If you watched the latest Mad Max: Fury Road trailer and thought, “That movie looks freaking insane,” your instincts for insanity are apparently dead-on. Tom Hardy gave an interview to Esquire about the film, and every description he offers of the production makes it sounds just as bonkers as the finished footage. Like:

We were in the middle of nowhere, so far away from the studio system that [Warner Bros] can’t really see what’s going on, and just getting things to and from the set was a nightmare. We’d lose half a vehicle in sand and have to dig it out. It was just this unit in the middle of x-million square-kilometres of desert, and then this group of lunatics in leathers, like a really weird S&M party, or a Hell’s Angels convention. It was like Cirque du Soleil meets fucking Slipknot.

(Cirque’s done shows based on The Beatles, Elvis, and Michael Jackson — fingers crossed that Cirque du Slipknot comes someday soon!)

Hardy also spilled one important detail about Fury Road and its future: He’s already attached two three more Mad Max sequels. The only catch? “Everything’s based on figures and how things are perceived,” he told Esquire. “Inevitably it’s a business.” In other words: If Fury Road flops, don’t expect Fury Road 2: The Squeakquel.

The more I see of the new Max, though, the more I find it hard to believe that this movie won’t be a hit. It just looks so apparently nuts, so cool and crazy, that I can’t imagine anyone resisting its psychotic charms. But this is why I am a writer and not a movie marketer; I thought MacGruber was going to be the biggest movie of all time. Mad Max: Fury Road opens on May 15.