Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road

by Kyle Buchanan

Because I went through that year of recrimination, I started a much deeper inquiry about how the first Mad Max had somehow tapped into a universal archetype,

this very simple idea popped in my head. What if there was a Mad Max movie that was one long chase, and the MacGuffin was human? Can you tell an entire story on the run, and how much of the backstory can you pick up on the way?

It’s a story of a man running away from his better self, but his better self catches up to him. And you could argue that Furiosa is his better self.

Reading about action is like dancing about architecture.

I also tried to find the premise—George always regarded the premise as important, but I don’t know to what extent he and his team had actually sat down and gone, “We have to start thinking what the nub is of this thing.” And that changed over several years until we got to “What’s broken can be fixed by love only.”

Tom Hardy He was trying to explain to us a color we hadn’t seen yet.

He’s still driven by his desire to find some kind of redemption, which he won’t find until he confronts the original problem, the death of his wife and child. He will be doing that forever until he goes back to the grave of his wife and his kid and sits there for a while and really grieves.

What’s so sad is that we keep repeating it, and we’re going to get to a place where it will be too late, and we won’t have the luxury of repeating it again.

The Swahili storytellers have this quote, “The story has been told. If it was bad, it was my fault, because I’m the storyteller. But if it was good, it belongs to everybody.” And that feeling of the story belonging to everybody is really the reward.