![]() ![]() An idea pops in your head and you push it away – because the last thing I wanted to do was another Mad Max movie – but then it festers in the back of your mind. The whole story started with a simple idea. The real star of the film was Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa. ![]() Even though he’s a pretty flamboyant character, like everything else in the film, there’s a logic to him. But like everything else in the wasteland – it has to be multi-purpose – so it also has a flamethrower. So he has to have a double-necked guitar and it’s amplified and he has drummers on the back. There’s always the music of war – the bagpipes and the drummers and the horn players – but in this case, when you’ve got an army with hot engines, you need something very loud. Somebody like the Doof Warrior has his own logic. In this situation the people are less valuable than the artefacts. Something that has survived an apocalypse would have a great importance. So they put a lot of love into preserving it. For instance, a car steering wheel now acquires the status of a religious artefact. In this world, we get about 50 years into the future and all the artefacts that survive are kind of corrupted but everything is repurposed, almost like found art. Just because it’s the wasteland doesn’t mean people have lost their ability to create beautiful things. If you go back to the Paleolithic times they had very little to work with and yet they made those beautiful cave drawings which are so extraordinary. But if you look at all human culture, no matter how impoverished the circumstances, it doesn’t mean that there’s not a strong aesthetic. One of the big things I’ve noticed in post-apocalyptic movies is that people would start with some ideas from the early Mad Maxes and paint the future as being a kind of junkyard. Would there have been artists and craftsmen in Immortan Joe’s kingdom? One thing that strikes is the level of craft at work in this world. I’m rambling on a bit but I just found this really interesting. In a lot of places, the actual stairways are so small and narrow and constrained that you can’t even draw a sword without bumping your head on the ceiling. That’s where the court is, where all the concubines are. Essentially the structure is concentric so that those with real power reside at the very centre. What’s been so interesting to me has been to go to different citadels around the world – whether it’s Salzburg or any of the great forts in India or the Imperial Palace in Kyoto – and see it’s the same structure wherever you go. Even though we’re 50 years ahead we go back into this more elemental time where the rules are a lot more simple and the technology is much more simple. The great attraction of going into this world is that it’s like going forward into the past. Read more What do you mean by the architecture of power? There he was able to create this new dominant hierarchy in the way that tyrants have in the past, using the architecture of power to control the major resources, especially the water. When the coastal cities started to fall into chaos after the events of Next Wednesday, he was able to organise these hybrid military biker gangs who, when the cities were razed, migrated like locusts into the centre of the continent. Immortan Joe was once Colonel Joe Moore, a military man. So where does the film’s baddie, Immortan Joe, come into it? People were trying to get in to the front of these very long queues and somebody pulled a gun – and we don’t even have a gun culture – didn’t fire it at anybody, fired it into the air, but I remember the moment so starkly and It really stuck in my mind. The only petrol stations that were open were in the middle of the city and could only be used by police and ambulance drivers. It’s a very sedate and ultimately easy city but it only took 10 days before the first pot shot was fired. One of the things that triggered the second Mad Max was an oil strike in Melbourne. It wouldn’t take long before you’d evolve into a more elemental state. You couldn’t look at Google or Wikipedia and so on. The internet would go down and you’d lose a lot of your history. All the banking is electronic, so that would go, and eventually currency is no longer important. So the power grid goes down, and once that happens you’re losing so much of technology. Then on top of that there’s stuff we never predicted, stuff that blindsided us. So we say that this whole story starts next Wednesday, when all the things we read about in the papers come to pass at once. How did you go about creating the world of Fury Road? ![]()
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