| “ | You said, 'A few vehicles in pursuit, maybe.' We count THREE war parties! | ” |
– Rock Rider Chief (To Furiosa) | ||
The Rock Riders are a bandit group that has taken residence in the canyon out in the Badlands to the east of The Citadel. They appear in Mad Max: Fury Road and the prequel Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
Description[]
Rock Rider look.
Rock Riders wear tan leather trousers, tan shirts with strips of frayed brown fabric sewn to them, furs, helmets, and goggles with mesh or knit-fabric hanging from them. Bones are used as decoration.
The Rock Riders ride the desert cliffs on adapted Gas Gas and Yamaha motorcycles that have been supercharged. They guard the only pass that leads through the wall of mountains where they ambush any vehicles daring to pass through. Any vehicle caught is stripped of valuable parts which are most likely bartered to the Citadel, Gastown, or the Bullet Farm for supplies. The stripped wrecks of vehicles, like the bones of dead carcasses, litter the pass.
Busted deal . . .
In Fury Road, the Rock Riders make a deal with Imperator Furiosa to block the canyon using explosives to stop Immortan Joe's forces in exchange for 3,000 gallons of Guzzolene. The Rock Riders are more cooperative than their fellow "Badlander" bandit group, the Buzzards, as they are willing to at least listen to a proposed deal rather than instigate aggression. That being said, although the Rock Riders agreed to the Imperator's deal, negotiations were severed when it was revealed that the magnitude of Furiosa's betrayal to Joe was so large that it, in fact, had attracted three entire war parties from The Citadel, Gas Town and Bullet Farm.
Origin[]
In the middle of writing the movie, Brendan McCarthy took a short break to a beach town on the Australian coast, Byron Bay. He wandered into a surfer's pub which had a big screen playing videos of track bikers doing incredible stunts. That's what gave McCarthy the idea for the canyon tribe, who leap over Furiosa's truck, "George Miller loved the high-flying action dynamics inherent in the idea and we worked a great deal on that sequence."[1]
Background Information[]
Most of the Rock Riders were portrayed by professional motocross riders, recruited from around the world. According to George Miller, they were the one group appearing in Fury Road who were not primarily played by stunt performers, since their riding required even more specialized skills and training.
Gallery[]
