Anna Daniels
Thankfully, Miller and his team found their star before too long in Hardy. As Miller remembered, “I had the same feeling about Tom that I had when Mel Gibson first walked into the room: There was a kind of edgy charm, the charisma of animals. You don’t know what’s going on in their inner depths, and yet they’re enormously attractive.” With a new star on board, production could finally get started in Broken Hill, Australia, a desert mining town where Miller had filmed a few previous Mad Max films.
After the entire cast arrived in Australia, the film was hit with yet another unexpected problem: Rain. As producer Doug Mitchell put it, “During preproduction, the weather pattern changed in Australia and it rained and rained in Queensland, the sort of weather that happens once in a century.” Colin Gibson added, “Slowly, what was desert turned into beautiful flowers. So we put everything into storage and slunk away yet again.”
Both the cast and crew felt defeated and devastated. Keogh recalled, “It was the first time I had experienced a big push on a film, and I was heartbroken. I was like, ‘Is it really because of the weather? Am I fired?'” Mitchell summed up the hopelessness of the entire production, saying, “We were basically defeated. How do we move on?”
Miller wanted to wait and see if the rain would stop, saying, “I said, ‘Let’s wait a year and see if it all dries up.’ And when we saw that it wouldn’t, I decided we should to go back to Namibia, where it never rains.” After yet another false start, the entire production moved to Africa and tried to begin once again.
Written by: Looper
