George Miller Wrote a ‘Novella’ for the ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ Cast and Crew That Helped Inspire ‘Furiosa’
Christian Zilko
When George Miller takes “Furiosa” to Cannes next month, it will be one of the biggest action films to hit the Croisette since the last time he took a “Mad Max” movie to the iconic festival. Miller’s groundbreaking blockbuster “Mad Max: Fury Road” was an instant hit when it premiered at Cannes in 2015, and his new prequel film promises to further expand the mythology by providing an origin story for Charlize Theron’s Furiosa, who is now played by Anya Taylor-Joy.
Finding more stories to tell about Furiosa was a simple task for Miller, who had already come up with an abundance of them while working on “Fury Road.” Speaking at CinemaCon this week (via Deadline), Miller explained that he wrote out new backstories for the characters of Hardy’s Max and Theron’s Furiosa for the cast and crew in the form of a full screenplay and novella before filming the 2015 franchise reboot.
“In order to tell the story of ‘Fury Road’ we had to understand everything about what we see on the screen. Not only the backstory of every character, but every prop, every vehicle,” Miller said before elaborating on the way he presented the material. “It wasn’t a bible — we wrote the story of Furiosa in the 15 or 16 years of her life before we meet her in ‘Fury Road,’ 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.”
Miller went on to say that once he knew “Fury Road” was a hit, he decided that the next “Mad Max” movie should emerge from that script and novella that he wrote for his collaborators.
“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,” he said. “That led to ‘Furiosa.’”
