From actor feuds to potentially harming the Namibian desert.
The Big Picture
- The making of
Mad Max: Fury Road
posed many challenges, starting in pre-production when the location had to be changed from Australia to Namibia. - Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron had an infamous feud while making
Mad Max: Fury Road
together. - Shooting in the Namibian desert for
Fury Road
posed challenges, leading to accusations of damaging the ecosystem.
It’s a herculean task to create a Mad Max film. Anya Taylor-Joy, star of Furiosa (2024), knows this. She recently talked about her experience making the prequel in a New York Times interview where she said, “There’s not everyone in the world that has made a Mad Max movie, and I swear to God, everyone that I’ve met that has, there’s a look in our eyes: We know.” It’s well-documented what the cast and crew went through in getting the last film in this franchise, 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, made. Surviving development hell wasn’t going to be the end of the hurdles for Fury Road — it was just the beginning. There was an infamous feud between Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron when filming began, along with several other challenges that could have derailed the production before it wrapped. Fortunately for moviegoers everywhere, the full-throttle efforts of director George Miller to capture the cruel, dusty, sun-burning world of the Wasteland saw the production to the bitter end.
Mad Max: Fury Road
Years after the collapse of civilization, the tyrannical Immortan Joe enslaves apocalypse survivors inside a desert fortress, the Citadel. When the warrior Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) leads the despot’s five wives in a daring escape, she forges an alliance with Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy), a loner and former captive. Fortified in the massive armored truck, the War Rig, they try to outrun the ruthless warlord and his henchmen in a deadly high-speed chase through the Wasteland.
- Director
- George Miller
- Cast
- Tom Hardy , Charlize Theron , Nicholas Hoult , Hugh Keays-Byrne , Josh Helman , Nathan Jones
- Main Genre
- Action
- Writers
- George Miller , Brendan McCarthy , Nick Lathouris , Byron Kennedy
Where Was ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ Filmed?
In the 2022 book, Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road by Kyle Buchanan, the pages take an extensive look at the development of Fury Road. An early section reveals how weather caused a major relocation for filming. After it seemed the project would never be made, George Miller’s luck changed and plans fell into place at long last. During the pre-production, Miller chose Broken Hill, Australia to be the desert landscape that depicts the on-screen Wasteland, the same location he filmed Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) at. And then the weather erupted into superstorms that the area had not experienced in years.
A rainy setting in Fury Road would defeat the purpose of the story Miller wanted to create, where the warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) hoards precious water at the Citadel. Although there seemed to be a promising start, Miller and his crew wouldn’t be able to use Broken Hill. In a BBC News article from 2011, Miller stated with disappointment, “What was meant to be flat, red earth is now a flower garden.” The production wasn’t going to re-enter development hell though, a new plan was made which brought the cast and crew to film in the desert of Namibia, the driest country in sub-Saharan Africa. But first, this involved a massive transportation effort to carry the life-size, post-apocalyptic vehicles featured in Fury Road.
In Kyle Buchanan’s book, executive producer Chris deFaria recalled how producer Doug Mitchell set out to get Miller’s film made, no matter what. “The studio very clearly said, ‘Look, we’re not going to go to Africa. That presents too much risk.’ Doug Mitchell’s answer to that, more or less, was to put all the vehicles on a boat and send them to Africa, but he failed to tell the studio that before the boat left the port.” Art director Richard Hobbs shared his memory of how big an undertaking it was to carry everything to Namibia. “On the ship, there were seventy-two containers full of stuff,” he said, “and that didn’t count the vehicles. These vehicles don’t fit on the back of trucks, they don’t fit in a container. You have to build custom freight boxes to move just about all of it.” Once the transportation was successful, the crew began to arrive in the city of Swakopmund, where they would reside during the shoot.
Why Did Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron Feud While Making ‘Fury Road’?
In Blood, Sweat & Chrome, J. Houston Yang, part of the film’s marketing, recalled watching the dailies for the fight scene between Max and Furiosa over the control of the War Rig, saying, “And boy f**king howdy, was it clear that those two people hated each other. They didn’t want to touch each other, they didn’t want to look at each other, they wouldn’t face each other if the camera wasn’t actively rolling.” Several factors contributed to the bitter relationship between Hardy and Theron, but the biggest reason came down to Hardy’s alleged habit of showing up hours late to set, while Theron arrived at the precise call time.
This led to an explosive outburst from Theron one day. Camera operator, Mark Goellnicht, talked about this in the oral history book, recounting how Theron yelled at Hardy when he finally came to set, “Fine the f**king c**t a hundred thousand dollars for every minute that he’s held up his crew!” This escalated the ugly rift when Hardy responded in a way Goellnicht described as “aggressive.” Eventually, things cooled down, and the feud between Hardy and Theron didn’t cause any irreversible consequences for the film. But if confrontations between the stars weren’t enough, the location brought difficulties of its own. The desert location could be merciless, and as much as the arid world of the Wasteland needed sand, it wasn’t a joyful experience for the crew.
The Desert Caused Multiple Issues for ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’
Andy Williams, the co-special effects supervisor, had been on projects that filmed in the desert before, and he knew the biggest issue was going to be the dust that blew off from the endless sand. In the behind-the-scenes featurette, Maximum Fury: Filming Fury Road (2015), Williams remembered what Miller had told him, “Dust is our friend.” And the dust did prove to be an ally to the production during a key scene. As detailed in Blood, Sweat & Chrome, it was Charlize Theron’s idea to capture the moment when Furiosa realizes her dreams of returning to the Green Place cannot be achieved.
Miller wanted to spin the camera around Furiosa during this devastating moment, but Theron had a different idea, telling the director, “I feel like we need to have a moment where she’s completely lost, completely vulnerable. We’ve seen this woman be so capable, so let’s have a moment where she’s none of those things.” George Miller liked the idea, but he wanted the weather to be perfect, saying, “We were fighting against the wind, and then it suddenly became our friend because it was blowing over the sand dune in the right away and we grabbed the moment.”
George Miller Has a Reason for Giving His Mad Max Protagonists So Few Lines
*Grunts*
Furiosa mindlessly walks away from Max and the Wives, until she collapses to her knees and screams in defeat. During this, the wind drifts the sand across the dunes for a beautifully haunting image. But even though the desert had the right look that Miller wanted for the Wasteland, and could be cinematic, there was so much sand that went everywhere when the horde of vehicles started driving. It looked great on camera, but it caused problems for the stunt drivers, who had to be playing their roles as War Boys and performing stunts with their safety in mind.
The Desert Made the Stunt Driving in ‘Fury Road’ Even More Challenging
Eugene Arendsen, one of the stunt drivers, mentioned the difficulty of driving the armada in Blood, Sweat & Chrome, “–you could never see anything, because as soon as the cars in front of you start moving, it’s a wall of dust. And in the scene where I’m driving the Razor Cola, I’ve got no windscreen, no goggles, nothing.” After a take, Arendsen needed his eyes to be washed out with saline by the medics on the set. While it was challenging and uncomfortable, no one was made to do anything reckless. Fury Road is now famous for its wild stunt work, and George Miller insisted on the performers’ safety throughout the shoot.
In Maximum Fury: Filming Fury Road, the featurette captured the day when the War Rig is flipped over in the movie’s finale. Lee Adamson was the principal War Rig driver, and he was behind the wheel for the climatic flip. It’s a controlled stunt, but Miller’s reaction upon seeing it is of instant concern over the safety of his crew. From what he saw on the monitors, it looked like the driver had injured himself, but it had been a dummy he forgot was in the shot. Adamson walked out of the crashed vehicle, injury-free. However, the same cannot be said for the desert. The production of Fury Road was accused of damaging Namibia’s ecosystem, known as the world’s oldest desert.
Filming the Wasteland Might Have Harmed the Namibian Desert
The Namibian government had been happy to allow filming because it helped the economy, but The Guardian published an article in 2013 that revealed potentially disastrous repercussions from this permission. A leaked environmental report stated that the film’s vehicles had endangered the desert. Ecological scientist Joh Henschel, who worked on the report, explained the production received approval before new legislation would have denied the shoot from using the location. There are no new updates to this, so it’s possible the desert wasn’t as damaged as initially claimed. What is confirmed is that the initial shooting schedule for Fury Road got a hard deadline from a worried studio.
The Stressful Production of ‘Fury Road’ Led to Great Success
According to Blood, Sweat & Chrome, Warner Bros. executives were concerned about the project going over budget, and this stopped the filming of crucial scenes at the Citadel that make up the beginning and ending. In that final month, the production moved to soundstages in Cape Town, where the last thing recorded on the camera was probably not what fans would expect. Camera operator Andrew AJ Johnson recalled the final day when Miller wanted to get the right shot of the bird ornament in the vehicle Nux (Nicholas Hoult) drives, “I was doing this shot of the little bird on the dashboard, and it took us two hours to shoot that three-second moment. It ended up with George sitting next to me with a bit of fishing wire, because he wanted to control how it was bobbing.” This would mark the end of the first round of filming.
Blood, Sweat & Chrome explored what came next. Almost a year later, the production got the green light to film the essential scenes at the Citadel. Then there was the tireless work by Miller and his editor and wife Margaret Sixel to cut the footage into a watchable film. But throughout development hell, a feud between the main stars, and the merciless desert, Miller’s passion for completing his vision persevered. After it was finally released, the blockbuster success surely made all the stress and intricate work worth it for the cast and crew. Fury Road involved a laborious feat of filmmaking that could match the intensity of fighting against Immortan Joe’s fanatical army. And it sounds like the production of Furiosa was the exact same.
Mad Max: Fury Road is streaming on Hulu.
This article was originally published on collider.com