NEW YORK (AP) â When it was time to start making production designer Colin Gibson went to a garage in Australia to find some old friends.
It had been years since wrapped production. Many of the vehicles seen in the film had been blown up or left to rust in Namibia. But a dozen of them â the âdirty dozen,â Gibson calls them â had been put in storage, including the War Rig, Gigahorse and Duff Wagon.
âThey did need a fair amount of cleaning up,â Gibson says a little wistfully. âA lot of the fuel had turned to jelly and the tires sink. And it all seemed so much sadder than you remember.â
Returning to the world of âMad Maxâ meant resurrecting the motorized army of âFury Road,â getting it back into running condition and building an entire new fleet of gas-guzzling, mutant machines of apocalyptic doom.
As terrific as the cast of âFuriosaâ is, including and Chris Hemsworth, letâs be real. The true stars of any âMad Maxâ movie are the vehicles. The characters and actors of âMad Maxâ may come and go across the sagaâs 45 years, but the marauding mechanized horde keeps chugging.
âIn a sense, theyâre characters â theyâre extensions of the characters,â Miller says. âYou see it right through the âMad Maxâ films. The V8 Inceptor is an extension of Max. Furiosa ultimately has that vehicle we call the Cranky Black thatâs an expression of who she is at the end of the movie.â
âFuriosa,â which opened in theaters Thursday, takes place years ahead of the events of âFury Road,â so the War Rig and company arenât called back into duty until the end of the film. But they were a necessary reference point for all the cars and trucks that lead up to that finale. âFuriosaâ is a prequel for more than its title character.
âWe did use the idea of those other vehicles to build an evolution in,â says Gibson. âSo we would drop in vehicles that looked in embryo like some of the vehicles that had since been destroyed or gone to gold or been exploded off in Africa.â
Gibson is a longtime collaborator of Millerâs whose fervor for doing things practically and as realistically as possible is nearly as extreme as the War Boysâ zeal for Valhalla. That was a big part of the kinetic thrill of âFury Road.â And while that film included CGI in nearly every shot to accomplish its explosive onslaught, âFuriosaâ depended on a bit more effects to realize its post-apocalyptic world.
âI donât like easy,â he says. âWe donât operate very well under easy. Itâs one of my ongoing arguments with George. I prefer uneasy, which may be why Iâm so annoying.â
Production designers might build the facade of a house or even an entire shell, but they don't have to install working plumbing. Gibson's creations, though, have to move. Most have working engines and when the director says âAction!â they have to move. As he says, âEverything has to be able to do its own stunt.â
âThereâs a lot of hidden, unseen effort that goes into that,â Miller says. âItâs a military exercise. Of the shooting crew, there was over a thousand people on set every day, just to keep all that stuff going.â
Gibson, who hadnât yet seen the film during an interview earlier this month, was still nursing some wounds over the fact that âFuriosaâ contains some digital machines, too.
âUnless itâs real, unless the sense of gravity is there, I donât think you get the hair going up on the back of your neck,â Gibson says. âI think thatâs what we achieved with âFury Road,â and Iâll keep my fingers crossed that the CG doesnât distance us too much in âFuriosa.ââ
âIt is slightly different,â sighs Gibson, âand Iâm an old-fashioned girl.â
But âFuriosaâ also had many more challenges than âFury Road,â which transpires across a three-day blur. âFuriosa,â spanning decades, needed more locations. (Here, Gas Town and Bullet Farm are visited.) And a more sprawling array of characters meant a lot more rides.
Dementus (Hemsworth) is a new villain whom the filmmakers styled after a fusion of Roman emperor and Genghis Khan. Early in âFuriosa,â he rides a chariot pulled by three motorcycles. Later, he pilots a six-wheeled monster truck.
The War Rig, the central semi-truck of âFury Road,â also needed an earlier iteration for âFuriosa.â Whereas the âFury Roadâ War Rig was more weathered and beaten up, âFuriosaâ finds Immortan Joeâs Citadel at the height of its power.
âSo this is Louis the Sun King,â says Gibson. âThis is the Palace of Versailles. This is a shiny, mirrored, godlike object racing out into the desert and reflecting all the nothing thatâs coming back but also emblazoned with the legend of the Immortan as he sees it himself.â
Itâs upon that rig that âFuriosaâ has its most lengthy and blistering sequence. And while Taylor-Joy feels a particular bond with the War Rig she spent 78 days crawling across, the thoughtful features of the Cranky Black roadster were more revelatory to her.
âI love the fact there are all these details in the filmmaking that you donât even see as an audience member,â Taylor-Joy says. âLike, the Cranky Black has human teeth all along the inside, which is so cool.â
But the defining vehicle of âFuriosaâ may be the motorbike. Two-wheelers star in the movieâs frenetic start and they only populate from there, eventually filling the desert like a swarm of locusts.
âGeorge had the idea that by the time Dementus arrived at the Citadel, there might have been 2- or 3- or 4- or 6,000 motorbikes,â Gibson says. âI looked at how long it would take me to build that many. Do you know how hard it is to make one motorbike look different from another? Theyâre basically two wheels and a seat.â
That meant, to Gibsonâs horror, the necessity of CGI. But that didnât stop him from building some 100 characterized motorbikes, along with doubles for about half of them.
âOf all the vehicles, you always love the ones that start with nothing,â Gibson says. âWe were fortunate that BMW, Harley Davidson and Yamaha all came to the party and gave us generously of their beautiful machines knowing that there was no exclusivity and that by the time I got through with them, their mother wouldnât recognize them.â
One bike has particular meaning to Gibson. He built it from an old 1940s Triumph kneeler, the kind used for racing. His mother â âa bit of a devil-may-care Sheila in her youth,â he says â had once worked at a speedway around such motorcycles. Gibson lavished his with detail and texture as a kind of ode to her.
âIf I could hang it on a key ring,â Gibson says, âthatâs probably the one Iâd keep.â
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Jake Coyle, The Associated Press
