As part of a special screening of Furiosa at IMAX Headquarters in Los Angeles, George Miller chatted with press about the highly anticipated prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road. The film, long in development hell during multiple WB regime changes, will finally open on May 24—and it’s worth the wait.
Miller talked about the decision to have multiple actresses take over the role of Furiosa for the film, which explores the origin of the wasteland heroine first played by Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road. “By the time we got to actually do Furiosa, best part of a decade had gone by. And then I thought, ‘Okay, we can still do it with Charlize [Theron] and then I saw these other movies like The Irishman and they made people younger. And particularly I saw Gemini Man—and it’s just, all I was looking at was the technology. I wasn’t looking at the performance. I thought, ‘We can’t do this, guys.’ This is someone who goes from 10 to 18,” he said. His decision to recast included finding a young actor to play Furiosa as a child, with Ayla Browne getting such a huge chunk of time as the character, it doesn’t feel like Anya Taylor-Joy took up the entirety of the role.
The film presents Furiosa’s life in chapters as she comes of age before the events in Fury Road, a decision made because of amount of backstory that had inspired Miller to make the movie. “[This format worked for the story] I wanted to tell because it was different than Fury Road. Because if we did another two like Fury Road, the fact that it was a saga was much more [of a] big contrast to something told sort of almost in real time,” Miller shared. Furiosa had long existed in his head as companion story with Fury Road but that film’s fraught release changed its original medium. “We were thinking of making it as an anime at first and that’s why it was fully developed, partly. But then Fury Road was once again delayed. There’s no point in making an anime. [We were] going to do it with Mahiro Maeda, brilliant guy. He started do some illustrations. He put a teddy bear on [Dementus, the villain played by Chris Hemsworth]. That became part of the story. That was way back before Fury Road so it was already there.”
Miller is not opposed to all CG tech in filmmaking; massive scale scenes in both Fury Road and Furiosa where Warboys fill the screen to the brim feature real actors whose performances are digitally inserted on screen, a practice begun on the filmmaker’s beloved animated penguin adventure films. “A classic example: when we made Happy Feet, Andrew Lesnie (Babe, The Lord of the Rings) had [shot] Lord of the Rings. He came back and showed us the first motion capture of Gollum,” Miller shared about how that technology based on movement influenced his use. “I didn’t want to animate every penguin because it means that the animators had to understand tap dancing. So the moment [he] showed us that … the first thought was ‘Andrew, you just showed us how to make Happy Feet’. And we were able to use Savion Glover … the greatest living tap dancer by far, all that talent to to make the penguins dance. That’s what drives the story, the tools. So that was the perfect tool to do that in.”
He continued to describe how that kind of digital tech evolved for use in Fury Road and Furiosa. “Now the tools are getting way faster. What we did on Fury Road … we had this massive table in the middle of the desert with a big tent and every single stuntman often dressed in their wardrobe, and every single camera like the edge arm which is the crane arm. [There was] a little model on the table and every Warboy had a little model [figure], and we literally playing like kids, saying, okay, ‘You move that way and I move this way, the camera does this, and I get killed and fall off here.’ All of that had to be worked out shot by shot. Every shot was rehearsed—we were able to do that digitally.”
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga opens May 24.
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