Tom Hardy Talks Mad Max: Fury Road Reshoots
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When a movie wraps production only to return for more filming at a later date it doesn’t usually bode well for that particular motion picture. It can indicate large-scale problems, the kind that can’t be edited around. Not always a kiss of death—World War Z was still a success after completely redoing the third act—it’s still not necessarily something you want to hear about a movie that you’re psyched about. However, in the case of George Miller’s long gestating Mad Max: Fury Road, these particular reshoots sound like the best idea you’ve ever heard. They’re reportedly not going back to fix anything or fill any missing holes, they’re apparently just cranking up the awesome a few degrees, which star Tom Hardy recently took a few minutes to discuss.
Hardy, who takes over the iconic role of Max Rockatansky from Mel Gibson, briefly stopped to chat with Flicks and the City, and they asked about film, which he calls, “Good fun.” It certainly sounds like a damn fine time to us. While the cast and crew are getting back together, the plan is to add a bunch more kickass stuff to the movie.
Principal photography on Fury Road wrapped up back in December of 2012, and for a movie that, at times, seemed to have made an enemy of some powerful deity—unheard of flooding and other incidents best described “acts of god” delayed production—the fact that it was finished at all was a feat in and of itself. Fans cautiously penciled it in as a movie they wanted to see in 2013, but as time wore on and we heard nothing, some of us began to fret. And then we hear reshoots. The dreaded reshoots. Something must have gone horribly wrong, like there was no film in the camera or Hardy is now some sort of weird vampire that doesn’t show up on film, or something equally as absurd. Those are the sorts of problems Fury Road has been plagued with, and the catastrophe-minded among us assumed the ship was sinking.
But then we learned a promising fact. Warner Bros. was so stoked on what they saw from the film that they gave Miller and company even more money to go back and up the ante as it were. There’s apparently a scene involving a car elevator that, while it’s awesome, it isn’t super awesome like Miller originally envisioned it. At least part of these extra filming days are dedicated to turning this into a mind-blowing action extravaganza.
Here’s what Hardy said about the film and the reshoots:
It’s [Mad Max] a big old piece, it’s a behemoth of a piece. I’m off there next week to do some reshoots, well not reshoots actually, but doing more. We’re building, building more Mad Maxes, even more spectacular and cool stuff.
And is it just me, or does he also make it sound like there could be future installments in the works? I’m all for that. Some of us were beginning to doubt that we’d ever lay eyes on Mad Max: Fury Road, and while there’s no official release set, hopefully it won’t be long before we go back to that desolate world Miller introduced us to back in 1979.
