Tom Hardy, keep your phone off silent — you may soon be getting a call from George Miller.
Miller told Entertainment Weekly that he has written another “Mad Max” prequel film set one year before the events of 2015’s “Mad Max: Fury Road,” which starred Hardy as the title character.
The upcoming prequel installment, “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” which will premiere at Cannes, has Anya Taylor-Joy as a younger version of warrior Furiosa after Charlize Theron originated the character in “Fury Road.” The script for “Furiosa” was birthed out of the pre-production process for “Fury Road.”
“In doing what we did in the preparation of ‘Mad Max: Fury Road,’ we also wrote what happened to Max in the year before we encounter him in [that film],” Miller said.
In fact, the possible Mad Max-character’s origin story could overlap with the events of “Furiosa.”
“Basically, we had to see that Mad Max was lurking around somewhere because we do know what happened,” Miller said. “The writers know what happened to Mad Max in that year before, and we have a whole story of that, which I would like to do sometime if I get the chance.”
Miller previously called the Mad Max background story a “novella” that was written while creating “Fury Road.”
“We wrote the story of Furiosa in the 15 or 16 years of her life before we meet her in ‘Fury Road,’” Miller said during CinemaCon 2024. “We wrote a story about Max in the year before he got there and so on. They ended up being a screenplay and one was a novella. We did it just for the actors and the crew so they could understand it. So when ‘Fury Road’ worked, I thought, ‘This is a rich story to tell.’ It’s different — you don’t want a film to be a repetition of what you’ve just done, it has to be uniquely familiar, as I like to say. That led to ‘Furiosa.’”
Theron actually tried to get Miller to go into production on “Furiosa” before “Fury Road” and film the prequels chronologically.
“She said, ‘Please, George, can we make this first?’” Miller told Empire magazine. “It was the first time I realized that there’s something really strong in this story. [‘Furiosa’] follows the story that runs directly into ‘Fury Road,’ for 15 years. It’s a different animal. It’s got many different locations. It’s an odyssey. No question.”
