Furiosa may have become a tyrant after Mad Max: Fury Road, says director

George Miller is making a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, not a sequel, but he still has some upsetting ideas about what happened next.

Mad Max: Fury Road has “Mad Max” right there in the title, but anyone who saw it knows that Imperator Furiosa, a hard-war captain who risked her life to free the captive wives of a brutal dictator, stole the show. She drove the movie forward, and as played by Charlize Theron, gave us a powerful, implacable character I won’t soon forget. Thank goodness director George Miller is making a prequel about her, cause I need more.

But I’m sure there are some fans who were hoping for a sequel rather than a prequel, if no other reason than because we wanted to see Charlize Theron back in the role. Fury Road ended at the start of a new chapter for Furiosa: she and Max had toppled Immortan Joe, the cruel dictator who lorded over a dry scrap of land in the post-apocalyptic desert, the only one with access to precious groundwater he could pump out of the earth. What happened next? What kind of ruler was she?

It’s not like Miller, who’s been making Mad Max movies since 1979, doesn’t have thoughts. In fact, speaking to Josh Horowitz in a recent interview, he seems to have plenty:

“I’ve often thought about it,” Miller said when Horowitz asked about Furiosa’s future. “There are two ways to go: One is utopian, which is not an interesting story, really. I’ve somehow imagined that the first thing she would do in line with that, is go up and release the water.”

That does indeed sound like something she’d do; heaven knows the people of the post-apocalypse need water. But after that, Miller sees things getting darker. “[Academic Joseph Campbell] said that the usual story is that today’s hero becomes tomorrow’s tyrant. The hero is the agent of change. They basically relinquish self-interest in order for some common good. He basically says … you love what you’ve built, or saved, too much. You become holdfast. You become the orthodoxy. You develop the dogma and basically then you have to protect it. That tends to be the rhythm of these things.”

So Furiosa could start out as a liberator but live to become the thing she fought against? That’s grim.

Joseph Campbell, by the way, is famous for popularizing the idea of the Hero’s Journey, a storytelling template that crops up again and again in fiction, whether the author intends for it to be there or not. But the Hero’s Journey isn’t gospel, and like Miller said, there are two ways this could go. “I think she’s too smart to fall into that trap,” he said. “She’s already seen it with the Immortan Joe.”

Ultimately, Miller says he’s “torn” between the two outcomes, which might explain why he decided to make a prequel about Furiosa rather than a sequel. But if he ever picks a path, he’ll have at least one fan eager to follow it.

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h/t The A.V. Club