Chrome and polished steel have some great qualities. They look sleek, sexy and powerful. Onscreen, they really pop.
But talk to the team that built the War Rig — the menacingly dazzling, steel-and-chrome 12-wheeler that carries a crucial action scene in “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” — and you’ll learn that these materials can at times be something else: a royal pain in the tailpipe.
“Metal gets hot in the Australian sun,” said Guy Norris, the movie’s action designer.
That became a challenge for the stunt performers, who, to execute the director George Miller’s vision, threw their bodies every which way around the tractor-trailer as it sped down a stretch of road near Hay, a rural town in southeastern Australia.
“They’d get blown up or shot and they’d fall,” Norris said. “And we had restraining cables on them, so they wouldn’t hit the ground, but they’d do a full fall, hit the side of the tanker and dangle.” Even worse: “they were all bare-chested.”
Shirtless skin. Sizzling metal. And surfaces so shiny, the crew’s reflection could often be seen in shots of the truck. This is how the team behind “Furiosa” created the War Rig, and how they worked with its idiosyncrasies.
A Truck That Tells a Story
“Furiosa,” a prequel, is an origin story for its title character (played by Anya Taylor-Joy), the postapocalyptic warrior in the 2015 “Mad Max: Fury Road.” But it’s also an origin story for the War Rig, on which the majority of “Fury Road” takes place. That film is essentially one long chase, as Furiosa escapes the deteriorating Immortan Joe, a tyrant controlling a kingdom in a wasteland and the owner of a dull-black War Rig. The Immortan Joe of “Furiosa” is younger and wealthier. Accordingly, his War Rig is gaudier.
“This is him at the high point of his wasteland wonderment,” said Colin Gibson, the production designer of both movies. “He’s putting everything he’s got into this one big commercial for Immortan Joe’s brand-new world.”
To stress that point, the story of Immortan Joe’s rise to power is carved along the sides of the “Furiosa” War Rig, in the manner of a myth on a Greek vase. While the artwork looks as if it’s made of metal, in reality it’s resin with a faux-steel coating. Gibson explained that the panels had to be quickly lifted on and off so the crew could access gizmos hidden on the truck, including generators and hydraulic power packs. They also needed to be easily replaceable (Remember those shirtless stunt performers careening into the side?).
The carvings helped combat the mirrorlike truck’s rather inconvenient tendency to reflect the crew. The remaining reflections were eliminated via digital effects, and replaced with sparse plains and a desert horizon. Gibson saw this as a way to further immerse audiences in the world of “Furiosa.”
“We could reflect and reiterate and see the wasteland in the vehicle,” he said.
Assembled for Action
The design of the War Rig was dreamed up in tandem with the story and action. Rather than creating an over-the-top vehicle and then figuring out how to stage scenes on it, the team built the truck to facilitate specific shots. In that way, Gibson said, each element was designed around “stunt, story and character.”
One example: The rig’s imposing front grille was originally conceived with vertical slats. Those were switched for horizontal ones after Miller came up with a shot of Furiosa’s eyes peeping through them.
Norris, the action designer, said this hyper-attention to characters’ relationships with their physical space arose from Miller’s love of Hollywood’s silent-era filmmakers.
“They used three-dimensional space incredibly well themselves,” Norris said. “Harold Lloyd is a famous one, being on the clock tower. You’re using space in a different way, and height.”
About that height: Part of the reason the War Rig was outfitted with such enormous tires was to lift the bottom of the truck higher off the ground, opening up the undercarriage as an additional area to choreograph action.
“A beautiful chrome stage is what it was,” Norris said.
The Sound of Fury
Before we’re introduced to any characters or, indeed, shown any footage at all, an engine’s roar plays over the Warner Bros. logo like a gassed-up response to the MGM lion.
That comparison is more apt than you might think: The engine sounds in “Furiosa” aren’t always just mechanical. Like “Fury Road,” “Furiosa” incorporates the howls of animals into its vehicles. Robert Mackenzie, the supervising sound editor, explained that the sounds of tigers and lions were mixed on top of real engine noises to create the War Rig’s revs. The animal audio is altered beyond the point of recognition — the sound waves stretched and pinched — but Mackenzie contended that the addition affects listeners subconsciously.
“On a primal level an audience really reacts to that,” Mackenzie said. “It probably harks back to our prehistoric days.”
Perhaps counterintuitively, the ferocity we hear when the War Rig is first fired up gave Mackenzie the freedom to reduce the engine noise once the chase scene gets underway, freeing up the mix for other commotions crucial to the story, like the buzz of enemies approaching on dirt bikes.
“Once we established the power of the War Rig, I could almost take the War Rig out of the mix and you wouldn’t miss it,” Mackenzie said, “because it’s had such a profound effect on you at the beginning of the scene.”
A Safety Feature?
Nestled on top of the new War Rig is another feature that wasn’t present on the War Rig of “Fury Road”: Long metal railings that run almost the entire length of the trailer.
The railing looks very much like the kind that borders the decks of ships for safety, to prevent passengers from slipping into the sea. Some people might reasonably assume that it served a similar purpose here. But, true to form, the “Furiosa” team had other ideas.
“We actually used it to get really nice effects,” Norris said, “where people would be tumbling off over.”