Anna Daniels
George Miller is set to start filming his next film, Three Thousand Years of Longing, with Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton this coming March, but already the director is thinking about his next Max Max sequel.
The sequel has been long coming since Mad Max: Fury Road transcended expectations to earn a Best Picture nomination at the 2016 Oscars. But in the time since Miller has directed Fury Road, genre movies — and debates about whether they can be called “cinema” — are all the rage. So naturally, Miller is the latest auteur to weigh in on that discussion.
It’s been too long, but we will be getting another Mad Max sequel after Miller wraps Three Thousand Years of Longing with Elba and Swinton. According to Deadline, Miller received the green light for Three Thousand Years and is set to begin shooting the film in March 2020. Not much is known about the film, but Miller describes it as “strong visually, but it’s almost the opposite of Fury Road.”
But Miller is a man of many talents, one of which is juggling two dramatically different films in his mind at the same time. Miller confirmed that he’s already working on the next Mad Max, even as Three Thousand Years of Longing moves into full prep:
“I’m not done with the Mad Max story and I think you have to be a multi-tasker and there’s certainly another Mad Max coming down the pike after this. We’re in preparation on that as well.”
The Mad Max: Fury Road sequel comes after a years-long legal battle with Warner Bros. that threw doubt on the future of the franchise, though Miller is confident that he will get the sequel made. Miller has strongly suggested in the past that three more Mad Max-related movies are in the works, including one that centers on Charlize Theron‘s Furiosa.
As packed as his schedule his, Miller still has time to weigh in on the ongoing superheroes vs. cinema debate that has been raging ever since Martin Scorsese compared Marvel films to theme parks. But unlike most of the auteurs who have weighed in on the subject, Miller has no hostility to superhero films. He told Deadline that he watches “all” superhero movies in what may be the best response to this whole discourse:
“To be honest, in terms of this debate, cinema is cinema and it’s a very broad church. The test, ultimately, is what it means to the audience. There’s a great quote I saw that applies to all we do. It was from the Swahili storytellers. Each time they finished a story they would say, ‘The story has been told. If it was bad, it was my fault because I am the storyteller. And if it was good, it belongs to everybody.’
Miller has happily transitioned between genre films, family fare, and more prestigious pictures throughout his career, and owes much of his success to blockbuster films, so it makes sense that he’ll have kinder words for superhero movies. While Miller has never directed a superhero movie himself, he’s been frequently connected to the genre, most famously signing on to direct a Justice League movie in 2007 that was ultimately shelved. And while Miller’s response to this whole debate is fairly diplomatic, the second half of his answer does aim at the harshest critics of blockbuster movies who dismiss them as being successful only because of “marketing”:
“It’s a mistake and a kind of hubris if a film does well at the box office to dismiss it as clever marketing or something else. There’s more happening there, and it’s our obligation as storytellers to really try and understand it. To me, it’s all cinema. I don’t think you can ghettoize it and say, oh this is cinema or that is cinema. It applies to all the arts, to literature, the performing arts, painting and music, in all its form. It’s such a broad spectrum, a wide range and to say that anyone is more significant or more important than the other, is missing the point. It’s one big mosaic and each bit of work fits into it.”
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