The movie Tom Hardy called a “fetish party”
Many film shoots are difficult experiences for those involved, and the history of troubled Hollywood productions is a long and varied one with countless examples.
Sometimes, a brilliant work of cinema emerges from a hellish production, such as Apocalypse Now or The Wizard of Oz. On other occasions, the movie is completely hampered by these circumstances. Meanwhile, the Tom Hardy-starring action project Mad Max Fury Road was a much more recent film with a complex production.
It took decades for writer-director George Miller to finally get this fourth Mad Max film off the ground. Life kept getting in the way. The September 11th terror attack caused the budget to balloon uncontrollably since the American dollar collapsed against the Australian dollar. The Iraq War made filming in Africa impractical, and then the original lead, Mel Gibson, needed to be recast due to his age and personal controversies. Even when the film was confirmed in the late 2000s, it wasn’t until 2012 that production actually got moving.
The book Blood, Sweat and Chrome, an oral history of Fury Road’s development, reveals that production wasn’t the easier affair either. Although lead actor Tom Hardy would later describe his co-star Charlize Theron as a “phenomenal talent” and praised her as “the finest lead character in an action movie”, the pair are rumoured to have heavily clashed on set. Meanwhile, Miller endured a difficult working relationship with Hardy and many of the other actors in the film – on the basis that they were often unsure of the shooting schedule and what scenes they were supposed to be filming.
Miller shunned CGI and created many hugely complex action sequences with practical effects… all while being in the middle of the Namibian Desert, which unsurprisingly proved to be a very challenging filming location. The changing weather constantly disrupted the shoot, which eventually overran and exceeded the budget. Ultimately, the crew were forced to stop shooting by the end of 2012 and were required to film the opening and closing scenes almost a year later. It was clearly a maddening experience, one which Hardy memorably described as a “fetish party… in the middle of the desert”, presumably referring to the eccentric costumes that the film’s post-apocalyptic society displays.
So, how did the final film turn out after this brutal production? Well, in a plot twist that would make M. Night Shyamalan proud, Mad Max Fury Road didn’t just turn out good; it emerged like a phoenix from the flame as a full-blown action movie masterpiece that was arguably one of the greatest ever made.
The outlandish car chases are beautiful, brilliant works of art, but what really takes the movie to the next level is how well it works on a narrative level. It’s got rich world-building characters who are easy to care about and even some pleasantly surprising feminist undertones, which are executed very well. Truly, this is an action movie that succeeds on every single level, and there’s a good reason it’s one of the only films of its genre to ever be nominated for ‘Best Picture’ at the Oscars.
It’s still hard to believe that such a refined, rich, enthralling and coherent film could’ve come out of such a messy production, but who’s complaining? That miserable shoot, that fetish party in the middle of the desert, it really did yield something magnificent, and you just love to see it.
