Director George Miller began working on an idea for a fourth Mad Max movie in 1998. It didn't hit theaters until 2015, for various reasons. By the time production started, Mel Gibson was too old to play Max, so Tom Hardy got the role. But the real star was Charlize Theron, who played Furiosa. Five years after the movie burned up theaters all over the world, Miller, Hardy, Theron, and more of the cast and crew share their memories of making Mad Max: Fury Road. It was an intense nine months spent in the Namibian desert, performing non-stop stunts, which you can get a glimpse of in this video.
“Like anything that has some worth to it, it comes with complicated feelings,” Theron said. “I feel a mixture of extreme joy that we achieved what we did, and I also get a little bit of a hole in my stomach. There’s a level of ‘the body remembers’ trauma related to the shooting of this film that’s still there for me.”
“It was one of the wildest, most intense experiences of my life,” said the actress Riley Keough, while her co-star Rosie Huntington-Whiteley added, “You could have made another movie on the making of it.” As for Hardy? “It left me irrevocably changed,” he said.
Here, in the cast and crew’s own words, is how a nearly impossible project managed to become an Oscar-winning action masterpiece.
Read the crooked path Mad Max: Fury Road took from concept to silver screen, the difficulty of the actual shooting, and its lasting legacy in this oral history. -via Metafilter