenobi could make an action movie, this would have to be it. Or Yoda.”
Fury Road is otherwise true to the lean, elemental Mad Max aesthetic. Max, a Ford Falcon-driving loner, still navigates a neo-Medieval wasteland where fuel and water are in scant supply. The heavy-metal mayhem of the original Mad Max trilogy has inspired musicians as varied as Tupac and Mötley Crue, not to mention a cottage industry of tamer big-screen dystopian visions.
“You see it over and over again, not only in movies but in music videos and games,” says Miller of his film’s influence. “It’s an evolutionary process and one thing builds on the next.”
Mad Max separates itself from the post-apocalyptic pack with its cinematic bravado. The latest film is a more inventively shot blockbuster than most, and rather than spend an hour on muddled exposition, it jumps right into the action. "A Western on wheels", is how Miller likes to describe it – Fury Road is essentially a relentless three-day car chase.
“The strategy on this film was to make it one long chase and see what you could learn about the characters, their relationships and the world on the run,” says Miller.
Instead of relying on digital effects, Miller pushed his crew and stuntmen to do as much as possible without the aid of CGI.
“It made for a technically and logistically hard shoot,” says Theron. “This is so [Miller’s] world and this world has been inside him for so many years. This is his baby.”
Hardy, who is signed up for potentially three more Mad Max sequels is intensely enthusiastic about the wildness of the film and being "a cog in Miller's imaginarium".
“It’s a crazy sort of surreal and heightened world within George’s head, which is fully transmuted and fleshed out now on a multimillion-dollar level,” says Hardy. “It’s been sort of turbo-boosted. It’s been blown into an ambitious orchestration of Technicolor psychosis.”
For Miller, being back in the driving seat of his apocalyptic hellscape was a happy homecoming.
“This was a movie you couldn’t kill with a stick,” he says. “It just kept on wanting to be made – and eventually it was.”
