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‘Mad Max: Fury Road’: Why Mel Gibson Didn’t Have A Cameo, And 7 Other Facts

By Stacey Cole
Published on: 20:44 PST, Feb 3, 2016

Mad Max: Fury Road has taken the movie industry by storm and has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. Part of a franchise that has been in existence since the 1970s, Mad Max: Fury Road has a lot of trivia and cool facts associated with its development.

Here are some fun facts about Mad Max: Fury Road.

1. Slash Film reports that the production of Mad Max: Fury Road was done over a span of more than a decade. The very beginning was in 2001, as described by director George Miller.

“We started to kick this off in 2001, but it fell away. The American dollar collapsed with 9/11, the budget ballooned, we had to get on to Happy Feet because the digital facility was [ready]. Then it rose again, and we had unprecedented rains in the outback of Australia. Where there was red desert there were now flowers. We waited a year for it to dry out. It didn’t, so we had to take everything from the east coast of Australia to the west coast of Africa, to Namibia where it never rains. We had to do it old school, this is not a CG movie, we don’t defy the laws of physics, and so we had to stage it. For 120 days, and every day was a big stunt day.”

2. Every stunt for Mad Max: Fury Road was planned out and tested before filming, and one crew member of the Fury Road crew, who was just young when they started out, was instrumental in coordinating the stunts.

“Every stunt you see we’d rig up an old wreck, get all the weights right. He’s one of those who uses a lot of computers, goes through engineering and really tests it on the computer, and then tests it in reality.”

3. IMDb reports that more than 80% of the effects in Mad Max: Fury Road are real, using stunts, makeup, and practical effects. CGI was only used for enhancing the landscape and the prosthetic arm of Imperator Furiosa (played by Charlize Theron)’s left arm.

4. The flame-shooting guitar used by The Doof Warrior (Iota) weighed an astonishing 132 pounds and shot real flames that he controlled with the whammy bar.

5. Miller was adamant about two aspects of making Mad Max: Fury Road. First, the cinematography would be as colorful as possible to make it stand out from other, bleaker post-apocalyptic movies. Second, the art direction would be as beautiful as possible because it seemed reasonable that those living in a post-apocalyptic world would try to find beauty wherever possible.

6. During the filming of Mad Max: Fury Road, Tom Hardy and Miller were at odds much of the time. Hardy apologized to Miller during a Cannes press conference.

“There was no way George could have explained what he could see in the sand when we were out there. Because of the due diligence that was required to make everything safe and so simple, what I saw was a relentless barrage of complexities, simplified for this fairly linear story. I knew he was brilliant, but I didn’t know how brilliant until I saw it. So, my first reaction was ‘Oh my god, I owe George an apology for being so myopic.'”

7. News Australia reports that there had been rumors Mel Gibson was to have a cameo in Mad Max: Fury Road, but it never came to pass.

“By the time the planets finally all aligned, Mel had hit a lot of turbulence in his life, and it was also never meant to be a story about an older warrior.”

8. Heavy reports that Mad Max: Fury Road was shot with a storyboard, rather than a traditional script.

[Photo by Kevin Winter / Getty Images]

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