Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road

Dedication

To my parents, Kirk and Linda

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Author’s Note

Cast of Characters

Part I: Building a World Gone Mad

Introduction

Chapter 1: Eyewitness Accounts of Those Who Survived

Chapter 2: The Mad Mastermind

Chapter 3: Everyone in the Old World Had a Show

Chapter 4: The History Men

Chapter 5: Who Killed the World?

Chapter 6: I Live, I Die, I Live Again

Chapter 7: Where Are You, Max?

Chapter 8: Pick Up What You Can and Run

Chapter 9: Witness Me

Chapter 10: We Were Basically Defeated

Part II: Shoot to Thrill

Chapter 11: Preparing for War

Chapter 12: Oh, What a Lovely Day

Chapter 13: My Name Is Max

Chapter 14: It Was All in George’s Head

Chapter 15: Figuring Out Furiosa

Chapter 16: Out Here, Everything Hurts

Chapter 17: All Hail the Immortan

Chapter 18: The Last Great Action Film

Chapter 19: The War Party

Chapter 20: Shiny and Chrome

Chapter 21: We Are Not Things

Chapter 22: The Many Mothers

Chapter 23: Dudes Were Coming in Through the Roof

Chapter 24: Fire and Blood

Chapter 25: Some Furious Vexation

Chapter 26: Spent and Enriched

Part III: End of the Road

Chapter 27: If You Can’t Fix What’s Broken

Chapter 28: "That’s Not a Mad Max Ending"

Chapter 29: The Final Battle

Chapter 30: What Was Lost

Chapter 31: Some Kind of Redemption

Chapter 32: Awaited in Valhalla

Chapter 33: Nothing Good Comes Easy

Acknowledgments

Sources

Index

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Author’s Note

In the world of Mad Max, a memory can become a legend based simply on who’s doing the telling. Stories from the past are passed down from History Men to their eager listeners, and as these tales are told and retold, the truth of what really happened is left up to the audience to piece together.

This oral history about the two-decade making of Mad Max: Fury Road is primarily comprised of over 130 new interviews I conducted with members of the cast and crew, as well as a number of the film’s notable admirers. Most of these conversations took place in 2020 and 2021, though a handful of the interviews occurred around the time of the film’s release in 2015.

Whenever people were unavailable to speak, I pulled from other published interviews, audio recordings, and video footage to provide additional perspectives. Many of the interviews have been condensed and edited for style and clarity, and a full list of sources is at the end of the book.

Cast of Characters

The Visionary

George Miller, director, co-writer, and producer of Mad Max: Fury Road

The Cast

Courtney Eaton, Cheedo the Fragile

Megan Gale, The Valkyrie

Coco Jack Gillies, Glory the Child

Jennifer Hagan, Miss Giddy

Tom Hardy, Max

Josh Helman, Slit

Nicholas Hoult, Nux

John Howard, The People Eater

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Splendid Angharad

Jon Iles, Ace

iOTA, Coma, the Doof Warrior

Melissa Jaffer, Keeper of the Seeds

Melita Jurisic, Vuvalini

Hugh Keays-Byrne, Immortan Joe

Antoinette Kellerman, Vuvalini

Riley Keough, Capable

Zoë Kravitz, Toast the Knowing

Abbey Lee, The Dag

Richard Norton, The Prime Imperator

Chris Patton, Morsov

Joy Smithers, Vuvalini

Charlize Theron, Furiosa

The Crew

Eugene Arendsen, stunt driver

Jenny Beavan, costume designer

Eric Blakeney, writer

Steve Bland, adviser

Jasin Boland, still photographer

Matt Boug, bike cosmetics and salvage artist

David Burr, director of photography, second unit

Tom Clapham, production runner

Chris deFaria, executive producer

James Doherty, unit assistant

Henry Dray, transport manager

Eve Ensler, consultant

Eugene Fillios, trailer editor

Mark Gatt, steelworker

Sean Genders, senior prosthetic artist

Colin Gibson, production designer

Robyn Glaser, second assistant director, action unit

Mark Goellnicht, camera operator

Dayna Grant, stunt performer

Scotty Gregory, stunt driver

Todd Matthew Grossman, audition camera

Dane Hallett, key prop maker

Richard Hobbs, art director

Shira Hockman, art director

Tom Holkenborg, score

Dean Hood, unit production manager

Natascha Hopkins, stunt performer

Petrina Hull, production and development executive

Alison Ingram, visual effects coordinator

Andrew Jackson, visual effects supervisor

Chris Jenkins, rerecording mixer

Belinda Johns, assistant to George Miller

Andrew AJ Johnson, camera operator

Shane Kavanagh, extra

Lora Kennedy, casting

Ronna Kress, casting

Adam Kuiper, key grip

Nico Lathouris, writer

Jacinta Leong, art director

Mark Mangini, sound editor

Kelly Marcel, writer

Brendan McCarthy, writer

Samantha McGrady, key second assistant director

Michael Mekash, makeup

Victoria Mielewska, dialect coach

Doug Mitchell, producer

Anthony Natoli, engineer

Mark Natoli, panel beater

James Nicholas, assistant

Guy Norris, second unit director/stunts

Harlan Norris, stunt performer

Harrison Norris, stunt performer

Chris O’Hara, on-set second assistant director

Ryan Osmond, additional assistant director, production assistant

Peter Pound, principal vehicle designer and storyboard artist

Massey Rafani, marketing

Tim Ridge, EPK, director (The Madness of Max)

Michele Robertson, awards publicist

Mick Roughan, stunt rigger

Ricky Schamburg, first assistant camera

John Seale, director of photography

Georgina Selby, script supervisor, action unit

Mark Sexton, lead storyboard artist

Zeb Simpson, video assist operator

Margaret Sixel, editor

Iain Smith, producer

Brendan Smithers, construction manager

Ben Smith-Petersen, stunt performer

Matt Taylor, stunt driver

Lisa Thompson, set decorator

Matt Town, postproduction supervisor

Nadia Townsend, assistant dramaturg

Michael Ulman, salvage artist

Tate Van Oudtshoorn, set dresser

Courtenay Valenti, executive producer

Lesley Vanderwalt, hair and makeup designer

P. J. Voeten, producer, first assistant director

Michael Wannenmacher, production assistant

Kento Watanabe, visual effects editor

Cory Watson, director (Going Mad: The Battle of Fury Road)

David White, sound designer

Andy Williams, special effects supervisor

Stuart Williamson, stunt performer

Shyam Toast Yadav, VFX data wrangler

J. Houston Yang, marketing

The Rest

James Cameron, director (Aliens)

Scott Carlin, former EVP at Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution

Justin Chang, film critic at the Los Angeles Times

Nia DaCosta, director (Candyman)

Manohla Dargis, film critic at the New York Times

Gregory Ellwood, journalist at The Playlist

Scott Feinberg, awards columnist at The Hollywood Reporter

Gal Gadot, actress

Pete Hammond, awards columnist at Deadline

Karen Han, journalist at Slate

Ron Hayes, former senior vice president of Warner Bros. toy division

John Horn, journalist

Joshua Horowitz, journalist at MTV News

Patty Jenkins, director (Wonder Woman)

Dave Karger, TCM host and Oscar pundit for Today

Richard Lawson, film critic at Vanity Fair

Gregg Maday, former senior vice president at Warner Bros. Television

Drew McWeeny, writer at Formerly Dangerous

Amy Nicholson, host, The Canon

Patton Oswalt, actor

Hutch Parker, former president of production at 20th Century Fox

Gina Prince-Bythewood, director (The Old Guard)

Peter Ramsey, director (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse)

Dan Romanelli, former chairman of Warner Consumer Products

David Sims, journalist at The Atlantic

Kris Tapley, former awards editor at Variety

Anya Taylor-Joy, actress

Anne Thompson, editor-at-large at Indiewire

Alison Willmore, film critic at New York magazine

Edgar Wright, director (Last Night in Soho)

Jen Yamato, journalist at the Los Angeles Times

Ziwe, comedian

Part I

Building a World Gone Mad

Introduction

For 55 million years, the Namib Desert has been where things go to die. Thought to be the oldest desert on the planet, it’s a barren wasteland almost completely devoid of human life, a place where the coastline is still studded with the remains of a thousand shipwrecks.

And in September 2012, it was where Mad Max: Fury Road would crash and burn.

Nearly ten thousand miles separate that south African desert from Los Angeles, but midway through Fury Road’s very long 2012 shoot, plenty of stories about the troubled production had already made their way back to the Hollywood rumor mill. Was it true that the film was wildly behind schedule and over budget because its mercurial lead, Tom Hardy, often failed to show up to set? Had a massive blowup between Hardy and his costar, Charlize Theron, required an outside intervention just so the film wouldn’t collapse?

And what the hell was George Miller making, anyway? Though the director had spent months filming Fury Road in Namibia, the footage he’d sent back to Warner Bros. left many executives freaked out. The dialogue sounded incomprehensible, the action scenes appeared astonishingly dangerous, and since Miller wasn’t working from a traditional screenplay—instead, in an unprecedented move, he had plotted the film out solely through storyboards—studio executives worried that Fury Road would make no sense once it was cut together. If this expensive boondoggle turned out to be a box-office bomb, forget just losing their jobs: They might never work in Hollywood again.

Jeff Robinov, the bald and beleaguered head of Warner Bros. Pictures, had been sending underlings to the desert to check on Fury Road ever since the movie’s June start. But during the last week of September, Robinov himself flew over to Namibia to take control.

The production was based in a massive tent city in the middle of the desert, a troubled oasis where several hundred crew members now waited to learn their film’s fate. The first person Robinov encountered there in the sands was P. J. Voeten, Fury Road’s loyal producer and first assistant director. We’re going to finish this film with or without George, Robinov told him.

Under his breath, Voeten muttered, "Good luck with that."

Eventually, Robinov made his way to Miller, who cuts a deceptively mild figure: At five foot seven, with wavy white hair, twinkly eyes, and a pair of amber-colored teashade glasses, he has the pleasant Australian lilt and chatty disposition of a favorite grandfather. Perhaps because of that, Miller has been underestimated his whole career, with rogue crew members and studio executives frequently trying to seize control from a man who simply will not budge.

Robinov was hardly the first money man to clash with Miller, but on that day in the desert, he threatened to be the very last. Though there were still three months of shooting left on Fury Road and many crucial scenes still to come, Robinov told Miller he would shut the film down early and then laid down an impossible ultimatum: With such limited time left, Miller could either shoot Fury Road’s third-act chase or sacrifice it to film the still-unshot beginning and ending of the movie.

No matter what decision Miller made, the outcome would be disastrous. The director had been imagining his dream project for over a decade and a half, and the head of the studio was about to blow a massive hole through it.

But this was just another catastrophe on a project that was beset with them. Fury Road was one of the most elaborate and difficult shoots in Hollywood history, and the making of the movie stretched over two decades and three studios. Still, over years of countless obstacles that would have prompted almost any other artist to give up, Miller persevered. He could not quit until he had told this story, and what he fought for is now considered by many to be a masterpiece and the finest action movie ever made.

Over several interviews with Miller, I had to ask: How did he keep the faith for so many years when everything was stacked against the making of this film?

The real answer is you have no choice, he said bluntly. I just had to keep going. Then, as if he were a character from his own movie, Miller added, You can’t surrender.

Though the scope of Fury Road is massive, the film’s postapocalyptic plot is boiled down to its barest essence: Nearly the entire movie is told on the run as drifter Max Rockatansky (Hardy) joins forces with the determined driver Furiosa (Theron) to spirit five young sex slaves to safety. Along the way, they are aided by the zealous turncoat Nux (Nicholas Hoult) and pursued across the desert by a staggering armada of vehicles commanded by the warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), who wants to reclaim his harem of Wives and murder his rogue lieutenant Furiosa for freeing the young women in the first place.

But while Fury Road initially appears to be a simple car chase stretched to feature length, there is plenty going on underneath the hood, and the subjects that Miller smuggled into all that spectacle were subversive and unexpectedly powerful: How often do you see an action movie that tackles up-to-the-minute issues like environmental collapse, female empowerment, and resource hoarding by the rich? The world here is so detailed and incredibly realized that it resonates well beyond the borders of the frame. A film like Fury Road isn’t just one of a kind—in this era of increasingly bland superhero movies, it’s the sort of film that could probably never be made again.

Many thought Miller couldn’t pull it off, and some of those doubters were even working on the movie. To be fair, by the time Fury Road hit theaters in 2015, Miller was seventy years old and had not directed a live-action film in seventeen years. It had been even longer—three tumultuous decades—since the world had seen a new Mad Max movie, and original series star Mel Gibson became professionally toxic in the interim, requiring a thorough rethink of what Miller had in mind.

And what exactly Miller had in that prodigious mind remained the point of some contention. The confusingly piecemeal way he filmed Fury Road could frustrate his actors, who felt adrift and often clashed with Miller and each other. During the better part of a year spent in the vast, remote desert of Namibia—surrounded by sandstorms, shrieking stuntmen, and insane vehicular mayhem—there was such an emphasis on making this fantasy world feel real that the conflict of the characters even seeped into the actual lives of the cast and crew. You either had faith in Miller’s mad vision or you struggled.

Almost every movie is hard to make, but few movies have a making-of story as wild, long, or difficult as Fury Road, and absolutely none of them turned out as influential and awe-inspiring. There’s no doubt now that the movie is an all-time classic, but an important question still remains: Did Fury Road become great despite being forged in fire, or because of it?

Chapter 1

Eyewitness Accounts of Those Who Survived

In almost every possible way, Mad Max: Fury Road is a movie that should not exist.

It’s the fourth film in a long-running franchise . . . yet it was hailed by critics as one of the most original movies ever made. It’s a big-studio action movie . . . yet it was nominated for Best Picture and won several Oscars.

And while it was a major hit when it was released in 2015, earning $375 million worldwide, Fury Road has only become bigger in the years since: At the end of the 2010s, nearly every major publication—including the New York Times, USA Today, Rolling Stone, and the Los Angeles Times—named it one of the best films of the decade.

With its iconic characters, exhilarating stunt sequences, and incredible ingenuity, it’s only natural to wonder how this modern classic was made. Even A-list auteurs can’t figure Fury Road out: Parasite director Bong Joon Ho has said that the sheer scale of the movie brings him to tears, while Steven Soderbergh put it more bluntly. I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film, Soderbergh once said, and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.

* * *

Gina Prince-Bythewood (director, The Old Guard) You watch Fury Road, and you’re really pushed back in your seat. Even knowing all the tricks that directors use, you still can’t figure out how he did it.

Tom Hardy (Max) It’s Technicolor, surreal, and over-the-top with all these car crashes that are actually happening. It’s magic. I haven’t ever seen anything like it.

Edgar Wright (director, Last Night in Soho) It’s an engine of pure cinema.

Patty Jenkins (director, Wonder Woman) How often do you see something so mind-blowing? First of all, George’s taste is unparalleled—he’s got the edgiest, most unbelievable eye. And this visceral, gripping vitality that comes out of the action is stunning.

Jen Yamato (journalist, Los Angeles Times) It makes me feel more alive just watching it, and that feeling has never gone away as I’ve watched it over and over and over again.

Patton Oswalt (actor) I don’t have words for it—it should just be holy fucking shit.

Nia DaCosta (director, Candyman) The audacity of it all! That’s the sort of thing that initially got me into directing—the fact that you could literally do anything—and what George did is to say, Yes, I’m going to go to the desert in Namibia to make this completely tonally wackadoo movie. And somehow it fucking works. I never would have been able to pull this movie off. It sounds like hell!

George Miller (director) Every day was physically demanding. There were no soft days. It was very noisy, very dusty, and very arduous.

Robyn Glaser (second assistant director, action unit) No one can say they’ve worked on a movie like Mad Max.

Charlize Theron (Furiosa) Hands down, this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

Jasin Boland (still photographer) I think it was our Apocalypse Now, I really do.

Dane Hallett (key prop maker) You’re not really allowed to make those movies anymore. You’re not allowed to commit to this fucking insanity and get away with it. The studios are too scared.

Sean Genders (senior prosthetic artist) We call it the most expensive independent film ever made.

Doug Mitchell (producer) It was destined, one day, to be what it is today. It’s now in the library of films, but there were umpteen times where it was irrelevant: Nah, that’s never going to happen.

Tom Hardy Looking back now, it’s impossible to put into words what being a part of it meant to me. It left me irrevocably changed.

Riley Keough (Capable) It was one of the wildest, most intense experiences of my life—to this day. Every moment is so emotional to me.

Abbey Lee (The Dag) It was like being in a very tumultuous relationship with the love of your life.

Charlize Theron Like anything that matters in your life or has some worth to it, it comes with complicated feelings. I feel a mixture of extreme joy that we achieved what we did, and I also get a little bit of a hole in my stomach. There’s a level of the body remembers trauma related to the experience of shooting this film that’s still there for me.

Nicholas Hoult (Nux) It was chaos out there, to be honest.

Kelly Marcel (writer) Sometimes I think, Was it made to be that way? Was it made to be really, really, really hard? George is not a person that wants to see one suffer. He really is the sweetest, kindest, gentlest man. But it’s just like . . . is he an evil genius?

Josh Helman (Slit) If you ever sat me down and showed me Fury Road, knowing nothing, and told me to draw the director, it certainly wouldn’t be a gray-haired man who’s incredibly soft-spoken and kind. It’s something special that these two things exist so indelibly in him at the same time.

Edgar Wright You have to kind of wonder when you meet the man, Where does it come from? Then he’ll tell you.

Chapter 2

The Mad Mastermind

Even some of George Miller’s closest collaborators still regard him as a bit of an enigma. George is a master and it’s all inside his head, says Charlize Theron. Sometimes I want to climb in and spend time in there to understand it better.

From a young age, Miller dreamed bigger than seemed possible. Hollywood could hardly have been farther away from Chinchilla, the rural town in the Australian outback where Miller grew up, but the young boy was mad about the movies anyway. Born March 3, 1945, to Greek immigrants Jim and Angela Miller, George and his three brothers lived for Saturday matinees at the nearby Star Theatre. Even when the films that played there were deemed too violent for children, Miller would sneak into a crawl space beneath the theater and listen for the sounds of gunshots, fistfights, and squealing cars as they filtered down through the floorboards. The movie being watched up above could only be surpassed by what he was assembling in his own imagination.

There was no such thing as a local film industry while Miller was coming of age, so the creative young man initially pursued work as a doctor, attending medical school at the University of New South Wales alongside his twin brother, John. But a sudden opportunity to swerve toward moviemaking presaged a career full of left turns: As a director, Miller would go on to make family films, wild action spectaculars, and fact-based dramas.

It’s an unconventional résumé, to be sure, but Miller is an unconventional figure. How could a man so mild-mannered create such eccentric visions, and what gives him the determination to see them through whenever Hollywood tries to tame his sensibilities? Blessed with a doctor’s intellectual rigor and a self-taught auteur’s willingness to break the rules, Miller has become one of Hollywood’s most idiosyncratic filmmakers. But that career did not come without conflict.

* * *

Drew McWeeny (writer, Formerly Dangerous) He has always been fascinating because of his range. The fact that the man who made The Road Warrior also made Lorenzo’s Oil and The Witches of Eastwick and then could make Babe: Pig in the City and Happy Feet is a mystery to some degree. I mean, when you look at The Road Warrior and Mad Max, those movies feel like they were made by these lunatics on another planet and then beamed to us.

Courtney Eaton (Cheedo the Fragile) George is the sweetest man on this planet and it’s crazy that he has these things that come out of his mind.

Edgar Wright George is essentially haunted by these images of the tragic deaths of people he knew and complete strangers growing up in an Australian car culture.

George Miller There’s no question that Mad Max was influenced by my childhood in rural Queensland. By the time we were out of our teens, several of our peers had already been killed or badly injured in car accidents, and there were those long flat roads where there was no speed limit and people would just go. It wasn’t until I ended up being a doctor in emergency and seeing carnage as a result of car accidents that it kind of got into me.

Cory Watson (director, Going Mad: The Battle of Fury Road) He trained to be a doctor, all the while nurturing this nascent interest in filmmaking.

George Miller I really did like studying medicine, but I started to see myself in flux.

* * *

After graduating from medical school at the University of New South Wales, Miller became a resident at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney. But even as he committed himself to a demanding career, another path began to beckon: A short film Miller made with his brother Chris gained them entry into a directors’ workshop at the University of Melbourne, where Miller met his future producing partner, a cinema-savvy gearhead named Byron Kennedy.

Miller and Kennedy soon collaborated on their own short, the black comedy Violence in the Cinema, Part 1. Made for only fifteen hundred dollars, the award-winning short vaulted Miller into a budding Australian New Wave of filmmakers that included Peter Weir (Dead Poets Society), Gillian Armstrong (Little Women), and Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy). Besotted with the creative possibilities of cinema, Miller decided to forgo his original career plan for a calling that was much less certain.

* * *

Tim Ridge (director, The Madness of Max) A film crew member from the original Mad Max said, As a doctor, George Miller made a very good director.

George Miller A filmmaker has an obligation to look at the world from many points of view, and that’s exactly what a doctor of any worth does. You’re looking at those individuals during surgery, or even postmortem. You’re looking inside of them; you’re looking at them as a full human being.

Amy Nicholson (host, The Canon) There’s this moral code at the center of a George Miller film where nobody’s life is cheap, whether you’re a pig or a penguin or one of the last human beings on this planet.

Guy Norris (second unit director, stunts) Those early images from being a doctor stuck with him and shaped a lot of what he made later.

George Miller I wouldn’t be the filmmaker I am if I hadn’t had that life experience. It resonated with me, the feeling of working in casualty at St. Vincent’s Hospital and being quite disturbed by the violence and road carnage and the way we processed it. We accepted it.

Tim Ridge George had this blue Bongo van, and him and Byron used to drive around Victoria on weekends. They’d go to any sort of medical emergency and patch people up.

Edgar Wright They were raising money for the first Mad Max by doing double shifts as EMTs and essentially performing roadside surgery on the victims of horrific car crashes.

* * *

At age thirty-one, having collected $350,000 from family, friends, and private investors, Miller prepared to make his debut feature, Mad Max. In this down-and-dirty thriller, Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson, plucked straight out of drama school) is a young highway patrolman tasked with chasing down a gang of depraved bikers led by the maniacal Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne). For a film that would launch a franchise, Mad Max ends on a surprisingly bleak note, as Max’s wife and child are killed by the biker gang, and he becomes consumed with revenge.

Filmed in a hurry at the end of 1977, the production was nothing short of a guerrilla-filmmaking experience, as Miller and Kennedy shot on locations they hadn’t secured permits for and learned as they went. But the film’s rawness was an asset whenever Miller staged an action sequence: These car chases felt far more visceral than anything a more polished production would dare to attempt.

* * *

Jen Yamato It’s interesting to watch Fury Road and the first Mad Max in proximity to each other. He had a fraction of the resources to make that, but the themes that were urgent to him at the time are still as important by the time you get to Fury Road. And there’s an economy to it. You hear him talk about it and he says, I didn’t know what I was doing, but he took a lot from silent filmmaking that really works.

George Miller When I started making the first Mad Max, I didn’t have very much experience and I found the process absolutely bewildering. I thought if I prepared properly, it was a matter of execution. What I didn’t know was that things could go wrong, and they do, every day.

* * *

Only four hectic days into shooting Mad Max, Miller’s stunt coordinator Grant Page and leading lady Rosie Bailey were involved in a motorcycle accident as he sped her to set: Cut off by a sixteen-wheeler, Page crashed his bike and both he and Bailey were left with broken legs. The movie shut down for two weeks to replace Bailey, allow Page to recover, and reassess a chaotic production where much of the crew was already skeptical of Miller’s vision.

Overwhelmed by all the turmoil on his feature-film debut, Miller considered asking a more experienced director to take over.

* * *

George Miller My nerves were shot. I said, I’ll step down as a director and I’ll help produce the movie and get it made, and that way, we’ll get through it. Effectively, I was fired as the director of the movie because I really kind of thought, We haven’t even started, and people are gonna die.

* * *

But Miller found himself unable to shake the vision he’d created in his head. Hours after telling Byron Kennedy that he planned to abdicate the director’s chair, Miller changed his mind: He had to make the movie his way, or else it just wouldn’t be Mad Max.

* * *

George Miller I said, Look, I’m not an arrogant man, but one arrogance I do have is that I can make movies. And I knew deep down how to make the movie, even though all these things were going wrong.

Tim Ridge So many crew members thought he didn’t know what he was doing. They were worried that all this effort might’ve been in vain, that what they were making wasn’t going to cut together into something successful.

George Miller I spent a year cutting the film by myself, and every day, I woke up having to confront all the mistakes I made and somehow salvage them. That’s the worst thing, when you’re saying to yourself, Why didn’t I solve that problem better? Why did I give up on that day and not push harder? Those endless recriminations basically fueled me for all those things that were to come.

Tim Ridge There was such a long postproduction period that a lot of the crew went, "God, that film is probably never going to come out. We finished filming it in ’78, and here we are well into ’79, and it’s still not out. What the hell’s going on?"

George Miller Byron had more confidence in the movie than I did. By then I thought, I don’t think this film is going to find an audience anywhere.

* * *

Mad Max finally debuted in Australian cinemas on April 12, 1979. Film critics who were shocked by its visceral violence called the film a nasty piece of work, blatantly exploitative, and morally queasy.

With audiences, it was an immediate sensation.

* * *

Hugh Keays-Byrne (Immortan Joe) When you sat down and watched Mad Max 1 for the first time, everybody in the cinema went, Oh fuck, what’s this?

Sean Genders I remember being a thirteen-year-old boy, seeing the ad on TV, and my father saying, Who’d want to see that rubbish? And me going, I do. I saw it in cinemas, and it had a profound effect on what I like about film.

Edgar Wright There are bits in that movie that you’ll never really forget. The final shot of Mel Gibson driving off with an explosion behind him and not even flinching, it’s something that was burned into my head.

Tim Ridge The budget was $350,000 and within the first few years, it returned over $100 million—it was in The Guinness Book of Records for cost-to-profit ratio. There seemed to be so many things going against it, so for it to turn around and become what it’s become . . .

George Miller It was a very valuable experience to have something that felt like a failure. The irony, of course, is that the film was a great success, but had I not been confronted with all my mistakes, that success would have really been pretty damaging, in the sense that it would have made me artistically hubristic, which I subsequently recognized in a lot of directors and artists I know.

Because I went through that year of recrimination, I started a much deeper inquiry about how the first Mad Max had somehow tapped into a universal archetype, and that led to reading Joseph Campbell and everything that follows. I can promise you, that would not have happened had I thought, Gee, I’m really cut out to make films. What’s next? I’ll just do what I did last time.

* * *

In a bid to redeem the miserable experience he had making the first movie, Miller poured everything he’d learned from it into a sequel, the bigger and bolder Mad Max 2. While the first, stripped-down Mad Max film was like a car-chase version of Death Wish, the second left its revenge-thriller origins behind and fully embraced postapocalyptic spectacle. And Miller, inspired by Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, began to recontextualize Max as a near-mythological figure.

This time around, civilization was nowhere to be found: As Max roams a blasted desert wasteland at the end of the world (the movie was filmed in Broken Hill, Australia) he helps a community of refugees defend themselves from vicious marauders trying to steal their fuel supply. With its outrageous outfits, dystopian setting, and spare dialogue—Gibson has only fourteen lines—Mad Max 2 feels the most like Fury Road of any of the original movies, and its car chases are still among the most propulsive ever filmed.

* * *

George Miller Mad Max 2 was different. The budget wasn’t the issue. The biggest shift in Mad Max 2 was my head. I felt utterly defeated by the first Mad Max. I felt that the film was unreleasable. What I didn’t realize is that filmmaking is tough, and it wasn’t until I spoke to Phil Noyce and Peter Weir, and they said, Oh, it’s always tough, that, as simple as that sounds, it really changed my attitude. We ended up having a very good experience on that film. I felt as though I was able to achieve something much closer to the film in my head than I did with Mad Max. I think every film that you do is a kind of rehearsal for the next one.

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The second Mad Max was retitled The Road Warrior when Warner Bros. released it in the United States on May 21, 1982, and this time around, critics had caught up with Miller’s vision: Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times that The Road Warrior was one of the most imaginative Australian films yet released in this country, while Roger Ebert called it exhilarating and a movie like no other.

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Amy Nicholson The second film on a franchise is often the best one, or often captures the franchise as we think of it: You see that in Terminator 2 or in Aliens, and you absolutely see that here. The Road Warrior is where George Miller takes a good idea and blows it up into a mythology, into a worldview. It’s this moment where Max goes from a B-movie hero to something larger-than-life.

Edgar Wright And because George Miller is operating outside Hollywood, it makes it even more impressive that he’s able to do it on his own terms and match films with ten times the