Film Trivia Fact Check: The feminist origins of Mad Max: Fury Road

Claim: “[George] Miller invited playwright Eve Ensler to act as an on-set adviser. Impressed with the script’s depth and what she saw as feminist themes, she spent a week in Namibia, where she spoke to the actors about issues of violence against women.” [Wikipedia]

Rating: True

Context: “Feminism is very much the backbone of the movie,” Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, who plays Immortan Joe’s “treasured breeder” Splendid, told Kyle Buchanan for his oral history, Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild & True Story Of Mad Max: Fury Road.

The politics of Mad Max: Fury Road are as plain as the “We Are Not Things,” adorning the prison wall that once held Immortan Joe’s slaves. The plight of women as victims of gender violence was at the front of director George Miller’s mind as he revved up his supercharged reboot of the Max Max saga. The guzzolene filling the tank, however, came from an unlikely source: Vagina Monologues playwright Eve Ensler.

During its long, troubled, and confusing shoot, Mad Max: Fury Road had a perspective problem. With a film filled with females, between Furiosa (Charlize Theron), the Wives, and the Vuvalini, George Miller needed help guiding the actors toward their characters’ interiority. How can he make women, who are essentially princesses escaping a castle on a roving fire-breathing dragon, more than damsels in distress? Fury Road’s beauty is in its blistering propulsion and disinterest in exposition—the only pee breaks are reserved for Furiosa’s mid-film scream. Perspective had to come from within the characters, the subtleties of their communication, the specificity of their situation, and humanity’s history of sexism, misogyny, and gender violence as a weapon for tyranny.

Miller started as many directors would: He offered the Wives the opportunity to write their own backstories. Yet questions about the Wives’ relationship with Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) persisted but weren’t answered by Miller’s script, wherein there is barely a whiff of character history. “We needed somebody to really help the female actors find a way into their characters and their world because everybody in this story, except Immortan Joe, is in some way a commodity,” Miller told Buchanan. Luckily, Ensler wasn’t far off.

“He wanted me to give them a perspective on violence against women around the world, particularly in war zones,” Ensler told Time in 2015. “I read the script and was blown away. One out of three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in her lifetime—it’s a central issue of our time, and that violence against women relates to racial and economic injustice. This movie takes those issues head-on. I think George Miller is a feminist, and he made a feminist action film. It was really amazing of him to know that he needed a woman to come in who had experience with this.”

After hearing Ensler on the radio in Australia, Miller reached out to the writer via voice memo (“That’s how he communicates,” Ensler says in Blood, Sweat & Chrome) while she was working in the Congo with survivors of gender violence. Coincidentally, she was there while production raged in Namibia, so Miller invited her to the war party.

The relationship began simply enough—Miller sent her pages of the script for feedback, but they soon realized that the actors would need a crash course on sexual violence as a “systematic tool of war throughout the world” and how they could embody its survivors. Ensler had worked with survivors in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Haiti, and the Congo and brought a new layer of understanding to the characters. “If you’ve been somebody’s sex slave for years, what would your relationship be to your slaver?” Ensler said. “It’s very complicated, obviously.”

Ensler established a week of workshops for the Wives, where she would teach them about the women’s lives in real situations that would be reflected on screen. Some exercises included writing letters to their captors as they ran scenarios about the physicality of being a sex slave. “We talked about how damaged your body would be after all these years,” Ensler said. “Where would your level of agency be in your body? Have you ever tried to fight back? and what would happen if you rebelled? We would map out all these stories based on those characters.”

By imbuing the actors with real-world perspectives on this supposedly fantastical heavy metal destruction derby, Ensler helped Miller ground the film with a feminist foundation that proved invaluable. The Wives became more than just damsels in distress and made Fury Road all the more tangible, presaging the wave of feminism that would break over the next few years. The #MeToo movement, for instance, began only two years later. Fury Road had driven 100 MPH to meet the moment.

“It was a radical thing that George asked me to do that,” Ensler said. “To me, it’s another indication of the depths of his exploration and his desire to really get things right and true and intricate.”