By Mad Max: Fury Road was one of the best films of 2015. An excellent addition to the loose continuity of the Mad Max series, George Miller essentially gave us a masterclass on the art of the action movie and how you can use visuals to convey layer upon layer of subtext.
Unfortunately, Fury Road may be the last Mad Max movie that the 70-year-old director ever does.
Miller reportedly told The New York Post the following:
I won’t make more Mad Max movies. I’ve shot in Australia in a field of wildflowers and flat red earth when it rained heavily forever. 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 any more.
The fourth Mad Max movie had a long and arduous history. Work on a new Mad Max film began as far back as 1997, and its initial 2001 production start date was postponed because of 9/11. The movie was effectively in development hell for more than a decade. Eventually Fury Road got shot in Namibia in 2012; it was originally going to be shot in Australia two years prior, but the weather and the environment didn’t cooperate, with unexpected rains turning the desert into a field of wild flowers.
As The Guardian notes, this may be an invitation for another filmmaker to drive the franchise, and perhaps Miller could serve as a producer or a story supervisor of some kind. It’s a shame he may no longer make Mad Max films, but, hey, at least Miller goes out on one hell of a f**king high note.
If another director takes on Mad Max, who should it be?
[via The Guardian]