For George Miller, Anya Taylor-Joy and their crew, a series of natural disasters made for an arduous production.

In the hardscrabble, postapocalyptic world of Mad Max, nothing is more precious than water and gasoline. But
to actually make Mad Max movies requires an even rarer commodity: faith.

Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy, who fought during the difficult and chaotic making of the 2015 Mad Max: Fury Road, later said they wished they had placed more faith in the vision of George Miller, the director. The people who greenlit Fury Road didn’t fully understand it, either: Warner Bros. executives flew to Namibia, the site of the filming, and demanded that Miller cease production before the movie was complete, then crafted an alternative edit in an effort to undermine Miller’s final cut.

Against all odds, Miller was able to release a one-of-a-kind, Oscar-winning masterwork. Now, he has returned with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, a prequel to Fury Road, which premiered last week at the Cannes Film Festival and will be released in NZ cinemas May 23.

Did Miller feel the wind at his back while making Furiosa, since the reception to Fury Road vindicated his vision?

“It definitely made it easier,” he said. “It didn’t make it effortless.”

That last point may be understating things just a bit: A bevy of natural disasters, including floods and the coronavirus, pushed the production’s budget to US$233 million ($382 million), making it the most expensive movie ever shot in Australia. At every point in its making, Miller was faced with challenges as outsized as the fantasy world he laboured to create.

“Furiosa was just as difficult in many different ways to Fury Road,” said Doug Mitchell, who produced both films.

Though many prequels are hastily conceived to pad out a hit franchise, Furiosa has been percolating for nearly two decades. When a 2002 incarnation of Fury Road that was meant to star Mel Gibson fell apart in preproduction, Miller and his co-writer, Nico Lathouris, spent the next few years drilling down deeper on the characters, devising a back story so strong for Furiosa that before they knew it, they had written a screenplay. Unlike Fury Road, which takes place over three turbocharged days, Furiosa spans 15 years and tracks Furiosa from childhood, when she’s kidnapped by a biker gang, to adulthood, when she plots revenge while working as a War Rig driver for the dictator Immortan Joe.

With Japanese animator Mahiro Maeda, Miller initially explored the possibility of turning the Furiosa screenplay into an anime feature. Delays tabled that idea, but even when Fury Road came out and reignited interest in the franchise, the future of Furiosa remained far from certain: Two years after Fury Road came out, at a time many directors would be busy readying a new instalment, Miller and Mitchell instead sued Warner Bros. for unpaid earnings related to Fury Road.

That lawsuit could have scuttled plans to make Furiosa, though the filmmaker felt justified in pursuing his grievance.

“It’s part of the process,” said Miller, who previously sued Warner Bros. when the studio dismissed him from the 1997 movie Contact. Miller noted that during postproduction on Fury Road, the studio tried to shore up financing by adding producers Brett Ratner (who was later accused of sexual harassment by multiple women, allegations he has denied), and Steven Mnuchin (who would go on to become Donald Trump’s Treasury secretary). “The last thing you want to do is that, knowing that some people just gave their all on the film,” Miller said.

Once the lawsuit was settled to Miller’s satisfaction, he reconvened several of the department heads who had won Oscars for their work on Fury Road — including production designer Colin Gibson, editor Margaret Sixel, and costume designer Jenny Beavan — and began years of prep work on Furiosa. When it came to casting, CGI was considered to de-age Theron for the prequel, but Miller concluded that the technology employed in films like The Irishman was not yet convincing enough. Instead, rising star Anya Taylor-Joy (The Queen’s Gambit) was tapped to play young Furiosa.

“When George was like, ‘I’ll see you in Australia, we’re doing this,’ I remember I held myself really, really tight,” Taylor-Joy said. “That’s one of my favourite moments ever, when something is just brimming with absolute potential and excitement.” Still, one of her hopes was dashed early on: Though the character is famously bald in Fury Road, Miller was so taken with Taylor-Joy’s long locks that he instructed her not to shave her head, instead working her long hair into several action set pieces.

“I had to really justify her having hair,” Taylor-Joy said. “I was so ready to shave my head; I’d wanted to do it my whole life!”

For Furiosa’s chief foe, Dementus, Miller cast against type with Chris Hemsworth, best known as the Marvel superhero Thor. “I have played the hero so many times and felt the restrictions and expectations of that,” Hemsworth said. “With this, I felt such freedom to make decisions that were a little more unexpected.”

Those choices included a squawking Australian accent that Hemsworth likened to a chatty sea gull, as well as a prosthetic nose partly selected to scramble the audience’s expectations of what Hemsworth can deliver as an actor. “For me to look in the mirror and see something different staring back really helps in the transformation,” he said, though it meant spending long hours in the makeup chair on an already-arduous shoot.

“Your day feels like it should almost be finishing by the time you’re getting on camera,” Hemsworth said. “I don’t know that I would have been able to keep that up if it wasn’t for someone as supportive as George.”

Taylor-Joy agreed. “I would go and spend all day covered in blood and with people who were suffering, and then I’d get back, fall asleep, and do it again,” she said, noting that Miller’s sense of imagination helped make the movie’s outlandish situations feel surprisingly real.

“He’s so smart — a bit Sun Tzu, a bit Art of War,” she said. “He creates situations, and then he shoots it.”

Miller originally planned to make Fury Road in Broken Hill, Australia, where he had shot the second Mad Max film, The Road Warrior. When a freak superstorm turned the red, flat earth there into a flower garden, the production decamped to Namibia, but years later on Furiosa, the filmmakers vowed to shoot in Australia, come rain or come shine.

Furiosa began filming in spring 2022, and once again, the typically arid region was beset by record storms and flooding. “If we need to stop making films, we could become water diviners,” said the film’s action designer, Guy Norris.

The new reality required contingency plans, additional computer graphics and a lot of improvisation, like moving a huge action sequence from the wet patch of desert it had been earmarked for to a somewhat drier airport runway. “You have to deal with the chaos that comes with filmmaking, and there is a control underneath it,” Mitchell said, “but you sure as hell don’t control much.”

The coronavirus also took a toll on key production members, including Miller, who at one point had to direct the film remotely while stricken. “Two o’clock in the morning, your phone starts ringing: ‘I can’t come to work because I’ve got Covid,’” said Lesley Vanderwalt, who oversaw the film’s extensive hair-and-makeup team. “You were constantly juggling things.”

Though Furiosa features fewer action sequences than Fury Road, what’s there is enormous: Its centrepiece action scene, which the production dubbed “Stowaway to Nowhere,” took 78 days spread out over nine months. “That was easily one of the most incredible things I’ve ever been a part of, and the hardest thing I’ve ever been a part of,” Taylor-Joy said.

Some 145 vehicles were crafted for the film, including an eye-popping motorcycle chariot for Dementus and an even bigger War Rig than the one Furiosa drove in the previous film. “I was a great fan of the as-real-as-possible” mandate of Fury Road,” said Gibson, the production designer, who explained that Miller’s expanded sense of scale on Furiosa required additional CGI embellishment. As the biker horde led by Dementus swells to the thousands, so do the special effects needed to realise it.

“I wouldn’t be able to build 6,000 motorbikes of very different cultures, classes, sizes and operations, so there was always going to be a larger CG component to how it was put together,” Gibson said. “I’m a bit of an old-fashioned girl, so I found that a little harder to deal with.”

So did social-media users, who criticised the first trailer for Furiosa for employing more apparent visual effects than the previous film. But Miller spoke glowingly of what new technology made possible on Furiosa, from motion-capture stunt work to deepfake effects that allowed him to use Fury Road characters even when the original actors had died.

“It’s somehow part of what keeps my interest in cinema,” he said. “The tools can add a freshness.”

Miller is contemplating one more trip to the wasteland, should Furiosa be successful enough to get a new instalment greenlit. That new project would also be a prequel to Fury Road, following Max a year before he crosses paths with Furiosa as he helps a young mother whose daughter is being held captive in an underground city.

In a movie that once again puts Max at the forefront, would the filmmakers want Hardy back after the contentious Fury Road shoot? “Tom’s always very interested, and I think he was an amazing end result in Fury Road,” said Mitchell, who cautioned that no offers have been made. Most of Miller’s department heads would be on board for one more film, though Gibson said he was on the fence.

“I’ve got a feeling that if it continues down the CG route, they will have scanned everything I’ve already done,” he joked. “And AI is just available to do pretty much what I do, but without what the algorithm’s missing, which is the broken home, the broken heart, and the slightly disordered mentality.”

Whether Miller would direct the film himself remains to be seen. The 79-year-old filmmaker is developing the sixth Mad Max movie alongside two other longtime passion projects, but he may make it a higher priority if it’s different enough from Fury Road and Furiosa.

“If you’re just doing it just to repeat a variation of what you’ve already done, that’s what you don’t have much of an appetite for because you’re not learning,” Miller said. “Even at this late age, I’m astonished how much I’m learning.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Kyle Buchanan

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