In director George Miller‘s “Mad Max: Fury Road,” Gas Town is seen as a speck on the horizon. Similarly with Bullet Farm, vehicles and people were coming from there, but it was never shown. This time around in “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” production designer Colin Gibson got to fully flesh out the towns after their history, function, textures, colors and leaders were already teased.
In the film, a young Furiosa, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, is kidnapped by Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus, a new villain. Demtenus and his biker bandits take her across the Wasteland in his quest for dominance.
Gibson spoke with PvNew about how war rigs and the towns came together to build up “Furiosa’s” vast Wasteland, which was shot on location across New South Wales.
Bullet Farm
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Gibson worked as the property master on Wim Wenders’ 1991 film “Until the End of the World.” Ever since, he’s followed Wenders’ work. Most recently, he enjoyed the 2014 documentary feature film, “The Salt of the Earth” on photographer Sebastião Salgado. Salgado’s work lent inspirational ideas to Gibson, along with what had been laid out in “Mad Max: Fury Road” and the “Furiosa” graphic novel as to how he would flesh this world out.
“Mr. Salgado, if you wanted to think about it, did the Bullet Farm for us with his photo pictorials. He had also done the gas workers, the people working in oil fields in the middle of Kuwait, so that gave us great ideas for Gas Town and Bullett Farm,” says Gibson.
The photography had the horror, majesty and scale that Gibson was looking for. He had envisioned the last as a place where bullets were farmed and the citizens were digging land. Additionally, they had a tower where they were “dropping lead from a great height.” Says Gibson, “That gave George the option to have the tower crash down at the end, almost taking out our friends.”
Gibson built the trenches where the farmers could make gunpowder, but he also considered having a trench “where everyone urinated in one spot. That’s always handy,” he says. “It was level upon level of backstory for Bullet Farm.”
In thinking of the color palette, Bullett Farm was off the dirt road and “filled with dust, filth and sweat,” says Gibson, so the dusty, textured setting had a rusty patina which was also reflected in the vehicles that came from there.
Gas Town
Gas Town’s look also had its real-world inspiration. “There were images of Saddam [Hussein] retreating from Kuwait and setting fire to the oil derricks out in the desert so nobody could get to them, and people were still fracking and operating all around them. Others were burning down, so that’s where that came from,” says Gibson.
When it came to the color palette of that world, people were covered in oil. “It was shiny, slick and over-lubricated,” says Gibson. “So in ‘Fury Road’ the vehicles that came from there were shined, weatherbeaten and sandblasted back to bare metal and oil. They had a black and shiny appearance which meant you know when someone was from that place.”
The War Rig
Since the film was a prequel, Gibson wanted something that was fast and powerful because they were “back on the road.”
Back in 2000, Gibson had seen an old Cummins V903 Kenworth truck while looking for locations in Dubai. The truck he saw was being used for mining in Saudi Arabia. “I loved it, but it was all torque and no speed, so we went with our version of that which were a couple of new 509 Kenworths and we rebuilt a manual truck,” explains Gibson.
The idea that Miller had was that this truck had to be an earlier version of warlord Immortan Joe’s war rig. After the battle with the Dementors, the next iteration for “Mad Max: Fury Road” would be “more industrial and less brutal.”
Gibson put everything he had into the rig, so it was gleaming with shiny sides. “This was the Louis XIV. This was the Sun King era of Immortan Joe.”
Motorbikes
The fleet of motorbikes are a character unto themselves in the film, as they feature among the many intense chases. However, Gibson lacked the time and resources to build the thousands on screen. He made 100, and the rest were computer-generated.
“It’s one thing to see a horde of locusts, but you want to know where they came from, and they’re all different,” Gibson says. He started thinking about each Dementor rider and where they would have been and what they represented. He had a story for every rider. From there, he created the looks and the bikes which came courtesy of BMW, Harley Davidson and Yamaha. “once we had them, we Frankenstein-ed them.”
Along the way, Hemsworth’s bike undergoes some modifications. “He starts on a low gunslinger. I wanted to give it something different, so it’s built on a Rotec R2800 Radial Engine which was set sideways into the bike so it looks like three wheels from the side on.”
once he takes down the next group, he gets a pair of BMW R18 low-slung bikes that lead to the chariot-like vehicle that he later loses during a siege.
By the end, Dementus finishes with a six-wheeler monster truck. “It’s a tow truck because he’s not interested in trade, so the truck made more sense for his character,” says Gibson.
