Veteran Australian filmmaker, Dr George Miller, and the skilled practitioners from Mad Max: Fury Road blazed their way through the international awards season, showcasing the talent, skills and proficiency within the NSW industry.

Mad Max: Fury Road has picked up over 100 awards so far, including multiple accolades in the recent BAFTA awards including best makeup, best editing, best costume design, best production design with additional nominations for best film and best director. Its crew have also been rewarded in many technical categories including VFX and cinematography – and an additonal 6 wins at this year’s Academy Awards.

Fury Road led a record year for the Australian box office in 2015, and a record year for Australian movies, with over AU$88 million taken at the local box office, or 7.7 per cent of the total.

Screen NSW worked closely on many of the year’s successful films from development to post production and contributed through its various funding programs.

The outlook for 2016 is for another blockbuster year that includes several major releases. Here are a few of the upcoming highlights from NSW:

• Gods of Egypt – This fantastical adventure film from director Alex Proyas (The Crow), Gods of Egypt was filmed in Centennial Parklands and Fox Studios in Sydney. A young thief (Brenton Thwaites) joins with the God of the Sky (Game of Thrones’ Coster-Waldau) to take back the throne in this blockbuster that uses Australia’s best post-production and animation studios to create a look that embraces the film’s mythological fantasy theme and that are unique and visually spectacular.
  Stars: Gerard Butler, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Geoffrey Rush, Rufus Sewell, Abbey Lee.
  Release: February 25
• The Daughter – Filmed in Sydney and regional NSW, The Daughter, from award-winning producer Jan Chapman and co-producer Nicole O’Donoghue, is a family drama set in a hauntingly beautiful timber town. Family skeletons fall out of the cupboard when an estranged son (Paul Schneider) returns to his small town home for his father’s (Geoffrey Rush) wedding to a much younger woman. The film showcases some of the most stunning landscape in the Australia.
  Stars: Geoffrey Rush, Anna Torv, Miranda Otto, Sam Neill, Odessa Young in her Big-screen debut.
  Release: March 17
• Backtrack – Filmed in regional NSW in Carcoar and Oberon, the film used both regional locations and Sydney’s world-class visual effects studios. Academy Award winner, Adrien Brody, plays Peter Bower, a psychologist whose life is thrown into turmoil when he discovers his patients are ghosts, all of whom seem to have died within a day of each other.
  Stars: Adrien Brody, Sam Neill and Bruce Spence.
  Release: Midyear

Want to shoot your next project in New South Wales? Contact the friendly team at Screen NSW.

Image: Courtesy of Warner Bros. & Village Roadshow Films Ltd.