While Furiosa is a prequel, director George Miller actually finished the first draft of the spinoff before Mad Max: Fury Road started shooting. Speaking with AV Club about the highly-anticipated film, Miller talked about the creative process of building Mad Max’s world and how it led him to write a full story for Furiosa only to give the cast and crew enough background details.

Created by Miller in the late 70s, the Mad Max universe remained dormant for almost three decades before the filmmaker decided to blow the desert dust off the franchise and release Fury Road. The movie replaced original star Mel Gibson with Tom Hardy and opened a new chapter in the Mad Max story by introducing Charlize Theron as Furiosa, a one-armed badass warrior who’s at the center of Fury Road’s plot.

While Furiosa became a fan-favorite character immediately, Fury Road only scratched the surface of the character’s backstory. Even so, Miller says he had a complete screenplay about the warrior origin by the time Fury Road began filming. In Miller’s words:

"When we wrote Mad Max, the task was to tell a story that was always on the run and to see how much the audience could pick up in passing. That was one of the tricks of Mad Max: Fury Road, that there would be references to things of where she's from, why they're doing things, but it was always on the run. There were very few moments of quiet. We never explained how she lost her arm. We never explain what the actual Green Place Of Many Mothers was. We never explained the workings of the Citadel. So we had the screenplay virtually complete before we shot Fury Road, and we did it because it arose out of wanting to explain to everybody who Furiosa was—to Charlize when she took on the role, and to all the actors and the designers and everybody else working on the Citadel and so on. The feeling was, gee, this is a pretty good screenplay, and then I kept saying to myself, 'if Fury Road works, I'd really like to tell this story.'"

Anya Taylor-Joy as Beth Harmon looking to her left in The Queen's Gambit
Image via Netflix

RELATED: ‘Furiosa’: George Miller Casts Bullied Child Who Went Viral In ‘Mad Max’ Prequel

Fortunately for all of us, Fury Road was met with critical acclaim, being nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. Fury Road took six Oscar statuettes home, all in technical categories, and the movie was deemed successful enough for Miller to make Furiosa. And from what Miller says, there are many other Mad Max stories he developed during Fury Road’s production. As Miller puts it:

"[Furiosa] came about, I'm not going to say accidentally, but it came out of a need to explain [Fury Road's] world which, as I said, essentially happened over three days and two nights. It's really trying to explain how that world came to be. We also wrote, not a screenplay, but almost in novel form, Nico Lathouris and I, what happened to Max in that year before, and that's something that we'll look at further down the track later. But in telling each other the story of Furiosa, everything in Fury Road had to be explained. In my mind, I have a back story of the Doof Warrior, who plays the guitar. How could a blind man who all he can do is play a guitar, how does he get to survive in a wasteland where everybody is in extremis? How did he come to be there? So we wrote little stories for every character when we made Fury Road."

Furiosa stars Anya Taylor-Joy as a young Furiosa, Chris Hemsworth, and Tom Burke. After working in all four previous Mad Max films, George Miller is back to direct Furiosa from a script he co-wrote with Nico Lathouris. Also returning from the Oscar-winning crew of Fury Road are production designer Colin Gibson, editor Margaret Sixel, and makeup designer Lesley Vanderwalt. Nathan Jones and Angus Sampson are also set to reprise their Fury Road parts in the prequel.

Here’s Furiosa’s official synopsis:

As the world fell, young Furiosa is snatched from the Green Place of Many Mothers and falls into the hands of a great Biker Horde led by the Warlord Dementus. Sweeping through the Wasteland they come across the Citadel presided over by The Immortan Joe. While the two Tyrants war for dominance, Furiosa must survive many trials as she puts together the means to find her way home.

Furiosa is expected to hit theaters on May 24, 2024. Check out the Collider Movie Club episode in which we break down Miller’s Fury Road: