A Mad Max Saga Scene Took 78 Days to Film

The cast and crew of the Mad Max prequel tease “Stairway to Nowhere.”

There is definitely a lot of hype surrounding Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, as viewers are excited to see George Miller’s latest vision for his post-apocalyptic franchise. The film, which is a prequel centered around the early days of Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy), has already promised some massive spectacle — and now we have a new idea of exactly what that entails. As producer Doug Mitchell explains in a recent interview with Total Film, Furiosa “has one 15-minute sequence which took us 78 days to shoot”, which was nicknamed on set as the “Stairway To Nowhere.”

“George and I would have these big conversations about why this particular set-piece was so long,” Taylor-Joy revealed. “It’s because you see an accumulation of skills over the course of a battle, and that’s very important for understanding how resourceful Furiosa is, but also her grit. It’s the longest sequence any of us have ever shot. On the day we finished, everybody got a ‘Stairway To Nowhere’ wine!”

In Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, snatched from the Green Place of Many Mothers, young Furiosa falls into the hands of a great biker horde led by the warlord Dementus. Sweeping through the Wasteland, they come across the Citadel, presided over by the Immortan Joe. As the two tyrants fight for dominance, Furiosa soon finds herself in a nonstop battle to make her way home. 

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is directed by George Miller, who co-wrote the film’s script with Nico Lathouris. The cast of the film also includes Tom Burke, Lachy Hulme, Nathan Jones, John Howard, Angus Sampson, Charlee Fraser, and Daniel Webber.

Why Is Mad Max Getting a Prequel?

As Miller has previously explained, he actually came up with the conceit of Furiosa while cracking the story for Fury Road — and felt that the story was too good not to tell in some capacity.

“When we wrote Mad Max, the task was to tell a story that was always on the run and to see how much the audience could pick up in passing,” Miller previously explained to The AV Club. “That was one of the tricks of Mad Max: Fury Road, that there would be references to things of where she’s from, why they’re doing things, but it was always on the run. There were very few moments of quiet. We never explained how she lost her arm. We never explain what the actual Green Place Of Many Mothers was. We never explained the workings of the Citadel. So we had the screenplay virtually complete before we shot Fury Road, and we did it because it arose out of wanting to explain to everybody who Furiosa was—to Charlize when she took on the role, and to all the actors and the designers and everybody else working on the Citadel and so on. The feeling was, gee, this is a pretty good screenplay, and then I kept saying to myself, ‘if Fury Road works, I’d really like to tell this story.'”

“So it came about, I’m not going to say accidentally, but it came out of a need to explain [Fury Road‘s] world which, as I said, essentially happened over three days and two nights,” Miller continued. “It’s really trying to explain how that world came to be. We also wrote, not a screenplay, but almost in novel form, Nico Lathouris and I, what happened to Max in that year before, and that’s something that we’ll look at further down the track later. But in telling each other the story of Furiosa, everything in Fury Road had to be explained. In my mind, I have a back story of the Doof Warrior, who plays the guitar. How could a blind man who all he can do is play a guitar, how does he get to survive in a wasteland where everybody is in extremis? How did he come to be there? So we wrote little stories for every character when we made Fury Road.”

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is currently scheduled to be released in theaters on May 24th.