With a new War Rig and a fleet of motorbikes, 'Furiosa' restarts the motorized mayhem of 'Mad Max'

NEW YORK (AP) — When it was time to start making “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” production designer Colin Gibson went to a garage in Australia to find some old friends.

It had been years since 2015’s “Fury Road” wrapped production. Many of the vehicles seen in the film had been blown up or left to rust in Namibia. But a dozen of them — the “dirty dozen,” Gibson calls them — had been put in storage, including the War Rig, Gigahorse and Duff Wagon.

“They did need a fair amount of cleaning up,” Gibson says a little wistfully. “A lot of the fuel had turned to jelly and the tires sink. And it all seemed so much sadder than you remember.”

Returning to the world of “Mad Max” meant resurrecting the motorized army of “Fury Road,” getting it back into running condition and building an entire new fleet of gas-guzzling, mutant machines of apocalyptic doom.

As terrific as the cast of “Furiosa” is, including Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth, let’s be real. The true stars of any “Mad Max” movie are the vehicles. The characters and actors of “Mad Max” may come and go across the saga’s 45 years, but the marauding mechanized horde keeps chugging.

“In a sense, they’re characters – they’re extensions of the characters,” Miller says. “You see it right through the ‘Mad Max’ films. The V8 Inceptor is an extension of Max. Furiosa ultimately has that vehicle we call the Cranky Black that’s an expression of who she is at the end of the movie.”

“Furiosa,” which opened in theaters Thursday, takes place years ahead of the events of “Fury Road,” so the War Rig and company aren’t called back into duty until the end of the film. But they were a necessary reference point for all the cars and trucks that lead up to that finale. “Furiosa” is a prequel for more than its title character.

“We did use the idea of those other vehicles to build an evolution in,” says Gibson. “So we would drop in vehicles that looked in embryo like some of the vehicles that had since been destroyed or gone to gold or been exploded off in Africa.”

Gibson is a longtime collaborator of Miller’s whose fervor for doing things practically and as realistically as possible is nearly as extreme as the War Boys’ zeal for Valhalla. That was a big part of the kinetic thrill of “Fury Road.” And while that film included CGI in nearly every shot to accomplish its explosive onslaught, “Furiosa” depended on a bit more effects to realize its post-apocalyptic world.

“I don’t like easy,” he says. “We don’t operate very well under easy. It’s one of my ongoing arguments with George. I prefer uneasy, which may be why I’m so annoying.”

Production designers might build the facade of a house or even an entire shell, but they don't have to install working plumbing. Gibson's creations, though, have to move. Most have working engines and when the director says “Action!” they have to move. As he says, “Everything has to be able to do its own stunt.”

“There’s a lot of hidden, unseen effort that goes into that,” Miller says. “It’s a military exercise. Of the shooting crew, there was over a thousand people on set every day, just to keep all that stuff going.”

Gibson, who hadn’t yet seen the film during an interview earlier this month, was still nursing some wounds over the fact that “Furiosa” contains some digital machines, too.

“Unless it’s real, unless the sense of gravity is there, I don’t think you get the hair going up on the back of your neck,” Gibson says. “I think that’s what we achieved with ‘Fury Road,’ and I’ll keep my fingers crossed that the CG doesn’t distance us too much in ‘Furiosa.’”

“It is slightly different,” sighs Gibson, “and I’m an old-fashioned girl.”

But “Furiosa” also had many more challenges than “Fury Road,” which transpires across a three-day blur. “Furiosa,” spanning decades, needed more locations. (Here, Gas Town and Bullet Farm are visited.) And a more sprawling array of characters meant a lot more rides.

Dementus (Hemsworth) is a new villain whom the filmmakers styled after a fusion of Roman emperor and Genghis Khan. Early in “Furiosa,” he rides a chariot pulled by three motorcycles. Later, he pilots a six-wheeled monster truck.

The War Rig, the central semi-truck of “Fury Road,” also needed an earlier iteration for “Furiosa.” Whereas the “Fury Road” War Rig was more weathered and beaten up, “Furiosa” finds Immortan Joe’s Citadel at the height of its power.

“So this is Louis the Sun King,” says Gibson. “This is the Palace of Versailles. This is a shiny, mirrored, godlike object racing out into the desert and reflecting all the nothing that’s coming back but also emblazoned with the legend of the Immortan as he sees it himself.”

It’s upon that rig that “Furiosa” has its most lengthy and blistering sequence. And while Taylor-Joy feels a particular bond with the War Rig she spent 78 days crawling across, the thoughtful features of the Cranky Black roadster were more revelatory to her.

“I love the fact there are all these details in the filmmaking that you don’t even see as an audience member,” Taylor-Joy says. “Like, the Cranky Black has human teeth all along the inside, which is so cool.”

But the defining vehicle of “Furiosa” may be the motorbike. Two-wheelers star in the movie’s frenetic start and they only populate from there, eventually filling the desert like a swarm of locusts.

“George had the idea that by the time Dementus arrived at the Citadel, there might have been 2- or 3- or 4- or 6,000 motorbikes,” Gibson says. “I looked at how long it would take me to build that many. Do you know how hard it is to make one motorbike look different from another? They’re basically two wheels and a seat.”

That meant, to Gibson’s horror, the necessity of CGI. But that didn’t stop him from building some 100 characterized motorbikes, along with doubles for about half of them.

“Of all the vehicles, you always love the ones that start with nothing,” Gibson says. “We were fortunate that BMW, Harley Davidson and Yamaha all came to the party and gave us generously of their beautiful machines knowing that there was no exclusivity and that by the time I got through with them, their mother wouldn’t recognize them.”

One bike has particular meaning to Gibson. He built it from an old 1940s Triumph kneeler, the kind used for racing. His mother — “a bit of a devil-may-care Sheila in her youth,” he says — had once worked at a speedway around such motorcycles. Gibson lavished his with detail and texture as a kind of ode to her.

“If I could hang it on a key ring,” Gibson says, “that’s probably the one I’d keep.”

Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Anya Taylor-Joy in a scene from "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga." (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Tom Burke, left, and Anya Taylor-Joy in a scene from "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga." (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Chris Hemsworth in a scene from "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga." (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Anya Taylor-Joy in a scene from "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga." (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Chris Hemsworth in a scene from "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga." (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows a scene from "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga." (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows a scene from "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga." (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

MOSCOW (AP) — The espionage trial in Russia of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich will begin on June 26 and will be held behind closed doors, a statement from the court that will hear the case said Monday.

Gershkovich, a U.S. citizen, has been behind bars since his March 2023 arrest and faces 20 years in prison if convicted.

The trial is to be held in the Sverdlovsky Regional Court in Yekaterinburg, Russia's fourth-largest city, where he was arrested. Gershkovich has since been held in Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, about 1,400 kilometers (870 miles) to the west.

The court said trial will be closed to the public, as is usual in espionage cases.

Gershkovich, 32, is accused of “gathering secret information” on orders from the CIA about Uralvagonzavod, a facility that produces and repairs military equipment, the Prosecutor General’s office said last week in the first details of the accusations against him.

The reporter, his employer and the U.S. government have denied the allegations, and Washington designated him as wrongfully detained.

Russia’s Federal Security Service alleged that Gershkovich was acting on U.S. orders to collect state secrets but provided no evidence to back up the accusations.

“Evan has done nothing wrong. He should never have been arrested in the first place. Journalism is not a crime,” U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said last week. “The charges against him are false. And the Russian government knows that they’re false. He should be released immediately.”

The Biden administration has sought to negotiate Gershkovich's release, but Russia’s Foreign Ministry said Moscow would consider a prisoner swap only after a trial verdict.

Uralvagonzavod, a state tank and railroad car factory in the city of Nizhny Tagil, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Yekaterinburg, became known in 2011-12 as a bedrock of support for President Vladimir Putin.

Plant foreman Igor Kholmanskih appeared on Putin’s annual phone-in program in December 2011 and denounced mass protests occurring in Moscow at the time as a threat to “stability,” proposing that he and his colleagues travel to the Russian capital to help suppress the unrest. A week later, Putin appointed Kholmanskikh to be his envoy in the region.

Putin has said he believes a deal could be reached to free Gershkovich, hinting he would be open to swapping him for a Russian national imprisoned in Germany. That appeared to be Vadim Krasikov, who is serving a life sentence for the 2019 killing in Berlin of a Georgian citizen of Chechen descent.

Asked by The Associated Press about Gershkovich, Putin said the U.S. is “taking energetic steps” to secure his release. He told international news agencies at an economic forum in St. Petersburg in early June that any such releases “aren’t decided via mass media” but through a “discreet, calm and professional approach.”

“And they certainly should be decided only on the basis of reciprocity,” he added, in an allusion to a potential prisoner swap.

Gershkovich was the first U.S. journalist taken into custody on espionage charges since Nicholas Daniloff in 1986 at the height of the Cold War. Gershkovich’s arrest shocked foreign journalists in Russia, even though the country had enacted increasingly repressive laws on freedom of speech after sending troops into Ukraine.

The son of Soviet emigres who settled in New Jersey, Gershkovich is fluent in Russian and moved to the country in 2017 to work for The Moscow Times newspaper before being hired by the Journal in 2022.

U.S. Ambassador Lynne Tracy, who regularly visited Gershkovich in prison and attended his court hearings, has called the charges against him “fiction” and said that Russia is “using American citizens as pawns to achieve political ends.”

The trial of a US reporter charged with espionage in Russia is to begin June 26

The trial of a US reporter charged with espionage in Russia is to begin June 26

FILE - Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich stands in a glass cage in a courtroom at the First Appeals Court of General Jurisdiction in Moscow, Russia, April 23, 2024. Gershkovich, who has been jailed for over a year in Russia on espionage charges, will stand trial in the city of Yekaterinburg, authorities said Thursday June 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)