Before Focus Features released Edgar Wright’s neo-noir thriller Last Night in Soho in October 2021, the filmmaker showed a cut to pal George Miller. The Australian director was so struck by star Anya Taylor-Joy’s performance that he went back to Wright with an idea.
“I said, ‘Gee, she’d be good for…,’” detailed Miller, who then said Wright interjected before he could finish the thought. “[He said], ‘Do it, do it. She’s great.’” Miller took Wright’s concise advice and cast Taylor-Joy in the title role of Warner Bros. Pictures’ Furiosa, the newest installment of his blockbuster Mad Max franchise. She plays a young woman in a dystopian universe who was snatched from home only to fall into the hands of the great Biker Horde led by the Warlord of Dementus, played by Chris Hemsworth. Furiosa is then forced to withstand many trials as she puts together the means to find her way home.
Ahead of the film’s release on May 24, Miller stopped in Las Vegas on Monday, taking the stage inside Caesars Palace’s Palace Ballroom to accept an international career achievement in filmmaking award from CinemaCon and the National Association of Theater Owners. A fireside chat followed the trophy presentation, and during the conversation, Miller discussed what it was like to work with both Taylor-Joy and her Furiosa nemesis Hemsworth.
“There’s something mystical about her, and yet, there’s an accessibility. I learned that she was somebody who is very, very disciplined, even though she’s very young. She was a ballet dancer. [Charlize Theron] was a ballet dancer,” he said of the Oscar-winning actress, who played the role in 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road. “I understand the physical discipline as well as the emotional discipline they have. So all of that led to Anya being in Furiosa.”
As for Hemsworth, Miller said of his Aussie comrade, “I knew the character but I never thought of Chris until we met and we talked, and I realized he was somebody with a lot more dimensions to him that I had initially thought. I mean, for me, he is, as they say in Australia, the complete article. He’s somebody who in every way is exemplary. He responded very well to the material.”
Miller’s onstage conversation also saw him opening up about his transition from medical doctor to feature film director with 1979’s Mad Max, his filmmaking influences and the varied career he’s carved out with multiple genres including family dramas (Lorenzo’s Oil), dark fantasy (The Witches of Eastwick) and animated franchises (Happy Feet). He also touched on how he came up with the idea for Mad Max in the first place and how its international success paved the way for a sequel. He followed up the original with Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and Mad Max: Fury Road.
He was asked specifically about Furiosa and how that character came to have a spinoff by moderator Andrew Cripps, Warner Bros. Studios president of international distribution, someone Miller is working closely with on the film’s release.
“In order to tell the story of Fury Road, which happens over a short period of time, three days and two nights, [we had] a lot of exposition to get through. We had to understand everything about what we see on the screen. Not only the backstory of every character, but every prop, every vehicle, every gesture,” he explained. “We wrote the story of Furiosa in the 15 or 16 years of her life before we meet her in Fury Road. We wrote a story about Max in the year before he got there, and so much else who the Immortan Joe was and so on. One was a screenplay, Furiosa, and the other was a novela. We did it just for the actors and particularly the crew, so they could understand where they’re coming from. So, when [Fury Road] worked, my thought was, gee, this is a rich story story to tell.”
Monday afternoon’s luncheon, part of CinemaCon’s international day to kick off the convention, also saw awards delivered to Universal Pictures International with Comscore’s international box office achievement award, CJ CGV with the global achievement in exhibition and Searchlight Pictures’ Rebecca Kearey with the CinemaCon Passepartout award.
