By Erin Free & Gill Pringle
“After the first Mad Max, I didn’t think that I’d be able to make another film ever again,” George Miller laughed to FilmInk back in 2015. “Then that film was released and it was successful enough. Then Mad Max 2 was an opportunity to do all the things that I had learnt on Mad Max. I never intended to do Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, but then that story came along and I thought, ‘Oh, okay.’ I work when the story insists on being told, as it were. The stories take hold of you at the back of your brain somewhere, and the ones that won’t let go are the ones that you find yourself doing.”
In the mid-2010s, the story that took hold of Australian director, George Miller, was Mad Max: Fury Road, a continuation of the filmmaker’s greatest and most significant cinematic work. Though his resume is dotted with groundbreaking, rabidly entertaining movies (Happy Feet, Babe: Pig In The City) and top notch Hollywood studio filmmaking (The Witches Of Eastwick, Lorenzo’s Oil), Miller’s creative spiritual home is on a broken highway in a dystopic future scarred with bullet holes and tarred with burnt rubber.
The director got there, however, via The University Of South Wales, where he was studying medicine in the seventies, despite the fact that his first love had always been cinema. While studying, Miller made shorts and volunteered on film crews, but still completed his residency at Sydney’s St. Vincent’s Hospital. With his first major short film – the twenty-minute Violence In The Cinema, Part 1 – under his belt, legend has it that Miller created his 1979 feature debut, Mad Max, after being inspired by the constant sight of battered road accident victims in the hospital emergency ward. “Being a doctor affected me a lot,” Miller said on Enough Rope With Andrew Denton. “It’s pretty brutal what can happen to a human being, and I could never reconcile that, so it did influence my filmmaking a lot.”
Made cheaply and recklessly, with stunt men in constant danger, Mad Max was a slow-build hit of staggering proportions. It’s the kind of wild, anarchic movie that could only have been made by a first time filmmaker. Its sense of urgency and immediacy literally tears its way through the screen, as its bleak but utterly arresting tale of an honest cop, Max Rockatansky (a fresh faced Mel Gibson), barreling down the highways of a dystopic future in search of the outlaw bikie gang that killed his wife and child, unspools at breakneck speed. Riding on nervy energy and brutal brilliance, Mad Max was a big cult hit, and it established Miller as a daring and original filmmaker.
While Mad Max was local in tone and low key in its design and style, Miller’s 1981 sequel, Mad Max 2, was a truly international piece of Australian filmmaking. Its kinetic meld of arid post-apocalyptic landscapes, souped up automobiles, and sexually ambiguous, punked out bad guys whipped up an entire rip-off cottage industry, particularly in trend-fixated Italy, which pumped out an army of B-grade clones. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then George Miller’s dirt-caked masterpiece, Mad Max 2 (or The Road Warrior, as it was known internationally), was the most loved film of the eighties.
It was also a worldwide smash, and delivered on the extraordinary promise that Miller had displayed with Mad Max. After co-directing 1985’s underwhelming Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (a largely unhappy experience for all involved, particularly Mel Gibson) with George Ogilvie, Miller launched himself into Hollywood in earnest, and it looked like the end of the road for one of Australian cinema’s greatest anti-heroes.
The journey of Max Rockatansky, however, was far from over. “I never intended to do another Mad Max movie,” Miller sighed to FilmInk in 2015. “Then one day, I was walking across a pedestrian crossing, and an idea flashed into my mind. I live in my head, in the imaginative life – I’ve been like that ever since I was a kid – and it occurred to me, ‘Oh, that’s an interesting idea for a Mad Max movie.’ But by the time that I’d gotten across the street, I’d forgotten about it. Then a couple of years after that, I was on a long haul flight from LA back to Sydney, through the night, and I was going to sleep. I was in that hypnogogic state, and a good two thirds of the movie played out in my head…in very rough form. When you create characters, they live like imaginary friends in your mind, and they keep popping up – that’s what happened with Mad Max. By the time I was back in Sydney, I said, ‘I think I’ve got a new idea for a Mad Max movie.’ That was twelve years ago!”
George Miller’s next Mad Max movie then went careening into what is commonly referred to as “development hell”, where it went through a number of incarnations that ended up lasting over a decade. Mad Max 4 was envisioned both as a 3D animated film (Miller had cited the Japanese classic, Akira, as an influence) and a straight continuation of the series with original star, Mel Gibson, playing an older, even more weather-beaten version of Max Rockatansky. Both versions went screeching off the development highway.
In the end, Miller opted for a truly fresh approach. Not a reboot, and not a remake, Mad Max: Fury Road is structured merely as a new adventure for Max Rockatansky, playing out not unlike the way in which James Bond has been recast and reconfigured over the years, without the need for origin retellings or expansive inter-film continuity. “Because none of the films had a strict chronology, this one didn’t have to fit in particularly with any of those,” Miller explained. “It probably is a continuation of sorts though, because he’s a lone character, and he wanders the wasteland in search of meaning. You can reinterpret the wasteland, and you can reinterpret the other characters, but in many ways, the character of Mad Max is very elemental. He’s a timeless character, and he’s no different really than a Japanese wandering Ronin, or the classic American western gunslinger, or a Scandinavian Viking warrior…it’s a common archetype.”
Not surprisingly considering that his series has had odd lapses in continuity, with actors appearing in various roles (the first Mad Max’s villain, Hugh Keays-Byrne, appears in Mad Max: Fury Road as a wholly different character, while Bruce Spence plays two different airborne characters in Mad Max 2 and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome) and other things that would be considered sacrilege in the far more ordered Marvel Cinematic Universe, Miller’s vision for the Mad Max films has always been a little more abstract.
“One thing that all the stories have in common, in terms of the chronology of the films, is the notion that the world we’re creating starts next Wednesday,” the director said. “That’s when all the bad stuff that we see in the news comes to pass, all at once. There’s a catastrophic cascade of economic crisis, oil wars and water wars, and failed states, and humanity terrorising itself, along with pitfalls that none of us could foresee. It’s like an organ failure, and it happens in a very short amount of time. Then you jump 45 years into the future. The cities have been razed, and there is a wasteland in the centre of a continent, like Australia. You see how people regroup over time, with dominant hierarchies controlling water, gasoline, and munitions. Then you throw Max into that mix. That’s in common with all the films – an apocalypse that starts next Wednesday.”
The mix for the fourth instalment – as with all of the previous films – was to be a decidedly simple one. “Alfred Hitchcock said that he wanted to make movies where they didn’t have to read the subtitles in Japan,” Miller told FilmInk. “Most of film language in the silent era was defined by chases, and that’s where the syntax of this relatively young language was essentially made, as opposed to theatre. With that in mind, we knew that the story of Mad Max: Fury Road was virtually a continuous chase. That’s not best rendered in words – it’s best done in pictures.”
Thus began a truly unusual scripting process, with Miller joining forces with British comic book artist and film designer, Brendan McCarthy, who has drawn on titles like Judge Dredd and Doctor Strange, as well as doing design work on movies such as Highlander and Lost In Space. Rather than nutting out a screenplay in dialogue and stage directions, the pair collaborated (along with artists, Peter Pound and Mark Sexton) on a series of extensive and finely detailed storyboards.
“We laid out the storyboards in what we called ‘The Mad Max Room,’” Miller explained. “It just accreted around the walls in about 3,500 pictures. I was trying to follow the Hitchcock system! When I first starting making films, I wrote them as pictures, except for Mad Max. In those days, there were no photocopy machines, so you couldn’t really do storyboards and send them out to the whole crew. The screenplay that I first did for Mad Max was 275 pages long, and it described every shot as a visual. It’s almost unreadable as a narrative or dramatic document. I just put everything in the screenplay: ‘The car moves right to left, the camera cranes up…’ We could only do one document, so I put all the shooting information into it. But this time, with new technology, we could do it properly and copy it. It’s amazing how much things have changed.”
The extensive storyboards were then condensed into more traditional script form for the sake of the studio, but the story of Mad Max: Fury Road remained an essentially non-verbal one. “There aren’t many lines,” Miller said. In this new tale, Max’s post-apocalyptic world has grown even crazier and more dangerous, and the lone wolf finds himself joining up with the imposing female leader, Imperator Furiosa, in a battle to survive against a horde of violent predators.
With Mel Gibson out of the picture, however, Miller needed someone new to slide behind the wheel and into the battered black leathers of his famous anti-hero. Not surprisingly, the world’s actors quickly lined up to play the iconic Mad Max. “It wasn’t until Tom Hardy walked through the door that I got that same sense that I got when I’d first met Mel Gibson all those years ago,” Miller told FilmInk. “Then I saw his work in Bronson and Stuart: A Life Backwards, and I also realised that he had very chaotic, drug fuelled teenage years, and that he’d spent a lot of time in the theatre. He’s a creature of the theatre, which offers a sign of someone who’s a very serious actor. Mel was back then too; he’d just come out of NIDA. And just looking at the chronology, Tom was born six weeks before we started filming the original Mad Max.”
When FilmInk met the in-demand star of The Dark Knight Rises, Lawless, Inception, Warrior, The Drop, and Locke at a roundtable interview in Calgary, the British actor was surprisingly in possession of a little dog called Georgia. “I always dog sit,” Tom Hardy explained. “I love dogs. They keep you grounded. I’ve got a good friend here who owns a sanctuary with 45 dogs, and I asked if I could look after one of them, to keep me company while I was here.”
It was strangely fitting considering Max’s famous, scene stealing canine companion in Mad Max 2, and was perhaps a good omen for the highly regarded Hardy, whose selection to play the eponymous anti-hero was met with a chorus of resounding cheers. Practically exuding authenticity and charisma from every pore, he didn’t balk in taking on the role. “I didn’t hesitate at all,” Hardy told FilmInk. “To play Max is a huge opportunity, and it’s such a great thing to get as a young actor. It’s an honour to play somebody who’s like, bottom line, out of all the heroes, the most cool at the moment. There’s something about Max that is quite real. Things hurt Max, you know? He’s very, very earthed, and though the world around him is fantastical, it’s built on very solid materials as well.”
Refreshingly, Hardy is also duly aware of the origins of Max Rockatansky. “There are lots of Australian actors who probably think that I shouldn’t be playing Max,” he said in 2015. “Obviously, I’m grateful that it’s me, but I’m very aware of the fact that he’s an Australian icon. I want to pay respect to that, and pay attention to that. A lot of people from all different countries were drafted in to audition for it, and it wasn’t a straightforward audition either.”
Along with Mad Max: Fury Road co-writer and noted Australian dramaturg, Nico Lathouris, Miller put potential cast members through an unusual auditioning process, asking them to read from their pick of five wildly diverse scenarios, one of which was the famous “parrot scene” from Monty Python. None, however, were from Mad Max: Fury Road itself. “Depending on which scene they chose, it told us a lot about them,” Miller laughed of the auditioning actors. “We were also looking for people who could work in an ensemble, because in many ways, it’s an ensemble piece – it’s about people thrown together in extremes.”
Hardy recalled the process with obvious fondness, absent mindedly stroking Georgia’s fur while speaking with clear affection for George Miller and Nico Lathouris. “We got into a conversation about telling stories,” the actor explained. “They’re very, very interesting and clever men who wanted to discuss large topics. They said, ‘Don’t worry about the script. How do you work and how do you see the world?’ That was a lot better than having to audition in the traditional way. I felt safe, and we just discussed everything for about two hours. We didn’t read. And then from that point, George Miller went and checked references from directors that I’d worked with previously to see if I was a problem or not,” Hardy laughed.
Considering the actor’s long list of wild, dangerous, and unpredictable characters – he’s played everything from psychos and compromised tough guys through to ruthless, cold blooded killers – it was a deft move from Miller. Hardy’s references checked out, and the actor got to continue his on-screen history of violence as Mad Max. “You’ve got to get your foot through the door, whatever that may be, and my way happened to be by playing slightly nutty characters, or people who get aggressive, or who experience some kind of mental instability. That’s a real playground for an actor, and there’s a lot of great material there. Being typecast as a lunatic isn’t great, but the other side to that is the opportunity of trying to understand the complex psychology of a character. That’s a lot of fun, but you shouldn’t misinterpret that with the actor,” Hardy laughed. “I play characters that are violent. I understand what violence is, so I can recreate it, but it’s not something that’s come from a crazy place. It’s something that I’ve observed. So I just reflect it, and if that gives me gainful employment, then I’m not going to knock back a paycheck, and I’m certainly not going to knock back good work. So I’ll do that, but I’m not a loony…well, maybe I am a loony,” he laughed.
As well as the obvious pop cultural iconography of Mad Max, Hardy was also excited by the elemental nature of the franchise’s storytelling. “It creates a grounded environment for fundamental human drama,” the actor offered. “If you clear the decks of all systems and all structures and the environment as we know it, and take it right back to the wilderness and having nothing, you strip an asset or a character down to the very fundamental needs of: What do I need and how am I going to get it? That’s the basic element of any storytelling: all characters need something, and what are they going to do in order to get it? That post-apocalyptic wasteland makes a great stage for very basic storytelling, and you can also let your imagination run wild in that environment. That’s a testament to the canvas that George has laid out…he’s the pioneer of it, and he’s continuing to paint on that canvas, and embellish and go further with it.”
With Tom Hardy in place as Max – and a strong supporting cast including Charlize Theron and Nicholas Hoult, along with a host of Aussie actors including Angus Sampson, Megan Gale, John Howard, Gillian Jones, Joy Smithers, and Richard Carter – Miller was all set to shoot Mad Max: Fury Road in and around Broken Hill in NSW, but torrents of rain had rendered the location untenable. “Where once there was red dust, there were now flowers and frogs,” Miller sighed. “We were all set to shoot at the beginning of 2011 when we got flooded out. That red earth was what it was all meant to be, and then it was suddenly all in bloom…all across the centre of Australia! We had a wonderful Australian crew, who were very well prepared. We’d built all the vehicles, and rehearsed all the stunts…everything had been worked out. We were ready to go, but it just wasn’t possible. Then we were going to shoot on the salt lakes in South Australia, which would have been a very different Mad Max. Finally, we ended up going to Namibia in Africa, and we were welcome there. The coast of Namibia is one of the few places in the world where there’s no vegetation, and the desert is accessible because of infrastructure. That said, it was like a military campaign. One of the big things that we really wanted to do, given the subject matter, was to make it real world, and not a fantasy film. Technology has shifted so dramatically over time that we could do things that we could never have dreamed of back on the first Mad Max. That said, we were determined to do it old school, with real cars crashing.”
In the middle of the crunching metal and grinding gears was Tom Hardy, who did what he could stunt-wise until the insurance company stepped in. “There is a very minimal amount of CG,” the actor explained. “There’s a huge amount of effects work, but the CG is minimal. Every single vehicle in there, every single person that you see thrown about, every single accident, and every single fight, there are people actually attacking or hurting each other. To a degree whereby they have committed to the contract to hurt each other as little as possible in doing so, but they are getting hurt. On a daily basis for six months, we were on vehicles. They didn’t stop moving…maybe for lunch, but not really. They didn’t stop. When you’re faced with an awful lot of adrenaline – six months of it – it gets pretty fucking tiring.”
Through all of that intense physical pressure, there was another type of pressure being exerted upon Mad Max: Fury Road. While the studio backing the film remained relatively quiet (“Because we were in a remote location, we didn’t see much of the studio…mostly we were left to our own devices”), there was much more noise on the internet, where speculation about the film sizzled since its announcement. Miller, however, was largely oblivious. “It doesn’t bother me, because I’m so busy making the movie,” the director explained. “I’m working with several hundred people, and I encourage opinions. But ultimately it has to be filtered through my brain, so I don’t have the bandwidth to see what’s happening out there in the larger world. I’m surrounded by people who are doing their best to make sense of what we’re doing across nanoseconds and nanoseconds of film: What colour? What costume? What gesture? What word? What camera move? We have to deal with all of those things. You’re driven by your instincts. But when you’re getting towards the end of post-production, and the trailers go out, you start to see people’s responses. That’s when you start to be aware of it.”
The response to the film’s initial and promo materials trailer was enormous. When it played at the geek mecca that is ComicCon, the consensus across the board was that it was one of the highlights at the pop culture extravaganza. “That was thrilling,” Miller told FilmInk. “As I’m fond of saying, the story doesn’t begin when the curtain opens in the theatre, the story begins with the first still that’s released, or the first synopsis, or the announcement of the cast, and certainly with the trailers in their various forms – the online trailer, the teaser trailer, the full trailer, another full trailer. When we talk to the studio marketing people, who are incredibly thoughtful about this, it’s so evident that they are the first line of storytellers – they begin the story. The storytelling starts long before the film is shown at the cinema.”
Tom Hardy was aware of this too, and he went right back to the source when George Miller told him that he had the role of Mad Max. “I had lunch with Mel Gibson in Los Angeles about five months before we started filming,” the actor revealed. “It was like handing the baton over. It just seemed right to touch base with Mel, and it was a real experience. He told my agents that it was really good that I was playing Max, and that they probably found someone who’s more insane than he was,” Hardy laughed. “I take that as a compliment.”
But while Mel Gibson was Mad Max, it was of course George Miller who created him. “It’s all come from one man,” Hardy said. “This is four films in now, and he’s sat on this one for ten years plus now…and he’s got more. This is just one installment. George has books and pages and drawings and other stories of this world, and he can go further and deeper into it. It’s all come from his mind. That’s what’s so inspiring about him. A great idea is a dime a dozen, but successfully implementing a great idea into fruition is what separates a master from somebody who is just very, very good at what they do. That separates the men from the boys.”
With George Miller now taking a major detour off Mad Max’s central broken highway by developing a prequel about the early years of Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy will take over from Theron, with Chris Hemsworth and Ya-Ya Abdul Mateen II in support), Australia’s most famous movie franchise is set to continue. That would not have been possible without the extraordinary success of Mad Max: Fury Road. The film was a major hit with critics and audiences, grossing $375.2 million at the global box office, and scoring glowing reviews across the board. As an unapologetic slab of full-tilt genre filmmaking, Mad Max: Fury Road also took home a surprising six Oscars from a whopping ten nominations, with the film placing in the Best Film and Best Director categories. The film has also inspired a whole new generation of Mad Max fans, as brilliantly showcased in the new documentary Beyond The Wasteland. Born from the wonderfully fevered imagination of the great George Miller, Mad Max has a permanent place on the world’s fractured cinematic highway…
The Mad Max series is available on various digital and streaming platforms. Beyond The Wasteland is currently touring across Australian cinemas and drive-ins. For a full list of dates and locations, click here. For our interview with the team behind Beyond The Wasteland, click here.
