Mad Max franchise auteur George Miller knew even before Fury Road, that by creating an extensive outline for the 2015 hit, he might have more stories to tell. But that wasn’t always the case for Miller, who co-created the concept with Byron Kennedy in Mad Max (1979), Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981), Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). The filmmaker thought he was done after that trilogy, and went on to make more genre-hopping films like Babe and Happy Feet—which share a through line of heroic characters going on journeys away from home and back again.
Now with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the fifth Mad Max universe film, he’s not ready to stop and may even return to the Max character for another prequel story. Furiosa focuses on the character originated by Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road, taking us back to her origins as a child (Alyla Browne) 20 years before she becomes the Imperator leader, and showing us her kidnapping from the Green Place of Many Mothers at the hands of the warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) and becoming his prized war ward. As she grows older (later played by Anya-Taylor Joy), her hate for him becomes greater.
Hemsworth gets to play a real atrocious bad guy here, in a heel turn that excited Miller. “He had a lot of wisdom about everything—about himself, about the world, about even a story like this, where it’s a world in extremis, and about how people would cope with all the moral injuries that happen in this world,” the director said to Entertainment Weekly about the casting.
He continued, adding that Taylor-Joy was a great foil as Furiosa to Hemsworth’s brute baddie because the actress has “…definitely a mystique to her, but also, there’s someone very, very resolute in her. You sense it almost immediately. And I think that’s up there on the screen.” Like Mad Max leads before her, she may not have many lines in the upcoming film but her searing eyes get to dominate her presence on screen as she plots her revenge and how to get back home.
The film will also feature nods to Mad Max—in fact, Miller confirmed to Entertainment Weekly that Max and his trademark car, “the Interceptor,” will make a funny but quick cameo. Miller knew he had to include it. “In doing what we did in the preparation of Mad Max: Fury Road, we also wrote what happened to Max in the year before we encounter him in [that film],” he shared about the genesis of a potential additional spin-off film. “And as we get towards the end of this movie, the chronology… Basically, we had to see that Mad Max was lurking around somewhere because we do know what happened. The writers know what happened to Mad Max in that year before, and we have a whole story of that, which I would like to do sometime if I get the chance.”
To the legendary filmmaker, making these films was never part of a fully mapped out plan. “Mad Max 2 came about because of all the things I learned from Mad Max. Not only how to make films but, despite the difficulty I had in making it, why it was so successful,” he said. “Why did the Japanese respond to it as a Samurai movie? Why did the French call it a Western on Wheels? Why did the Scandinavians see it as a lone Viking [film], and so on. And I realized that, inadvertently, we’d tapped into some sort of archetype.” Forty-five years later, the world he created is still unfolding in an exciting way for the director—and there could be even more to come.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga opens in theaters May 24.
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