Here’s How George Miller Filmed The Big War Rig Crash In ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’

Mad Max

Warning: Ahead are spoilers, if that’s even possible with a movie like Mad Max: Fury Road.

Last week, we spoke to director George Miller about the insanity that is Mad Max: Fury Road. During that conversation, he explained the intricacies of filming one of the biggest scenes… the destruction and explosion of the War Rig as it passes back through the canyon. Basically, that Miller never thought they’d be able to pull that stunt off without using CGI or some other form of trickery. But, like most everything else in the movie, that stunt is real. Ahead, Miller explains:

The other big thing was the roll, the wreck at the end. I thought, I’m not going to put a human in there. We tried to do remote control. Well, first of all, we were going to do it CG — and it would be after the whole movie being real — so we can’t do it CG. So then we tried to remote control it, but we couldn’t get it fine enough, because it had to go through two massive rocks and right in front of our phantom high-speed camera. It had to hit the sweet spot. And [pyrotechnician] Leo [Henry] and the brilliant driver who kept us all safe, he said, “We’ll do the shot.” They worked on it and they worked on it – they rehearsed it with similar weight vehicles and stuff like that. I never thought we’d be able to do it, but he landed it just [Millers kisses his fingertips, meaning “excellent”] like this, in that sweet spot. There were things that I never thought we could do.

If you haven’t see Mad Max: Fury Road while it’s still in theaters, you should see Mad Max: Fury Road while it’s still in theaters.

Mike Ryan has written for The Huffington Post, Wired, Vanity Fair and New York. He is senior entertainment writer at Uproxx. You can contact him directly on Twitter.

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