I remember thinking, ‘Holy cow, this could work out OK!’ I landed in Sydney, and I went to my colleagues and I said, ‘Look, I think there’s another Mad Max sometime in the future.’ I didn’t know that it would be such a long time – that was in the late ’90s. It’s through the night over the Pacific and in those unguarded moments when you’ve got nothing else to do, the story played out in my head, at least a good half of it. I’m on that long flight home from Los Angeles to Sydney. “So, cut to months later, I didn’t give it another thought.
I thought, ‘Well, the best thing would be for them to be five or six women,’ and initially it was five to seven women being chased across the wasteland, pursued by a warlord, and Max gets caught up in their story. The idea was very, very simple: What if there was a chase and what was at stake was very elemental and very human? In the old Hitchcock sense, the MacGuffin has to be very human. I don’t want to do another Mad Max movie.’ And that’s what it was. By the time I got to the other side, I said to myself, ‘No way. When the light went green to cross, I was walking across the road, and this idea popped into my head about what eventually became this Fury Road. I remember specifically, I was in Los Angeles, and I was at a traffic crossing. And that’s exactly what happened with Mad Max: Fury Road. “Ideas are banging around in your head all the time, and you keep pushing them away until some get more insistent. “The idea was simple: What if there was a chase and what was at stake was very elemental and very human?”
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Here, Miller talks us through the moment he got the idea for this movie about an endless desert chase, dealing with the setbacks that delayed it, and how he finally got started making his vision a kinetic reality.
Fury Road‘s themes are big and weighty, its engines loud and mighty, and its impact has been huge.
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(It is number one on our list of 140 Essential Action Movies.) In a bold move, Miller moved Max Rockatansky (once played by Mel Gibson, here played by Tom Hardy) into an almost-supporting role, with Charlize Theron the true lead as Imperator Furiosa, the warrior on a mission to free a group of enslaved wives from their master, the evil Immortan Joe ( Hugh Keays-Byrne). Critics hailed Miller’s 30-years-later sequel to Beyond Thunderdome as a bold and visionary achievement, with a relentless energy and practically-achieved action sequences that were beyond anything they’d seen before. The acclaim was instant and loud the pain had been worth it.
The movie did eventually shoot in Namibia, though, and after years in editing – overseen by Margaret Sixel, Miller’s collaborator and wife, who would win an Oscar for the film – was released in 2015. Over the course of decades, production was famously waylaid by global events (September 11, the Iraq War), other productions shifting the filmmaker’s focus ( Happy Feetand its sequel), and then by nature: things were all set to go for shooting in Broken Hill, Australia, when mass rains turned the landscape from something that looked like a post-apocalyptic wasteland into something more like FernGully. Looking for a definition of that cursed Hollywood term, “Development Hell”? Look no further than Mad Max: Fury Road, the movie that came three decades after the last Mad Max film and which took writer-director George Miller almost 20 years to make. VOTE FOR THIS MOMENT IN OUR 21 MOST MEMORABLE MOVIE MOMENTS POLL In this special video series, we speak to the actors and filmmakers who made those moments happen, revealing behind-the-scenes details of how they came to be and diving deep into why they’ve stuck with us for so long. Once we’ve announced all 21, it will be up to you, the fans, to vote for which is the most memorable moment of all. In this episode of our ‘21 Most Memorable Moments’ series, Mad Max: Fury Road director and co-writer George Miller reveals how his wild road movie – and the female warrior at its center – came to be. In 2019, Rotten Tomatoes turns 21, and to mark the occasion we’re celebrating the 21 Most Memorable Moments from the movies over the last 21 years. Watch: Director and co-writer George Miller on the making of Mad Max: Fury Road above.