George Miller’s extravagantly grotesque and physically astounding prequel “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” opens nationwide following last week’s celebratory Cannes Film Festival world premiere.
“Furiosa” arrives with Anya Taylor-Joy (“The Queen’s Gambit”) as the teenage Furiosa (who becomes Charlize Theron’s formidable amputee in “Mad Max: Fury Road”) bent on revenge against Chris Hemsworth’s Biker Warlord Dementus who tortured and murdered her mother while she watched.
“This film is 50 years after the collapse of humankind. Arguably it’s climate change,” Miller, 79, said earlier this week in a virtual press conference. “Even though set in the future the behavior goes back to the Dark Ages or Medieval times.”
As director of all five films, going back to the series’ low-budget 1979 debut, why does it continue to resonate?
“I don’t think you can come down to fixed answer,” he said. “It’s a thing where I was still drawn to telling these stories. They’re basically allegories — like Westerns, fairy stories, folklore, mythologies, even religious stories. Where story is in the eye of the beholder, where you’re responding to things in the story that has meaning to you.”
Hemsworth, bearded, with a comically low-rent Aussie accent and aquiline nose as mighty Dementus, was easy casting. “I felt nobody else could play him. He’s a multi-dimensional person as a human being and in his approach to acting. Whatever happens I thought, This will be interesting.
“Because Dementus is a showman, a great marauder across the Wasteland, similar to the Romans or Genghis Khan, Chris understood his character far more than I did. There were times I was watching that performance — and I don’t know where he got it from!
“You prepare and guide as best you can but at the moment of performance you don’t know what the actor is going to do. When they surrender to intuition, stuff comes out. You can guide it. You have no real control.”
Surprisingly, a small teddy bear that Dementus is never without gained greater resonance as filming progressed.
“The teddy bear he saw as a way of connecting with Furiosa. It didn’t figure in the script,” Miller said.
“It’s not specified what he went through. But everyone in the Wasteland had to endure great trials. The way he saw himself, in a wacky sort of way as a mentor to Furiosa, was expressed with this teddy bear.”
Hemsworth’s parents, Miller revealed, “were social workers who in Australia pioneered working with abused children. Chris saw the work his parents were doing in childhood. So he has a lot of wisdom about that for someone so relatively young.”
