George Miller’s **Mad Max: Fury Road **has been many years in the making - in 2003, a version in which Mel Gibson was set to reprise his role as Max Rockatansky, the road warrior himself, had the plug pulled with about 12 weeks before cameras were set to roll. But the Australian writer / director kept beavering away, coming back to the project with Tom Hardy replacing Gibson in the title role, and today in Hall H he unveiled the first footage from the film. And it didn’t disappoint.
It begins with a shot of a long-haired Hardy, seen from behind, standing beside a new version of Max’s famous V8 Interceptor, looking out at the post-apocalyptic desert landscape from a cliff. And we then heard Hardy’s voice for the first and only time in the near four-minutes of footage that followed. “My name is Max,” he growls in voiceover, with an accent that sounded Australian to Empire’s ears. “My world is blood and fire.”
And so it proved. The new issue of Empire features an exclusive and in-depth interview with Miller, in which he reveals that the movie is essentially one long chase sequence, and that certainly seems to be the case. Early on, Max is chased down by a group of steampunk thugs, including Nicholas Hoult’s Nux, and is taken hostage, chained, muzzled and strapped to the trunk of a car as they race through the desert.
We then got glimpses of the chase itself, as Nux and his gang drive directly into a giant series of sandstorms. Miller placed much emphasis on practical stunts and effects while shooting the movie in Namibia, but there was a fair amount of CG in this sequence, whipping cars into the air until they explode, drivers and debris whizzing through the wind. But the stunts and effects did look pretty amazing - it’s been a long time since we saw vehicular mayhem like this on the big screen, and Miller’s determination to make this a visual poem, to pare the dialogue to the minimum, to tell the story through visuals alone, seems to be paying off.
And then there’s the characters. Nicholas Hoult, bald and caked in white make-up, looks simply deranged as Nux, at one point deciding to try to kill Max by filling his own car with petrol and lighting a flare. We got little impression of Hardy in the footage, strangely enough, as he spent most of it chained to the back of a car, but we imagine that once he gets free, he’ll bring stoicism enough to the role. And then there was Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa, a one-armed hardcase who, judging from the footage, saves Max and recruits him in her cause: to outrun the movie’s main villain, Immortan Joe (played by series veteran, Hugh Keays-Byrne, who appeared in the first movie). Again, we got little more than an impression of Furiosa, who drives a giant war rig that becomes the focal point of the movie, but there’s much more to come, with the movie not due in cinemas until next May.
For more from Miller on Fury Road, pick up the new issue of Empire, which is on sale on July 31.