Mad Max: Fury Road’s guitar was very (very) heavy!

Remember that blind mutant wearing a red jumpsuit playing an electric guitar while swinging precariously on a wire suspended from a truck in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)… a member of Immortal Joe’s “War Boys”. Named The Doof Warrior, he was part of this horde relentlessly pursuing Max (played by Tom Hardy) and his new ally, Empress Furiosa (Charlize Theron).

During many of the spectacular chase sequences that made George Miller’s film famous, The Doof Warrior, hitched to his Doof Wagon, stole the show in every scene he appeared in without saying a word.

Shot on green screen in the age of blockbusters, the metal chaos we saw Dangerous road, he was very right. As the film’s producer Colin Gibson explained to MTV, no CGI was used for the performance of The Doof Warrior.

“The goal was basically to try to make a vehicle and something that could be heard at a few hundred amps.“, he explained. “And the only way to do that was to build Marshall’s biggest and final pile at the end of the world.“

Behind the character is a man: the flamboyant guitarist was actually played by Australian musician Sean Heap, better known by the pseudonym iOTA.

“I was told the character was somewhere between Keith Richards and horror“- the latter told Buzzfeed about his hearing. “So I put on my best Mad Max 2 gear: feathers, leather and more. I blackened my teeth and went in looking pretty disgusting. I was playing guitar and that was it. I got a job.“

A heavy guitar like you… or almost!

He later learned that in the scenes he would be suspended from the wires. “I was hanging on top of this truck driving through the desert and I was thinking, “How did I get here?”According to Gibson, the guitar weighed about 132 pounds (that’s almost 60 kilos!) and at the insistence of the director. George Miller, it was highly functional, made from scraps by an entire production team led by Michael Ullman. It also spewed real gas-powered flames, which the musician controlled using the instrument’s vibrato stick (or “whammy bar”).

“You know the guitar was no good“, he admitted iota. “He spent a lot of time in the sun, sand and cold. So it was quite difficult to get a good tune out of it. But it was a lot of fun. I was just jamming. I was on top of the amp you can’t see. But he was lying on his back. I was upstairs with the guitar screaming in my ears. I just went. I pulled out every rock lick I could think of.“

And for the record, know that the concept around the guitar, like Doof Wagon and Doof Warrior, was developed by Australian screenwriter Peter Pound in the late 1990s. George Miller The idea for the film came about 10 years earlier: it had to have two handles, shoot 45 feet (a little over 13 meters) high and look like the craziest gun ever – the bet won.

Mad Max: Fury Road is still available on VOD. Its prequel, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the trailer of which can be seen below, will be in theaters near you from May 22.