Think about the expectations. Nine years ago, you released maybe one of the best films ever made. It won a ton of Oscars, made solid money at the box office, and has since only risen in respect and reverence. And now, you’re going back. Not just to that world, but to that story and those specific characters.
That’s the task George Miller set out with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, his follow-up to the iconic Mad Max: Fury Road. Recently, io9 had the pleasure of sitting down with the legendary filmmaker and ask him if he felt he’d achieved that same bar with Furiosa and how he thought people were going to react to it. His answer was fascinating. You can watch it below and read after that.
“I hope so,” Miller told io9 when asked if he lived up to expectations. “You don’t know. The truth is it’s really interesting to me. It’s one of the excitements. One of the things that keeps me doing it is that. You tell a story. You bring your best instincts and skills forward into the process, and you tell the story, and then you kind of push it out into the world to see what people will make of it. And you can’t tell. You can’t predict it. And I found that’s always been the case.”
Miller explains why people’s reactions to his films fascinate him. “From the very first film that I made, I was really interested in finding out how to tell stories,” he said. “And that’s become not only ‘How do we tell stories?’ but ‘Why we tell stories?’ Why are we hardwired for stories? Why are stories so important to the way we find our way through life as individuals and as little subcultures and communities and indeed as humankind at large? And that’s been something that still keeps me going in the process.”
Then, in typical Miller fashion, he got even deeper, dipping into his incredible wealth of knowledge. “As you probably know I put a lot of store up on the wisdoms of Joseph Campbell,” Miller said. “[He] basically did all the hard work to collate all the world’s stories and come up with what was in common across all time and space, going back to the earliest traditions of storytelling at every level whether they’re mythologies, the great religions, fairy tales, whether they’re modern stories, all the levels of storytelling.”
“Basically, the Venn diagrams overlap to some degree,” he continued. “So he made a comment. He observed that the Swahili storytellers in East Africa, when they told their story, when they finished their story, they’d say ‘The story has been told. If it was bad, it is my fault because I’m the storyteller. If it was good, it belongs to everybody.’ Which is exactly why this point of the story is one of the most interesting parts of it. I’ve finished. I probably will only watch the film one or two times more with with paying audiences. And then I want to see what people make of it, good or bad. They will read according to their own worldview what the film gives them or what they take from it. And basically that used to take up to 10 years. On the first Mad Max it took me 10 years to see what it really meant to people. And now that’s accelerated. So that’s really interesting to me.”
So, go see Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga on May 24 and let George Miller know what you think. He’s waiting to hear.
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