Robyn Glaser (second assistant director, action unit) You’d be driving down toward the base camp, and it looked like a hovering spaceship of lights, like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s only at the very end, when you see that at least some of what you set out to do has some resonance with the audience – that’s when I allow myself to celebrate. But also, I’m one of those people who has no sense of celebration at the beginning of something. George Miller (director) I remember the day well, and I was happy to get to it. Tom Hardy (actor, Max) Day one was: “This is a beast.” How do you eat an elephant? I suppose, metaphorically speaking, it would be a mouthful at a time. In this extract from Blood, Sweat and Chrome – an oral history of Fury Road – its cast, crew and creators look back at a one-of-a-kind shoot Photograph: Village Roadshow/Kobal/Shutterstock ‘A fetish party in the middle of the desert’ What a rush.ĭesert storm … iOTA, and his flame-throwing guitar. And the wordless chase scenes have something of Buster Keaton. With his delirium in the desert, Miller is more like crazy-genius site-specific artists such as Robert Smithson, creating monoliths in the wilderness, or Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapping the Arc de Triomphe in fabric – for the sheer devilment of it. Staggering out of the cinema in 2015, I mentally compared Miller to Hieronymus Bosch. Mad Max: Fury Road is weirder, more irrational: more dreamlike. Most action movies take place in a notionally rational present day world and they are about crime and violence.

And that’s what made audiences react so passionately. What I didn’t grasp at the time is that the stunts weren’t CGI. But Hardy’s alleged behaviour did not seem to affect the finished product, and may even have bolstered the defiant disdain in Theron’s performance. According to a new book, Blood, Sweat and Chrome by Kyle Buchanan, Hardy was persistently late, making everyone wait in the burning sun, and when Theron confronted him he was “aggressive” so she requested a female producer as “protection”. As with so many movies that involve a tough location shoot, the atmosphere was rancorous.

With the dedication of the entrepreneur Fitzcarraldo in Werner Herzog’s classic movie, transporting a steamship through the jungle, Miller dedicated himself for decades to making this film happen, eventually decamping to the desert in Namibia.

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