CANNES – George Miller’s “Furiosa” got a warm reception from global critics and the Cannes Film Festival faithful last night, and it already has many wondering if another “Mad Max” film is in the works. Miller has often told the story about how “Fury Road: A Mad Max Saga” was only made after scripts provided the back stories for Furiosa (originally played by Charlize Theron) and Max (Tom Hardy) were completed. One of those scripts became “Furiosa” which opens in theaters a week from Friday. Will Max return to the spotlight the next time around? It’s possible.
Speaking at a press conference for “Furiosa,” Miller noted, “Well, there’s certainly other stories there. Mainly because in order to tell the story of ‘Fury Road,’ we had to go the back story of Furiosa and Max in the year before. And that was a tool for the cast and crew. And so we know the Max story for the year before, but I’ll definitely wait to see how this goes before we even think about it.”
So, yes, Miller basically telegraphed the obvious: if you want more “Mad Max” we suggest you buy a ticket at your local multiplex.
As with other installments in the franchise, no action exists in “Furiosa” without a world-class stunt team. Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays the title character this time around, was overflowing with praise that no “action movie, specifically ‘Mad Max’ exists without an unbelievable stunt department.”
“Beyond that, I think when George and I first had a conversation, it was very important to him that I was willing to throw myself into it as much as I possibly could,” Taylor-Joy recalls. “But even if you are throwing yourself into it as much as you possibly can, there’s somebody that has pretty good stuff that has tested that, has tested that, that has taught you how to do it. My sunt double Hayley Wright is my sister. She has been with me consistently. We met on this movie. She’s now one of my best friends in the entire world. Everything that she did, I did too. And the most important thing is rather than it being an environment of aggression in any way of like ‘You have to do this,’ it was “I love you, I believe in you, you can do this and I’m going to help you do it in way.'”
Chris Hemsworth, who delivers one of the best performances of his career as the twisted Dr. Dementus, said that both he and Miller agreed they had to find the humanity in this villainous persona and “sprinkle in moments of vulnerability” to understand his own background as a survivor of this post-apocalyptic wasteland.
“He too had suffered tremendously and had a traumatic past,” Hemsworth explains. “Not to excuse his horrific actions, but to understand that he was responding and trying to survive in a very brutal space. There was a vibrance and a bombastic sort of nature on the page. I felt that this script was very different to the other ‘Mad Max’ films. We discussed this as well at length and wanted to lean into the absurdity. [We] wanted to lean into the polarity of him and have him be contradictory and hopefully surprising.”
Hemsworth continues, “I like the way that humor can lull you into a false sense of comfort. So, then when you do do something that is violent, it’s unexpected as opposed to hinting at it or setting it up in a more obvious way. But to have the freedom just to be inconsistent as we as humans are, I found creatively very satisfying and I love every second of the experience and I really thank George so much for that.”
Seemingly full of creative energy at a spry 79-years-old, Miller doesn’t seem ready to ride into the directorial sunset any time soon. He says he’s still curious not only about how to tell stories but why we tell them. It’s something he says he’s been doing since he was a little kid.
“Even when I worked as a doctor, the first thing you do with a patient is get a history,” Miller says. “And I found that was being exercised. It’s through the history of the patient that you understand, you’re able to put some sort of narrative. And then starting to make films I got caught up in the kind of process as described by Joseph Campbell as to how stories are told. The safe stories are told over and over again, across all cultures, across all times. That was a fascinating thing for me that we are hardwired for stories. We are telling each other stories now. You’ll tell stories to your friends and family about what happened when you were at can at this particular moment and so on. So that’s the thing that sort of drives me.”
“Furiosa” opens nationwide on May 22