Mad Max: Fury Road blew into Cannes this morning with a rapturously received press screening that blew any remaining cobwebs off a slow-starting festival. Afterwards, the key cast – Charlize Theron, Tom Hardy and Nicholas Hoult – joined director George Miller for a press conference in which talk of a sequel was addressed. “If we get the appetite again to go back out into the wasteland, there's other films we want to do,” revealed the director, stressing that any prospect of remounting his giant post-apocalyptic caboose would be some time off. “That's the answer I can give this moment, now: I've just come out of labour."
From there, talk turned to the film’s surprisingly female-friendly storyline, which sees once-loyal warrior Furiosa (Theron) staging a mutiny and escaping from an apocalyptic dictatorship with a tankload of fuel and a despotic warlord’s five wives.
“Initially, there was never a feminist agenda – it was just the story,” says Miller. “There was simply going to be an extended chase, and the things being chased were going to be not an object but human beings – the five wives. The story needed a warrior. But it couldn't be a man, because a man taking five wives from another man is an entirely different story. So then we created Furiosa, and everything grew out of that. Meanwhile, Max is like a wild dog, a wild animal trying to find freedom, and from there it was just a question of finding a way to put the two together.” {Mad Max premiere} Picture credit: Getty Images
Hardy admitted to having misgivings about taking on a role made famous by Mel Gibson in the original trilogy. “Initially I was super-jubilant and really excited to land the part,” he said. “Like any actor, you get really excited when you land a part. And then I realised that the role of Max is synonymous with Mel Gibson – there's a large group of people who love Mel as Max, and if it's not Mel, it's not Max. I was a bit crestfallen, for a second. But what I really understood from further conversations with George – because it was a concern – was that there was no need to step in, or replace, or try to do better, or try to bring something new. Ultimately, George and Mel went on a journey for three movies, then the legacy continued to develop, at which point it was time for me to switch in. Max is led for George, he was created by George, so I just had to take my lead from him and do what he wanted me to do.”
Asked about the script, Hardy made the playful aside that a script “would have been nice”. “That was more of a concern,” he added. “It was a luxury we didn't have. But when tapped about his thoughts on the finished film, the actor conceded that he had greatly underestimated his director. “When I saw the movie, I suddenly got what George was talking about,” he recalled. “Because for seven months, the hardest, the most frustrating thing for me was trying to know what George wanted me to do, on a minute by minute basis. But because he's orchestrating such a huge vehicle – literally – and because the whole movie is just motion, I got frustrated. And I have to apologise to him for that, because there is no way that George could possibly have explained to me what he could see in the sand when we were out there… I knew he was brilliant, but I didn't quite know how brilliant until I saw it. My first reaction was, ‘Oh my God.’ And, 'I owe George an apology for being so myopic.'”
It seems pretty certain that Warner Bros. will be interested in another Mad Max outing – the prospect of a “live show” was hinted at but not explained – but Miller won’t be making any kind of commitment just yet. “Being asked that question feels to me like being a woman who's just given birth to a really big baby,” he laughed. “And then someone asks you, 'When are you having your next baby?' We only finished 12 days ago. I'm just not recovered enough to get into it."