"Blood, Sweat, and Chrome": George Miller talks Furiosa

We sat down with George Miller to talk about his upcoming film Furiosa, a prequel to the critically-acclaimed Mad Max: Fury Road. Read the full interview after the cut.

Furiosa will be the first Mad Max film not to feature Max as its protagonist. How has that affected your creative process?

It's a lot of the same crew as on Fury Road, so there's a sense of continuity there, and the film incorporates a lot of ideas that have been sitting in my notebooks for years, ideas I'd always wanted to come back to. And of course there's a lot that came to me during the filming of Fury Road too—it's one thing to sit in your office and dream up this wasteland world in your head, but when you see it living right in front of your eyes, it just kicks your imagination into overdrive. And Tom and Charlize just lived the characters—you couldn't help but be sucked into their world. So it's very exciting, and a little scary, because like you said, this is also something new.

The idea of notebooks full of Mad Max details sounds fascinating. Are there any unused concepts you can tell us about?

Oh, definitely—there are loads I know I'll never use, because they just wouldn't work on screen, or they're just too weird. [Laughs] One of the characters I initially envisioned for Fury Road was a guy we called the Troughmaster. This was before we settled on the final design for the Citadel, with the huge water pipes—back then we were imagining this whole sort of enclosed ecosystem all based around human beings, since most of the animals have died out. And there are still elements of that in the film... we kept as much as we could. Of course, water is scarce in the desert, so the Troughmaster was in charge of collecting Joe's urine tax. There was this whole irrigation system... the planning really got out of hand, and I realized it'd just have been a nightmare to shoot, so he never made it into the film. It was the right choice, but I'm still fond of the Troughmaster character. I'd like to revisit it someday. Maybe he'll get a comic book or something.

We hope so!

Right.