In the beginning, it was a motor. And a leather jacket. And desert, dust and thirst. Now there is a peach, vegetation and water. But for a few seconds: soon the desert, the motorcycles and the roar of the combustion engines will appear again. In Furious, which premieres this Wednesday in Cannes out of competition before hitting theaters on May 24 — in Spain under the title Furiosa: from the Mad Max saga—, George Miller returns to the universe of the mythical warrior who was resurrected as a luxury secondary in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). She has embarked on a crazy film journey, which has left emotional corpses along the way, similar to that of the preceding film. Filming big action films is not easy, even less so with emotionally tough characters, and only sometimes the result is worth it: has it been like that with Furious?
In person, Miller is a charming guy, completely removed from what part of his filmography shows, his wild side. The filming of the Mad Max They were never easy, but during the promotion of Mad Max: Fury Road It was clear that sparks flew, that some actors felt emotionally abandoned and only understood the puzzle they had been putting together by watching the finished film. He gave testimony of all this Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max, the book by journalist Kyle Buchanan from 2022, where both Charlize Theron, a hard-working actress who respects schedules and equipment, who plays Furiosa, and Tom Hardy, a performer of enormous intensity who inherited the role of Mel Gibson’s Max Rockatansky, confessed their feelings and their anger. A week ago, interviewed by Buchanan in The New York Times, Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays Furiosa as a young woman, said: “I have never felt more alone than when filming this film.”
And all this despite the fact that Miller, after the disputes between Theron and Hardy, which constantly clashed, brought together Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth and told them, as he confesses in The Telegraph: “You have to be obsessive about safety: physical safety as filming progresses and fatigue grows and overcomes us, but also with psychological safety. “This is not like the old days.”
lone heroes
However, Miller prefers to base his films on anonymous heroes, hardened by circumstances and confronted with the society in which they live. That’s why he got out of hand Road rage. The filmmaker notes: “I’m an optimist, so I saw Charlize and Tom’s behavior as a reflection of their characters, where they had to learn to cooperate to ensure mutual survival. “I think there is a tendency in this business to use big performances as an excuse for other disruptions that could be avoided.”
He didn’t make it. If in the New York newspaper the actress, who started powerfully in cinema with The witch (2015) and achieved popularity with the series Queen’s Gambit (2020), closes his comment with “I don’t want to go too far, but everything I thought was easy turned out to be difficult,” ending with: “Next question, sorry. Ask me in 20 years.”
![The 'Furiosa' team at Cannes: from left, Tom Burke, Elsa Pataky, Chris Hemsworth, director George Miller and Anya Taylor-Joy.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/LYBHOE5COT4RBTCWBDDPJHGARY.jpg?auth=cb2e44a1c245e9ec7c188d7f98de9753c9960ce05f55253b1960e1457fece7fd&width=414)
Already in Cannes, in the middle deadline, has insisted: “Despite the complexity of the filming, I was often alone and he is a character that is very present in my head and very, very quiet. “So I felt like everything around me was pushing me into this sense of isolation.” Her character only has 30 lines of dialogue in 150 minutes because “George had a very, very strict idea of what Furiosa’s war face looked like, and that only allowed me to use my eyes for much of the movie. It was really a ‘close mouth, no emotion, speak with your eyes’. Is that all you have”.
![A moment from the filming of 'Furiosa', with Chris Hemsworth, in the truck, receiving instructions from George Miller.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/OAWC6YCENVAVXLNCLTU7TC3AWI.jpg?auth=2d316db6a25d3d2d60a0630ad7f397b9f974d06fdef384ffc97f36f9917761f3&width=414)
For this reason, he accumulated an internal pain that ended up exploding: “We are animals, and there is a moment when someone breaks. There’s a scream in this movie, and I’m not kidding when I tell you that I fought for that scream for three months. [Como] “A fervent defender of female rage,” it was important to her that this cry come to light.
The filming, in New South Wales, Australia, like the rest of the Mad Max, except road rage, which was filmed in Namibia, was complex. One of the chase and action sequences, which lasts 15 minutes and which the team named Stairway To Nowhere (highway to nowhere), It took 78 days of filming for a shoot that ran from June to October 2022, with a budget of 168 million dollars (154 million euros).
![Anya Taylor-Joy turns around to pose on the 'Furiosa' red carpet. Behind her, George Miller and Chris Hemsworth.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/BV45ILJYEAW2OEKP5SWCB4KZOI.jpg?auth=f18fd70c705234715c6718eb0a0db24b9ecd954e608754eef0a0d40114c9c1fc&width=414)
Still, like Theron and Hardy, Taylor-Joy defends Miller: “I love George, and if you want to do something like that, you have to be in the hands of someone like him. It is his vision. I can present everything I have, but he is the one who decides.” When the fourth installment of Mad Max, the first without Gibson, the cinematographic world received with joy that storm of creativity, full of forceful images created with physical effects that gave the texture of reality to the narrative, and that put the adventures of a character like Furiosa before the theoretical hero, Mad Max. It was a slap in the face to younger generations of action-hardened filmmakers. It didn’t do so well at the box office: it cost $150 million, grossed $380 million. It won six Oscars and left behind a halo of a masterpiece.
Some of the virtues of the previous installment are not in Furious. The action stars Imperator, a girl who is kidnapped from her home, the Green Land, by a horde of bikers, led by the warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). Imperator Furiosa must learn to survive in the middle of a war for dominance of the Citadel controlled by the tyrannical Immortan Joe, with whom the protagonist will forge an alliance. That is why the story, which is divided into five episodes, has a time arc of about 15 years and fits exactly with the Mad Max mythology thanks to the landscape, the characters, the atmosphere, a wink for fans and its ending.
![Chris Hemsworth, in 'Furiosa'](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/NQ7HY7SOXJGF7LT5GJWAVLOSF4.jpg?auth=c434a6962ec547414ebea4f607a4d8eea5bf8ceda25f06dd1b81a93f03e85ca3&width=414)
There are three brilliant actors: if Taylor-Joy unifies her toughness and her look with that created by Theron, Hemsworth – outstanding – who returns to the old trickster villains and as charlatans as they are physicists of the first Mad Max. Finally, Tom Burke plays Praetorian Jack, the only warrior in the Wasteland who harbors a shred of humanity. Miller, at 79 years old, gives the viewer no respite and in some chases achieves the brilliance of road rage, but it has lost the surprise factor of 2015 and has resorted too much to digital effects. Of course, Furiosa has a splendid final hour.
![Anya Taylor-Joy, in 'Furiosa'.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/34PPM6O36ZCHXKUFM3VVNS4GYU.jpg?auth=0f82deca37b9990ef9eaebf0a39d406a254ee595a43e85a41a8d29323e027ef4&width=414)
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