Come for a drive in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

In post-apocalyptic action film Mad Max: Fury Road, a battle hardened warrior named Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) helped five women to escape their enslaver and “husband”, violent cult leader Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), the head of the Citadel. Now Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga reveals how the young Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy, with Alyla Browne as the younger Furiosa) was snatched from the Green Place of Many Mothers by the biker horde led by the insane warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) and got caught in the middle of his battle for power with The Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme). While these two tyrants rip into each other, Furiosa wages her own war to carve out a way to survive and find her way home again.

Director-producer and screenwriter George Miller reveals that he and his co-screenwriter Nico Lathouris already had Furiosa’s backstory plotted out for Fury Road. “We had to write the story of Furiosa before we even attempted to make Fury Road. We had to know where she came from, under what circumstances, what forged her as a person. Where did she learn her skills? How did she come to be in this position of conflict with the world, and how and what are her aspirations?”

“This is a story that follows somebody from the age of 10 to the age of 26. It’s this 15-year saga, an odyssey. And it basically runs right up into the events of Fury Road. The purpose of an “odyssey” is not the actual events that happen so much as what’s happening to the soul of the protagonist. So, it’s about what happens to her in that attempt to get home and who she becomes – Furiosa.”

To survive at all, Furiosa needs to adapt to herself in a culture that fanatically worships male violence and the power of machines, where a vehicle can be transformed into a moving temple to a death god. So grease up, polish your chrome, and come hit the wasteland road with the Furiosa production team.

Stream Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga now, along with original Mad Max films, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.

Furiosa’s war machines

“One of the things that we’ve tried to be careful to do in both “Fury Road” and “Furiosa” is have the vehicles represent the characters – they’re extensions of the characters in the same way that costume, hair and whatever else is, including weapons and all the artifacts they carry,” insists George Miller. 

The Immortan Joe’s War Rig

One of Furiosa’s most iconic vehicles is The Immortan Joe’s War Rig. “George talked about it being totemic, and it’s really part of the religious side of Immortan Joe’s world,” says Tom Burke, who plays the rig’s commander, Praetorian Jack. “It’s like a temple on wheels – and beautiful to look at, all chrome and steel. The details inside the cabin are amazing. The gear stick looks like it’s carved out of a femur, and the steering wheel has a massive skull holding a grenade in its mouth, made of screws and bolts. “

Production designer Colin Gibson designed the War Rig as The Immortan Joe’s ultimate propaganda vehicle. “He’s at the high point of his own mythmaking and legend. He’s more Louis XIV, more Sun King, than the aging Napoleon that he was in Fury Road. So the War Rig is larger, more magnificent, more polished. And we’ve made a bas-relief story of his legend, an advertisement for him to drag through the Wasteland, proclaiming his greatness.”

For gearheads, The War Rig  is a refashioned 900 series Kenworth heavy-duty cab truck, skinned in shiny stainless steel and chrome, and decorated in a bas-relief story of the legend of The Immortan Joe.

Dementus’s “Chariot”

“We needed Dementus to have something that set him apart from anyone else,” says Colin Gibson. “His bike had to be made from the ground up. I had it originally that he was an Icarus fallen from the sky. And that gave us the option to take a Rotec seven-cylinder R2800 – basically, a plane engine – turn it sideways, mount in-between two big wheels and fabricate a motorbike around it. It has been done before; they’ve been mounted longitudinally, horizontally. They do have rather a lot of technical problems to go with them, given that they spit oil, and they like to turn on, run for a long time and then turn off, and not start again. So, it’s a high maintenance object, but it’s worth the effort. The chariot itself was born of a desire to upgrade him, and we had the idea of him coming into the Citadel to lay siege, almost like Caesar, running back into Rome. I had originally had him with a pair of BMW R18s as these large black horses in front of the chariot. George, of course, outdid me, and added the chariot, the radial [engine bike], to become the central “horse” of this object. Waste not want not in the Wasteland. And if two is just enough, then three is even better. So we upgraded the chariot to both the radial in the centre and the two R18s, either side.”

Vroom vroom noises

Supervising sound editor Robert Mackenzie reveals, “In the Wasteland, it’s all found and built. So all of the vehicles in the film need to have that quality that they were put together from bits and pieces, certainly not off-the-factory-floor sounding vehicles. They don’t run on normal fuel. The vehicles in the Mad Max movies are definitely a reflection of the characters that drive them. The way the vehicles are tuned and built on set is extraordinary. Just listening to them, they’re not muffled down. They’re not set pieces; they’re real vehicles that make these real noises.

“For all of them, we’ve got a fantastic jumping off point, which is actually the sound that they’re making on the day. And then George (Miller) gives us direction on if they need to be modified and if so, in what way? There was a lot of re-recording of the motorcycles, for instance, in order to get that contrast between the broken bikes and the thunderous bikes. It was exciting getting a hold of the big monster trucks and recording them. The War Rig has two engines – the main engine, and the turbo-boosted second engine – and we recorded both. Sometimes, we would take the real sound of the vehicle and then inject a little bit of an animal sound, bits of thunder, or whatever other sounds we can think of, to get that immediate built-in reactions that humans have to the sound of lions and tigers.”

Dress to kill

With such magnificent machines, you can’t have some guy popping out of them in their undies like a snail without its shell. So the wardrobe team led by Jenny Beavan designed the costumes to form the visual link between man and machine.

“George (Miller) always said, ‘Just because it’s the Wasteland, and it’s dirty and desperate and all that, it doesn’t mean it can’t be interesting and beautiful.’ We thought in the Wasteland, they’d be doing something in their evenings with their clothing to give it interest and personality,” says Jenny. “There’s no Wasteland supermarket. They’re going to make clothes last and last and last – they’re going to use anything they can find out there, bones, leather.”

“Every single thing they’re wearing is there to keep them alive. It’s to do with breathing, because none of them can breathe because it’s so toxic. They’re all suffering from every disease. And The Immortan’s body is rotting, so he wears the carapace to protect himself. It’s not pure decoration, although it’s got a slight gladiatorial sense to it. We’re mixing metaphors all the time, but it is to do with survival.”

“The whole thing of Dementus … I remember researching gurus, pop culture phenomenons, flamboyant characters, dictators. They all seem to be in the realm of what this character is. He obviously rides a motorbike and he is a showman. And that funny little jacket thing looks like a bandleader … so we put one on a guardian of Gas Town – the idea being that if you see it somewhere else, you know where he got it from. As his power increases, he’s adding to his visual look. We worked on the white parachute cloak. And the teddy bear, I think, is just because he’s such a damaged character. It’s his thing from childhood. We actually got the original bear off eBay in England and then we had multiples made by a phenomenally talented crew in Australia. The bear became quite a big part of Chris Hemsworth’s look as Dementus.”

Lachy Hulme reveals that, especially in the case of The Immortan Joe, practically is not king. It’s all about making an impression. “On my first day as The Immortan, I was like Frankenstein’s monster; I couldn’t even sit down without eight people helping me, or I’d just tip over and roll down the set. If you take one element of The Immortan’s costume away, it looks ridiculous. The whole thing only works as a complete package. The hair, the eye makeup, the maw, the breathing apparatus, the carapace, the medallions and medals – three of them, replicated from Hugh Keays-Byrne’s (who played Immortan Joe in Fury Road) father from his days in World War II, so a nice tribute to Hugh. The boots alone are about 15 kilos. The skirt is 16 kilos around the waist. [You have] The belt, the guns, the skirt, the pants, the boots, the layers on top of the boots, the rags and bandages. Underneath this whole costume, which is meant to make The Immortan look so fearsome, his body is rotting. He’s a physically weak man. But you put it all together, it looks utterly fearsome and compelling. It is so imposing. It’s like a great white shark is in front of you.“ 

10 Furiosa facts

1. Chris Hemsworth’s father, Craig (a social worker), was friends with the stunt bike crew who played the biker gang in the original Mad Max film in 1979 and he popped up in some of their on-set photos.

2. Chris Hemsworth’s way of speaking as Dementus was partly inspired by watching seagulls fight over chips, and partly by the rapid-fire, nasal quality he heard from a horse racing announcer who was belting out descriptions of the action over the racecourse. 

3. Anya Taylor-Joy didn’t even have a driver’s licence when she was cast in Furiosa. But under the guidance of action designer Guy Norris and the stunt team, she spent a year training with her stunt double, Hayley Wright. So now she can ride a motorbike and “pull a juicy lift 180” … but she still can’t parallel park or drive on a highway.

4. Anya reveals that Furiosa’s mechanical arm turns the tide for her because, “In this universe, being organic, being human, is at your detriment. Everyone worships machines – she makes herself a machine. And that begins this kind of mythology around her.”

5. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga used 145 vehicles, including 35 “hero” vehicles, including the two War Rigs, Dementus’ Six Foot, Furiosa’s Cranky Black and Furiosa and Praetorian Jack’s Valiant, and 110 “hero” motorbikes, including Dementus’s chariot and the motorcycles ridden by his sergeants and other Wasteland characters. 

6. The hair and makeup department used 87 wigs, 5 500 sheets of tattoo paper, 120 litres of clay for the War Boys makeup, 60 litres of “dirt” makeup for The Wretched, and 35 sets of prosthetic teeth.

7. It took 78 days spread over nine months to film the 15-minute Stowaway to Nowhere sequence in which Furiosa first meets Praetorian Jack.

8. Dementus’s biker horde is made up of smaller factions. The Bikies were inspired by police, militia, doomsday preppers, prisoners, and prison guards. The Mortifiers were created as ex-SAS (Special Air Service) members who’d turned to cannibalism. The Refugees were made up of the kind of people who anticipate the Rapture as a kind of apocalyptic death cult. And the Roobillies were rednecks mutated by both inbreeding and radiation fallout.

9. According to production designer Colin Gibson, “For Gas Town, we envisaged those scenes of Kuwait, where the derricks had been set on fire, way too many to ever be capped and stopped, so that the camels and the desert, the dust and the sand itself, are all stained with sulphur and black.”

10. Furiosa also takes us to explore Bullet Town for the first time. Colin reveals, “The Bullet Farm grew out of a series of fantastic photographs from Serra Pelada, which was a goldmine in Brazil that operated from 1980 to 1986. There were thousands upon thousands of men climbing rickety wooden ladders with sacks on their back … it’s man as mule and basically that mule dragging itself up a hill for the right to stay alive another moment, another day.”

Stream Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga now, along with original Mad Max films, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.