Add Category
FILM
Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road
Kyle Buchanan
HarperCollins, $34.99
It’s widely known that George Miller’s $US350 million Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) followed a protracted, obstacle-ridden route to the screen, passing through three Hollywood studios along the way.
Some of the difficulties it faced were self-imposed: artistic choices. Since there was no script, just a meticulously crafted storyboard, how were the actors supposed to audition? And, as a result of Miller’s commitment to live-action stunt work and multi-camera coverage for the spectacular action sequences rather than CGI in post-production, the shoot inevitably went on longer than planned.
Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road.Credit:Jasin Boland/Warner Bros
But there was also much that was out of the control of the filmmakers. Such as the financing, which constantly had to be readjusted because of the fluctuations of the dollar and the government inducements on offer. The film was originally supposed to have been shot in Broken Hill in 2009, but the inclement weather there led the production to Namibia, in southern Africa. Then there were the shifting allegiances of the studios involved and their financial strictures.
All of this, and a lot more, is covered in journalist Kyle Buchanan’s Blood, Sweat & Chrome, which grew from an article he wrote for The New York Times in 2020 as, in his words, “some sort of fifth anniversary thing” for the film. It’s effectively an oral history, mostly based on Buchanan’s interviews with more than 130 individuals: main players such as the estimable Miller, his fiercely loyal producer Doug Mitchell, many of the cast members, including the feisty Charlize Theron and the moody Tom Hardy, gifted cinematographer John Seale, Oscar-winning editor Margaret Sixel (Miller’s wife), and a wide range of others who made up the production team.
George Miller and crew filming at Penrith Lakes, NSW.Credit:Jasin Boland
Laid out on the page like a script, with Buchanan providing bridging comments, the book is smartly assembled and is a racy read. But while it’s an invaluable historical document, it would have benefited had its author taken a more sceptical view of his material. Unlike the recent crop of often-insightful books about the making of a film – such as Glenn Frankel’s Shooting Midnight Cowboy, Sam Wasson’s The Big Goodbye and Noah Isenberg’s We’ll Always Have Casablanca – Blood, Sweat & Chrome doesn’t set out to situate Fury Road in the context of its times. And it ends up more like a production history (or a very long press kit) compiled by a perceptive fan rather than a cultural study written by a diligent historian.
Tom Hardy’s Method approach was all over the place compared with Charlize Theron’s disciplined professionalism.Credit:Jasin Boland
It does include a wealth of interesting and useful material, the most newsworthy of which are the on-set tensions that grew out of the clash between Hardy’s all-over-the-place Method approach to his performance and Theron’s tightly disciplined professionalism. And there are fascinating insights into Miller’s modus operandi on the Mad Max films overall, with their design based on the repurposing of found objects, and his approach to filmmaking in general.