How Furiosa Director George Miller Avoided A Common Prequel Problem

George Miller is the master of the modern myth. His sprawling "Mad Max" franchise now includes five feature films, novelizations, a comic book series, and two video games — all helping expand a post-apocalyptic Wasteland loaded with lore, characters, and laws different from our own. "Furiosa" serves as a prequel to "Fury Road," but a continuation of the story started in the first "Mad Max" film from 1979. As an audience, we know where Imperator Furiosa's story ends up, but "Furiosa" will show us how she got there.

One of the hardest things about making a prequel is ensuring that there are still stakes to the story at hand, knowing that what comes after has already been established. Sometimes it works, like with "The Hunger Games: The Battle of Songbirds & Snakes," but more often than not, the delivery is more akin to "The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas," "Dumb and Dumberer," or depending on who you ask, the "Star Wars" prequels.

During a special screening of "Furiosa" at IMAX Headquarters in Los Angeles, Miller spoke with the press about bringing the film to life after years of development and touched on his approach to crafting a story with an ending the audience already knows. "Well, you've got someone who was taken as a child who [...] can [no longer] depend on others. She has to [use her] unevolved, unpracticed inner resources to survive and then make a way back and go through all that hardship and trauma and so on — and still endure the wasteland, which is not an uncommon story," he says. Of course, Miller doesn't believe any of us have been tossed into a post-apocalyptic Wasteland of warfare and power-hungry warlords, but we've all endured hardships in our lives that helped shape us as people.

Miller spoke about his own parents who left Europe during World War I and fled to Australia to make a new life, noting that these histories and people still have stories to tell even if we know where they landed. "That's a story that regardless of what the outcome is, it's not about where they end up. It's what happens and how that person is forged in those worlds and we are interested in those sort of stories," he says. He cited "The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales" by Bruno Bettelheim, a famous book that examines fairy tales through the lens of Sigmund Freud's theories of psychoanalysis.

"A kid will want to watch or be read the same story over and over again until they get to a moment where they don't need it anymore and Bettelheim said, 'Never ask the kid what they were processing, but they were processing something because they can't articulate it,' but that's one of the functions of stories to help us process the world, make meaning of the world around us," says Miller. This approach is very similar to my personal feelings about spoiler culture, where the journey is just as important as the conclusion. "And that's why, regardless of what happens in 'Fury Road,' 'Furiosa,' for me, is part of that process, I think. That applies to all stories," adds Miller. The script for "Furiosa" was virtually complete before production on "Fury Road" began — so while this is a prequel film, Miller isn't coming up with a story after the fact. Furiosa's story was always a part of "Fury Road."

Miller has talked about wanting to pursue a "Fury Road" sequel called "Mad Max: The Wasteland," but knew that "Furiosa" would likely come first. "That's the one I most wanted to tell because it was different from 'Fury Road,' because if we did just another all like 'Fury Road' [...] The fact that it was a saga was a much bigger contrast to something told sort of almost in real-time," he explains. "The two big sequences in 'Fury Road' are almost real-time. That first act chase and the last act chase play out in real-time. So that's a completely different filmmaking exercise than something told over 18 years. And that was much more attractive to me at this point." That much is evident based on Miller's most recent film, "Three Thousand Years of Longing," a movie that /Film's Rafael Motamayor called "an epic, romantic fairy tale about the power of storytelling" in his review.

"Furiosa" has a similar epic scope covering 18 years of the titular protagonist's life, but with all of the action-packed excitement of a "Mad Max" tale. There was a time when the story was instead going to be told as an anime first, but delays on "Fury Road" prevented that from happening. However, some of that anime lives on, as artist Mahiro Maeda's inclusion of a teddy bear on the villainous Dementus (Chris Hemsworth's character in "Furiosa") made the final cut. "Furiosa" is an atypical prequel from what audiences might be accustomed to seeing, but it's one of the film's greatest strengths thanks to Miller's apt touch of myth-making.

"Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" arrives in theaters on May 24, 2024.