George Miller Says ‘Mad Max: Furiosa’ Was Initially Planned As An Anime Companion Film To ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’

Inspiration comes from unlikely places, and the inception of the upcoming “Mad Max: Fury Road” was on a now-legendary long flight from Sydney to Los Angeles where Miller has said he was in a “hypnologic state between sleep and wakefulness” and dreamt up the story for ‘Fury Road.’ But that dream some twelve years ago or more included much more than just the ‘Fury Road’ story. Indeed, early on, there was talk that “Mad Max: Fury Road” would shoot back-to-back with “Mad Max: Furiosa.” The latter picture didn’t lens, so what became of it? What was the concept? As the title suggests, it shifted the character focus, and acted as an independent strand from the events of ‘Fury Road,’ almost sounding like a prequel.

“[The dream] wasn’t a conflation of two stories,” Miller said in an interview with L.A. Playlister Charlie Schmidlin. “We were going to do [‘Furiosa’ as] an anime before it was delayed a second time when we were rained out of Australia. But because we were delayed that didn’t happen, and so we’ve got that script, and we’ve got another one.”

Indeed, this isn’t the first time Miller has revealed he has much more ready to go in the ‘Mad Max’ world. “In order to tell this story, we came up with two others. We’ve written the screenplay of one and the novelization of another, but it’s a very rough novel,” he said at Comic-Con last year. “We kept working on them while we were working on other things.”

But whether or not “Mad Max: Furiosa” happens — live action or otherwise — remains to be seen. Charlize Theron has already made clear her reticence to reprise her role after a very tough shoot on ‘Fury Road.’ But Miller shares what the film would entail. “It’s more Furiosa’s story and how she came about,” he explained. “Even though it’s a chase, to really make the film as authentic as possible we wrote backstories to every vehicle, to every character. We knew Nic Hoult’s character Nux from the moment he was conceived, we knew who his parents were, how he became a War Boy.”

We’ll have more from an interview with George Miller soon. But it’s clear that the long gestation project for ‘Fury Road’ hasn’t just allowed the filmmaker to zero in on the details of his upcoming films, but on where the story goes after. “Mad Max: Fury Road” opens on May 15th. Check out a new featurette about Furiosa below.