The shoot for 2015 instant-classic Mad Max: Fury Road was famously arduous, in large part due to a remote Namibian desert shooting location with extreme elemental trials that only served to further the film’s high-wire madness. For this year’s prequel, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, things were a touch easier as production returned to the Australian setting of the original Mad Max trilogy. The Outback, while not quite the desolate landscape of the Namib (we are talking a difference of a few blades of grass), is still red hot for apocalypse action.
Returning from the previous film are such wonderful settlements as Gastown and Bullet Town, between which the call sheet relentlessly races, as well as the paradisal Green Place of Many Mothers from which our titular heroine hails. But this time they’ve been built down under. Aussie production designer Colin Gibson is also back, now on his New South Wales home turf, and he sat down with us to take us behind the scenes.
Where in the world is Furiosa?
As much as I would have loved to have gone back to Namibia, and hurtled through real wasteland vistas, the producers said that there was no way, and that we were definitely shooting in Australia. The main big rig against the mortar fire sequence was shot in a high, very, very flat country area, to the west of New South Wales in Australia. Not quite in the Outback, but a very, very, very flat space. Which was great for people who were flying along in a truck with cranes suspended off them doing 50 to 60 miles per hour along a roadway that we specifically graded and set and put in. This five-mile stretch of flat highway in, hey, the outback of Broken Hill and Silverton, gave us the open red spaces and allowed us to dig our own chasms, abysses, et cetera.
I had a friend who I’d worked with out on the other side of Broken Hill before, and he had a goldmine there and I had hoped to shoot in the goldmine. As it transpired, the joys of [computer-generated imagery] allowed us to capture that goldmine and then rebuild large sections of it as Bullet Town in Kurnell, a sand-dumped area on the coast, from back in Sydney. And then George had shot Three Thousand Years of Longing in a couple of warehouses. Strangely enough, those warehouses had since been knocked down. And a huge concrete area that looked like an aerodrome was awaiting rebuilding as a new suburb. So before they built the suburb, we went in and built Gastown on top of George’s once-warehouse. Nothing wasted, everything used, all in New South Wales. And then you can see the Tasman with a short drive.