When it comes to franchise breaks, 30 years is a long hiatus. The sun last set on Mad Max thirty years ago, back in 1985, Beyond Thunderdome. what you’d expect from the post-apocalyptic antihero, whose iconic reputation is fraught with expectations. Not that he’s ever been considered the face of a franchise.
This interview was first published in Total Film magazine’s Factor 231, 2015. You can subscribe here so you don’t miss any factors.
“After completing the first Mad Max, I never thought I’d make a second one. After completing the second one, I never thought I’d do a third,” laughs director George Miller, who has been the driving force behind the series ever since. its beginnings. ” And here I am, doomed to make Mad Max movies. . . Damned might be a more apt term here, given the arduous history of spawning Fury Road. Not that you knew it from watching the teaser footage revealed to an unsuspecting audience at Comic-Con in July 2014. Six minutes of breathtaking vehicle destruction, with armored buggies traversing the desert and futuristic tribesmen dressed in ghoulish clothes suffering like mad. Their cars and everyone else. One thing was immediately clear: Mad. Max: Fury Road wouldn’t be like anything else in the blockbuster’s release schedule.
Given how battered, shocked, and dusty the audience felt after the SDCC video, Fury Road’s checkered production story feels incredibly appropriate. The concept of “Mad Max 4” has been around for so long (up to a quarter of a century, according to some reports) that Mel Gibson was still attached to it in the first place. During its time on the shelves, Fury Road was nearly made into a 3-D animated film (the first incarnation of the story was a “comedic” script concept). , before this live-action edition was announced in late 2009, with Tom Hardy shown as the new protagonist. Filming won’t begin for another two years, and production has been further delayed due to weather conditions. “There was a lot of feeling that this would never happen,” Miller recalls. “The rain evicted us from our sites in the Australian outback. . The red desert was transformed into a flower garden. The salt lakes had pelicans in the water. “
In search of a suitably arid alternative, the franchise’s local Australia moved to Namibia, where the lack of rain means there is no plant life. In Miller’s simple, minimalist morality tales, the main issues are fluid: as far as he is concerned, the filming location only wants to duplicate that of a continent “like Australia”; Fury Road may not be held back by any major issues. The Mad Max universe has operated according to its own logic, in which the replacement of the main actor is not surprising. Australian actor Bruce Spence played various roles in The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome; Hugh Keays-Byrne (Toecutter in the original) is Fury Road’s tyrannical villain, Immortan Joe. Searching for a new Max, Miller remembered what he saw in Gibson all those years ago, when he was searching for the stoic and vengeful drifter. “It’s probably a cliché, but it’s the perception of animal charisma,” he says of Hardy. “The presence of an animal is a wonderful, majestic unpredictability that I think all great, charismatic actors possess. This is the quality I first saw in Mel Gibson when he was playing Mad Max at age 21. (Coincidentally, Miller reports that he just discovered that Hardy was born the same week the first Mad Max began filming, in September 1977. )
“Tom brings his own unique quality,” says Miller. We’ve had a lot of James Bond movies; We had two Mad Maxes. There are a lot of overlapping similarities in James Bond, but [the actor] brings his own unique quality to the table. It’s precisely the same between Tom and Mel.
Hardy called the role “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for an actor” and his co-stars agreed that it was the best match between star and role. “He’s an intense guy and he’s an intense actor, and that’s what the role demanded,” says Charlize Theron, when TF met her in a suite at the London Hotel in Beverly Hills. As Imperator Furiosa, the quintessential tough guy in the new installment, she sports a shaved haircut, a grease-stained face, and a bionic arm that looks like it was improvised with a combination of used car parts. Not to mention a vest so dirty that John McClane would run to the dry cleaners.
“I had to show up 20 minutes before I went to set and I’d get out of my trailer and go to my closet and roll around in the sand, literally rolling,” Theron smiles. As for her hair? He just cut it off every 3 days. According to Miller, the hair salon was his idea. ” She called one day and said, “I think I’m going to take my breath away. “The moment he said that, I just came up with the idea. , ‘awesome. ‘” Stripped of her femininity in a long-term where survival is the only priority, Furiosa plays another transformative role for Theron (unrecognizable at the top of an Oscar in Monster). “When survival has to step in, sex is going out the window,” explains the South African-born actress. “I mean, it’s like there’s no conscious thought process: ‘I guess I’m a woman, so I can do this. . . It’s like, “No, I gotta survive, fuck, that’s it!””Only time will tell, but I don’t think anyone has noticed anything like [Furiosa] in cinema before. “
Nicholas Hoult also underwent a significant transformation to play “War Boy” Nux. “Every time you put on makeup like that, it’s less difficult to act because your appearance changes, then everyone’s technique towards you changes, so suddenly you feel like a user and you look like him, that’s right. “It’s less difficult to tap into other parts of your user,” says the 25-year-old Briton, dressed in a grey sweatshirt and blue jeans. She spent two full hours in makeup every day to look pale and crisp. skin and a scarred mouth. He also shaved his hair and used a jump rope on set to lose weight to ensure he could succeed in the action environment. “I wanted to look like I had super upper body strength because there was. There’s a lot of physicality in the movie, especially with someone like Tom Hardy. I just hate this concept of small, skinny women fighting men and then looking like a football player in that movie!
Returning to the franchise for which he became famous, Miller is also returning to the action genre, having recently worked on the hit animated film Happy Feet and its sequel (can you think of a filmmaker who had good fortune with two of those?) Diametrically opposed films?series?). With its comfortable Aussie accessory and conceptual and conceptual character, it’s not what you’d expect from the face of the movie Carmageddon. Even the concept of Fury Road came at an unpredictable and low-key time. He in particular remembers the moment when inspiration struck him. “I was crossing a street at a crosswalk. When I was given halfway through, this concept came to mind. I thought it would be a very clever Mad Max movie. The moment they gave me Across the Road, I was like, ‘No, I don’t need to do a Mad Max movie. ‘Years later, when the entire film (or at least the first two acts) unfolded in his mind.
The “core architecture” was there from the beginning, but it inevitably became more subtle as new workers arrived. The idea, in Miller’s words, was to create “a continuous action piece”: to tell a story almost entirely. visually. ” Originally, the script was just a comic book,” Hoult recalls. “It basically consisted of three hundred pages with no dialogue. All you have to do is look at the photographs of your character and figure out what was going on. The goal was clear: we won’t be telling a story to the public; They will have to try to keep it for life. Given the intensity of the Comic-Con photographs, the entire film may just be proof of a kind of story. Miller explains that “the goal is to immerse the audience as intensely as possible: they enter at one end and exit at the other like a roller coaster, and see what reports they pick up along the way. “3D – lately in progression – deserve to get on top of this.
While summer 2015 will likely have no shortage of impressive sets (with Avengers: Age Of Ultron, Jurassic World and Terminator: Genisys fighting for box office dominance), Fury Road promises to be a GREAT set. “In a lot of movies, there are sets of stunts,” says Miller. “In this movie, each and every set had a threat or stunt detail. Although it is a discussion series, it is in a fast vehicle.
Many times there were other people hanging from the vehicle, above or below the vehicle. This is what created the utmost anxiety in me: how are we going to maim or kill someone today?
With such an undeniable setup, the main plot points are necessarily sparse, Miller does give a few main points. Furious she frees the so-called “Five Wives” (young women of childbearing age, with Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough and Zoë Kravitz among the quintet) from the custody of the great villain, Immortan Joe, and continues the journey. Max is reluctantly caught up in his troubles, as is Hoult’s Nux, who seeks an excellent death in battle, hoping for a sweet afterlife. As one of Immortan’s most productive chase riders, he is sent to hunt down fugitives.
While anyone familiar with the Mad Max universe will recognize the barren, desolate landscapes and armored supercars, it’s designed to be a hotspot for beginners, and Miller is sure audiences are familiar enough with the apocalyptic scenarios not to want to. Explain each and every detail. Since visuals take precedence over argument (Miller paraphrases the Hitchcockian maxim of a “movie you don’t want to read subtitles in Japan”), Fury Road is more about an opera than its popular blockbuster style (and burgeoning requiem). ). The music in the trailer only adds to this feeling. )”People only speak when they need to, and as much as possible, the story is told through images; In that sense, it’s very operatic,” the director acknowledges.
But make no mistake, this will be an all-night night with Madama Butterfly, with Miller’s attachment to immersion and the spirit of Mad Max videos that demand genuine stunts, on the biggest scale imaginable. “Mad Max has a raw, elemental quality to it,” says Miller. “It’s not a CGI fantasy movie. So why create a twist of automotive fate in CGI when you can do it in real life?This meant building, cornering, and crashing dozens of stunt cars in Namibia. actors, who were very involved in the stunts, the experience was amazing. With his eyes wide open, Hoult doesn’t forget the first time he drove out of the wonderful war group. “I was sitting in my car and there were about 50 other people. cars, motorbikes and trucks and everything that flies in the desert. And I don’t forget to hunt around before the shot and it actually gave me chills.
“I don’t forget to think, ‘Oh my God, other people are going to think this is CGI. . . ‘” sighs Theron. “It was one of those moments where you say, ‘We’re in a world. ‘WE ARE AT WAR! YES!” Filming in the brutal Namibian location (“We were there for almost eight months,” Theron recalls, “we all went through everything”) added to that tangible quality Miller was looking for. It just wouldn’t have been a Mad Max movie. if it had been filmed behind the scenes. ” It’s not a green screen movie shot in a studio. It exists in the real world,” he says, Miller. La film is different (it looks like another one) from a CGI movie. It’s like you’re really there.
It’s that world-building component and attention to detail that could mean Fury Road is exclusive among this summer’s blockbusters, though possibly not necessarily. Miller makes some comparisons to the comrades in Max’s film (“Tohis, very realistic”). “He has the same difficulties as a superhero”), but like his main character, he’s alone. And while Fury Road is based on a franchise from the past, it wastes no time in creating its own expanded universe, complete with comic book stories. (co-written through Miller) for Max, Furiosa, Nux and Immortan Joe will be released shortly after the film’s release. And in terms of full-length films?The engine is already running. ” Because of the delay, we wrote two more,” admits Miller. “If it works well enough to warrant another one, we’ve got the scripts. . . “
To learn more about Total Film, subscribe here and get access to over 10 years of previous virtual issues as part of the subscription. That’s over a hundred issues you can explore, adding our maximum of recent issues.
Furiosa is now in theaters. To learn more about this movie, check out our guides for:
I’m the editor of Total Film magazine, I oversee the running of the magazine, and I’m regularly obsessed with all things Nolan, Kubrick, and Pixar. Over the last decade, I’ve held a variety of roles for TF online and at Print, Add on GamesRadar and you can hear me chatting on the Inside Total Film podcast. His career highlights include reporting on Tenet and Avengers: Infinity War, as well as the politics of Comic-Con, TIFF, and the Sundance Film Festival. .
Just Cause, the open-world action favorite, is getting a movie from the producers of The Fall Guy, and I’ve already got the most ridiculous skydiving stunts ever filmed.
Tom Hiddleston the kind words Josh Brolin said to him before Thanos killed Loki in Infinity War
Django Unchained and Fatal Attraction are the new stars to sign Daniel Craig in Knives Out 3
GamesRadar is from Future plc, a leading foreign media organization and virtual publisher. Visit our corporate website.