George Miller Lets us Know Why He Keeps Making MAD MAX Movies

So far CinemaCon 2024 has been fun and very informative. On day one, we were treated to the International Day Lunch and Award Ceremony during which director George Miller was awarded the International Career Achievement in Filmmaking award. In a Q&A that followed the ceremony, Miller talked about his need to keep giving us new additions to the Mad Max universe.

Miller, originally a doctor, wanted to be a filmmaker but didn’t think he could make money doing so. However, one day while talking to a policeman who had to work his own son’s fatal accident, Miller developed the idea for the original Mad Max.

In speaking about having to film in the middle of nowhere Australia, Miller said:

“It’s almost impossible to do action sequences in the streets of Melbourne in the city in the modern day … the idea was to set it in a dystopian future simply because we could play in empty streets — and that was a really lucky thing because accidentally the film, which otherwise would have been present-day naturalistic, turned out to be more allegoric, unwittingly, and that’s what led to Mad Max and that’s why I’m still doing them, because they’re very addictive.”

Thus why we not only got Mad Max: Fury Road, but also Furiosa, which we will be getting in theaters soon. Furiosa was not just fan service because of the success of Fury Road, they were written around the same time.

“In order to tell the story of Fury Road… we had to understand everything about what we see on the screen. Not only the backstory of every character, but every prop, every vehicle. … It wasn’t a bible — we wrote the story of Furiosa in the 15 or 16 years of her life before we meet her in Fury Road, we wrote a story about Max in the year before he got there and so on. They ended up being a screenplay and one was a novella. We did it just for the actors and the crew so they could understand it. So when Fury Road worked, I thought, ‘This is a rich story to tell.’ It’s different — you don’t want a film to be a repetition of what you’ve just done, it has to be uniquely familiar, as I like to say, and that led to Furiosa.”

It appears that Miller has put a lot of time and effort into each of these stories. This makes me want to watch Furiosa even more. What do you think about the whole Mad Max franchise?