On the road again with Mad Max's mastermind

GEORGE MILLER HAS SPENT MORE THAN 40 YEARS swerving in and out of the post apocalyptic world of Mad Max.

- ELIANA DOCKTERMAN

Miller insisted the vehicles in Furiosa be functional, including a motorcycle that runs on a plane engine

It’s an unpleasant place: dry, barren, and violent, but Miller can’t seem to stay away. And he had a compelling reason to return after 2015’s hugely successful Mad Max: Fury Road. In preparing to bring that story to the big screen, Miller wrote not just one movie, but three.

The first film was, of course, Fury Road. The film introduced a new protagonist, Furiosa, a one-armed road warrior played by Charlize Theron. She betrays the dictator she serves, a man obsessed with big muscles and bigger car engines, by smuggling his wives out of their prison. Furiosa ended up eclipsing the franchise’s titular hero, with Tom Hardy in the role made famous by Mel Gibson.

But in the nearly two-decade-long development process for Fury Road, Miller also sketched out two more films: an origin story for Furiosa and what happened to Max a year before Fury Road. Miller shared concept art for the Furiosa movie with Theron so she could better understand her character. “She said, ‘Oh, gosh, can we do the Furiosa story first?’” Miller remembers. But that train had left the station—or in the parlance of Mad Max, that war rig had left the Citadel.