When Mad Max: Fury Road was released by Warner Bros. back in 2015, Mad Max saga mastermind George Miller already had ideas for more Max Rockatansky stories and a prequel that would focus on the Furiosa character. Unfortunately, before he could move forward with any of them, his production company had to take WB to court over unpaid Fury Road earnings, an issue that slowed things down for years. The problem was finally resolved and now, nine years after Fury Road, the prequel Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga has made its way through production and is set to reach theatres on May 24th. In anticipation of the film’s release, we have compiled a list of everything we know about this one – and you can check it out right here:
STORY
Directed by Miller from a screenplay he wrote with his Fury Road co-writer Nico Lathouris, Furiosa has the following official synopsis: As the world fell, young Furiosa is snatched from the Green Place of Many Mothers and falls into the hands of a great Biker Horde led by the Warlord Dementus. Sweeping through the Wasteland they come across the Citadel presided over by the Immortan Joe. While the two Tyrants war for dominance, Furiosa must survive many trials as she puts together the means to find her way home.
Miller and Lathouris wrote the script long ago; in fact, Miller has said that it was “virtually complete” even before Mad Max: Fury Road started filming in 2012. The story begins 15 years before the events of Fury Road and spans across those 15 years, leading directly into the previous film. As for why this story is being told, Miller has said, “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 Theron 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 essentially happened over three days and two nights. It’s really trying to explain how that world came to be.“
There’s a chance that parts of this story may be familiar to Mad Max fans, as some of the prequel elements Miller had put together were published as comic books around the time of Fury Road‘s release.
ANYA TAYLOR-JOY AND CHARLIZE THERON
When he was first planning Furiosa, Miller thought he would be able to bring Fury Road‘s Charlize Theron back to play the younger version of the character and they would just do some CG de-aging on her. But, “despite the valiant attempts on Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman“, he came to the decision that CG de-aging just hadn’t been perfected yet, there’s still an uncanny valley effect when watching people who have been de-aged. So the character had to be recast. While it was rumored that Killing Eve actress Jodie Comer might be in the running to play Furiosa, the role ended up going to Anya Taylor-Joy of The Witch, who Miller first saw in Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho. Although Taylor-Joy doesn’t have a drivers license, she did perform her own stunt driving in the film.
When she learned she wouldn’t be starring in Furiosa, Theron told The Hollywood Reporter, “It’s a tough one to swallow. Listen, I fully respect George, if not more so in the aftermath of making that film with him. He’s a master, and I wish him nothing but the best. Yeah, it’s a little heartbreaking, for sure. I really love that character, and I’m so grateful that I had a small part in creating her. She will forever be someone I think of and reflect on fondly. Obviously, I would love to see that story continue, and if he feels like he has to go about it this way, then I trust him in that manner. We get so hung up on the smaller details that we forget the thing that we emotionally tap into has nothing to do with that minute thing that we’re focusing on.”
Theron and Taylor-Joy didn’t discuss their shared role until after production ended. Taylor-Joy told People, “Charlize was sweet enough — I think both of us ended up in a situation where we were both so respectful of each other that we didn’t want to reach out prior [to filming]. The second it’s over, we’re having dinner and we’re going to swap war stories for sure.“
CAST
Beyond Taylor-Joy, the cast also includes Chris Hemsworth (Thor) as the biker warlord Dementus, with Tom Burke (C.B. Strike) and Quaden Bayles (Three Thousand Years of Longing) in unspecified roles. Alyla Browne (The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart) appears as a younger Furiosa, and Nathan Jones and Angus Sampson are said to reprise their Fury Road roles of Rictus Erectus and The Organic Mechanic. IMDb has a list of characters with names like Smeg, Pissboy, War Boy, Treadmill Rat, Blackfinger, Fang, The Wretched, Corpse Minder, Mr. Harley, and Mortiflyer.
Don’t expect to see Nicholas Hoult show up as his Fury Road character Nux. As Hoult told ComicBook.com, “Going into Fury Road, I knew all of Nux’s life up until the moment we meet him in that film. And obviously as (Furiosa is) a prequel, it’s earlier. Nux would’ve maybe just about been born and I don’t think I could play a six-month-old or a year old. It would be a stretch for me.“
Hemsworth has said that working on Furiosa was “by far the best experience of my career, and something I feel the most proud of.” He came into the film exhausted, wondering how he was going to get through it, but as soon as rehearsals started it reignited his creative energy. “It made me think, the work isn’t what’s exhausting, it’s what kind of work it is, and how invested I am in it and if it is challenging in the right way.”
FURY ROAD REUNION
Miller, Lathouris, Jones, and Sampson aren’t the only Fury Road holdovers on Furiosa. The films also share editor Margaret Sixel, production designer Colin Gibson, sound mixer Ben Osmo, makeup designer Lesley Vanderwalt, costume designer Jenny Beavan, and composer Junkie XL.
BIGGEST AUSTRALIAN PRODUCTION
Furiosa was the biggest production ever for Australia, surpassing the $150 million production of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (which was recently reworked into a mini-series called Faraway Downs). It created 850 jobs and brought $350 million AUD (around $230 million USD) to the local economy. Miller is producing the film with Doug Mitchell.
MORE MAX STORIES
While it seems clear that he’s not a major character, Miller has never said whether or not Max Rockatansky will be making an appearance in Furiosa, but he did say, “Max is lurking around somewhere in this story.” If you’re more interested in seeing Max than you are in seeing Furiosa, don’t worry: Miller has said that he has two more Max stories in mind, one of them being the Mad Max: The Wasteland movie he was already mentioning by name back in 2015.
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