Mad Max prequel Furiosa contains a 15 minute-long action scene that was so complex, it took 78 days to shoot, it’s been revealed.
The production of Furiosa doesn’t appear to have been quite as arduous as Mad Max: Fury Road's, but that doesn’t mean director George Miller has reigned in his appetite for big, complex action sequences.
In fact, producer Doug Mitchell has teased that the upcoming Mad Max prequel – full title Furiosa: A Mad Max Story – contains a 15-minute vehicular action scene that took 78 days to shoot and took in 200 stunt performers.
It’s a production detail revealed in the latest issue of Total Film, in which it was revealed that the action scene was dubbed on-set as “Stairway To Nowhere.”
If Furiosa follows the usual storytelling structure, it sounds as though the set-piece will land in the middle of the upcoming film which stars Anya Taylor-Joy as a younger version of the character we met in Fury Road. The sequence will represent a “turning point,” for Furiosa according to Taylor-Joy, where we see “an accumulation of skills over the course of the battle”. She also adds that the scene is “important for understanding how resourceful Furiosa is, but also her grit.”
The actor also revealed everyone involved got a special bottle of wine when the scene was finally captured. “It’s the longest sequence any of us have ever shot,” Taylor-Joy said. “On the day we finished, everybody got a ‘Stairway To Nowhere’ wine.”
Miller has previously said that Furiosa's story spans the course of 15 years – a marked contrast to Fury Road, which unfolded over the course of three days. It’ll explore the early days of Furiosa – played in Fury Road by Charlize Theron – and how her tussle with a biker warlord named Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) led her to fall into the clutches of Fury Road’s villain Immortan Joe.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is out in UK cinemas on the 24th May 2024.
Read more: Why didn’t Mad Max: Fury Road change blockbuster cinema?
