Furiosa is on the horizon, and as we prepare to return to the Wastelands, press for the film is gearing up, and we spoke to Mad Max franchise creator George Miller at a Los Angeles screening of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
Miller, who is responsible for the Mad Max series, returned to it back in 2015 for Mad Max: Fury Road. The standout of the franchise, it introduced a new generation of Mad Max fans to Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron). While Fury Road was a Furiosa and Max (Tom Hardy) joint venture, Furiosa is decidedly just a story of how she became the Imperator as we know and love her.
When I spoke to Miller, he had shared that the filmmaking process didn’t change between the two because he had already storyboarded a Furiosa story prior to shooting Fury Road. Still, I wanted to know if making a female-centric story in the Mad Max universe would change his approach.
“I can’t say that it changed because the story was fully formed before we shot,” Miller said, alluding to the prep work for Fury Road that gave Furiosa her backstory. “Because I didn’t have to say, ‘Oh, how do we have to change Furiosa?’ because it really had to be written beforehand. We were thinking of making it as an anime at first, and that’s why it was fully developed partly, but then Fury Road was once again delayed. There was no point in making an anime. We were going do it with Mahiro Maeda. A brilliant guy who, you know that teddy bear? He started to do some illustration. He put a teddy bear on [Dementus’ outfit]. That became part of the story that was way back before Fury Road. So, it was already there. And it was just a question of when we’ll get time to do it.”
Furiosa hits theaters on May 24.
(featured image: Warner Bros.)
