‘Mad Max: Fury Road’: The Story Behind Its Most Insane Stunts

“It was literally like going to war,” says Guy Norris of the enormous, intricately orchestrated Namibian Desert battle scenes in Mad Max: Fury Road, the year’s most spectacular action film. As the movie’s supervising stunt coordinator, Norris oversaw a small army of stunt people – up to 150 at a time – during more than 300 sequences, which are all the more impressive given the film’s relatively minimal use of CGI. (For stunt scenes, the technique was mainly used to erase safety rigs and cables.) “We wanted to make it real,” he says. ‘Real vehicles, real locations, real movement and real stunts.”

After cutting his teeth (and other body parts) as a traveling stunt-show performer in his native Australia, Norris teamed with Max franchise creator and Fury Road director George Miller as a stuntman on 1981’s The Road Warrior. While shooting, Norris broke his femur in a motorcycle stunt, but he was back on set within days. He later coordinated stunts on Miller’s more family-friendly films Happy Feet Two and Babe: Pig in the City. “We’ve worked so closely together, it was like we were thinking with one mind,” Miller says of their time on Fury Road.

Norris, 55, is supervising stunt coordinator for next summer’s DC superhero movie Suicide Squad. But after personally performing two key stunts in Fury Road, he figures he’ll leave actual daredevilry to the next generation. (His two teenage sons play War Boys in the film.) “I crashed a 12-ton vehicle into the War Rig,” Norris says. “I’ve jumped off 500-foot buildings. I’ve crashed cars. I’ve been set on fire, but that stunt worked so well I thought, ‘I don’t know what else I can do.’ I wanted to go out on that feeling.”



Here, Norris shares behind-the-scenes tales of five of Fury Road‘s most visceral stunt sequences: