Empire UK

DIRECTOR GEORGE MILLER TALKS US

THROUGH THE YEAR’S MOST CRUNCHING

ACTION FILM

WORDSCHRIS HEWITT

Mad Max:

Fury Road

★★★★★
FROM OCTOBER 5 / CERT. 15

DRIVE ANGRY

HERE’S A BLESSED

purity to Mad Max:
Fury Road. It roared
in on monster-truck
treads without an
ounce of storytelling
baggage. Is Tom’s
Max the same as Mel’s? Is this a sequel
to Beyond Thunderdome? Who cares?
George Miller doesn’t. His concern is
the iconography Western to the core:
the silent stranger sucked into another
hellish misadventure. There’s no ‘brain
trust’: you just trust the brain of Miller.
As Hardy puts it: “You’re not really in
a movie. You’re in George’s head.”
The extras a respectable 90
minutes bear something else out too:
the storytelling is purely fantastically
visual built from 3500 storyboards
and powered by kinetic energy. It’s
a chase from A to B. Then from B to
A. A full-on deranged rock ’n’ rollbar
opera that turns explosions into ballet
and makes fi ne art of the car crash.
Though it’s hardly shallow. We
weren’t expecting the ‘men’s rights’
lot to get their dicks in a twist over
the feminist agenda in a Mad Max
movie but the women from Charlize
Theron’s Furiosa (the real lead) down
do the real driving. The men killed the
world and can now only hope to be
judged “reliable” — the men that is
who aren’t corpulent rapist tyrants.
Miller is 70. His last fi lm was Happy
Feet 2. And this year he reminded
everyone how you craft an action movie.
He took ’em all to the old school and
taught ’em new tricks. For that he’s
surely awaited in Valhalla. DAN JOLIN

SPOILER

ALERT!

“My name is Max.”

Most of Tom Hardy’s lines come at the start of the movie.

“We wanted to see if we could do it silently with no voice-over”

explains Miller. “But when I saw it we just didn’t have enough.

We had to get inside his head.”

This Is Max

A fan theory posits that this Max

wasn’t Max Rockatansky at all but

the Feral Child from Mad Max 2 all

grown up. “No” refutes Miller. “The

Feral Child grew up to be the leader

of the Great Northern Tribe and an

old man. He couldn’t be Max.”

Angel Interceptor

In an interesting move Max only gets

to drive his iconic V8 Interceptor for

30 seconds. “Max has to let go of his

identity” explains Miller “to have a

chance at renewal. And in a way the

vehicles are characters too.”

Return To Oz

The film was shot in Namibia in

2012 but Miller reckons the action

takes place as with the others in

Australia. “The coastal cities have

been razed and the gangs have

marauded across the landscape

like locusts. It’s Australia 50 years

after the apocalypse.”

CHAPTER 1

0:18

CHAPTER 1

1:07

CHAPTER 2

1:58

CHAPTER 2

10:59

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