20 Things You Didn't Know About Mad Max: Fury Road
4. Talk Is Cheap
From the first inklings of a story filling his brain to the uncompromising desert swirl of the Namibian set, George Miller always envisaged Fury Road as a visual story rather than a dialogue slog.
Even so, the sparsity of dialogue in the film may come as a surprise to unsuspecting cinemagoers, especially those unfamiliar with the likes of The Road Warrior. The Mad Max sequel that was, for many, their first sight of Mel Gibson in his signature role saw him utter just 16 lines in total, and his successor Tom Hardy has a comparable amount of dialogue in Fury Road.
Miller has provided some context for this choice, explaining that in his post-apocalyptic world the absence of books, TV and the Internet has reduced language to a functional role:
“There's very specific language in Fury Road but people don't do it recreationally and they don't think aloud because they're in extremis. They don't have time to think aloud.”