We already know that director George Miller is keen to make more Mad Max movies, and that he made sure star Tom Hardy was locked in for those future films-to-be. What we didn’t know was just how far his commitment to non-CGI practical effects extended. In Esquire’s new interview with supermodel-turned-Michael-Bay-fetish Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, the actor reveals that Miller didn’t want to just fill in the backstories of his movie’s abused women on the run with some computer-generated tales of woe. No, he wanted real-deal horrifying, so he flew in author and performer Eve Ensler, famous for her work The Vagina Monologues, to class things up. As Huntington-Whiteley explains, Ensler made sure that everyone knew just what kind of mindset could come out of the awful experiences to which their characters were subjected:
We were so lucky that George arranged for Eve Ensler, who wrote the Vagina Monologues, to fly in and work with us girls for about a week. We did extensive research with her. Eve herself has had a very intense life. She’s spent time in the Congo working with rape victims and women who have had unthinkable things happen to them through the power of men’s hands. We were able to pick her brain for a week. She told us the most tragic stories I’ve ever heard in my life, which gave us so much background to our characters. We really wanted to kind of showcase that. It was a privilege to have her around to make these characters something more then just five beautiful girls.
So when you go see Mad Max: Fury Road, you can walk in knowing that Miller didn’t sit around telling women what it’s like to be horribly mistreated. No, he got someone else to do that—which is actually a pretty cool move, given that the alternative is for the aging male screenwriter to think he can write women really well. Of course, Huntington-Whiteley precedes that quote by doing that great thing where a supermodel explains to the world just how hard they have it, so obviously Ensler’s stories of brutal, real-world misogyny and oppression really sunk in.
[Via io9]