Nine years after Mad Max: Fury Road, the Australian director, screenwriter and producer George Miller’s new opus is back on the Croisette. The highly anticipated Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga will be revealed in the presence of the director and the cast, led by Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth and Tom Burke, at an Out of Competition Gala session at the Grand Théâtre Lumière at the Palais des Festivals on Wednesday 15 May.
Mad Max (1979), Mad Max II: The Challenge (1981), Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024): in five episodes and in almost five decades, George Miller has created a cathartic myth, even a cathartic mythology. Mad Max is a chronicle of societal and environmental collapse, playing with genre codes to question these themes, initially visionary and now cruelly topical. Originally filmed in the Australian Outback, this revisited “Western on wheels” describes a dystopian world where speed and movement are just as synonymous with life energy as with death as a result of resource depletion, offering the viewer a dose of adrenaline rarely equalled on the big screen.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is the latest episode. It returns to the origins of Furiosa, the new saga-heroine who appeared in Mad Max: Fury Road, rewarded with several Oscars. Actress Anya Taylor-Joy plays the young Furiosa, trying to return home, despite numerous hostile armed gangs.
“The idea of this prequel has been with me for over a decade,” said George Miller. “I couldn’t be more thrilled to return to the Festival de Cannes – along with Anya, Chris and Tom – to share Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. There is no better place than La Croisette to experience this film with audiences on the world stage.”
George Miller, the singular and unclassifiable filmmaker, passing from post-apocalyptic films to young audiences –Babe (1995), Happy Feet (2006) – was twice a Festival de Cannes Jury member before becoming its President in 2016 for the 69th edition. In 2022, he presented Three Thousand Years of Longing with Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba, Out of Competition.
