George Miller is preparing a sequel to Mad Max: Fury Road

It’s almost 2020, and a lot of people are putting together lists of the best movies of the past 10 years. One movie you’ll see show up on a lot of those is Mad Max: Fury Road, George Miller’s thrilling chase movie set in his post-apocalyptic Mad Max universe.

And I am down with that, because this movie was incredible. It’s one of two movies in the past 10 years I made a point of seeing twice in the theaters. Ever since it came out in 2015, I’ve wanted more. Speaking to Deadline, Miller sounds like he wants to give it to me. “I’m not done with the Mad Max story and I think you have to be a multi-tasker and there’s certainly another Mad Max coming down the pike after this,” he said. “We’re in preparation on that as well.”

That is outstanding news. And if you’re angling for a sequel to come out sooner, just remember that 30 years elapsed between Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and Fury Road, so it’s all about context.

At the moment, Miller is working with Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton on a movie called Three Thousand Years of Longing, a conversation-heavy film that is apparently “the anti-Mad Max,” although Miller won’t give away more than that. “I really like stories where there is a lot of iceberg under the tip,” Miller said. “Too often, a story can be quite dazzling but it’s amazing how quickly you can forget about it. I must say, going back to Mad Max: Fury Road, that was the thing that satisfied me the most. For a film like that, it could have been read just on the surface. It was very, very hard to get in a lot of subtext and exposition while you are on the run. That was the formal exercise of that film and I was really happy when people started to read a lot of stuff underneath that film. They saw the allegory. I think that’s why the film got traction to the extent it did.”

I completely agree. It’s hard to understand why Fury Road has lived in the imaginations of so many fans when lots of action movies fade from memory so quickly, but I think it has something to do with the subtext and commitment to detail Miller is talking about. He even revealed that he came up with a backstory for the shredding guitarist strapped to the front of one of Immortan Joe’s rigs. You remember him:

“I would like to think he’s still alive, somehow,” Miller said. “In fact, we’ve got a whole backstory on how he came to be in that position. I often think about it. The approach to the film was, you have to be able to explain everything. Not only all the characters, but every object, how it all found its way into this world and how it survived. In his case, he was blind from birth. When things started going a bit crazy, he and his mother were left in a mining town. The only way they could survive was to go into a place where there was a competitive advantage to being blind. And that was to go deep down into a mine shaft where they were able to survive. He took what was most precious to him, a musical instrument, probably a guitar.”

"As [Immortan Joe’s followers] were careening through the wasteland, someone heard this music echoing out of that mine shaft, went down there and luckily they saw him as an asset. I think they killed his mother because she wasn’t of any use. They took him and he eventually ended up as the equivalent of the drummer, the fife player or the bagpiper, in Immortan Joe’s army."

And he has stories like that for every character. It’s that kind of richness that turns viewers into diehard fans.

Honestly, reading this interview, Miller is starting to become one of my favorite directors. He also had an enlightened take on the whole “Are superhero movies really cinema” debate kicked off by Martin Scorsese a while back. “I watch all of them,” Miller said. “To be honest, in terms of this debate, cinema is cinema and it’s a very broad church. The test, ultimately, is what it means to the audience. There’s a great quote I saw that applies to all we do. It was from the Swahili storytellers. Each time they finished a story they would say, ‘The story has been told. If it was bad, it was my fault because I am the storyteller. And if it was good, it belongs to everybody.’”

"It’s a mistake and a kind of hubris if a film does well at the box office to dismiss it as clever marketing or something else. There’s more happening there, and it’s our obligation as storytellers to really try and understand it. To me, it’s all cinema. I don’t think you can ghettoize it and say, oh this is cinema or that is cinema. It applies to all the arts, to literature, the performing arts, painting and music, in all its form. It’s such a broad spectrum, a wide range and to say that anyone is more significant or more important than the other, is missing the point. It’s one big mosaic and each bit of work fits into it."

Preach.

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