In the late 1970s, Australian director George Miller was just out of medical school when, fuelled by his love for cinema’s early action and chase movies, he set out to rediscover their pure visual language on his own. Drawing from his experiences as an emergency room doctor, he conceived of a solitary figure in a post-apocalyptic world, terrorised by psychotic road gangs. The iconic Mad Max was born, and thirty years after the franchise’s last instalment, the character has been rebooted with Mad Max: Fury Road. The movie sees Tom Hardy replace Mel Gibson as the stoic, leather-clad racer. Miller acknowledges that the character’s reappearance has been a long time coming.
“It’s been on my mind since the last millennium, in 1999,” laughs the director, now 70. “When the idea first came I’d already made three Mad Max movies, so I didn’t really want to do another one. I had other things I wanted to do. But it always came back and grew and grew.”
The film – which also stars Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Zoe Kravitz and Rosie Huntington- Whitely – is a wild and visually striking journey through the chaos of a post-apocalyptic world. Certainly, Miller has achieved his vision of creating a breathless chase from start to finish.
“I think of action movies as a kind of visual music, and Fury Road is somewhere between a wild rock concert and an opera.”
It’s also an orgiastic explosion of real stunts, as Miller put his actors through their paces, demanding they perform all the wild car chases, fights and balletic aerial battles themselves.
“It’s a natural film for practical real world effects,” he notes. “There’s no defying the laws of physics, no flying human beings, no spacecraft, and it would be wrong I think. The human eye can detect if it’s artificial, and we did it I guess the hard way, with real vehicles crashing with real people in a real desert, a very isolated place. It was a tough movie to make, but I guess all that effort and grit and grind somehow finds its way onto the screen. It was also a kind of demented fun to go out and do something like that.”
Recasting Mad Max could seem like a daunting challenge, but from Tom Hardy’s first audition, Miller knew that he’d found an actor who could bring a palpable truth to the mythic and almost silent figure.
“It’s easy to be cautious as an actor, but there are some who are emotional warriors, and that’s Tom,” the director enthuses. “He’s fearless. It’s a charisma born out of paradox which makes him so exciting. Tom can be accessible, yet mysterious; tough yet vulnerable. There’s tremendous warmth, but also an element of danger. When Tom walked into the room all that time ago, it felt exactly like Mel did when he walked into the room 30 years before.”
Of course, the original Mad Max in 1979 and the subsequent sequels were the films that transformed Mel Gibson from a struggling actor into an icon, as his leather-clad post-apocalyptic survivor became a legendary character throughout pop culture. Since Miller first revealed his desire to make another Mad Max feature, speculation was rife that Gibson would return to the franchise, even as a cameo – but since then, the actor’s life has become rife with controversy, as accusations of domestic violence and recordings of Gibson making anti-Semitic, racist and misogynistic remarks all but ended his career. While Miller blames the three-decade long gap since the last Mad Max instalment, he does allude to Gibson’s personal life also contributing to the actor’s absence.
“Tom [Hardy] was six-weeks-old when we started shooting Mad Max and this movie took so long to get going that by the time all the planets aligned, Mel had hit a lot of turbulence in his life. But it also was never meant to be a story about an older warrior. It’s not like the movie Unforgiven or something like that. So it was time for there to be a new Mad Max just like there’s been several James Bonds over the periods. But we did have Hugh Keays-Byrne, who was the Toecutter at the end of the very first movie. He dies at the climax and now over 35 years later he comes back to play Immortan Joe, not the same character.”
The blend of star-power, kaleidoscopic action and unique visuals may seem miles away from the work of a classic cinematic master, but Miller relates Mad Max: Fury Road back to one of his greatest inspirations, Alfred Hitchcock. “One of the ideas that drove the first Mad Max and drives Fury Road is Hitchcock’s notion about making films that can be watched anywhere in the world without subtitles,” Miller reflects. “You’re trying to achieve what great pieces of music do – no matter what your mood, they take you to a place outside yourself, and you come out the other end having had an experience.”