Inside Miller’s Mad Max reboot
Fury Road director discusses action film
There is a furious expectation for Mad Max: Fury Road, the reboot of the cult-popular Australian film franchise. Critics and fans attending previews are already on board. The must-see factor in surveys of wider audiences is off the charts. When Fury Road opens Friday, the box office will explode.
So we sat down in Toronto with the 70-year-old creator, Down Under director George Miller, and one of his costars, British actor Nicholas Hoult, for a chat. We wanted to learn six insider things about the action movie, which Miller shot in Australia and Namibia:
Miller, co- writer as well as producer- director, never planned his socio-political commentaries, even though Fury Road is a savage satire of humanity’s baser instincts. Instead, he had just two ideas in mind for the story, which follows anti-hero Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) and rogue warrior Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) on a reckless journey across The Wasteland in an 18-wheeler dubbed the War Rig.
“One idea,” Miller says, “was the extended chase to see whether we could pick up everything on the run, including the characters and their relationships, and do it at breakneck speed to see what you get with very little forced exposition. The second thing should be that the ‘ MacGuffin’ ( the plot device that drives the action, even though it is not really the point) should be not ‘a thing’ but human cargo — the Five Wives.”
Alfred Hitchcock popularized the term “MacGuffin” in the 1930s. More recently, it might be a bomb timed to go off in a James Bond movie, with 007 the only man able to shut it down. Miller’s “MacGuffin” is the collection of slave wives owned by The Wasteland’s dictator. Theron kidnaps them and the chase is on.
Hoult admits he never heard of a “MacGuffin” before. “Not until today actually — and I thought you were trying to order something from McDonald’s.”
One of the Five Wives — Riley Keough — is the granddaughter of Elvis and Priscilla Presley. But that had nothing to do with giving her the role of Capable, Miller says. “I didn’t know that Riley was Elvis’ granddaughter when we cast her.” Instead, like other actors including Hoult, Miller tested Keough by having her read a speech from the 1976 classic, Network.
Miller shot Fur y Road “oldschool” by minimizing digital effects and putting people and vehicles on the ground in front of his camera. “We don’t defy the laws of gravity. There are no flying human beings. There are no spacecrafts. It is not a fantasy. So it has to be old-school with real-world, practical events. So we had to take the people and the vehicles into the real world, into the real desert. And we shot that sort of in continuity as best as we could so that the attrition to the vehicles or the attrition to the people, the characters, would be logical. So that’s how it was done. It is just as real as you can get. Of course, the story of Fury Road happens over three days. We took 130 days to do it — in two countries!”
For practical reasons, night scenes in Fury Road were actually done in the daytime, Miller says. “We ended up shooting day-for-night in the same way they did in westerns — because horses don’t have headlights and neither did the War Rig.”
Nux and the other War Boys in white-face makeup and with shaven heads were originally based on Japanese kamikaze pilots of the Second World War, Miller says. That is because he wrote the script in 1999, before 9/11 and before the wave of terrorism that followed. “Now it’s got a different connotation with suicide bombers,” Miller explains of his War Boys metaphor.
“The thing about these movies is that you go back into a much more elemental, allegorical world, even though you are going into the future.”
Hoult never saw the original Mad Max trilogy until he was getting ready to audition for Fury Road. “Then I did see them and I was upset that nobody had told me about them. Why? They are these great movies and a fascinating world and no one had ever thought of telling me about this before?”