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Mad Max Fury Road stole the show at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony and took home six Oscars, mostly because of the film’s astoundingly complex action sequences. Fury Road, the fourth film in the Mad Max franchise, follows the titular Max (Tom Hardy) as he escapes from a post-apocalyptic warlord’s prison with the aid of Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a lieutenant gone rogue.
Much of Fury Road features explosive action sequences in which the warlord, Immortan Joe, sends out his army to recapture Furiosa, Max, and his once-captive wives. The two factions fight to the death using flamethrowers, guns, and bombs as their respective vehicles tear up the Namib desert.
Working on a film set is often exhausting. Imagine working with late nights and early days, hundreds of reshoots, and rarely time for a break. Now, imagine you’re doing that work in the middle of the desert. Now, imagine you’re doing that work in the middle of the desert, except you’re also in a speeding vehicle that’s about to crash, and someone is performing a BMX stunt while shooting a flamethrower at you. That’s what life was like on the exhilarating Mad Max set, as a special feature from the film’s DVD revealed. The feature shows raw footage, sans CGI. Check it out, above.
The video shows just how many of the film’s unforgettable action sequences were based in practical effects that were then enhanced with CGI. That means that people were actually performing outrageous stunts while firing flamethrowers and driving through explosions and crashing cars. Even the Polecats, which were originally supposed to be CGI, ended up being real guys dancing precariously above the desert dust. The stunts that do involve rigging in harnesses are still quite dangerous, as they’re being performed on four — or sixteen — wheels. The featurette ends with an intertitle that reads, “Dedicated to celebrating the daring and ingenuity of the Mad Max: Fury Road Production Team.”
It’s eye-opening to see just how many of Fury Road‘s crashes and explosions were artfully-timed stunts. It almost makes you upset that Fury Road‘s team ultimately didn’t win the Oscar — that is, before you remember that Ex Machina, who took the statue home, was a low-budget film that created a robot-human hybrid without using any green-screen. It’s noteworthy how, despite ongoing advancement in digital effects, filmmakers still choose to go all the way with practical effects. This featurette just gives fans of Fury Road yet another reason to love the pulse-pounding epic.