Mad Max director on how he filmed Furiosa’s electrifying stowaway sequence
George Miller explains the groundbreaking pre-vis technology behind the film's showstopping action set-piece.
There are few working film directors who have contributed more to action cinema over the years than George Miller – whose Mad Max series has ushered in some of the most impressive work ever accomplished in the genre.
Now the Australian filmmaker is back with the fifth entry in the franchise, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which has just arrived in UK cinemas and has received almost unanimous rave reviews from critics.
The new film serves as a prequel to 2015's hugely acclaimed Mad Max: Fury Road and once again delivers several electrifying, high octane sequences full of incredible stunt work and choreography.
Arguably the centre-piece of the film is a segment titled Stowaway to Nowehere, which unfolds over 15 minutes and finds Anya Taylor-Joy's Furiosa and Tom Burke's Praetorian Jack involved in an epic road fight that sees their War Rig confronted by flying motorbikes and parachuting assailants.
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It's an incredible sequence, and so during an exclusive interview with Miller, RadioTimes.com asked the director just how such a complicated scene was pulled off.
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"Well it took a long time!" he said. "And it's built... we wrote something, and then we storyboarded something based on it.
"But [the] thing that helped us make it much more organic and effective was Guy Norris, with whom I've been working there for 41 years, the second unit director, stunt coordinator, he and his sons developed a system called PROXi, which is a very accurate and fast way of pre-vising."
He continued: "We used pre-vis on Fury Road and other films... but we started working with this system called PROXi... which they basically devised and then we did our own version for this film, which we called Toy Box, which not only let you virtually have that War Rig but put people underneath it, above it, front, back, and flying around the space around it.
"Not only doing that, but you could put all the cameras in, and you could choreograph the cameras with what people were doing. So we built that up, and we did it virtually.
"And then we had to figure out how to do it in a practical way – which [because] we have the accurate tools, it wasn't experimental, we knew what each shot required. We knew where each camera was.
Read more:
- Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga review – A blockbuster against which all must be measured
- Furiosa director George Miller reveals how Chris Hemsworth adapted character
"And we did that in long rehearsals, technical rehearsals and so on with the stunt crew, and then comes the day of shooting, and then you shoot it! So its built up carefully.”
But while much of it is worked out in the planning process shooting the sequence itself was hardly straightforward either – as Norris explained in the film's press notes.
"We shot that, off and on, for close to nine months," he said. "Starting in [the] country, New South Wales in March, winding up in Sydney, on a stage at Fox Studios in October. We shot it over the course of that time in-between other sequences as well. It’s a big sequence."
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is released in UK cinemas on Friday 24th May 2024.
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