For more than a decade, reports have been circulating about the original version of the upcoming action movie Furiosa— an anime series that director George Miller and writer Mahiro Maeda were working on at the same time they were developing Mad Max: Fury Road.
At a Q&A after a recent press screening for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga at IMAX Headquarters outside of Los Angeles, Miller revealed that while the anime series eventually evolved into a live-action film, one small element survived from the defunct project, taken from early character sketches by Fury Road concept artist and anime stalwart Maeda.
Miller revealed that the script for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga was finished before he even filmed Fury Road. “In order to tell that story cohesively, we had to know everything that happened in the time before [the movie started],” he said. “So we wrote a story about Furiosa from the time she was taken as a child, as she refers to in Fury Road, until she became the Imperator Furiosa.
That ended up as a full screenplay, with concept art and so on. And the actors, the designers, and all the crew got the screenplay of that before shooting Fury Road.” That unusual production route led to the supplementary screenplay being considered as an anime project, with Fury Road concept artist Maeda — best known for his work on Evangelion 3.0 and Kill Bill — creating designs for the series.
His art has been shared online since 2015, when the film version of Furiosa was believed to be just as dead as the anime project. “We were thinking of making it as an anime, and that’s part of why it was so well-developed,” Miller said. “But then Fury Road was delayed, so there was no point in making an anime.” The only element taken from that concept art that actually made it into the finalFuriosa film: an unexpected accessory worn by Chris Hemsworth’s villainous wasteland warlord, Dementus.