Facts I Learned From Blood, Sweat, and Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max Fury Road

Honestly I am including less than 5% of the wild information in this book

[Spoilers for Fury Road. Why haven’t you seen Fury Road yet?]

Steven Soderburgh said that watching Fury Road made him want to quit directing.

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George Miller’s goal with Fury Road was “to make a movie where they don’t have to read the subtitles in Japan.”

Another part of his philosophy: “If two vehicles were to smash into each other, why simulate it digitally when you could make it real? Then you get all those random bits you can’t predict—the way that the dust reacts, and all that.”

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When George Miller was a child and the Saturday matinee was deemed too violent for children, he would sneak into a crawl space beneath the theater and listen to it.

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The Mad Max series was influenced by George Miller's work as a doctor in an emergency room, seeing people who had died horribly in car accidents.

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Tom Hardy was psychotic but fixed it by going to drama school.

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Charlize Theron was so excited about Fury Road that she took the part even though she had a newborn baby during filming.

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Visual effects technician Shyam “Toast” Yadav originally became a visual effects technician so that he could work on Mad Max if there was ever a fourth movie.

Yadav’s nickname is Toast because he is the leader of the French Toast and Hugs Gang, which gives people free French toast. He carried out his solemn duty of making French toast for everyone on set. One of the Wives is named Toast in his honor.

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The “screenplay” for Fury Road was written as a thirty-five-hundred-panel storyboard. If you wanted to find out what the movie was about, you had to fly down to Sydney to the room whose walls were covered with storyboards and have George Miller walk you through it. After you read about two or three hundred frames, the movie would start playing out in your brain like an animation.

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Max has exactly sixteen lines in Fury Road. [Commenter C_B says that Max this is actually true of Road Warrior, and Max had an enormous 63 lines of dialogue in Fury Road. Sorry! I will attempt to take notes more carefully in the future.]

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One of the most fun days when the film was edited was Dialogue Nuking Day, where they deleted all the scenes with unnecessary dialogue.

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The dramaturg (who George Miller hired to hone the theme and symbolism of the movie) wrote a novel about Max which covered his entire life in the year before the movie. For some reason, this does not appear to be available on Amazon.

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Fury Road was originally going to be shot in an Australian desert, but the desert had a once-in-a-century rainstorm and was blooming green. The studio insisted that the movie be shot on a soundstage. So the producer put the vehicles on a boat, sent them to the Namib Desert, failed to tell the studio until the vehicles were already there, and was like “well, I guess it’s settled, unless you know of a soundstage in Namibia…”

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The Fury Road cast and crew filmed for twelve to fourteen hours a day, six days a week, and usually got between twenty-four and thirty seconds of usable footage daily.

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To make the cars, George Miller pulled in a bunch of totally random found-object artists, and the found-object artists were like "I don't work in Hollywood? I am some random fine artist from Boston?"

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Everything in Fury Road was made out of repurposed found objects. When Furiosa locks the accelerator on, she does it with a repurposed shoe-size measurer. Everything in the film had to have three or more functions: for example, a crowbar might be decorated to be a religious icon and also useful as a weapon.

The designers were forbidden to buy things from the hardware store. Instead, they got their parts from "the boneyard,” a collection of wrecked vintage cars and trucks and parts from cars whose bodies were used as the base for vehicles. People would just bring in random stuff-- bolt throwers, a crate of fire extinguishers. If you found something cool, you'd have to grab it immediately and put it under your workbench before someone else took it.

The designers were urged to create beautiful things because people create beautiful things even in the apocalypse.

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The Doof Warrior’s guitar was a white porcelain bedpan with a French horn inside it. The first version looked gorgeous and shot real flames, and then George Miller stopped by and was like “I can’t wait to hear how it plays!”

The designer: “For some reason, I hadn’t imagined that when we were out in the middle of the desert with thirty-six V-8s rolling, we would actually need the guitar to make sound.”

They had to add the bungee cords for the Doof Warrior because the guitar was eighty pounds and otherwise impossible to carry.

The actor who played the Doof Warrior: “It is the shittiest guitar I’ve ever had the misfortune to have hanging in front of me.”

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For a while, Imperator Furiosa was going to have a Barbarella-style costume, but Charlize Theron put her foot down about Furiosa being androgynous. Theron felt that Furiosa wouldn't get respect in the postapocalyptic society as a feminine woman. Furiosa was also intended to have dreadlocks or a ponytail, but Theron demanded that Furiosa have a shaved head because if she had long hair men could grab her hair and pull it around.

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George Miller was going to shave Immortan Joe's head but decided against because the nephews of Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played Immortal Joe, would grab his hair and Keays-Byrne would swing them around like it was a circus ride. Miller didn't wish to disappoint the nephews.

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The War Boys were played by stunt people who spent several weeks taking acting lessons. The acting lessons concluded with an elaborate ritual where the War Boys venerated Immortan Joe and his Wives.

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Every single War Boy in Fury Road has a detailed backstory developed by the stuntperson that played them—where they grew up, what happened to their parents, who did they love, who did they hate. George Miller would go up to the stuntpeople playing the War Boys and ask them "why is there a rip in your clothing?", "what's that scratch on your vehicle?", or "why is there a dent on the mud flap?" The stuntpeople had to have an answer prepared.

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Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played Immortan Joe, played Toecutter in the original Mad Max. He was sufficiently Method that he broke into Mel Gibson's trailer and left graffiti on the walls.

During the filming of Fury Road, Keays-Byrne would write notes from the Immortan in what looked like blood and hand them out to the War Boys and the Wives. He would put pictures of himself in the stunt gym for motivation. He sang nursery rhymes during the acting workshops because the War Boys were his babies. His arrivals on set were announced ten minutes in advance so that the War Boys could get in formation and do a chant when he arrived.

Whenever the War Boys saw him, they’d yell “we love you, Daddy!” Even if they were at the grocery store not in costume, whenever a War Boy would see Keays-Byrne, they’d bow and do the V-8 salute.

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There were 88 vehicles which had backstories and character arcs, and 135 vehicles in all (mostly doubles of the other vehicles). Every vehicle had trinkets all through it that would never show up in the movie.

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Eve Ensler, author of the Vagina Monologues and anti-sex-slavery activist, consulted on Fury Road to make sure that the Wives’ psychology was accurate.

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The Wives' actresses were given a bag and five tables of props and told to pack their bag with what their characters would take on the run. That became the props their characters carried in the movie.

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The Charlize Theron/Tom Hardy chemistry was so intense that, during auditions, one person accidentally crashed their car because they were too busy staring at them.

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The Vuvalini's actresses loved their parts because older female actresses usually do not get to be badass. They get to play mothers, grandmothers, and people dying of dementia. The Vuvalini’s actresses did many of their own stunts.

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There were no major injuries in the entire production due to George Miller's emphasis on safety and preparation.

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In Fury Road, there were a bunch of crashes where the car was surrounded by people and vehicles, which are not how car chase movies generally film crashes. There was no best practice for it because you don't do that. They designed a "flipper"-- a paddle that pushed the car up and then retracted, so that they could crash the car in a safe way. You have to be tightly trussed in the car for crashes, because the centrifugal forces are more than what a fighter pilot experiences flying a plane.

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One stunt driver drove with no windscreen or goggles, and of course the cars kicked up a ton of dust, so after every take medics would rush over to wash his eyes out with saline.

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The people on poles were originally supposed to be CGI but the stunt coordinator insisted that he could do them practical. The poles are in fact a completely practical effect, other than removing the wires in postproduction.

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The toxic storm is the only thing in Fury Road that's purely CGI, but even it originally came from a practical effect. The VFX team set up a camera with black curtains and bright light, then threw dust at the camera. After shooting it for a day or two, they added the dust to the already filmed shots.

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The stunt coordinator personally did the most dangerous stunt in the film, when the Doof Warrior's car collides with the War Rig crashed by Nux. The stunt coordinator didn’t want to have the car controlled remotely, because he was worried about the car going out of control without a human hand on it. Instead, the stunt team put the controls in a pod next to the vehicle, because there was no place to put the controls in the vehicle itself. The experience was like steering a car in a video game. After an tnormous amount of work, the crash occurred at twenty- to twenty-five Gs. Without safety precautions, it would have been fifty to seventy-five Gs.

The stunt coordinator was totally uninjured. It was nevertheless the last stunt he ever performed, because he felt that he would never do anything cooler.

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Fury Road was filmed in the winter, so it was freezing. The War Boys and Wives spent a lot of time hanging around space heaters. One Wife got pneumonia after a scene where she had to be repeatedly sprayed down with water so it looked like she was sweating.

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The guitarist who played the Doof Warrior was on every single day because George Miller wanted him to play speed metal to get everyone in the mood. I hope he got to use his actual guitar.

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Tom Hardy hired an ice cream truck at one point to give everyone ice cream.

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The War Boys wore thick black eyeliner which was impossible to get off, so they just wore constant eyeliner. By the end of the shoot, all the local men were wearing eyeliner too.

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The stunt guys removed the pictures in their rented condos and put up pictures of the War Rig in order to confuse future people renting the condos.

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Many of the extras in the Citadel scenes were homeless people whom the casting department had hired off the streets of Sydney.

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Tom Hardy thought of Max like Wile E. Coyote and tried to make the fight scenes almost slapstick.

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The sound designer thought of the War Rig like Moby Dick, so they played whale sounds underneath all the truck sounds. When it is struck with a harpoon you get deep wounded-whale sounds. When Nux sacrifices the War Rig at the end, there are no realistic sounds-- only whale sounds and slowed-down bear roars-- to give the sense that this is a dying animal.

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One Wife is wearing one glove and the other Wife is wearing the other glove in a pair.

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Originally, George Miller wanted Fury Road to have diegetic indicators of when to put on your 3D glasses: when Max was wearing googles, you should be wearing your glasses. The last shot would be Max’s goggles in the ground, indicating that you’d take yours off forever.

Sadly, shooting in 3D would have been too expensive.

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The Vuvalini were supposed to be named the Vulvalini, before the studio vetoed it.

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In the storyboards, Immortan Joe didn’t drop water, he dropped potatoes.

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There was a cut Max mpreg scene.

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The studio tried to get George Miller to cut out all the masks so that the movie would be less scary and get a PG-13 rating.

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When the costume designer won the Oscar for best costumes, she went up wearing a leather jacket emblazoned with Immortan Joe's symbol.

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I talked to a friend whose parents work in Hollywood about this film and she told me “I hope you know that none of this is how movies are normally made.”

Blood, Sweat, & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road, by Kyle Buchanan. Published 2022. 384 pages. $12.