Writer/Director George Miller on ‘Mad Max: Fury Road,’ the Post-Apocalyptic World, and the Characters

Mad Max: Fury Road George Miller Interview
Tom Hardy as Max Rockatansky in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Village Roadshow Pictures’ action adventure MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. (Photo by Jasin Boland)

The big question when it comes to Mad Max: Fury Road is whether the new addition to the franchise will be worth the wait. Mad Max: Fury Road opens in theaters on May 15, 2015, a good 30 years after the release of the third film of the franchise, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Circumstances beyond their control caused writer/director George Miller and Warner Bros Pictures to delay the film, however based on the reaction to the first trailer released, Mad Max fans are feeling very hopeful that Fury Road will revive the franchise and will live up to its predecessors.

At the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con, Miller conducted a Q&A with fans as well as took part in a press conference. Here’s what he had to say about Mad Max: Fury Road, his cast, the story, and the delay:

On the actual time frame between Fury Road and Beyond Thunderdome:

George Miller: “I keep asking the question and I’ve got it down to between 45 and 50 years from next Wednesday, or the next Wednesday from the day that you watch the movie.”

On how it feels to revisit this world:

George Miller: “What happens, if you work on something it does stay around in the back of your mind somewhere. We’ve all got that place that we’ve had from childhood, and I like to call Mad Max and the characters in the films imaginary friends. It’s a very, very compelling world to work in with because it’s allegorical. That’s why the Westerns were basically what cinema grew up on, from the silent era on. They were very accessible, elemental stories, and that’s the attraction of working in this post-apocalyptic, Mad Max world.

Getting back into it, it felt familiar in many ways, and very, very strange. So much has changed. The technology has changed. You can do a lot more. You can keep everyone safe. When you see the movie, you’ll see a lot of the actors doing the actual stunts. It probably would have been criminal to do that in the old days, but now you can keep them safe with harnesses and things like that. It was just interesting to go back there after all these years. I’m thankful that I’ve been able to do it.”

On his view of what a post-apocalyptic world would now look like:

George Miller: “One of the things that’s quite interesting is that many of the same issues apply. In many ways, we are doomed to repeat history. With information, things change. Mad Max 2, for instance, was basically based on oil wars. Back in the early ‘70s there were sudden restrictions; cars got smaller and people went to war over oil and we call it gasoline in Mad Max. We’ve arguably been fighting oil wars ever since. Now, in some places in the world, there are water wars. In my own country, there are no wars but there is a huge dispute over water. There’s a financial crisis that we’re all worried about. All of those things are in the news. Even 45 or 50 years in the future we’re in a medieval construct, in terms of how people behave towards each other.

The other big thing I wanted to do was to tell a story with very little dialogue. It’s a world in which people say very little. I wanted to have one extended chase, in which you discover the backstories of the characters on the way. All those things come together. A post-apocalyptic world allows you to make it very, very elemental. I like to call them ‘Westerns on Wheels’. For the same reasons why the Westerns had that very essential quality, you can find that in Mad Max: Fury Road.”

On what version of Mad Max Tom Hardy is playing:

George Miller: “Yes and no. Yes, of course, it’s based on the same character that Mel [Gibson] played. He’s the lone warrior in the wasteland, basically disengaged from the rest of the world. But, naturally, Tom brings his Tom Hardy-ness to it. He brings another quality and the character is different, to some degree, because the story is different. So, it’s a yes and no answer. Yes, it’s different, but no, he’s essentially grown out of the same material.”

On Charlize Theron’s character, Furiosa:

George Miller: “Without trying to give away too much story, I can say that she plays the Imperator Furiosa. She’s the boss of a War Rig, in which the people flee across the Wasteland. I can’t really think of another character in cinema quite like her. I’m sure that other people might find connections, but just the way the character was conceived and how Charlize took it on and transformed herself and played it, she did it with such authority. There have been great female action characters, but there’s just been nothing quite like this. If I say too much more, I’ll give away too much story. We’re coming out next May. We haven’t finished the film yet.”

On what Nicholas Hoult brought to the film:

George Miller: “He’s just a wonderful guy who’s incredibly mature for someone so young. I have a son not quite his age, but almost. I thought he was mature, but Nicholas has been working since he was nine and he’s one of those really centered actors. This film doesn’t have many speaking roles, but I tested with really complicated scenes. I’d seen his work, but I was just struck by his abilities. He’s one of those actors who insists on doing his own stunts. He’s very methodical and very clear and very safe, but he can really get in there. He plays a character called Nux who’s a War Boy. He gets caught up in the story, with Max and Furiosa and the others. He’s just got a lot to give and a lot to contribute to cinema and acting. He’s got so much going on.”

On whether he considered bringing back Mel Gibson:

George Miller: “Back in the early part of the decade, Mel Gibson was cast in the movie. We were about to shoot and then 9/11 happened and that caused a whole lot of issues, not the least of which was a decline in the American dollar and we lost a significant amount of our budget. At the same time, we had to move on Happy Feet. I thought, ‘Okay, we’ll do Happy Feet and take four years for that.’ So we did that and then by the time we came out of that, it just went on and on.

It’s not a story about an old Mad Max. It’s a story about a younger Mad Max, so I had to find a new Mad Max. Luckily, Tom Hardy came along. And then we were about to shoot in Australia where they shot the first ones and we had record rains, and what was flat red desert became a flower bed. The salt lakes in the center of Australia where we were going to shoot had pelicans and frogs in them. So, we waited and Warner Brothers – to their credit – said, ‘Let’s wait and see if it dries up again.’ It hasn’t dried up yet, which is great for the land but not for Mad Max. That’s how we ended up in Namibia.”

On whether there will be any characters or descendants of characters from the previous films:

George Miller: “No, but the one thing that I did do was that, in the first Mad Max, there was an actor called Hugh Keays-Byrne who played Toecutter. He died at the very end of the movie. He was the bad guy. In this film, he played the Immortan Joe who’s the warlord. The whole movie he wears a mask on the lower part of his face. The notion is that those people who saw the early one all that time ago might recognize Hugh, 30 years later. I’ve always loved him as an actor and as a person, and it was great to have him in there. But, that was the only one.”

On the story and why he returned to make another Mad Max movie:

George Miller: “I didn’t want to do another Mad Max movie because I’d done three and I do have a lot of stories that I want to tell. But the story came to me over 12 years ago and I kept on pushing it away. I always find that those stories that keep on playing in your mind are the ones that you should pay attention to. So, this story emerged and I made a deal with myself that I was going to do it with storyboards and not write a screenplay, specifically. I wanted to have the visuals come first.”

On the visual approach to Mad Max: Fury Road:

George Miller: “First of all, it’s a chase. It’s very hard when people are chasing across the wasteland to write that in words. It’s much easier to do it as pictures. Because it’s almost a continuous chase, you have to connect one shot to the other, so the obvious way to do it was as a storyboard and then put words in later. So, I worked with five really good storyboard artists. We just sat in a big room and instead of writing it down, we’d say, ‘Okay, this guy throws what we call a thunder stick at another car and there’s an explosion.’ You can write that, but exactly where the thunder stick is, where the car is, and what the explosion looks like, it’s very hard to get those dimensions, so we’d draw it. We ended up with about 3,500 panels. It almost becomes equivalent to the number of shots in the movie.”

On returning to location shooting after doing a few animated movies:

George Miller: “Animation is much more thoughtful. Shooting movies is much like sport. Making animation is a bit like writing about sport. In the middle of a football game, I would imagine that you don’t have much time to think. It’s the same thing with going out and shooting. There’s also an exhilaration to it. It’s a bit of a military exercise, logistically. It’s tough, particularly out there in the middle of a desert, on the west coast of Africa. It’s pretty spare out there.

We also wanted to do this film old school. It’s not a big CG movie. There is CG in it, but every stunt you see is real, involving real people, and often involving members of the cast. That was a big logistical exercise that brings a certain degree of anxiety with it. We had a wonderful rigging crew, stunt crew and camera crew, and we had no serious injuries at all. Every day safety was the utmost, but there is a certain tension about that. I wouldn’t say that it was a pleasant thing to be out there wrecking cars, but when we’d see the footage and review it, each day, it was worth being out there. It was better than being a green-screen movie. This movie is very real world, very palpable, and very visceral, and that’s what we were going for.”

On the possibility of more Mad Max movies:

George Miller: “In order to tell this story, we came up with two others. We’ve written a screenplay of one and a novelization of another, but it’s a very rough novel. When you watch this movie, and you’re watching what happens over three or four days in these people’s lives, you have to form everything that you see in the movie – not only the characters, but everything they touch and see – with deep backstory. So, we wrote bibles. We asked about who Furiosa is and we actually had to tell her story. We did that with every character. Out of that, because of the delays, we just kept working on them while we were working on other things. So, we ended up having two other very, very highly developed stories.”