Director George Miller Updates Mad Max 4
Posted 03.05.11 by Ryan
George Miller would have already been shooting the fourth Mad Max movie, a Tom Hardy "relaunch and revisit" of the character "Mad" Max Rockatansky titled Mad Max: Fury Road. Like the other Mad Max movies, Miller planned to shoot in his native Australia, but heavy rains in the Broken Hill region of New South Wales, Australia, caused the sequel to suffer a delay. "Unfortunately for Mad Max, what was wasteland is now this wonderful flower garden," Miller explained last October.
In a recent interview with The Daily Telegraph, Miller said that he "will restart pre-production later this year and begin [shooting] early next year — weather permitting."
We've built the vehicles. We've designed the movie. The principal cast is locked in. The film is funded. It's all ready to go. We just wait. Ironically, had we been shooting in Broken Hill in January and February — when we were meant to — we would have been flooded out.
The 12-month delay gives Miller time to finish Happy Feet 2, a sequel to his 2006 original that won an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
It also gives me a chance to get Happy Feet [2] really going well — so there were a lot of factors in the decision. But the big one was that we really had nowhere to shoot.
The delay also gives the cast time to work on other projects. Tom Hardy, taking over the lead role for Mel Gibson, will be busy this year shooting The Wettest Country in the World with director John Hillcoat and the highly-anticipated sequel The Dark Knight Rises later this year with director Christopher Nolan.
Charlize Theron, who will play a one-armed badass, is set to play the evil queen in Universal's Snow White and the Huntsman starting this summer, and is also attached to director Ridley Scott's upcoming sci-fi movie Prometheus.
Nicholas Hoult, who will be seen later this year as Beast in
X-Men: First Class is about to start shooting Jack the Giant Killer with director Bryan Singer and will play a romantic zombie in director Jonathan Levine's adaptation of Warm Bodies right after.
The busy schedules of the cast are another element of that Miller isn't concerned about. "All the contracts are signed. It's a locked-in film. It has been for 18 months now," Miller said.