One of Entertainment Weekly's Best Books of 2022!
"New York Times journalist Kyle Buchanan details the bonkers
construction of director George Miller's long-awaited and often
seemingly-doomed fourth Mad Max movie via testimony from the
filmmaker, Charlize Theron, Tom Hardy, and a host of others. The result
is an epic and - when it comes to the Theron-Hardy on-set relationship -
acrimonious tale no less jaw-dropping than the movie itself." --
Entertainment Weekly
A full-speed-ahead oral history of the nearly two-decade making of the
cultural phenomenon Mad Max: Fury Road--with more than 130 new
interviews with key members of the cast and crew, including Charlize
Theron, Tom Hardy, and director George Miller, from the pop culture
reporter for The New York Times, Kyle Buchanan.
It won six Oscars and has been hailed as the greatest action film ever,
but it is a miracle Mad Max: Fury Road ever made it to the screen...
or that anybody survived the production. The story of this modern
classic spanned nearly two decades of wild obstacles as visionary
director George Miller tried to mount one of the most difficult shoots
in Hollywood history.
Production stalled several times, stars Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron
clashed repeatedly in the brutal Namib Desert, and Miller's crew
engineered death-defying action scenes that were among the most
dangerous ever committed to film. Even accomplished Hollywood figures
are flummoxed by the accomplishment: As the director Steven Soderbergh
has said, "I don't understand how they're not still shooting that film,
and I don't understand how hundreds of people aren't dead."
Kyle Buchanan takes readers through every step of that moviemaking
experience in vivid detail, from Fury Road's unexpected origins
through its outlandish casting process to the big-studio battles that
nearly mutilated a masterpiece. But he takes the deepest dive in
reporting the astonishing facts behind a shoot so unconventional that
the film's fantasy world began to bleed into the real lives of its cast
and crew. As they fought and endured in a wasteland of their own, the
only way forward was to have faith in their director's mad vision. But
how could Miller persevere when almost everything seemed to be stacked
against him?
With hundreds of exclusive interviews and details about the making of
Fury Road, readers will be left with one undeniable conclusion: There
has never been a movie so drenched in sweat, so forged by fire, and so
epic in scope.