GUITAR ON FILM: MAD MAX: FURY ROAD
Twisted metal. Death-defying stunts. 45-foot flames. Angle-grinding guitar riffs. No, this isn’t a Rammstein show. This is Mad Max: Fury Road. Regularly referred to as one of the greatest action films of all time, this turbo-charged chase movie raced from the mind of George Miller, the Aussie auteur behind 1979’s original Mad Max and its two follow-ups. When Miller’s modern update finally screeched onto the big screen back in 2015 following years of production battles, the acclaim was explosive. Critics and fans alike fawned over its bone-rattling action sequences, its sharply drawn world and its large cast of colourful and unforgettable characters.
With the Namibian desert standing in for post-apocalyptic Australia, Fury Road sees Max Rockatansky, Imperator Furiosa and the five wives that she liberates from the film’s big bad, Immortan Joe, fleeing across the desert, with Joe and his army of very loyal, very loud War Boys in hot pursuit. But of all the movie’s madcap characters, one made more noise than most: Coma, the Doof Warrior.
Wearing a red onesie and the dead skin mask of his murdered mother (that metal enough for you?), the Doof Warrior is an eyeless field musician whose role is to marshal Joe’s army and relay his battle orders via sound. His weapon of choice? A high-speed collision of garbage, legitimate art and movie magic: the fire-spitting, double-neck Fury Road guitar.
SPEED KING
“I’m into the hot rods and the speed shit,” Michael Ulman says over Zoom. A graduate of Boston’s Northeastern University, Ulman is found-object sculptor, a scavenger who repurposes trashed radios, chainsaws and kitchen appliances – basically whatever he can get his hands on – into detailed models of cars, planes, speedboats and especially motorcycles. The ‘speed shit’.
One of the Boston-based artist’s most important early pieces was Lo Rida, built in 2001. A low, blue, badass two-wheeler that Ulman describes as his “dream bike”, it crystallised the approach that his career artworks would take, his pieces growing in complexity along with his confidence. “That first motorcycle might have had maybe 10 pieces,” he says. “Now they have thousands of pieces. Sometimes I don’t know when to stop.”
In 2007, Ulman turned a standard US mailbox into a miniature 1930s Ford hot rod. The piece took off, wheeling around art blogs in an age before Instagram made viral art so easy to see. Sometime later, the
