Seven years went by between the release of Mad Max: Fury Road and the start of production on the prequel Furiosa, which is currently filming, but director George Miller has had the script for Furiosa ready for a long time. In fact, during an interview with AV Club Miller revealed that the script for Furiosa was already “virtually complete” by the time Mad Max: Fury Road started filming way back in 2012.
Miller 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 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.”
The filmmaker also confirmed that he has another Mad Max story written, which would presumably be the Mad Max: The Wasteland story that he has referenced here and there over the last seven years.
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.”
Directed by Miller from a screenplay he wrote with Nico Lathouris, Furiosa has the following 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.
Anya Taylor-Joy is playing a younger version of the Furiosa character Charlize Theron played in Mad Max: Fury Road and is joined in the cast by Chris Hemsworth (Thor) and Tom Burke (C.B. Strike).
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