George Miller Talks About the Process of Getting to the Backstory of FURIOSA in His Upcoming MAD MAX Prequel

Director George Miller is working hard this year on a couple of films he’s had in the works. Three Thousand Years of Longing was released this week, and he’s currently shooting his Mad Max prequel, Furiosa. In a recent interview with AV Club, Miller talked about his two most recent projects, and he was asked about the risks and the opportunities in telling a prequel story, as the ending is already known. Miller explained:

Well, it’s really interesting because it’s the core of the process. When we wrote Mad Max, the task was to tell a story that was always on the run and to see how much the audience could pick up in passing. That was one of the tricks of Mad Max: Fury Road, that there would be references to things of where she’s from, why they’re doing things, but it was always on the run. There were very few moments of quiet. We never explained how she lost her arm. We never explain what the actual Green Place Of Many Mothers was. We never explained the workings of the Citadel. So we had the screenplay virtually complete before we shot Fury Road, and we did it because it arose out of wanting to explain to everybody who Furiosa was—to Charlize when she took on the role, and to all the actors and the designers and everybody else working on the Citadel and so on. The feeling was, gee, this is a pretty good screenplay, and then I kept saying to myself, “if Fury Road works, I’d really like to tell this story.”

So it came about, I’m not going to say accidentally, but it came out of a need to explain [Fury Road’s] world which, as I said, essentially happened over three days and two nights. It’s really trying to explain how that world came to be. We also wrote, not a screenplay, but almost in novel form, Nico Lathouris and I, what happened to Max in that year before, and that’s something that we’ll look at further down the track later. But in telling each other the story of Furiosa, everything in Fury Road had to be explained. In my mind, I have a back story of the Doof Warrior, who plays the guitar. How could a blind man who all he can do is play a guitar, how does he get to survive in a wasteland where everybody is in extremis? How did he come to be there? So we wrote little stories for every character when we made Fury Road.

It sounds like Miller had a good time delving into the depths of this story. He created such a rich world within the Mad Max lore, and I know that’s what will bring fans back to the theaters to see how this story plays out. Furiosa is set to hit theaters on May 24, 2024. Are you excited to watch this film?