The Death-Defying Story of ‘Furiosa’’s Most Thrilling Stunts
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MAD MAX: FURY Road isn’t just one of the great action movies of all time—it’s one of the best movies of all time, period. The film earned six Oscars, yes, a number that surely would have been higher if stunts were justly awarded.** But more importantly, it’s a marvel. Fury Road is a technical and visual feat on every level, a visceral experience filled to the brim with incredible performances and some of the most compelling, mortality-defying action sequences you’ll ever see.
So, when it came time to make Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the prequel that franchise mastermind, writer, and director George Miller conceived before even making Fury Road, the team knew it had to find a way to both match the previous film’s adrenaline-fueled action, and top what they saw as Fury Road’s signature: the Cirque du Soleil-inspired “polecat” stunts (A “polecat” is what the Fury Road production called the characters perched high atop a tall metal pole, seen swinging all the way to the ground, up, and back again, while driving full-speed in battle).
**(Longtime stunt coordinator and second-unit director Guy Norris, who’s worked on the Mad Max franchise since 1981’s The Road Warrior, receives a single-card “Action Designer” credit in Furiosa, a strong step in the continued fight to establish a much-deserved and long-overdue Oscar category for stunts)
Cue a soon-to-be-iconic sequence that the filmmakers dubbed the “Stowaway to Nowhere,” where Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) plans to escape from The Citadel, where she’s spent nearly the last 20 years of her life in sub-captivity, by hiding aboard a War Rig heading out of town. The title of the sequence comes from the fact that the character doesn’t know where she plans to go, but knows any way out represents a chance to find her former home, the “Green Place.”
Planned over a year in advance, filmed for 78 days over the course of nine months, and featuring more than 100 stunt performers, Furiosa is joined in the scene by driver Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke) as the newly-minted chrome War Rig takes off to Gas Town; the two wind up fighting off ambushes from hordes of renegades (rogues who once worked for Chris Hemsworth’s villainous Dementus) as they attack from both land and air. After Furiosa opens with a lengthy sequence introducing its titular character’s childhood, the “Stowaway” scene quickly establishes the adult Furiosa’s incredible survival skills, bad-assery, and blood-soaked grit. “Basically, it’s a crash course in being a road warrior,” Miller says. “She has to learn on the run. She has no time to think—she’s got to improvise her way through it, and we see what she’s made of.”
It’s also a Mad Max movie, of course, so there are plenty of fire-breathing vehicles, bone-crunching fights, and explosive violent collisions. Lots of violent collisions. But what could really set things apart? There was only one answer: skiing motorcycle parachutists, Norris says. “We wanted to show what was really unique to the Furiosa story… when we came up with that idea, it was like, ‘Okay, well, how do we actually do this?’
Planning It All Out
THE IDEAS FOR Furiosa’s action sequences were birthed on Zoom in 2021, when meeting and brainstorming in person simply wasn’t an option. While pre-production for Fury Road consisted of Miller working with illustrators to break the story via extensive visual storyboarding (a format that more resembled a graphic novel than a traditional movie script and surmised of more than 1,400 panels), for Furiosa, he and Norris would get on Zoom for sessions lasting four hours at a time, and use a tool called Proxy. They were joined by Norris’s son, Harrison, who co-created the tool.
Proxy, built on the Unreal engine that video game players are likely familiar with, allowed the Furiosa team to animate and pre-visualize every sequence in the film ahead of time, planning out every shot long before production was ever underway. And so they started with the biggest and most ambitious first—the “Stowaway to Nowhere.”
“It was like a digital sandbox,” Norris says. “We could bring in all of the vehicles, cars, and people, and we could design all the action live, in real time, inside this digital 3D world.” Proxy’s realism was important for Miller, who insists on the Mad Max world being as grounded in reality as possible—well, as grounded as anything can be in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
“These are films where we don’t defy the laws of physics,” the director says, explaining why he still prefers planning his stunts practically as opposed to primarily using CGI. “There are no flying humans or flying vehicles. The physics of bodies, and vehicles, is much more convincing when we render it realistically.”
Working on the early stages of Furiosa was difficult not only because of the pandemic, but because Miller was also finishing up his previous film, Three Thousand Years of Longing; free time was few and far between. The Zoom sessions working in Proxy were built around the director’s commitments, all the while fitting in some of Furiosa’s most vital planning.
When making Fury Road, Miller, Norris, and the team knew they wanted the famed polecat stunts in the film at any cost; at one point, they thought it would need to be done via CGI imagery, but they eventually were able to achieve it practically, all in-camera. For Furiosa, there was a desire to match something, spiritually, to the polecats—and that ended up being the parachutists in the “Stowaway” sequence. However, the planning and contingency-protection that Proxy provided would remove much of the uncertainty that came while making the previous film. “We knew exactly what our camera angles were, because we placed them all with George,” Norris says. “We knew what the physics were, because it was all real-life physics inside the engine.”
Their planning was pristine. Executing would be next.
Putting It On Screen
THE “STOWAWAY TO Nowhere” was filmed in an Australian town about a 5-hour-drive outside of Melbourne called Hay—the flattest location in the Southern Hemisphere—on a 10-mile stretch of the road, where the team was able to have traffic blocked off for a full month. The Furiosa team captured 197 different shots over 78 separate days for the sequence, bringing in stunt-car drivers, motorcycle riders, explosives experts, fall specialists, acrobats, and parkour artists to help portray the various War Boys defending the Rig as well as the attackers.
Midway through the scene, though, something particularly captivating starts to happen. The bikers attacking the rig aren’t alone—they have passengers seated in cars next to them. Suddenly, those passengers are launched from their seats, and begin coasting the ground/air/desert sand/gravel on skis, pulled along by the rogue attacking motorcyclists. They then pull a cord, and jet up into the sky, floated into the air by a black parachute. Speaking anecdotally, when I saw Furiosa a few weeks ago, the people sitting behind me gasped when this all happened; that will likely be a common reaction.
Here’s how they pulled it off: Norris uses essentially the same intensively-chosen stunt team for all of his projects (which previously included the likes of Fury Road and James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad), and felt comfortable when it came time to execute this stunt. But there were still a lot of moving pieces they needed to get into place. The first of those pieces was embracing a device called the “Tik-Tok,” which Norris called compared to a “polecat on steroids.” The Tik-Tok is, essentially, an extra large polecat, run by six riggers from Norris’s team, and set up horizontally on top of a moving truck.
The stunt performer—who was actually Norris’s other son, Harlan—would then be hanging by wires from the Tik-Tok, while also on skis and making contact with the ground, all with cameras set up and on the move all around him. The parachute itself was added in later with CGI, but between the Tik-Tok, the War Rig, the War Boys atop the war rig, the War Pup (another character in the scene), there were tons of moving pieces that really needed to get right. “When it was time to fly, they would pop him off the bike, he'd be skiing, and when he went up in the air and pulled his chute, that was all in-camera,” Norris says. “Then, they would be able to pick him up in the air and take him over to the tanker. It was all a big choreographed sequence.”
Despite being the person actually executing the most difficult part of the stunt, Harlan remains humble.
“My performance was only a small cog to the workings of successfully executing the stunt,” he says. “All credit goes to the talented stunt rigging department, and Tik-Tok driver and operators who are responsible for my safety, and the stunt taking flight. Any marginal error would cause a ripple effect throughout the working elements, causing the action to fall apart.”
Tim Wong, a stunt coordinator who’s worked on Norris’s team for years, calls “Stowaway” the most “challenging and rewarding” sequence he’s ever worked on. “There were over 190 shots in “Stowaway,” and some go for 1 second, while others go for 30 seconds,” he says. “Each shot can have a combination of technical stunt elements, from moving cars & motorbikes, to wire rigs, to fight action and practical falls.”
But while every stunt in Furiosa is intricate, complicated, and complex, Miller, Norris, and Wong all cited the parachute deploying sequence—which was eventually captured in a single take, without any cuts, as the most challenging. The sequence begins atop the tanker, where we then see the War Pup come out of his hole in the rig. The camera then pulls back as the War Pup throws thunder sticks, panning back over to the biker’s passenger, who then gets off and skis the desert surface for a while, before throwing a thunder stick, pulling his parachute release, and flying up into the air. The camera then tracks him through the air, over the top of the rig, where he starts throwing bombs of his own.
After trying to capture that sequence of events 25 times, the production called it a day, thinking they pretty much got it. But the next day, they decided to chase perfection, and give it another go. “We thought we really got it,” Norris says. “Then we said, ‘Okay, let's come back the next day and try to just change one element,’ which we did. We got it on the second take the next day, and it was perfect.” The shot exists in the finished cut of the movie without a single cut.
Keep in mind, of course, that this is all actually happening, on top of a giant War Rig, at speeds of up to 50 miles-per-hour. This isn’t your typical movie production—this is dangerous.
But mitigating that risk is always the name of the game. “There’s no question—the biggest anxiety I have on a movie is everybody’s safety,” Miller says. “When you’re doing an action movie, particularly on a remote location with lots of people, when there are big stunts most days, it’s ‘preparation, preparation, preparation.’ And then making sure you’re several degrees removed from catastrophic error.”
Norris confirms that, somehow, everything worked out: “Everything we do as stunt performers, you’re always getting a knock or a bang or a strain, because you're performing at the absolute edge of physical performance. But we were very fortunate to go the entire film without any major injuries.”
Stars Buying In
FOR AS IMPRESSIVE as the stunts done by the professionals in Furiosa are, though, the movie also got its stars to buy in in a major way. The “Stowaway” sequence extensively features both Taylor-Joy and Burke, while Hemsworth puts his own extensive skills on display elsewhere throughout the movie.
The stars aren’t blindsided by what the movies demand of them—they know they have to come to set eager and ready to put their bodies on the line. “Clearly, for anybody coming to the Mad Max world, it's a real challenge,” Norris says “It's always been known for its physicality.”
Hemsworth, in particular, has some experience working in action with his role as Thor in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and was coming off of shooting another stunts-heavy role in the Extraction series. “He's a very, very, fit individual, very talented, and is understanding about where his body is in the air,” Norris adds.
The skills they accrue aren’t limited to just physical ones, either; the Furiosa team tapped into Burke’s training before arriving on set, and he was specifically monitoring his own nutrition. But he’s also the one behind the wheel of the War Rig during the Stowaway, and Miller, Norris, and company made sure that was really him driving. Truck driving lessons were part of the pre-shoot necessity list.
Before the shoot, in fact, Taylor-Joy didn’t even have her driver’s license. So Norris had sequence coordinator Carl Van Morsel take her for driving lessons (for both cars and trucks), as well as training in motorbike riding, fighting, and handling firearms. “It's about embedding them into the character, and what the tool sets of those characters are,” Norris says. “The fact that they can drive, and they can fight, and they're warriors. If you drill and rehearse and they do that constantly, that just becomes part of how they walk and how they move.”
Miller was astonished with Taylor-Joy’s abilities, coming in with a very physical and strict background as a ballet dancer. “I was watching the monitor one day, and they were doing a stunt where she had to jump into the window—she had a really wonderful stunt double, Hayley,” Miller says. “And I said to [Norris] after a take, ‘Gee, I’m amazed how Hayley looks so much like Anya.’ And he said ‘George, that was Anya.’”
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