As a teenager, Mad Max: Fury Road's supervising stunt coordinator Guy Norris toured with old-fashioned "thrill shows," death-defying acts that traveled across Australia."There was always a clown act with high falls and exploding fake toilets," says Norris. "Cowboy fight scenes. Motorcycle crossovers. Fire walls." If a local fair paid enough, they'd crash cars and motorbikes.

"Those days, we thought you could eat four-inch nails for breakfast and wipe our bum with sandpaper," he says. "We thought we were bulletproof."

In 1980, Norris turned 21 while preparing for his first film gig: George Miller's Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior—a movie, he says, that "took all those stunts we did in Evel Knievel-style thrill shows and put them on steroids." Mad Max 2's low-budget, brutal action style grabbed sci-fi by the scruff of its neck and dragged it down from the space opera stratosphere.

"I was George's go-to guy," says Norris, who performed as Mel Gibson's driving double and menaced as the marauder Bearclaw Mohawk. "Essentially every character that jumped onto the tanker was me. I'd put on a different wardrobe, jump. Then put on different wardrobe and jump again from a different position."

One day, Norris suggested a trick he'd done dozens of times before: a "cannonball" motorcycle stunt. He would ride a speeding motorcycle straight into a wrecked dune buggy, then soar into a ditch filled with what one behind-the-scenes documentary accurately claimed was "the most reliable and advanced cushion yet devised: a huge mound of empty cardboard boxes."

Only, instead of flying over the wreckage like Superman, Norris's knee clipped the top of the buggy and he whirligigged like a marionette shot from a catapult. Despite the boxes, he says. "I broke my femur." (Still, Norris limped to the set a couple days later and shot his final fight with Mel Gibson, propping his broken leg on a box just outside of the camera's frame.)

In the 34 years since, action cinema has evolved, and so has Norris. "When I first started, if you were ballsy enough to do it, you could do it," says Norris, who's worked on everything from Moulin Rouge to Superman Returns and David Ayer's upcoming Suicide Squad. "We were doing things that were within the bounds of what a fit individual could physically do: Real high falls, real crashes. Getting dragged behind cars. Now audiences want it bigger, faster, better than the last film. What they want to see superheroes do goes way beyond what any mortal can physically do."

But Miller still felt that audiences—thrilled by MMA, fights, and Jackass-style stunts, and fight videos on YouTube—were craving old-school action. "George foresaw that people were getting tired of CG," says Norris. "You know, the Charlie's Angels upside down on a motorcycle with explosions behind them: There's just no base in reality, no peril. The Matrix movies were very good, but a little soft."

So Miller conceived of Fury Road as an old-school action film, with practical effects and stunts, only filmed on the vast scale that audiences have come to expect from tentpole franchises. The shoot, one of the most elaborate in history, was plagued by delays and racked up a reported $140 million budget—about 1,000 times the budget of Mad Max 2. It required Norris's massive team of stunt drivers, performers, and riggers (which peaked at 150 on some days) to collaborate for months with special effects, visual effects, and design teams for months on a total of 303 stunts sequences including seventy mainline (or particularly dangerous) stunts.

"Nowadays, I'd say we do high-risk illusion," says Norris, noting that the stunts profession is now more of a collaborative science. "You have to be very clever. You combine all the tools available to you as a filmmaker to make the action sequence look amazing but be as safe as you can possibly make it."

Now 54 and a father of two teenage sons who both worked on his Fury Road stunt crew, Norris feels "it's been an incredible full circle," since The Road Warrior. As Max's driving double, yet again, he crashes an updated version of the Interceptor he drove 35 years ago in the film's opening scene. And Norris decided to make the most dangerous stunt in Mad Max: Fury Road his very last behind the wheel.

In one crucial scene, Norris drives a ten-ton, sixteen wheel truck at 60mph directly into a wrecked 16-wheeler, without slowing down. The spectacular impact could kill a person—particularly because the driver's cab is mounted over the engine, at the very front of the truck. But the Fury Road teams worked for months on a new solution: A steel driving pod and attached it to the side of the truck, mounted on sliding rails with special braking assemblies, designed specifically for this stunt, that would allow the pod to continue to decelerate after the main impact, reducing the g-force. It was a high-tech solution to an old-school problem—and Norris survived, without a scratch. Since he can't possibly imagine going out with a bigger bang, Norris said he's retiring from stunt driving after that spectacular crash.

"George and I laugh quite often about it all, since I turned 21 during the making of Mad Max 2, when the most sophisticated safety equipment we had were cardboard boxes," says Norris. "Crashing a ten ton truck was a nice way to go out."