Released in May 2015, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) brought Max Rockatansky back to the Wasteland 30 years after Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), with Tom Hardy taking over from Mel Gibson and Charlize Theron alongside him as Imperator Furiosa. Directed by a 70-year-old Miller, shot largely in the deserts of Namibia with real vehicles and real stunts, it won six Oscars and is now regarded as one of the greatest action films ever made. Getting there involved two collapsed productions, a desert that bloomed with flowers, a very public feud between its stars and a guitar that shot real flames. Here are 40 facts about how it was made.

1. The idea struck halfway across a road

George Miller, the Australian director who created the Mad Max series with Mad Max (1979), first had the notion of a Mad Max film that was “almost a continuous chase” back in 1987. The story itself arrived in August 1998, as he was walking across a pedestrian crossing in Los Angeles. “An idea flashed into my mind,” he said, “by the time that I’d gotten across the street, I’d forgotten about it.” It came back to him about a year later on a long flight from Los Angeles to Australia, and this time it stuck. His central concept was a world where “violent marauders were fighting, not for oil or for material goods, but for human beings.”

2. The film fell apart twice before a camera rolled

The project was first due to shoot in 2001 at 20th Century Fox, with Mel Gibson returning as Max, until the September 11 attacks upended it. “The American dollar collapsed against the Australian dollar, and our budget ballooned,” Miller said. It was revived at Fox in December 2002 with a budget of around $104 million, a reported $25 million fee for Gibson and a shoot planned in Namibia for spring 2003, only to be postponed again just 11 weeks before filming as the Iraq War loomed, bringing insurance and security worries on top of the currency problems. Production designer Colin Gibson was already in Namibia when he got the call to stop spending, and the vehicles he had built were scrapped and melted down.

Miller moved on to Happy Feet (2006), which won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, but never let go of Max. Around 2007 he explored making Fury Road as an R-rated 3D animated film with Japanese anime director Mahiro Maeda, who had worked on The Animatrix (2003), alongside a tie-in video game with God of War II (2007) designer Cory Barlog. He eventually returned to live action, and the backstory developed for Furiosa later became Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024).

3. The weather sent the production to another continent

In October 2009, having moved the project to Warner Bros. after working together on Happy Feet, Miller announced he would shoot in early 2011 around Broken Hill, the outback town in New South Wales where the franchise had filmed before. Then it rained, heavily and unexpectedly, and the flat red desert burst into life. The location turned into what the crew described as a flower garden, which was no use for a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and in November 2011 the production confirmed a move to Namibia. It then rained in the Namibian desert just before shooting and delayed things again. It was the third time rain had interfered with the series, after a desert downpour suspended Mad Max 2 (1981) for a week.

4. Each day of filming produced roughly a minute of film

Principal photography finally began in Namibia on June 26, 2012, according to production sources, and ran for 120 days. The finished film runs 113 minutes without credits, which works out at about a minute of screen time per day of shooting. The desert action came first, followed by interiors in Cape Town, South Africa, and the Citadel scenes in Australia. More than 1,700 people worked or appeared on the film, with around 1,000 on set on an average day, and the widest crowd shots needed almost the entire crew to act as extras. Life in the production’s base town of Swakopmund had its own hazards. So many cast and crew members were mugged or burgled that the producers brought in former SAS soldiers as bodyguards.

5. The script started life as a wall of drawings

Miller designed the film in storyboard form before a screenplay was written, producing around 3,500 panels, almost the same number as there are shots in the finished film. Paraphrasing Alfred Hitchcock, he said he wanted the film to be understood in Japan without subtitles. “Eighty percent of what people see today, all these years later, is what was on that wall,” he said. The approach left some of the cast bemused when they were handed drawings instead of a conventional script, and it goes some way to explaining how little the title character says. Counting the opening voiceover and discounting any grunts, Max has exactly 52 lines.

6. The original Max handed over the keys

Mel Gibson was attached throughout the Fox era, and when Miller pitched him around 2001, he warned him they would have to move fast because he was ageing out of the role. By 2006, Gibson himself was saying the film wouldn’t happen, and Miller agreed he was “too long in the tooth” for the younger Max he wanted for a planned series of films. Gibson’s off-screen controversies made a studio-backed return even less likely. When the part eventually went to Tom Hardy, the two actors met for lunch, and Gibson told him, “I’m just too old to effectively play Max,” before giving him his blessing. Some of Gibson’s Max survived anyway. Hardy’s jacket is a replica of the one Gibson wore in the second and third films, copied from the original that was found in storage at Miller’s production company.

7. The search for a new Max took almost a year

Casting director Ronna Kress said the process of casting Max “took close to a year”. Heath Ledger had been Miller’s first thought (“The person who was foremost in my mind was Heath”) until the actor’s death in 2008. Joel Kinnaman and Eric Bana were in the mix, and Michael Fassbender later called his own audition “one of the worst… awful”. Miller was even intrigued by Eminem after seeing him in 8 Mile (2002), but the rapper wouldn’t leave home to shoot abroad. According to Kyle Buchanan’s oral history Blood, Sweat & Chrome, it came down to Hardy, Jeremy Renner and Armie Hammer in a joint audition, where Hardy gnashed and spat his way through the scene. Hammer told Miller that Hardy “needed to be Max more than he did”. Hardy was cast in June 2010. He had been six weeks old when the original Mad Max began shooting.

8. The casting director celebrated with a car crash

Miller had been drawn to Hardy by two very different performances: the brutal prison drama Bronson (2008) and the gentle TV film Stuart: A Life Backwards (2007). “I could not put Bronson together with this Rain Man type guy,” he said. When Hardy walked into the room, “it felt exactly like when Mel walked into the room 30 years before.” Even so, he wasn’t finalised until Miller had seen him alongside Charlize Theron on a video call from Australia. The chemistry was so striking that Kress was distracted as the pair left. “While I was waving goodbye to them, I backed my car into a pole and crashed the side of my car,” she said.

9. The leading man publicly apologised to his director

Working from storyboards in the middle of a desert, with little sense of how the pieces would fit together, Hardy struggled. At the film’s press conference at the Cannes Film Festival, he apologised to Miller in front of the world’s media. “There was no way George could have explained what he could see in the sand when we were out there,” he said. “I knew he was brilliant, but I didn’t know how brilliant until I saw it. So, my first reaction was ‘Oh my god, I owe George an apology for being so myopic.’” Theron had similar experiences on set, at times asking Miller what on earth he was doing, and was equally blown away by the finished film.

10. Furiosa could have been played by a sci-fi icon

Imperator Furiosa, the one-armed lieutenant to warlord Immortan Joe who smuggles his wives to freedom, had a long list of potential actresses. In the Gibson era, Gibson suggested Sigourney Weaver, his co-star in The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), while Uma Thurman, Monica Bellucci and Bridget Moynahan were also discussed. Gal Gadot later tested, but Miller felt she wasn’t quite right. Producer Doug Mitchell said Theron’s name had come up even in the earliest versions, and Miller said she was his first choice from the very first auditions. Theron loved Furiosa’s backstory so much that she pleaded with Miller to make the prequel first, and he has said that if they hadn’t been so far into pre-production, he might have done it.

11. The star reinvented her character

The original concept for Furiosa, from an earlier costume designer, was far more ethereal, with long hair, a Barbarella-style costume and African mud art. Theron wasn’t convinced. “I called him and said, ‘I don’t know how she’s getting by in the mechanics’ room with all this hair. I think we need to shave my head, and she needs to be a more androgynous, grounded character.’” Miller agreed, Theron shaved her head the next day and texted him a picture, and he replied simply, “Hello Furiosa.” She had to wear a wig for her role in A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014) as a result.

Theron also created Furiosa’s defining moment, when she discovers her homeland, the Green Place, is gone and falls to her knees screaming in the dunes. It wasn’t in the script. “I feel like we need to have a moment where she’s completely lost, completely vulnerable,” she told Miller. The wind obliged on the day, blowing sand across the dune at just the right moment.

12. One late arrival became the turning point

Theron and Hardy clashed throughout the shoot, and the flashpoint came over a call time. According to camera operator Mark Goellnicht in Blood, Sweat & Chrome, the crew were due on set at 8am, and despite a special request for Hardy to be punctual, Theron sat waiting in the War Rig in full costume and make-up while he turned up three hours late. She got out and demanded he be fined “a hundred thousand dollars for every minute that he’s held up this crew”, calling him disrespectful. “He charged up to her and went, ‘What did you say to me?’” said Goellnicht. “She really felt threatened.” Theron asked for protection on set, and producer Denise Di Novi was sent to Namibia, though Theron said she largely stayed in the production offices. Theron had earlier broken Hardy’s nose, accidentally, with an elbow while wearing the green sleeve for Furiosa’s mechanical arm.

13. Everyone on set could see it

The crew were in no doubt about the tension. “Boy f*cking howdy, was it clear that those two people hated each other,” said editor J. Houston Yang. “They didn’t want to touch each other, they didn’t want to look at each other.” Theron has since taken her share of responsibility. “[We were] like two parents in the front of the car,” she said. “We were either fighting or we were icing each other, I don’t know which one is worse, and they had to deal with it in the back… We should have been better. I can own up to that.” Miller chose to see it as life imitating art, with two characters who have to learn to cooperate to survive. “There’s no excuse for it,” he added, “and I think there’s a tendency in this business to use great performances as an excuse for other disruption that could be avoided.”

14. One actor lied his way through his audition

Nicholas Hoult, who plays the fanatical War Boy Nux, was one of the first actors attached, in January 2010. His audition was a five-hour session of acting games run by co-writer Nico Lathouris, who would come up behind him with a rattle and give him words to repeat while moving around the room. Asked to tell a story, Hoult borrowed one from actor Liam Cunningham about a wedding where petrol poured down a toilet exploded when the grandfather dropped in his pipe match. “I told it as if I was there,” Hoult said. “I lied.”

The job itself was no easier. Nux’s make-up involved eight silicone prosthetics, airbrushing, clay and several layers of dirt, and had to be applied 77 times, taking two hours on each occasion. Hoult passed the time by learning to knit from a make-up artist, and his body paint gradually fades through the film as Nux regains his humanity.

15. Some future stars were considered for Joe’s wives

The five wives Furiosa smuggles out of the Citadel were originally seven, before Miller trimmed the number. Margot Robbie and Jennifer Lawrence were considered, and Miller met Rihanna. “Boy, Rihanna looked spectacular when she walked in,” he said. Auditioning actresses were given classic scenes to perform, reportedly including Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch. Courtney Eaton, who won the role of Cheedo the Fragile after Adelaide Clemens dropped out, was making her film debut and knew nothing about Mad Max until her father told her. Riley Keough, cast as Capable, is the granddaughter of Elvis Presley, and model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley was the last to be cast, as Joe’s favourite wife, the Splendid Angharad.

16. The shoot produced lifelong bonds

The wives arrived knowing little about their characters. Eaton had assumed she would be in leathers and motorcycle boots, but Miller had them design their own costumes from scraps of bandages and write their own backstories. Zoë Kravitz even chose her character’s name, reportedly borrowing it from crew member Shyam “Toast” Yadav, a visual effects data wrangler who ran a “French Toast Gang”. The five became so close that they all got the same tattoo, three dots and a triangle, as a memento.

Others left Namibia with even more. Dayna Pomare, Theron’s stunt double, met Hardy’s rehearsal double Dane Grant on the shoot, and they married in March 2013. Keough married stuntman Ben Smith-Petersen, who doubled for the Doof Warrior, in February 2015.

17. Two members of a matriarchal clan had unfinished business

The Vuvalini, the band of motorbike-riding women from Furiosa’s homeland, include the Keeper of the Seeds, played by Melissa Jaffer. She was 78 at the time. “I thought well, I won’t get another chance like this before I die, and that’s why I took it,” she said. Megan Gale, who plays Valkyrie, had history with Miller. He had cast her as Wonder Woman in Justice League: Mortal, his planned superhero film for Warner Bros., before it was cancelled in 2008. Gale’s character was originally meant to survive Fury Road, but she became pregnant during production and had to leave early, so Miller killed Valkyrie off instead.

18. The villain insisted on being called Daddy

Immortan Joe is played by Hugh Keays-Byrne, who had been the villain Toecutter in the original Mad Max. “He trained with the Royal Shakespeare Company,” said Miller. “Unfortunately, we killed the character at the end of the first movie. For years, I’ve been trying to get him into a movie.” Keays-Byrne, who had also been due to play the Martian Manhunter in Justice League: Mortal, arrived on set in character and insisted on being called Daddy, which every War Boy did, including Hoult. He called the wives his “littles”. Joe’s war club belonged to his mother-in-law, who had been given it during World War II. It was Keays-Byrne’s final film role.

One of Joe’s sons was written in by request. Quentin Kenihan, who has osteogenesis imperfecta, contacted Miller himself to ask whether there was a role for him, and Miller created Corpus Colossus, the brains of Joe’s family, with no prosthetics or effects beyond make-up. Corpus was meant to die at the end, but after about ten takes Miller decided he couldn’t do it, and reshot the scene the next day so he survives.

19. The co-writers were a comic artist and a drama coach

The screenplay is credited to Miller, Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris. McCarthy was a British comic artist who had worked on 2000 AD, the anthology comic behind Judge Dredd, and had been obsessed with the Mad Max films since seeing Mad Max 2. He caught Miller’s eye with a Mad Max parody he storyboarded for the animated series ReBoot, with a note reading “Whatever happened to Mad Max?”, and his storyline became the seed of Fury Road. He left partway through the storyboarding for another project, and was reportedly caught off guard to find his ending had been changed.

Lathouris, who joined around 2002 as a script analyst, had a history with the series too: he played the “Grease Rat” mechanic in the original Mad Max. He structured the story on the Fool’s Journey, the story path traced by the 22 cards of the Tarot’s Major Arcana, with Max as the Fool. It’s why Furiosa calls him “fool” when he won’t tell her his name.

20. A famous playwright prepared the wives for their roles

Wanting the wives to read as survivors rather than props, Miller brought in V, formerly known as Eve Ensler, the playwright behind The Vagina Monologues who had worked with survivors of sexual violence in Bosnia, Afghanistan and the Congo. Having heard her speak in Sydney, he reached her with a voice recording sent by email, and she spent about a week in Namibia running workshops with the actresses, including writing letters to their captors. “If you’ve been somebody’s sex slave for years, what would your relationship be to your slaver?” she said. “It’s very complicated, obviously.” She was clear about the result: “I think George Miller is a feminist, and he made a feminist action film.”

21. The cinematographer came out of retirement

For years the film was planned in native 3D, with Dean Semler, the cinematographer of Mad Max 2 and Beyond Thunderdome, attached. A dedicated team spent three years building custom 3D cameras small and rugged enough to fit inside the War Rig’s cab, but tests showed the sensor had nowhere near the range to capture detail inside and outside the cabs in the same frame. Semler parted from the project amicably, and in January 2012, around two months before shooting was due to start, producer Doug Mitchell phoned John Seale. The veteran Australian had shot Witness (1985), Dead Poets Society (1989) and Miller’s Lorenzo’s Oil (1992), and had retired in 2010. He had told Miller, “If anybody else rings, I’m retired. If you ring, we’ll have lunch.”

22. The director’s rules shaped every frame

Miller wanted the opposite of every post-apocalyptic film before it. “Every post-apocalyptic film for the last 30 years has gone with a desaturated, bleached look,” he told colourist Eric Whipp. “Let’s do the opposite. I want to go saturated and graphic.” His original idea had been to release it in black and white, which the producers talked him out of, though he eventually got his wish with the Black & Chrome Edition. With around 2,700 cuts in the film, he also insisted the point of interest sit dead centre in every frame so the audience never had to search for it. “Keep the crosshairs on her nose!” he told Seale. Many of the most dynamic shots came from the Edge Arm, a 24-foot crane mounted on a supercharged Toyota Tundra that could spin the camera 360 degrees, while Miller directed from inside the truck. He likened it to being inside a video game.

23. The composer was hired within a day of landing

John Powell and Marco Beltrami were both attached to score the film at earlier points, but the job went to Dutch composer and DJ Tom Holkenborg, better known as Junkie XL. In 2013, as he was finishing 300: Rise of an Empire (2014), he got a call from Warner Bros. music executive Darren Higman, who was in Sydney with Miller: “What are you doing tonight?” After a 17-hour flight, Holkenborg was shown a cut with no beginning and no end, and told to sleep on it. He couldn’t, so he spent the night preparing a two-hour pitch for a “big rock opera” and was hired on the spot the next morning, despite Miller initially wanting no music beyond the sounds of cars and guitars. Much of the war drumming was built from hitting car doors, oil drums and paint cans, repurposing junk in the same way as the film’s vehicles.

24. The production designer wrote a bible for the Wasteland

Colin Gibson had been on the project since 2000, when Miller first took him into a room full of storyboards. He had nearly worked on Beyond Thunderdome years earlier, but turned it down because his first son had just been born and he “couldn’t go off into the desert.” With no conventional script, he began by writing what he called a “bible of tribal”, dividing everyone into groups and working out where and how they lived. Miller gave him one guiding idea: the story was being narrated by a “history man” from even further in the future, so the world could feel like a legend being retold. For Joe’s fortress, the Citadel, Gibson studied African sites carved into mountains during “primitive and violent times”, and the effects team built its cliffs from real rock faces photographed in the Blue Mountains. “I’ve got an absolute aversion to people painting rocks,” said visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson.

25. The vehicles came with a threat attached

Miller’s brief to Gibson for the film’s fleet was simple: “Make it cool or I’ll kill you.” Around 150 vehicles were built in a workshop in western Sydney, all capable of at least 100km/h off-road, with roughly half eventually split, ripped apart or blown up. The War Rig combined a Tatra truck with twin supercharged V8s, a 1940s Chevy Fleetmaster and a Volkswagen Beetle cabin, while Joe’s Gigahorse was two 1959 Cadillac Coupe de Villes stacked on top of each other and powered by a pair of Chevy 502 engines. “In a world where nobody had one of anything, it seemed a fait accompli that he would have a pair of 1959 Coupe DeVilles,” said Gibson. Shipping more than 80 of them to Namibia required a $2 million freighter, with special containers built for vehicles like the War Rig that were too big for anything the shipping company owned.

26. A street performer inspired one of the maddest stunts

The Polecats, the warriors who swing down from giant poles to snatch people from the War Rig in the final chase, date back to Miller’s time on Babe (1995). On the studio backlot, he and stunt coordinator Guy Norris watched a street performer doing tricks on top of a tall pole, and Miller wondered what would happen if he was moving at 50 miles per hour. He assumed they would need CGI, but Norris was determined to do it for real. A designer at Weta Workshop in New Zealand helped solve the physics with a pivot point and counterweight, eventually an engine block at the base of each pole, and the performers trained in Chinese pole work for eight weeks under former Cirque du Soleil performer Stephen Bland. The effects team only had to erase the harnesses and cables.

27. The opening crash nearly set a world record

Early in the film, the War Boys capture Max by flipping his Interceptor with explosive spears. To get the car airborne safely, the crew fixed a flat steel blade to its chassis that slapped the ground and immediately retracted, giving the driver control over exactly when the flip happened. It worked a little too well. The car flips five times in the film, but during testing Norris managed eight-and-a-half rotations, which would have been a world record had the cameras been rolling.

28. The War Boys’ chrome had a darker meaning

Before going into battle, the War Boys spray their lips and teeth silver, a ritual they believe will carry them to “the gates of Valhalla, shiny and chrome”. Keays-Byrne revealed the spray is actually a euphoric drug keeping them high and devoted to Joe, and “chroming” is Australian slang for inhalant abuse. Miller took the idea from Front Line (1981), David Bradbury’s Vietnam War documentary, in which Cambodian soldiers suspended small Buddha figurines from their mouths before going into battle. The make-up team made the chrome from food-grade silver powder, glycerin and alcohol. The film’s fans later found a real-life equivalent, flooding the online reviews of Wilton’s Color Mist silver food spray with messages such as “What a spray! What a lovely spray!”

29. The Buzzards’ cars were designed to be prickly

The Buzzards, the tribe who attack the War Rig from spiked buggies before the sandstorm, are of Russian descent according to Norris, and speak Russian in the English-language version of the film. In the Russian dub, they speak German instead. McCarthy based their vehicles on the thorny devil, a spiky Outback lizard, and more than 5,000 spikes were used across the fleet. The Buzzard Excavator alone received 1,757 hand-built spikes, precisely the number of quills on an echidna. Their cars also bear a striking resemblance to the vehicles in Peter Weir’s cult Australian horror comedy The Car That Ate Paris (1974). Miller was aware of the similarity, but McCarthy apparently wasn’t.

30. The Doof Warrior’s gruesome mask was the actor’s own idea

The blind guitarist riding Joe’s war party is Australian musician Sean Hape, better known as Iota. The casting brief described the part as “a cross between Keith Richards and a scarecrow,” and Iota turned up to the audition with dirt rubbed into his teeth, black make-up around his eyes and tattered clothes. “I just wanted it so bad,” he said. “I got in the cab and the guy gave me a funny look.” The name comes from Australian slang for rave parties, and Miller wrote the character a full backstory: blind from birth, he survived the apocalypse in a mineshaft with his mother and a guitar until Joe’s men found him, killed her and took him to be the army’s equivalent of a bagpiper.

The most gruesome detail is often credited to Miller, but it came from Iota. “My story was that Coma was found with his mother’s head,” he said, “and Coma took her face off and made the mask out of her face, to honour her when he went to war.” With no score written during filming, he spent the shoot playing whatever he felt like on set, from Led Zeppelin to Soundgarden to AC/DC.

31. That guitar had to actually work

The Doof Warrior’s double-necked guitar was a real, playable instrument. Boston-based sculptor Michael Ulman built the body from a bedpan stuffed with brass and tuba parts, and Australian propmaker Matt Boug made it work. Ulman said Gibson’s brief had just three conditions: “It has to have two necks, it has to look like the sickest weapon, and it has to throw flames 45 feet.” It weighed 132 pounds and had to be held up with bungee ropes, used spark plugs as tuning keys and fired real gas-powered flames that Iota controlled with the whammy bar. It had to be real because Miller hates props that don’t work. “I have in the past built him props that I thought were just supposed to be props,” said Gibson, “and then he goes, ‘OK, plug it in now.’”

32. Some of the effects are hiding in plain sight

More than 80% of the film’s effects are practical, and visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson’s rule was “practical first, over everything.” That didn’t mean there was no CGI. Lead effects house Iloura delivered more than 1,500 shots, and the sandstorm at the end of the first act was largely digital, built from real twister footage and dust simulations laid over vehicles filmed in full sun, with Miller adding the idea of leaking fuel exploding inside the storm. The most effective work goes unnoticed. The canyon where the War Rig meets the Rock Riders was made significantly taller and narrower in virtually every shot, and the rock wall that collapses behind them was real, blown up in a local quarry whose owner Jackson persuaded to let them film.

33. The night scenes were shot in blazing sunshine

The film’s half-hour stretch of night scenes was achieved with a method that broke the rules. Seale deliberately overexposed the digital image by around two stops in full sunlight, and Whipp then brought the exposure back down in the grade, pulling detail out of the shadows while keeping the scenes reading as a stylised blue night. “This goes against every rulebook,” said Whipp, “but the Arri Alexa camera has so much range.” The technique borrowed from a still photography approach called “expose to the right”. The eerie Crow Fishers wading through the swamp on stilts in the same stretch are, according to Miller, the banished male offspring of the Vuvalini, an idea dating back to a 1999 story outline.

34. The final chase put a star inches from the tarmac

Spoilers ahead. After Furiosa is stabbed in the final chase, Max falls from the War Rig and she catches him. Hardy was filmed hanging from the moving truck for real, with his head inches from the ground at 50mph, and Theron said she was terrified. Hardy’s young son, who was on set, asked Miller what would happen if the wires snapped. “Well, I suppose he’d go under the wheels,” came the reply, though Hardy has since claimed he was the one who said it.

The biggest stunt came last, when Nux flips the War Rig to block the pass. Miller considered CGI, models and a remote-controlled truck, but felt “having all that CGI at the end of a movie with very little CGI would be cheating.” Stunt driver Lee Adamson flipped it for real, landing it on its mark in front of a camera shooting 1,000 frames per second in a single take. Watching the monitor, Miller was briefly convinced Adamson had been crushed, until he realised it was a crash-test dummy.

35. The ending changed because of the leading man

The film ends with Furiosa rising up into the Citadel while Max melts away into the crowd, but that wasn’t always the plan. “Very early on, I had [Max] going up to the top of the Citadel with them,” said Miller. “But Tom Hardy picked that up very early. Max would never go. He wasn’t even remotely ready for that.” Miller agreed, and ended on Furiosa and the others taking control of the resources instead. “It asks the question,” he said. “Are they going to do any better?”

36. The studio pulled the plug before the Citadel was filmed

By late 2012, the production was behind schedule and over budget, and Warner Bros. president Jeff Robinov flew to Namibia with an ultimatum: the cameras would stop on December 8, no matter what. They did, but the opening and closing scenes at the Citadel still hadn’t been shot, leaving a film that was essentially one enormous middle. Then Robinov left the studio, and his replacement, Kevin Tsujihara, reversed the decision. Miller got his extra shooting, and the Citadel scenes were finally filmed in Sydney in November 2013.

37. The editor had never cut an action film

Margaret Sixel is Miller’s wife, and when she asked why he wanted her to edit Fury Road, having never cut an action film, he replied, “Because if a guy did it, it would look like every other action movie.” She was faced with around 480 hours of footage, which took three months just to watch, and spent a year assembling it. Miller asked her to cut it as if it were a silent movie. The result is one of the most celebrated pieces of editing of the century, and won Sixel the Oscar for Best Editing.

38. Test audiences wanted to hear more from Max

Warner Bros. required test screenings before release, and at least one went badly. Viewers disliked the Doof Warrior, who at that point was playing the same temp riff every time he appeared, grew tired of all the car action and felt Max should talk more. Audiences who didn’t know the earlier films also wanted to know more about him. The opening voiceover, with Max introducing himself and his world, was added as a result.

39. The series finally got some Oscars

Fury Road opened on May 14, 2015, in Australia and a day later in the US, and grossed $379.4 million worldwide. The reviews were rapturous, with The Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy writing that it “energetically kicks more ass… than any film ever made by a 70-year-old.” It received ten Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won six: Film Editing, Costume Design for Jenny Beavan, Makeup and Hairstyling, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing and Production Design. They were the first Oscars for any Mad Max film, although Miller lost Best Director to Alejandro G. Iñárritu for The Revenant (2015), and Best Picture went to Spotlight (2015).

40. A legal battle delayed the prequel

Miller’s deal with Warner Bros. promised his company a reported $7 million bonus if the film’s net budget stayed below $157 million. Kennedy Miller Mitchell said it had come in at $154.6 million, while the studio claimed it had blown out to around $185 million, and refused to pay. Miller sued in 2017, and the dispute blocked any further Mad Max films until it was settled in 2020. That finally cleared the way for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, with Anya Taylor-Joy in the title role, the prequel Theron had once begged Miller to make first.

And you’ve reached the end: 40 chrome-plated facts about Mad Max: Fury Road, the two-hour chase that took nearly three decades to make and set a new standard for practical action filmmaking. Please share on your social media channels, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for lots of great video content.