Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

George Miller’s 2024 film picks Furiosa up in childhood and spreads her years between Dementus and Immortan Joe across five titled chapters: The Pole of Inaccessibility, Lessons from the Wasteland, The Stowaway, Homeward and Beyond Vengeance. Fury Road had to move to Namibia because rain brought wildflowers up in the Australian desert; Furiosa was shot in New South Wales: Broken Hill and Silverton, Hay for the Stowaway chase, Terrey Hills for the Green Place, the Disney lot in Sydney for the Citadel. Visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson says the film leans far more heavily on effects than Fury Road, and that Miller embraced building worlds in the computer. In his words no scene here has a background photographed on set; everything was built to the horizon. Anya Taylor-Joy has around thirty spoken lines and went months on set without a word on camera. Alyla Browne, who plays the young Furiosa, had her face blended with Taylor-Joy’s by Rising Sun Pictures using machine learning, from about thirty-five per cent at the start to eighty at the end. A good fit if you can sit with a lead who barely speaks and let the face and camera carry it. Not for you if you want the in-camera horizon of Fury Road.