Mad Max: Fury Road is one of the most intense action movies ever. Director George Miller described it as "one long chase sequence" that essentially takes place over three days and two nights. But unlike Mad Max: Fury Road, which moved at a frantic pace and never relented until the end, Miller’s upcoming prequel, Furiosa, will be much more constrained.
Furiosa will be epic, no doubt, but in scale and scope rather than just being a giant action set piece like Fury Road. Apart from the titular protagonist, now played by Anya Taylor-Joy, Furiosa will also flesh out some of the characters previously introduced in Fury Road, including Immortan Joe, Rictus Erectus, The Organic Mechanic and The Bullet Farmer.
In a recent interview with The AV Club, while promoting his latest directorial effort, Three Thousand Years of Longing, Miller revealed that the screenplay of Furiosa was born out of necessity during the filming of Fury Road. Since there was so little characterization in the movie, Miller wrote elaborate backstories so that the actors could better understand their characters, which eventually led to Furiosa.
"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.’"
George Miller Has Written A Novel’s Worth Of Material For Furiosa
Mad Max: Fury Road reportedly didn’t have a conventional screenplay at the time of the shooting, with George Miller relying on his meticulously crafted storyboards instead to direct the film. But he and co-writers Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris penned tons of material to explain to themselves and the actors the dystopian world of Fury Road. Miller said:
"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."
George Miller teased earlier this year that Furiosa would be a "saga," as opposed to Mad Max: Fury Road, which took place over a few days. And if the early set pics are any indicator, Furiosa does look like an epic follow-up to Fury Road.
Anya Taylor-Joy stars in Furiosa alongside Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Nathan Jones, and Angus Sampson, with the latter two reprising their roles as Rictus Erectus and The Organic Mechanic, respectively, from Fury Road.
Furiosa is currently filming in Australia and is due to be released on May 24, 2024.