Thread by @kylebuchanan

I wrote a mammoth, no-holds-barred oral history of MAD MAX: FURY ROAD.

Tom! Charlize! All the Wives, War Boys, and even the Doof Warrior!

They’re all here, and candid as hell about the difficult making of an against-all-odds masterpiece: nytimes.com/2020/05/12/mov…

5 years after its release, Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy get candid about why they fought during the making of MAD MAX: FURY ROAD nytimes.com/2020/05/12/mov…

George Miller puts it plainly: “When someone is directing a film, they’re thinking about it every waking hour, and even processing it in their dreams. The problem is, if you’re a studio executive, you tend to think about it for 10 minutes on a Wednesday.” nytimes.com/2020/05/12/mov…

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD was hard as hell to make, but it produced one unlikely marriage: nytimes.com/2020/05/12/mov…

Warner Bros shut down MAD MAX: FURY ROAD before they were able to film the beginning and ending Citadel sequences. It wasn’t until over a year later that George Miller finally got his way. nytimes.com/2020/05/12/mov…

How about some outtakes from the MAD MAX: FURY ROAD oral history?

Furiosa’s iconic desert scream wasn’t scripted. It was a suggestion from Charlize Theron, and George Miller gave her 4 takes to nail it. Here’s why Charlize thought it was necessary:

Throughout FURY ROAD, Charlize was looking for little moments where she could make Furiosa more recognizably human, and less of a stock heroine

I asked Charlize to elaborate on why the actors sometimes got frustrated while working with George Miller on FURY ROAD

The first time Charlize Theron saw FURY ROAD, it was a 3-and-a half hour cut, and she fell hard for it: “I felt like for the first time in my career, I was part of something where you could truly say, ‘This feels original.’”

Here’s George Miller elaborating on the tension between his leads on the set of FURY ROAD, featuring a Jack Nicholson cameo

Oh, a little tangent: Before he began developing FURY ROAD, George Miller came very close to directing a CONTACT movie that would have starred Uma Thurman

Here’s something alarming: WB wanted the Doof Warrior cut from FURY ROAD!
“The Doof Warrior tested really badly at first,” Miller told me. “We had temp music, and whenever the Doof Warrior played in the test screening, it was the same riff, so it got annoying.”

“A couple people at the studio said, ‘Oh, we've got to drop the Doof Warrior.” I said, ‘No no, it's way too early to even think of that.’” Once the Junkie XL score was added to the cut, Miller’s instincts proved correct: “He became one of the most popular characters in the film.”

And the Doof Warrior’s flame-spewing guitar really worked! (Eventually.) Here’s a funny story from FURY ROAD production designer Colin Gibson about it

The actresses cast as the Wives in FURY ROAD were auditioned with script pages from ERIN BROCKOVICH, NETWORK, and MONTY PYTHON, and sometimes, they did gender-bending character exercises. Here’s how it went for Zoe Kravitz when she auditioned opposite Jeremy Renner (!!) as Max

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley has starred in only two films: Michael Bay’s 3rd TRANSFORMERS movie, and FURY ROAD. Here’s how she felt at the beginning of FURY ROAD (with a little bit of Bay shade), and how she felt after

Zoe Kravitz felt the same way after FURY ROAD was done, she told me: “I don’t think we realized until it was almost over how far down the rabbit hole we had all gone. Just returning to normal life after was bizarre. None of us knew how to do it.”

The FURY ROAD Wives all had pretty crazy stories from the set. Here’s one from actress Courtney Eaton:

FURY ROAD editor Margaret Sixel said cutting together Tom Hardy’s performance posed some unique challenges

Oh, and I really liked this FURY ROAD end-of-production story from iOTA, who played the Doof Warrior