20 Things You Didn't Know About Mad Max: Fury Road

9. The Shoot Was A Logistical Nightmare

Mad Max Fury Road Tom Hardy 4
Warner Bros. Pictures

George Miller is not a man who’s easily discouraged: when the freak rainfall in Broken Hill ruined the proposed start date, he elected to delay production by a year in the hope that the land would be restored to its former state. When no such thing occurred, Miller was forced to consider alternative locations and eventually settled on Namibia.

Basing themselves in the town of Swakopmund, the cast and crew were assembled and cameras finally starting rolling in June 2012. Which is when the problems really began to mount up.

The costs involved in transporting hundreds of vehicles and filmmaking equipment to a remote region of the Namib Desert had a major impact on Miller’s ambitious plans for Fury Road and the environment was anything but hospitable, as Hardy explains:

“We were in the middle of nowhere, so far away from the studio system that [Warner Bros.] can’t really see what’s going on, and just getting things to and from the set was a nightmare. We’d lose half a vehicle in sand and have to dig it out. It was just this unit in the middle of X-million square-kilometres of desert, and then this group of lunatics in leathers, like a really weird S&M party, or a Hell’s Angels convention. It was like Cirque du Soleil meets f*cking Slipknot.”
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