MAD MAX Director: "I'm Not Making Any More 'Mad Max' Movies After 'Fury Road'"

Last year was a tremendous year to be director George Miller. The release of his latest film, Mad Max: Fury Road was an otherwise culminating moment that ultimately proved beneficial at the box office as well as among critics, ultimately celebrating the return of an iconic film anti-hero.

As such, having previously gone to the presses the following summer with mentions of at least a few more follow-ups from the epic desert road rage opera, the last thing you would believe is Miller ever retiring from the franchise for any reason. Well, color us wrong, as the latest article published at the Page Six column of the NY Post (via The Wrap) so suggests through Miller’s own words.

“I won’t make more ‘Mad Max’ movies,” he says. “‘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 wasn’t exactly exaggerating given the film’s extensive development roller-coaster history; The production struggled holding onto franchise star Mel Gibson’s return amid dealing with global turmoil caused by 9/11 and George W. Bush’s expensive war in the Middle East, followed by replacing Gibson with the right actor and all the other innumerable problems said to have taken place on-set – all in the span of nearly two decades.

“I’ve shot in Australia in a field of wild flowers and flat red earth when it rained heavily forever,” said the 70 year old filmmaker. “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.”

This probably won’t mean Miller’s complete departure from the potential future of the franchise in its current state. The director did go on record with at least two more films in the works, namely the fifth with a script titled Mad Max: The Wasteland, in addition to having mused about expanding on Mad Max: Fury Road co-star Charlize Theron’s character, Furiosa.

“She’s a pretty compelling character, so it’d be great to tell her story,” says Miller. “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.”

I’m pretty interested in what that iceberg is founded on myself. Miller rebooting his classic franchise was a phenomenal step forward for moviegoers along with the addition of actor Tom Hardy taking the mantle, and ultimately opening the doorway to a multitude of possibilities and ways for the new Mad Max films to build upon and change its cinematic universe in the best ways possible. Moreover, with any luck, we may even see a black-and-white re-release of Fury Road as it was originally intended, which would make cinephiles happy, no doubt.

As for the next Mad Max films, a new director will ultimately be sought after while we await an official word from Warner Bros. on what their plans will be.