‘I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead’: the chaos behind Mad Max: Fury Road

How on earth did they do that? In the summer of 2015, it was hard to watch Mad Max: Fury Road without a feeling of gut-level astonishment, a chasm forming between your upper and lower jaw. Our brains know real stunts when we see them, but we’ve become so inured to the digital mayhem of modern blockbusters that the experience of watching George Miller’s savage post-apocalyptic chase movie – with its rattling velocity and visceral danger – was one of shock.

They went out and made this whole thing in the desert? How? When and where? The answers – yes; with a crew of hundreds; mostly in Namibia from July to November 2012, then for a month in Cape Town, then with the beginning and ending completed in Australia the following year – are merely the tip of the iceberg, as Kyle Buchanan relates in his breathless oral history of Fury Road’s making, Blood, Sweat & Chrome.

The film itself may seem like chaos uncorked – an escape spree from a tyrant’s stronghold into the desert, with a wary alliance formed between renegade ex-patrol-officer Max (Tom Hardy) and fugitive War Rig driver Furiosa (Charlize Theron). Yet its production is wilder: 20 years after the inklings of a fourth Mad Max movie first came to Miller and his team, realising this vision was a series of almost unending nightmares.

The previous instalment, 1985’s third iteration Beyond Thunderdome, had been a disappointment, as had everything Miller had touched since then (save the first Babe, which he produced and co-wrote). By the late 1990s, however, Mel Gibson was such a huge star that his $25 million salary raised the stakes for whatever a fourth Max might be. Miller was indeed all set to make it with Gibson in 2003, and had gone so far as to start building vehicles in the Namibian desert to do so – until Fox executives pulled the plug, alarmed at a budget that was certain to balloon above the allotted $104m.

Everyone involved, per Buchanan’s book, considers that abortive effort a blessing in disguise. Though it took a further decade to get Miller’s film back in front of cameras, those cameras had by then advanced enormously in their practical capabilities, and there was now extra time to dig down into the mythology with which the director was wrestling, which featured a matriarchal tribe called the “Vuvalini” (originally named the “Vulvalini”) and an outrageous assortment of bloodthirsty antagonists. “It’s just a pain in the ass that it had the gestation period of an elephant,” says the Oscar-winning production designer, Colin Gibson.

Meanwhile, Mel Gibson had become unhirable at one point for reasons other than the merely financial, so in came Hardy – not yet the star he would soon become – and Theron. Much of the pre-release buzz around Buchanan’s book has focused on the extreme animosity of that lead duo, a relationship that apparently almost came to blows and required a female producer, Denise de Novi, to be flown in so that Theron (in her words) felt “safe”. Later, Hardy would partly agree, telling Buchanan: “In hindsight, I was in over my head in many ways… What [Theron] needed was a better, perhaps more experienced partner in me. That’s something that can’t be faked. I’d like to think that now that I’m older and uglier, I could rise to that occasion.”

In fact, their headline-grabbing scuttlebutt occupies a single chapter (out of 33), and not only Hardy but also several of Buchanan’s other interviewees, who range from co-stars Nicholas Hoult and Zo? Kravitz to screenwriter Kelly Marcel, make clear what enormous pressure both leads were under, with their different working methods. Miller, for his part, would shoot tiny chunks of footage back and forth – “shooting the edit”, as it’s called – rather than letting the camera roll, leaving the whole cast without the luxury of sinking into character on cue. Instead, they had to switch it on like lightning.

Both Theron and Hardy, especially the latter, admit in these pages that they couldn’t see the wood for the trees. They were required to have blind faith in the leadership of a mad-messiah director when all they could see around them was pandaemonium. While the tensions between the leads threatened to push the shoot far beyond schedule, the stunt guys were having the time of their lives, and somehow didn’t forfeit even one of those. “You feel like if you breathe, you could screw something up,” remembers the script supervisor for the action unit, Georgina Selby. Or, as Steven Soderbergh put it when he saw the end product: “I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film, and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.”

There were close calls. One of the “polecats” – masked marauders who come swaying in from nowhere in the third act, imperilling the heroes’ switchback return to where they started – tumbled from the top of his pole during an additional chase that was cut. This crew member, Chris Patton, was knocked unconscious, but ultimately escaped unharmed. The insanity of such stunts being done practically in the first place, which big-budget cinema has long ceased doing, was not lost on those involved – nor on audiences, who would have felt the difference had such elements been grafted on in post-production. Though Fury Road still needed around 2,000 VFX shots, and the toxic storm that ends the first act’s chase-by-armada was impossible to do any other way, a huge quantity of that work came down to the simple digital erasure of the stunt performers’ safety wires.

Living in the Namibian desert for eight months, with sandstorms rolling through, was an unearthly experience for all involved. So was commandeering the village of Swakopmund as a kind of travelling circus, and being subject to muggings, burglaries and a general air of nocturnal threat. Another thing the locals stole was a predilection for guyliner, after the cast gave up removing make-up overnight, walking around with their blacked-out eyes instead. “We accidentally glam-rocked the s--t out of that place,” says the stunt performer Harrison Norris.

After the shoot, Miller and his wife Margaret Sixel – who would win an Oscar for her editing, alongside the five others garnered by Fury Road – had a daunting job on their hands persuading Warner Bros that the studio hadn’t bankrolled a catastrophic turkey. It took a fluky break at management level, with obstructive WB president Jeff Robinov dethroned as CEO by Kevin Tsujihara, even to let Miller shoot the citadel sequences he needed at the beginning and end, which show us the despotism everyone’s fleeing, then the comeuppance of the grotesque tyrant Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who died in 2020). Without those bookends, the film made no sense at all. Even then, only after months of screen-tests and executive anxiety could it be beaten into inspired shape.

Seven years on, the electrifying results are a testament to Miller’s farsightedness, but also to the loyalty he inspired from every person (excepting, at times, Hardy) on set. A time will come when they won’t make films the way they did Mad Max: Fury Road. Most of us thought it had already passed.

Blood, Sweat and Chrome: The Wild True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road by Kyle Buchanan is published by WilliamMorrow on March 17. To order your copy for ￡20, call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop