Could a 'Mad Max' Prequel Still Be on the Table? This Director Has Some Ideas [Exclusive]

For more than four decades, legendary filmmaker George Miller has been taking audiences into the post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max and dropping us in the wasteland. Fans have always been thirsty for more to come from the tale of the titular ex-cop originally played by Mel Gibson, and, in recent years, they received exactly that thanks to the latest two films, 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road and this year’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. But, will there be more where that came from or has the film series sputtered to a stop following the latter Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth-led flick? If Aussie-born filmmaker Justin Kurzel has anything to say about it, the dystopian universe of Mad Max is far from over, with the director recently telling Collider’s Steve Weintraub that he would be totally game to pick up the torch and get to work on an overall prequel film.

Weintraub and Kurzel recently sat down for a chat alongside Jude Law during which the director and actor spoke about their upcoming production, The Order, and Kurzel was happy to open up about something he would love to work on in the future. With Furiosa serving as a prequel to Fury Road, we’ve known for a while that Miller also has a plan to do a similar pre-telling of Max’s life before it crosses paths with Furiosa’s on the titular war-rig-driven road. Deviating from this plan, Kurzel says that he wants to investigate what was going down even earlier in the timeline, with his idea digging into the moments leading up to 1979’s Mad Max. Gushing about his hopes for a possible Mad Max takeover, the Nitram director said:

“I’ll tell you what, maybe because it was such a big influence, but I’ve always been curious about
what happened before the first
Mad Max

— what was that world with the Nightrider, pre-
Mad Max
? I’ve always been very curious about that and very tempted to talk to George [Miller] about the possibility of a world that is pre-
Mad Max 1
and what that is. That’s been one that I’ve always been really curious about because it was such an influential film in my time… It’s an amazing franchise, but I’ve always been curious about those moments before that first one because it’s set up so richly. And it’s such a great time in Australia, too, that period.”

Wait — What’s the Other ‘Fury Road’ Prequel?

Ahead of Furiosa’s theatrical arrival, Weintraub touched base with Miller just ahead of the movie’s grand debut at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. Eager to share his plans for another hopeful prequel, Miller spilled plenty of tea about what he has in mind should the studio be interested. He told Collider:

“Mainly because to tell the story of Fury Road , which happens over a very compressed amount of time, you could argue that the first act of Fury Road and the last act are almost playing in real time over three days in order to tell that story on the run. Picking up all the backstory, all the exposition on the way, everybody working on the film — not only the cars, but all the designers, all the prop makers, everybody — had to understand the backstory very intimately in order for it to be coherent.

So, we had to write the story of Furiosa and the 18 years, as it turns out, before we meet her in Fury Road .

We also had to write the story of the year of Max in the year before we encounter him in Fury Road .

So, we have that story. We wrote that as a novella, Nico Lathouris and I, and so that’s the story we have yet to tell.”