Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a movie full of spectacular chaos but the clear standout – certainly for petrolheads – is the sequence where Furiosa and the War Rig are chased by the Motorflyers. A motorcycle gang who use parachutes and paragliders to attack from the air while attached to bikes on the ground, they are led by the Octoboss, a bikie leader dressed in a flight suit and with a horned mask who rides a literal flying motorcycle.
Though Mad Max movies are renowned for their practical stunts, having the Octoboss suddenly take flight on his heavy motorcycle – propelled by a giant tentacle kite and firing down on a speeding semi-truck – seems impractical. But as the film's production designer, Colin Gibson, tells GQ, the bikes were fully operational and ready to go. “They could fly at speed and keep up with the trucks.”
Producing this particular scene required around a dozen stunt performers working with parachutes and skis that you see on camera, out of 200 stunt workers in total for the overall chase sequence. Gibson says that to make this scene possible, Furiosa's design team had to work backwards from having Octoboss raining down hellfire from his flying Harley-Davidson, down to his grunts jumping off bikes.
The key became the phrase "ski to sky", meaning in theory they start with warriors on skis grabbing onto bikes, then launch upwards on parachutes. But Gibson says that their early attempts at lifting with the parachute didn't work out, so he reached out to experts for further advice.
"We talked to some champion paragliders and they explained the venting and the opening and how to make it work," Gibson says. When the skiing parachutes were solved, the next step was to master powered paragliders – light contraptions with small engines meant to be like the gyrocopter from the second Mad Max.
Then the big fight comes along, with the Octoboss arriving gloriously on his flying Harley-Davidson Ultra. Unsurprisingly, a simple parachute or paraglider wasn't going to cut it for this 400kg machine. The solution was adding a giant octopus-like kite that could give him the lift, while a big motorised fan on the back of the bike would offer enough aerial power.
Gibson and the vehicles team went ahead and built the paragliding contraptions and even the flying Harley to be functional and to “fly at speed and keep up with the trucks”, with the production designer confessing to going up in the air to shoot some test footage. But when it came to filming the scene, director George Miller chose to put a stop to this stunt.
"George being the caring and loving man that he is, has a bit of a bent against flying things for real," Gibson says. It makes sense, given that Miller's good friend and co-creator of Mad Max, Byron Kennedy, died in a helicopter crash. "Plus, he has that Hippocratic oath hanging over him, whereas I'm a little more gung-ho and care a little less."
Still, just because we don't get flying bike gangs doesn't make the stunts any less dangerous. "Whenever we put a stuntman or an actor in those positions, they were hung almost as dangerously off a moving truck and crane," Gibson adds, laughing.