The Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga script is full of “Holy shit!” moments. But when Tom Burke first read it, a single line shot straight up like a red flare in his head. “I remember exactly what it said in the script,” he recalls. “It said, ‘The Mortifiers become the Mortiflyers.’”
The 42-year-old actor, who plays War Rig driver Praetorian Jack in the postapocalyptic prequel, is describing an image that feels like it’s designed to break the no-talking-at-the-movies rule. During a race through the Australian wasteland, motorcycle-towed attackers sprout parachutes and go airborne. The sight of marauders dive-bombing Jack’s convoy caused me to reflexively blurt out, “Wooooo!” I assume many viewers reacted the same way on opening weekend.
It’s the kind of eye-singeing mayhem—at once utterly fantastical, viscerally realistic, and seemingly impossible—that only one director can pull off without completely relying on CGI: George Miller. His and Nick Lathouris’s screenplay lays out every fiery set piece in vivid detail.
“Sometimes action sequences are just this big, dense block of things, which is somehow never quite helpful with my brain,” Burke says. “There’s something about the spacing of the way they write these out that you really go, OK, yeah. So it was beautifully put, beautifully curated in what it was.”
What makes Miller’s brutally picturesque imagination unique is that it’s not confined to the page. Even his most wildly explosive fever dreams make it to the screen. Who else could’ve conceived the guitar-strumming Doof Warrior in Mad Max: Fury Road or the bungee battle in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome?
In Furiosa, there’s no more memorable example of the filmmaker’s visual flair than that chase scene. It lasts 15 minutes and took about 78 days to shoot.
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And Burke was in the middle of it all. The sequence blows his mind because a lot of it was actually shot. “I was never just staring at a green screen,” he says. “There might be little squares of things that they were going to have to put in after. But there was always so much going on. I never wasn’t reacting to something.”
There were stunt performers on wires, vehicles on wires, and people high in the air. “I thought they were up there for ages because they’d be doing take after take after take after take after take,” Burke says. “They’d send a cup of tea for them somehow. They’d need a little break. I mean, it was quite funny the way all that had to work.”
Meanwhile, Burke and costar Anya Taylor-Joy were really riding on a massive tanker truck. Even when they weren’t rocketing through the desert at 100 miles per hour, they were still in motion. “The whole thing is juddering away,” Burke says. “It’s got a whole machine to make it move as if it’s going full tilt.”
That’s what working with Miller is like: Everything feels real, even if it’s not. “I don’t remember the green screen,” Burke says. “I remember what I saw. I remember the sky. I think they think this is what happens with people seeing ghosts. It might be a macular degeneration thing. Your imagination fills in the blanks.”
Miller doesn’t remember how long it took to come up with Furiosa’s epic chase sequence. But, he told me at a screening of the movie earlier this month, “it was all storyboarded.” These days, that doesn’t only mean using pencil and paper.
To meticulously plan out action scenes, Miller and his team used 3D software developed by second-unit director and supervising stunt coordinator Guy Norris (a Miller collaborator since Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior) and his son Harrison Norris (who’s both a stunt performer and an actor in Furiosa). “We were able to map out every camera, every camera move, every one of those flying people,” the director says. “All of that was done beforehand.”
When I asked Miller which element of the chase was the most difficult to film, he couldn’t narrow it down. To him, it was all challenging. “I’d say what is always the hardest is safety,” he says. “By far it’s the most important thing. Every rig has redundancy on them so that if one cable breaks, it’s not going to be catastrophic. So all of them are hard.”
Building the vehicles used in the sequence wasn’t just hard. It was painstaking. But production designer Colin Gibson, who won an Academy Award for his work on Mad Max: Fury Road, took on the challenge with the hellacious determination of a War Boy.
“The main variation was that Fury Road was set over three days,” Gibson says. “And so it was a full-pelt, high-speed cram. As much detail as possible. A vehicle might take you five, six months to build and appear on-screen for five seconds and then go out in a Catherine wheel screaming, fiery explosion. So you tried to pack as much into that time. This time it’s set over 15 years, and it’s largely motive focused because of our new villain provocateur for this film, Dementus.”
Dementus, Chris Hemsworth’s character, has a motorcycle fetish. (At one point, he introduces sidekicks named Harley and Davidson.) “He’s basically Genghis Khan or a locust plague sweeping across the wasteland, and it’s the anti–Animal Farm. It’s two wheels good, four wheels bad,” Gibson says. Compared to Fury Road, he adds, “there were a hell of a lot more motorbikes, obviously. We did probably only another 30 or 40 cars and trucks.”
For the War Rig, Gibson needed a truck that could believably evade the bikes on asphalt, not just sand. “We are back on the bitumen for this job, baby!” he says with a smile. “We needed more speed and less talk this time round.”
American manufacturer Kenworth made two tankers for the movie. “They were extended front, back, sideways, and lifted to 6 feet on sand tires so that we could actually play all the action underneath the vehicle,” Gibson says. He takes no credit for one of the coolest weapons in the film: the Bommy Knocker, which basically turns the War Rig into a whirling, industrial-size mace.
“That was completely George and the stunt guys, who wanted something at the back end of the machine,” Gibson says. “Theoretically, it’s from a drill. The back-end curving is from mining machinery that would’ve been used at Bullet Farm. And so that machine is then mounted horizontally rather than digging down. And then the bowling balls and steel balls with spikes added on chains were there to spin as a defensive unit for the back end of the truck.”
Burke remembers chatting with Miller about the War Rig for the first time. “It’s more than just a truck,” he remembers the director saying. Miller described it, Burke says, “like it’s a rocket to outer space.” And Praetorian Jack, the actor adds, isn’t just a driver; “he’s like a test pilot or an astronaut.”
Gibson initially planned for the truck to be painted pitch-black, like the one in Fury Road. Then, he says, Miller made a big request: “George, in true form, came up with ‘What if it was shiny instead?’”
The choice made sense to Gibson; Furiosa takes place years before Fury Road. In the prequel, warlord Immortan Joe is still flexing, without any serious challengers. The truck is an opulent tribute to his dominance. Gibson even helped design a steel relief sculpture of Immortan Joe and his conquests adorning the tanker. “This vehicle, it’s the Sun King level, it’s Louis XIV, it’s the Palace of Versailles,” he says. “So it became a beautiful, big, shiny monument to the apogee of our friend, the Immortan’s height of power when he meets Dementus. So his legend is basically being carried out along that strip of bitumen into the wasteland to let everybody know who the fuck I am, how important I am, and what I did.”
Gibson’s one disappointment about the War Rig is that the prequel doesn’t go deep into the tanker truck’s intricate iconography. “I won’t forgive George for going by it so fast in the film,” Gibson jokes.
In Furiosa, there wasn’t much room for lingering. Miller was too busy showing the audience new things. “George has very specific ideas about how to up the ante every time,” Gibson says. In Furiosa, that meant taking to the air. The Mortiflyers—a crew of Dementus defectors—are made up of parachutists and paragliders. Their leader, the Octoboss, rides an attack motorcycle held up by a giant tentacled kite.
“We worked backwards,” Gibson adds. “It became ‘Well, the first thing is you’re going to go from ski—so dragging along the back of the vehicle—to sky, and then from sky, you up the ante and go to parachute, then you go to paraglider, then you go to the actual big Octoboss on his powered machine that’s actually held aloft by the octo-kite.”
Gibson wasn’t surprised that Miller was behind all that. That’s something that the production designer loves about the director: He hates repeating himself. “You can never go back and do the same gag because everybody knows the hat’s got a rabbit in it,” Gibson says. “So this was us attempting to pull a hat out of a rabbit.”
By now, Gibson is used to Miller making dystopian magic. “I mean, come the apocalypse,” he says, “I’ll be following General George.”
Tom Burke is a Shakespearean actor, not a stuntman. But Praetorian Jack is an intense physical presence from the moment we see him behind the wheel of the War Rig. Burke became a gym rat while making Furiosa, spending hours on location working out with fight choreographer and actor Richard Norton.
“It was one of those gyms where they pump in really loud pop music, which is all I want from the gym,” says Burke, whose most recent high-profile role before Furiosa was Orson Welles in David Fincher’s Mank. “It was stuff that I haven’t really heard before. I mean, I’m quite particular in my music taste. The only time I hear that is if I’m out in a club somewhere.”
Like Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa—who has about 30 lines of dialogue in the film—Jack barely speaks. But he does have one of the movie’s best lines. After recognizing Furiosa’s talent and heart during the chase sequence, he lets her know what he thinks of her: “You may be raw, but you have about you a purposeful savagery.”
Burke was thrilled that Miller gave him a chance to play someone who, in lesser hands, could’ve been just a cookie-cutter stoic. The character is basically an Australian version of Kyle Reese from The Terminator, a veteran of the postapocalyptic wars serving as a mentor to an iconic heroine. We learn that it’s Praetorian Jack who inspires Furiosa to paint her forehead black.
Burke personally loved that particular intimidation ploy. “Because it looks cool,” he says. But his character is conflicted about it. After all, Jack works for Immortan Joe. It’s a job he takes to survive—he’s not exactly proud of his allegiance to an evil boss.
“I feel a bit like I’m wearing a swastika because this is Joe’s regime. I can’t be into it,” Burke says. “When [Furiosa] puts it on, I’m behind her. There was a whole conversation about whether or not I should be smiling because in some sense you feel like she’s achieved something by getting there. And it furthers her journey, which is about getting out of there.”
The pair’s bond is forged during their chase through the desert. Afterward, Jack gifts Furiosa a double-barreled “boom stick”—he doesn’t need to explain why. “He gives it to her when he knows she’s ready to go and he doesn’t know how to say the words ‘You’re ready to go,’” Burke says. “That’s a difficult thing for him to say because of the bond they formed.”
For Burke, filming the chase sequence was “completely surreal.” It brought him back to his childhood, when he first watched Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the third installment of Miller’s original trilogy.
“I remember my mate had it on VHS from Blockbuster,” Burke says. “The bit where [Max] first goes to Bartertown and he’s unloading all the guns and the weapons with the amazing hair. I was like, ‘What is this?’ And it was like the film I’d always wanted to see.”
As Burke got older, he realized it was the kind of film he always wanted to be in. Miller, he quickly figured out after coming on board for Furiosa, was unlike any other director he’d ever met. “Well, getting to know him as a human being, I can only imagine that there’s something about the way he’s in touch with himself that is quite rare,” Burke says. “To also do Babe and Happy Feet? There are very few artists that have that kind of breadth. I mean, you think of somebody like Goya. It’s the kind of closest you can come up with. It’s unique. And you think, ‘Those people must have a very unique understanding of the breadth of their own soul.’”
That’s why Miller’s movies are both affecting and brutal. Naturally, Furiosa leans hard toward the latter. But for us, that’s not a bad thing. Purposeful savagery can be a blast. Or at least pretty damn entertaining.
Just ask Burke. After he finished filming the movie’s epic chase, he was sad. He didn’t expect to feel that way. “I remember the day before thinking, ‘Oh, it will be such a relief,’” he says. “And then I was like, ‘OK, I could have more, yeah.’”
When I tell Burke that it sounded like he didn’t realize how much fun he was having until the monthslong part of the Furiosa shoot was over, he smiles and corrects me. “No,” he says. “I knew how much fun it was.”
