The 'Fury Road' Practical Effects Myth Is Hurting 'Furiosa'
Don't believe it when Hollywood says there was no CGI
When the trailer came out for Furiosa, the prequel to George Miller’s 2015 arthouse blockbuster Mad Max: Fury Road, folks across the net (and reportedly even in theaters) started to unfavorably evaluate the film via comparisons to its predecessor.
A recurring argument was that Fury Road looked like a much better movie than Furiosa, as it had far less CGI (computer graphic imagery) and/or relied almost entirely on practical special effects (SFX), as opposed to digital visual effects (DVFX). In essence, the new film was being negatively perceived due to the enduring belief that DVFX are fundamentally inferior to SFX in terms of quality.
Putting aside the fact that FX quality is actually an inherently subjective issue and can really depend on a whole lot of factors, I found this recurring argument to be not only unfair but also downright ignorant. Because the simple fact is that it relies on perpe-tuating the enduring myth that 80-90 percent of the effects in Fury Road were entirely practical and that the film had a minimal use of CGI.
This is what I will illustrate in the course of this article.
Contents1. The ‘Fury Road’ Practical FX Myth
2. What Does Miller Actually Say About ‘Fury Road’?
3. At least 74% of the shots in ‘Fury Road’ Used CGI
4. The “No CGI” Marketing Deception
5. ‘Furiosa’ Suffers The Consequences
The ‘Fury Road’ Practical FX Myth
Since it came out in 2015, Fury Road has been repeatedly praised for having little to no CGI , with innumerable articles and posts by journalists, influencers, social media users, redditors and others using some variation of the claim, ostensibly first made by director George Miller himself, that 80-90 percent of the picture’s special effects were created practically, ie. ‘for real.’ Here are some examples:
“Prior to the film's release, Miller gloated over the fact that 90 percent of the film was shot with practical effects. The compilation above affirms his claim, showing many of the explosive car and motorcycle stunts before CGI or VFX were added.”
Source: NoFilmSchool, 2016
“Over 80% of the visual effects are practical. The film was shot on digital, and some CGI was used to remove stunt wires, create the Citadel, create the sandstorm, remove Furiosa’s arm, and to enhance the colours in post-production.”
Source: All the Right Movies, 2024
“Over eighty percent of the effects seen in Mad Max Fury Road are practical effects, including stunts, make-up, and sets, not CGI.”
Source: Learn Filmmaking, 2020, via @thefilmszone
If the film has 90 percent practical special effects aka SFX, then that would suggest only about 10 percent were DVFX/CGI.
These conclusions are typically accepted at face value, as a basic truth. But while everyone seems to agree that Miller said either over 80 or 90 percent of the effects are practical, nobody can actually point to when, where, and in what context he said it.
And trust me, I’ve looked. The earliest mention I’ve been able to find of this claim is a preview of the film by Business Insider, released (ironically) on April 1, 2015 - about six weeks prior to the film’s theatrical debut in the US:
“It’s hard to believe no one got hurt. Miller claims 90% of the effects are practical.”
Like so many articles that would come after, this one doesn’t provides any direct quotes from Miller himself, nor links to the original source if it’s referring to one.
This raises the possibility that Miller had NEVER actually made this claim at all. Perhaps, he said something else that was misconstrued and transformed, then endlessly repeated by the media until it widely became accepted as fact.
Of course, I could be wrong.
Maybe Miller really did give an actual percentage of what he believes the SFX were in the movie a long time ago. But the absence of direct evidence leads me to believe that this was most likely a media invention. Bolstering this possibility is what Miller regularly reiterates about the film’s FX in the press interviews he’s done for Fury.
What Does Miller Actually Say About ‘Fury Road’?
Look at the many available interviews with Miller in 2014-2016 about Fury Road, and you’ll find that the director repeatedly tries to distinguish Fury Road from big budget movies that rely extensively on the use of green-screen to visualize impossible or physics-defying elements, such as superpowers or aliens.
Boldly proclaiming that Fury Road is “not a green screen movie,” Miller stresses that its real-world setting necessitated having real stunts and practical effects.
“We also wanted to do this film old school. It’s not a big CG movie. There is CG in it, but every stunt you see is real, involving real people, and often involving members of the cast. That was a big logistical exercise that brings a certain degree of anxiety with it…. It was better than being a green screen movie. This movie is very real world, very palpable and very visceral, and that’s what we were going for.”
Source: Collider - August 2014
““We don’t defy the laws of physics,” explains Miller about his resolve to keep as much of the film happening right in front of the camera as possible. “There are no flying humans. There’s no spacecraft. So it’s not a green screen, CG movie. It’s analog compared to digital. You go and crash a car, no matter what simulations you do, you are never going to get the detail of the fragments and the way the sand behaves. It will look fake. Why not do it for real when you can and you’ve got the people who can execute it?””
Source: Den of Geek - May 12, 2015
“This is a movie that’s real vehicles, and real people and real desert. It had to be old-school - there are no flying humans, it’s not a green screen movie, so we had to shoot it for real. And I think that makes the movie feel very very authentic.
And… all the action… everything you see on the screen happened. I mean, we did use CG for harnessing - to erase harnesses, to change skies, to erase our tracks and to create a big toxic dust storm and things like that, but for the most part it’s - yeah.”
Source: VICE - May 17, 2015
“It’s a movie that doesn’t defy the laws of gravity. There’s no flying people… no spacecraft, there’s no alien worlds. So, it’s kinda crazy to do CG… of events that you can do for real. We only use CG to … enhance or help a shot. For instance, erasing safety harnesses, making the sky consistent…We’re asking audiences to immerse themselves into the screen and… you better make it as real as possible. If they detect an artificiality which you often get from CG when it’s only CG, then you sort of fall away from the movie.”
Source: Digital Spy, Feb 5 2016
Miller never outright denies that CGI was used in the movie but he also tries to clearly downplay the role DVFX played in the construction of the picture.
He stresses that DVFX is subordinate to practical shooting and reality, that it fulfills a supporting role rather than being key to the film’s visual style and on-screen action, and implies that the scope of its usage was rather small. For certain then, he promotes Fury Road as a SFX-first film, culturally elevating it by comparing it with the more ‘artificial,’ green-screen-reliant pictures that have entire sequences of pure CGI.
In this sense, he clearly contributed to the popular yet erroneous cultural perception that the film has virtually no CGI. But of all the things he reiterates over and over, the claim that 80-90% of the FX in the film were practical isn’t one of them.
At least 74% of the shots in ‘Fury Road’ Used CGI
Now, it’s important to note that even in 2015, there were some interviews and articles that went against the grain, providing a much clearer idea of the role played by DVFX in the making of Fury Road as a whole and its action sequences in particular.
The May 12, 2015 Filmmaker Magazine interview with director of photography John Seale, for example, undermined the notion that Fury Road was a ‘no green screen’ movie, with him stating:
“ There was an enormous amount of green screen. The 40 to 45 percent of the film with the beautiful Charlize Theron and five beautiful girls in the backseat who are all involved in getting that truck to a certain point and back again is done without the truck moving. The visual effects boys built big hydraulics rams and could put the entire semi-trailer tanker onto rams and rock that thing. They could throw you off of the roof if they wanted to, which they nearly did a couple of times on-set!”
May 29, 2015 saw the publication of the elaborate behind-the-scenes piece “A Graphic Tale: the visual effects of Mad Max: Fury Road” by Ian Failes for the website FX Guide, which, in addition to providing specific FX breakdowns of several shots and sequences, interviewed the movie’s VFX supervisor Andrew Jackson.
I highly recommend at least skimming the article, as it paints a very different portrait of the film’s production and, reading between the lines, was actively pushing back against the SFX Narrative promoted by Miller and the media. Its second paragraph directly states that the practical and on-location filming told “only half the story” when it came to the making of the film’s action and landscapes. It then reveals:
“Hundreds of visual effects artists, led by overall visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson, would spend considerable time crafting more than 2000 visual effects shots and helping to transform the exquisite photography into the final film…. ”
As it turns out, the film underwent very elaborate digital VFX and color grading changes, the majority of which worked to enhance “the largely practical and stunt-based effects” that were filmed by Miller.
The following passages from Jackson are crucial here:
““I’ve been joking recently about how the film has been promoted as being a live action stunt driven film – which it is,” says Jackson.
“But also how there’s so little CGI in the film. The reality is that there’s 2000 VFX shots in the film. A very large number of those shots are very simple clean-ups and fixes and wire removals and painting out tire tracks from previous shots, but there are a big number of big VFX shots as well.””
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The article additionally delves into the use of green screen, such as in the creation of the ‘Toxic Storm’ sequence. In some cases, entire practically filmed elements were painted out and then replaced with digital doppelgangers. Per the article:
““You shoot the layout and vehicles and gradually everything might get replaced,” he says, “except the camera and the positions of where things were. You may end up with nothing left of what was actually filmed, but the shot still inherits something real from the plate you shot originally.””
What Jackson and the article make evident then is that Fury Road actually had a LOT of CGI quite literally on top of the practical SFX and stunt sequences, which were often enhanced, revised, transformed, augmented, supplanted, etc. through DVFX manipulation. Such changes were, for the most part, microscopic yet their scope was considerably larger than audiences were led to believe.
Much of what Jackson states in the FXGuide article was given additional credence by Julian Mitchell’s interview with Fury Road colorist Eric Whipp in Definition Magazine, which was published on June 8, 2015.*
*Sadly, most of the images from the article are no longer showing up. But the text remains.
The film’s color grading process entailed using DVFX to modify certain pre-existing recorded elements within the frame, such as the skies and background environments. This was deemed necessary as the film’s on-location shooting resulted in many shots having different looks, often due to differences in weather conditions, and it was necessary for scenes to match. Furthermore, it helped to produce the film’s recognizable exaggerated, color-saturated, graphic images.
Using CGI in that regard was key to properly color grading and correcting the picture. Tellingly, Whipp describes such changes as ‘minor visual effects.’
““The beauty of doing that in the grade is that George can change it at any time, he can position the sky, he can switch the sky, we can grade the skies interactively with the scene…. It felt like this was what digital intermediate had been designed for… people don’t usually think of sky replacements in the DI suite or adding lens flares but the technology in the colour suite is getting so good that you can do some of these minor visual effects. I call them minor visual effects because we’re not bringing in CG ele-ments or anything crazy but we can do some basic 2D compositing work. But it makes a huge difference to the image especially if you’re trying to make a really graphic look.””
At the same time, there was direct collaboration with the film’s VFX department to achieve the final look of a given scene. The film was essentially shot with the intent of being elaborately modified via digital technology in post-production to this end.
““John Seale shot an amazing digital negative to work from, there’s a lot of latitude in it… Then visual effects are enhancing things as well and so the collaboration between visual effects and colour and cinematography. They all go hand in hand. We’re all trying to achieve that graphic frame.””
From this perspective, CGI was intrinsic to the creation of the picture as a whole.
Rather than a minor element, it was as crucial as the shoot itself. Indeed, if one com-pares the number of reported VFX shots (~2000) to the total number of shots in Fury Road (~2700 per Whipp), then CGI is actually present in 74% of the movie!
The “No CGI” Marketing Deception
Altogether, these articles demonstrate that while Fury Road indeed contains numerous practical effects, it is not at all low on DVFX. Rather, DVFX often merged with the SFX and other photographed physical elements into a single unified whole, to the extent that you often don’t realize that CGI was used at all when watching it.
The notion that it’s a CG-light film then is a popular misconception, one that Miller himself initially helped foster in 2014-2015. Over time, however, the director would get more candid about the extent to which the film employed CGI.
In an interview by Kurt Andersen for the Studio 360 Podcast in February 2016, Miller admits when asked if there wasn’t ‘that much computer-generated trickery’:
“There was CG involved in an enormous number of shots, but it was always supportive of the real world stuff… Harnesses, we had a lot of actors in the stunts…. We had to change landscape… So there was quite a deal of visual effects but they were never the principle thing.”
In a 2022 interview with Vulture, when discussing the release of his new CGI-heavy fantasy film 3000 Years of Longing, Miller is even more candid, stating about Fury Road:
“The world was medieval, in a way, so it had to be grounded, and we had to do as much of it for real. However, there was not one shot in that movie that wasn’t CGI in one way or another. We shot over months, but [the story] was compressed in time over three days. Which meant the skies had to remain consistent, so every shot virtually had a changed sky. If you’re driving vehicles across the desert, you’re doing take after take, you’re doing track after track. You had to erase all but the necessary tracks…. Landscapes you had to change, if there was some greenery in it, and so on, and so on.”
Naturally, one might wonder: if at least 74 percent of the film has CGI and/or is achieved with some degree of DVFX, then why would Miller misleadingly promote the movie as being low-CGI in the first place?
The answer is simple: because it sells.
By the time the film came out, audiences had become really invested in the idea of practical FX after years of CGI-dominant spectacle. And so, studios decided to capitalize on this by creating marketing campaigns designed to foster the false impression that their big budget titles were largely, if not entirely, devoid of CGI.
Journalists then typically pick up these scenarios and run with them uncritically, generating clickbait headlines and spreading misinformation.
If you don’t believe me, then you should watch the amazing four-part YouTube video series “No CGI” Is Really Just Invisible CGI by VFX supervisor Jonas Ussing, who dismantles the ‘No CGI’ marketing deception step-by-step:
What Ussing makes very clear, among other things, is that contrary to popular belief, there isn’t always a clear distinction between practical and digital effects.
Even films that extensively utilize practical FX in the course of shooting, such as Top Gun Maverick, might then use CGI to tweak, enhance, replace, reference, or otherwise modify the filmed effect during post-production. The end result is a combination of practical and digital but the fact that DVFX were utilized is not evident on-screen, a style of VFX usage that has come to be termed “Invisible VFX.”
“Invisible VFX work ranges widely in scope, purpose and style. Much of it is a matter of problem solving — correcting mistakes and oversights on set. Changes have always been made in the editing room, of course, but as VFX have become cheaper and more plentiful, filmmakers are increasingly relying on computer wizardry to fix errors, make adjustments, and otherwise tune things up.”
Source: Calum Marsh, New York Times, March 16 2024
Invisible VFX work is often associated with period films and dramas, such as Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), The Power of the Dog (2021), or Ford vs. Ferrari (2019). Often, it can help “accurately represent the world at the time,” as a Foundry article explains.
But based on what Ussing reveals in his videos, I believe that many big budget movies nowadays, such as the Mission Impossible films, are essentially adopting that style in an effort to elevate themselves above those that don’t. When watching the resulting “Invisible FX Blockbusters,” viewers are regularly fooled into thinking that they are watching a film almost entirely without CGI, when in reality the CGI is simply imperceptible and does not draw attention to itself.
The problem is that the marketing campaigns for such works attempt to support the illusion of ‘No CGI’ and so in turn bolster them culturally and commercially by misleading and sometimes outright lying to audiences, while promoting the false notion that somehow practical FX are inherently superior to DVFX/CGI.
And this in (re)shapes the cultural discourse, inspiring more audiences and critics alike to negatively perceive films with instances of obvious, evident DVFX.
Case in point: Furiosa.
‘Furiosa’ Suffers The Consequences
The early reactions to the Furiosa trailer footage on social media platforms like Twitter or sites like Reddit clearly illustrate how pervasive the false “No CGI” and the “Fury Road was 90% practical FX” narratives continue to be. Despite there currently being relatively little information regarding how much Furiosa actually relied on DVFX, or how its elaborate action sequences were made, detractors decided in advance that it must be a lesser picture due to the ‘obviously larger’ CGI quotient.
It doesn’t help that a number of articles from high-profile media publications seem to support the popular cultural legitimation narratives, according to which SFX are inherently better than VFX, when discussing Furiosa.
Just look at this excerpt from the recent Variety article on the movie:
“And in 2015, a year in which the box office would be dominated by the CGI-ridden “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” “Jurassic World” and “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” Miller’s practical-effects-driven “Fury Road” offered something different: a propulsive survival thriller whose ultimate special effect lay in its human-scale stakes… One of the reasons why “Fury Road” was so beloved (and such a nightmare to make) was that 90% of the special effects were performed for real, but “Furiosa” incorporates more CGI.”
Or this bit from Time Magazine:
“Expectations for Furiosa are sky-high after Fury Road won six Oscars and became a cultural phenomenon: its high-octane action scenes, shot largely without CGI, were so original and unrelenting that the movie left audiences dazed.”
Or this review from Forbes:
“Fury Road… was hailed for its commitment to practical stunt work with minimal CGI alteration or augmentation…. In a desert of Marvel CGI overload, Fury Road was an action oasis.
So why does Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga look like Fury Road’s airbrushed plastic cousin? … Through nearly the first hour of the film, CGI dominates the action with its jerky, weightless mayhem. ”
Look, I haven’t seen Furiosa yet. I don’t know if it’s a masterpiece or a disaster. But it really bothers me that even legitimate publications suggest that it’s perfectly fine to base assessments of the film’s ‘quality’ on the amount of CGI it has.* From everything I’ve gathered, the issue isn’t really that the film might have more VFX shots than its predecessor, but that the CGI seen on-screen is more visible and perceptible.
*If you ask me, this is simply the wrong way to approach and critique movies. Not to mention, it is disrespectful to the work of VFX artists, whose contribution to such major motion pictures is basically being disappeared from the public record.
The mistake, however, is to automatically think that when CGI is noticeable, then it means the visibility is unintentional and thus a sign of low quality. This overlooks the possibility that CGI is meant to intentionally distort and exaggerate what we see on-screen. Indeed, to me the Furiosa trailers suggest a prequel that is less grounded yet more mythic and abstract than Fury, even though the two movies share a great deal of continuity both in terms of story and production.*
*The script, or at least drafts of it, were written before Fury Road. At one point, it seems the two live-action movies might’ve been shot back-to-back, though I don’t think this has been definitively confirmed. At another point, Furiosa was going to be an anime prequel series or perhaps a movie - the anime part is confirmed but the details are a little confusing to me.
Whatever you might think of Furiosa if you do see it, don’t jump to conclusions about its CGI and SFX, and don’t assume whenever you hear that a big budget movie did everything practically or without resorting to green screen that this is necessarily true. Instead, question the hype, try to look past the narrative.
And if the CGI you see in a movie is indeed visible and evident, ask yourself:
“Is this intentional? And is the visibility necessarily bad? What is it that makes Invisible VFX preferable to or better than Visible VFX? Are more abstract, fantastic, or exagerrated images that draw attention to themselves inherently worse than grounded, realistic images that do not? And why do CGI and green-screen get such a bad name nowadays anyway?” If you have any thoughts on this, then please
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After seeing the film, I have written more about the use of CGI in Furiosa. I honestly think the film deserves praise for its DVFX, especially considering that it used AI machine learning to help create an imperceptible composite of Alyla Browne’s and Anya Taylor-Joy’s faces.
Click the link above to jump to the AI section or the one below to check out the full article:
Reading this after seeing the film gives me a different lens to analyze it. I'm writing my own review of it today, but I was going to be critical of the visual effects, even without really hearing some of the buzz mentioned in this article about the reactions to trailers etc. I agree that much of the visual feel of the film mirrors what we saw in Fury Road, and therefore likely falls into the camp of Invisible VFX that you mention, but unfortunately there are some visual effect elements that were glaring when I watched the film. I still enjoyed it, but I took note of those little visual missteps, something I don't remember doing with Fury Road.
Do you think the myth of practical effect usage is why "Fury Road" won so many Oscars in the technical categories?