Mad Max: Fury Road was supposed to be paired with an anime prequel, but plans changed
George Miller reveals what the next Mad Max: Fury Road Prequel is about
For more than a decade, reports have circulated about the original version of the upcoming action movie Furiosa — an anime series that director George Miller and writer Mahiro Maeda worked on while developing Mad Max: Fury Road. At a Q&A following a recent press screening for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga at the IMAX Headquarters outside Los Angeles, Miller revealed that while the anime series was eventually developed into a live-action film, a small element survived from the defunct project, taken from early character sketches by Fury Road concept artist and anime faithful Maeda.
Miller revealed that the script for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga was finished before he even filmed Fury Road. "In order to tell that story in a cohesive way, we had to know everything that happened in the time before [filming started]," he said. "So we wrote a story about Furiosa from when she was taken as a child, which she refers to in Fury Road, until she became Imperator Furiosa. It ended up as a whole script, with concept art and so on. And the cast, the designers and the whole crew got the script before they shot Fury Road.”
The unusual production path led to the supplementary script being considered as an anime project, with Fury Road concept artist Maeda – best known for his work on Evangelion 3.0 and Kill Bill – creating designs for the series. His art has been shared online since 2015, when the film version of Furiosa was thought to be as dead as the anime project. "We set out to do it as an anime, and that's part of why it was so well developed," Miller said. "But then Fury Road got delayed, so there was no point in making an anime."
