Thirty years after Mel Gibson faced off against Tina Turner’s minions in 1985’s “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,” the post-apocalyptic series reared its loud and angry head once again with “Fury Road.” Starting off with 1979’s “Mad Max,” we followed the adventures of one Max Rockatansky, a former Australian policeman striving to survive the break down of civilization. Looking back at the first film of the series it is interesting to see how different it was from everything else. The world has not gone to hell just yet but violence is threatening to explode just around the corner. Owing much more to the Roger Corman produced biker flicks of the early 1970s than to the wild dystopian fantasies of “The Road Warrior” or “Beyond Thunderdome,” “Mad Max” was an action oriented spin on the revenge story.
Director George Miller with leading man Tom Hardy on the set of “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Photo credit: Warner Bros.
Its director George Miller was a novice filmmaker at the time. And “Mad Max” was inspired by the grisly injuries and deaths resulting from the car accidents he witnessed while working as an M.D. in Sydney, Australia. But in order to complete his ambitious vision of spectacular chases and jaw dropping collisions, he would need the perfect stunt crew to back him up. Flash forward to 2015 as we finally bear witness the release of the fourth chapter in the Rockatansky saga “Mad Max: Fury Road.” It was recieved with great critical success and now boasts a Best Picture Academy Award nomination, which is no mean feat for a film that suffered through many production hurdles and postponements.
But let’s talk about the stunt work.
Part of the appeal of the “Mad Max” franchise rest in the oftentimes jaw dropping stunt work on display. It’s rather amazing (and somewhat troubling) to think back and realize that no precedents were set for the first film. Most of the stunt crew were inexperienced as Australia’s film industry was at its infancy. One of the more infamous sequences involves a shot of a fallen motorcyclist who gets his head clipped by another, flying motorcycle. That was an unplanned accident and the driver got seriously hurt. But that moment remains in the film. Miller is a much more experienced director at this point (and still energetic at the age of 70) and so the precautions taken for each successive film has become increasingly professional.
“Fury Road’s” stunt coordinator Guy Norris has worked with Miller since 1981’s “The Road Warrior.” He oversaw an army of 150 stunt people appearing in over 300 sequences – all this with minimal CGI. Although Norris himself performed some of the stunt work, he says that at the age of 55 he’d rather leave it to a new generation. In an article for RollingStone Norris states, “I crashed a 12-ton vehicle into the War Rig. I’ve jumped off 500-foot buildings. I’ve crashed cars. I’ve been set on fire, but that stunt worked so well I thought, ‘I don’t know what else I can do.’ I wanted to go out on that feeling.”
The sequence Norris refers to involved driving a sixteen-wheel truck at 60mph into a rather impressively large tank. This was an incredibly dangerous stunt to pull off. But thanks to some clever engineering designed to decelerate the impact of his vehicle, Norris was able to walk off the set and leave with nothing worse than a good night’s sleep.
Different gangs or tribes are introduced throughout the duration of the film. And each gang has a signature mode of transportation or means of travel. For example, characters known as the Rock Riders zoom about with motorcycles on top of mountainous terrain. Norris likened them to mountain goats and so he hired some of the best Motocross riders in the country. They had to train for months in order to “ride a motorcycle, fly through the air, and throw a bomb at the same time, and then get ready to land,” according to Norris. “And we had four or five of them doing it all at once, so that was pretty intricate.”
The final chase sequence was designed to keep Max and female counterpart Furiosa apart for as long as possible. Adding to the challenge was coordinating over seventy vehicles to maintain constant motion within the same shot. Norris claims that having access to the vast expanse of the Nambian dessert made the seemingly impossible possible. Experienced acrobats from Cirque du Soleil were also hired to swing back and forth while attached to poles extending from moving vehicles. “The first step was training on poles, spending months developing core strength,” explains stunt trainer Glenn Suter in an article for Variety. “Then we married the sequence with real poles mounted on the floor that provided a swinging motion, similar to that in the actual vehicle.”
To add reality to the proceedings, the lead actors supplied some of their own stunts. This apparently resulted in one of the scarier moments of the shoot: star Tom Hardy falls off a speeding rig and is left hanging upside down with his head barely touching the ground. However Hardy was supposedly okay with it. According to the actor, it did frighten his seven-year-old son. In an interview with Yahoo! Movies Hardy gives this recollection, “George (Miller) said to him, ‘Don’t worry, your daddy’s being held upside down by a couple of wires, Louie. They can hold a grand piano.’ And he said, ‘But what if they snap?’ ‘Well, Louie, I suppose he’d go under the wheels.’ And that was that.”
“Mad Max: Fury Road” has wowed audiences all over the world thanks in part to the hard work supplied by the remarkable stunt crew. In an age where everything is overly computer generated, it’s refreshing (if not unusual in this day and age) to see some good old fashioned human dexterity showcased on the big screen. It reaffirms the tradition started back when a young Max Rockatansky drove his V8 Interceptor towards a foreboding future.
