Audiences will soon delve into the early years of the Mad Max post-apocalypse - without Mad Max - as Furiosa focuses on the character introduced in 2015's superb sequel, Mad Max: Fury Road. While many might miss the presence of Max, director George Miller has revealed that Furiosa may not be the only prequel on the horizon, with the filmmaker having written another that would bring Max Rockatansky back into the spotlight.
"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."
Miller revealed these details during an interview with The AV Club, teasing a Mad Max: Fury Road prequel that would feature not only Tom Hardy's Max, but also several other standout characters, including the Doof Warrior.
During the interview, George Miller revealed that the idea behind a Furiosa prequel was born from crafting the character from the ground up for her appearance alongside Max. After building the character and the world around her, Miller realized that he would love to bring the story to the big screen.
"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."
Miller and his team created such detail for Furiosa to explain to Charlize Theron who the character is and where she has come from. And in doing so, stumbled upon the idea of a spinoff prequel.
"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.'"
Directed and co-written by George Miller, Furiosa will follow Anya Taylor-Joy (Last Night in Soho, The Northman) as an earlier version of Mad Max: Fury Road character Imperator Furiosa alongside Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Nathan Jones, and Angus Sampson.
Furiosa is due for release on May 24, 2024.