It’s now nearly two years since the release of “Mad Max: Fury Road,” George Miller’s extraordinary fourth movie in his post-apocalyptic franchise, and we still get the urge to watch it about once a month. Taking the building blocks of the earlier ’70s and ’80s trilogy and turning it into a relentless yet oddly human action movie set in a beautiful world, it did deservedly well at the box office, and even proved to be an unexpected force at the Oscars.
Twenty-four months on, it’s still finding new leases on life: the “Black & Chrome” version is screening in theaters in the UK this weekend, and Miller sat down with The Independent to mark the occasion, and in the process, spilled a few beans on future entries in the franchise. The director, who still hasn’t committed to a next movie (and usually goes several years between films), again stresses that he wants to make something “quick and small just to reboot the brain” before he returns to the world of Max. But he says he definitely wants to: “These characters and these worlds tend to swirl around in the back of your brain like imaginary friends. It’s easy to go back to them.”
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Miller again confirms that, in fact, there are two more projects planned. “We dug deep into the subtext, the backstory of all the characters, and indeed the world…and without really thinking about it, we wrote two other screenplays just as part of the bible of the stories…Somewhere, if the planets align, there will be two other films.”
And expect to see some characters beyond Max and, fingers crossed, Furiosa, with Miller saying for the first time that one fan favorite should be back — the guitar-playing Doof Warrior who served as something of a figurehead for Immortan Joe. “I know who his mother was. I know how it was that a man who is mute and blind survived the apocalypse. I know his story very well! If we get to make another movie, the Doof Warrior will be there!”
There’s no firm word on when “Mad Max: Fury Road: Doof Warrior: Origins” (not the actual title, at least as far as we know…) will actually shoot, but we hope Miller doesn’t wait too long — he is 72, and we went nearly 30 years between previous ‘Max’ movies…
