It’s been 45 years since we first visited the dystopian future Wasteland when Mel Gibson starred in George Miller and Byron Kennedy’s sci-fi classic Mad Max.
Since then, we’ve joined the world of Max Max a further three times, with Gibson returning as Max for its sequels: Road Warrior and Beyond The Thunderdome.
After a lengthy gap (30 years in fact!) we returned to the Wasteland back in 2015 for the supremely successful Mad Max: Fury Road, which starred Tom Hardy as Max (alongside Charlize Theron as a new character to the world, Furiosa) and won an incredible six Academy Awards.
Now, George Miller is back to look at the origin story of Furiousa in Mad Max: Furiosa, which stars Anya Taylor Joy as the titular character, alongside Chris Hemsworth and Tom Burke (pictured above), who we spoke to recently about entering the world of Mad Max, and driving the War Rig…
What’s it been like for you to be part of the Mad Max franchise?
It’s hard to find the words really because I’m still pinching myself. It’s more than one dream really!
What is your favourite Mad Max movie?
I like Thunderdome because it was the first one I saw – that bungee cord fight was just like, wow! And I love Tina Turner in it, I think she’s brilliant.
What’s it like working with the legend that is George Miller?
A privilege and a joy because he’s such a nice human being!
What was it like being on the set of a Mad Max movie? We imagine it’s pretty intense…
I liked watching it because stuff’s happening around you. There’s so much going on! You feel very immersed in it. It’s like you’ve been dropped in the middle of it. It’s extraordinary.
The first Mad Max movie was released 45 years ago. What do you think it is about this world that keeps audiences coming back for more all these years later?
The idiosyncrasy of it. It’s not just that sometimes you get things that are aesthetically very ‘other’ and ‘wow’, but it doesn’t necessarily extend it to the language. The language [in the Mad Max movies] is so unusual. It’s brilliant. You know what’s being said, you know exactly why, but they’ve twisted and turned the words in a really interesting way. And it’s about humanity.
Mad Max has always delved into important issues, and Furiosa is no different. What do you think it is about genre that gives it a good platform to discuss such topics?
Genre is exactly that. It’s a platform, it’s an infrastructure. What’s exciting about genre is you can push it into a more abstract kind of storytelling than you can with something that’s already a little abstract or a little esoteric. You’ve got this infrastructure to hang it on and sometimes you can make far more interesting choices within that and still have people engaged.
How would you describe your character, Praetorian Jack?
There’s something in that that’s like the seed of humanity in him. She gives him a sense of meaning that he hasn’t really had. I mean, Anya says that he falls in love with her dream, which I like.
We’re not given much of a backstory for Praetorian Jack in the movie – did you feel like you wanted to give him a background when you took on the role?
George suggested that and I probably would have done it anyway. It was good that he suggested it because it was hard to know where to begin and actually having somebody say, ‘no, do that’ you can then just go ‘okay!’.
I went to an old drama school teacher of mine called Lloyd Trot; he’s very good at helping to get that out of an imaginative place rather than the kind of intellectual writing on a whiteboard thing.
So we workshopped it and I was zooming with Nick [Lathouris] and George [Miller]. And when I got out there, Nico and George and I filled it in more to see how the backstory echoes into the present story. That’s always useful.
How would you describe Praetorian Jack’s relationship with Furiosa?
There’s an ambiguity there, but you don’t achieve poetic ambiguity in storytelling by being ambiguous. So we actually charted it very carefully that anything romantic wasn’t something they could really allow themselves until their horizons changed. Until they’re driving away from anything, certainly anything Praetorian Jack has made. Back to this place that she has on her arm, which [Praetorian Jack] refers to as a mirage, initially.
It’s interesting because you still think it’s a mirage at the end, but it’s worth the journey for the mirage. Is the mirage better than the reality? Is integrity better than survival if survival means you’re kind of dead inside?
What was it like working with Anya Taylor-Joy?
Very exciting. Very inspiring. I really feel like we were working together – it felt like teamwork, it really felt like that was the only way we were going to achieve what we wanted to achieve.
A lot of that is turning up and seeing what happens and having a relationship with chance and letting things happen in the moment.
There’s plenty of action in the movie – it’s a Mad Max film after all! How did you feel about taking on those action-heavy scenes?
You have to do a bit of it yourself just to know how you’re approximating that when it’s a shot that involves fire as they’re hurtling down the road full of petrol!
I don’t think that was the stuff that worried me the most. I suppose you just want to make sure you’re getting everything, like the handling of the weapons, exactly right.
Then just practical stuff… if you’re going to be jumping out the War Rig, you’re not going to be doing it once or twice. You’re going to be doing a lot, until the shots, right. So how do you do that again, and again and again? How do you build the right muscles so that so you don’t just get injured…?!
What was it like shooting scenes in the War Rig?
It was different at different times… Sometimes it was THE truck. I don’t remember it ever being less than the front of it with wheels and they had various versions of it.
I think they had at least two actual full [War Rigs] but it always felt like a very solid thing and when it was stationary but needed to look like it was moving they’d fire up this big old thing that literally made it shake and there were leaf blowers. Someone said the other day ‘not normal leaf blowers? Like NASA leaf blowers right?!’ and I said, no no, normal leaf blowers! Haha!
Did you have to do much physical driving?
Mainly not because you know… fire! Fire and petrol – not a good mix haha!
What are you most looking forward to audiences experiencing when they finally get to watch Furiosa?
The unknown. I think that’s what all great stories do…
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is out in cinemas now
