“Mad Max: Fury Road” was one of the best-received movies of 2015, but director George Miller has bad news for fans eagerly awaiting a sequel.
“I won’t make more ‘Mad Max’ movies,” the director told the New York Post’s Page Six. “‘Fury Road’ with Charlize Theron, Zoë Kravitz, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and Riley Keough was forever getting completed. If you finish one in a year, it’s considered a leap of faith. Start, stop, start again.”
Miller is referencing “Fury Road’s” troubled production, which began in the New South Wales outback in 2010, but had to be moved to Namibia.
“I’ve shot in Australia in a field of wild flowers and flat red earth when it rained heavily forever,” he said. “We had to wait 18 months and every return to the US was 27 hours. Those ‘Mad Maxes’ take forever. I won’t do those anymore.”
Miller previously told Entertainment Weekly that he wanted to do “something smaller that’s contemporary and that we can get through fairly quickly” as his next project. “Something without too much technical difficulty – just something more performance-based, just to sort of clear the exhaust,” he said.
But in the same interview, Miller also expressed interest in exploring the backstory of Theron’s character Furiosa, possibly in another film.
“She’s a pretty compelling character, so it’d be great to tell her story,” he said. “Her backstory is pretty interesting; we only allude to it in this movie. This movie is on the run, people don’t have much time for recreational talk. You have a sense of her having gone through stuff, that’s what the movie is trying to do. You know, you’re trying to put a lot of iceberg under the tip, I like saying.”
Even more confusing contrasting Miller’s latest statement to his very first tweet last May.
“Hello Twitter! Thanks for all the kind words written and said about the film,” he tweeted. “We had a lot of fun making it and there’s more Max to come.”
The filmmaker also previously said he was planning a sequel called “Mad Max: The Wasteland.” Perhaps Miller will simply step out of the director’s chair for the sequels.