Hardy: Fury Road was like herding cats

Tom Hardy has compared directing Mad Max: Fury Road to “trying to herd cats”.

The 37-year-old actor portrays protagonist Max Rockatansky in the new post-apocalyptic thriller, which also stars Charlize Theron, Zoë Kravitz and Nicholas Hoult.

And Tom feels for director George Miller, because providing direction to the actors proved to be quite a challenge during the shoot, which was filmed in the deserts of Namibia and Australia.

“Everything that George [Miller] had in a 300 page sort of comic book document, frame by frame is accurately executed and up on the screen, but much more relentless and hydraulic and dynamic than it would be in a comic book,” Tom told Collider.

“It was not until I saw the finished piece and I saw the latest version last night that I realised fully what George was trying to articulate on the floor. Because you couldn’t explain what I saw, and we wouldn’t have known—it was like trying to herd cats. He was trying to explain to us a colour we hadn’t seen yet, so we were trying to understand but couldn’t have fully understood.”

Tom is still in awe over how production houses Kennedy Miller Mitchell and Village Roadshow Pictures managed to realise Mad Max: Fury Road.

The $150 million feature was incredibly difficult to execute.

“If you’re logistically trying to create an X amount of hundred million dollar movie, and you’re that far away from Los Angeles and you’re that far away from Australia which your home base is, Namibia is right in the middle of both of those places in the middle of the desert and it could be hard to get anything to and from that place and all that crap,” Tom said. “So it was kind of surreal as well to see this military campaign going on in the middle of the desert, as some kind of strange festival, an orchestration of mad, epic stunts, violence, and surrealism.”