George Miller on Why He Was Hard-Wired to Make Furiosa

When a film is a huge success, we often imagine studios pressuring filmmakers to follow it up. “Get the sequel out fast,” is the prevailing thought. And while sometimes that happens with varying degrees of success, George Miller told io9 he didn’t feel any pressure to follow up Mad Max: Fury Road after that film’s success. He just kind of had to, deep in his bones. And so Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga was born.

As most people know, the first seeds of Furiosa came in the development of Fury Road. To give the actors backgrounds for their characters, Miller developed elaborate backstories for each. And in the case of Furiosa, that morphed into a whole separate screenplay. One that the writer-director very much liked. “The whole theory was that if Fury Road got enough traction we’d at some point, come and make this film,” Miller told io9.

But that was around 2015. It’s currently, spoiler alert, 2024. So what was the film’s journey in between? Well, Miller made 3000 Years of Longing and Warner Bros. experienced multiple changes in not just ownership but direction of its film studio.

“I knew [Furiosa] would happen at one point,” Miller said. “You’re drawn to stories first. You feel a gravitational pull to stories or a compulsion to tell a story. I’m a habitual storyteller. I started as a little kid and now it’s just part of how I work and how I am. The stories compete in your head, almost, in a Darwinian way. And some of them, you’re saying, ‘You know, this is the one that I most want to tell at this point.’ And that’s just how it happens. And luckily, the planets aligned, and we were able to sort of do it.”

Miller calls the current Warner Bros. film group, led by Michael De Luca and Pamela Adby, “a very, very film-friendly group of people” and heaps praise on the relationship. “[They’re] people who understand the relationship between a studio and filmmakers is not adversary, it has to be collaborative,” Miller said. “And it’s not just in their words, it’s by their actions. And we benefited from that immensely in the making of this film. Unlike the well-documented troubles we had on Fury Road.”

So, by hell or high water, Furiosa was made. George Miller had to. And this weekend, he’s giving it to us.

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