The original Mad Max film turned into a trilogy which ended in the mid-80’s. George Miller is currently working on a fourth movie, and despite multiple stumbling blocks, may be considering the possibility of kicking off yet another trilogy.
Of course, that all depends upon the success of the new film in theaters, if and when, it finally gets made. As we reported a while back, filming on Mad Max: Fury Road was slated to begin last year, but hit an ironic challenge.
The studio had chosen the dusty wastes outside of a small Australian town called Broken Hills in New South Wales. It looked the perfect part for a dystopian wasteland when Miller scouted it out earlier, but on the day shooting was scheduled to begin, it started to rain, and when the rains slacked off, the landscape was greener than it had been in decades, ruining the look that Miller was going for.
Shooting was put off, tentatively until April of 2011, when the land might have dried up a bit again, but it was still too green. So they put it off a few more months, and a few more, and now the plan is to start shooting in April 2012 at a new location. Of course it’s a shame for the people of Broken Hills who were expecting the income that a film production can bring to a small town, but the land seems to have turned indefinitely green.
During a recent interview with the Financial Review, Miller acknowledged that the delays have sapped some of his enthusiasm for the project, but at the same time, have given him and his collaborator Doug Mitchell time to think about where Mad Max is going.
They’ve rewritten small parts of the script, and begun to think more in-depth about the role of the characters in potential future films.
Indeed, the duo has already announced the possibility of a fifth film, Mad Max: Furiosa a few months ago, and now they are considering a 6th.
“We started with [Fury Road], but we then started to do a second story and a third,” he says.
“We’ve written the script for the second and almost finished the third. We never intended to, they were part of the exploration of the characters.”
Through the rest of the interview, Miller makes interesting observations about the film industry, its effect on the Australian economy, and the convergence of media in filmmaking. You can read the whole, very long, story here.
Mad Max: Fury Road stars Tom Hardy, and has no announced release date.
