Furiosa and the country George Miller will not leave

There is a fifty-second sequence, roughly nineteen minutes into Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (George Miller, 2024), in which a child rides a stolen motorcycle across a stretch of the Hay plains photographed in flat, blown-out morning light, and the camera, mounted to a chase rig of Miller’s own particular design, holds her face in profile against the horizon for what is, by the standards of contemporary Australian cinema, an unfashionably long time. Simon Duggan, the cinematographer of record, has said in subsequent interviews that the take ran for the better part of an afternoon and was attempted across three consecutive shooting days in late 2021 before Miller was satisfied that the light was wrong on each prior attempt. The picture is full of these small, expensive patiences. It is part of why the film cost what it cost, and part of why it earned what it earned, and part of why I want, two years on from its May 2024 release, to make a careful argument for it.

Furiosa is the most patiently photographed film George Miller has shot in fifty years of filmmaking. It is also the picture in which, almost certainly, he is saying farewell to a stretch of country he has been photographing since 1979.

The country he will not leave

Miller’s Mad Max series has been shot, with one exception, on the same patch of New South Wales semi-arid plain. The original Mad Max (1979) used the Little River and the You Yangs in Victoria, but every entry from The Road Warrior (1981) onward has been Hay, Broken Hill, and the saltpans north of Silverton. The 2015 Fury Road shifted production to Namibia after the Australian shoot was disrupted by an unseasonable wet that turned the Broken Hill saltpan into wildflower meadow, a problem the production wrote a five-page memo about and which Miller has discussed with some impatience in subsequent press. Furiosa came back. It came back, in fact, with a particular insistence on returning to the original ground. Production designer Colin Gibson, who has worked with Miller across three of the five Max pictures, rebuilt the Citadel, Gas Town, and the Bullet Farm in the corridor between Hay and the South Australian border, and Duggan photographed them in a register that flatly refuses the colour-graded heat-haze of Fury Road.

Where Fury Road was orange and chrome, Furiosa is bone and brass. Duggan’s grade pulls every red toward rust and every blue toward graphite. Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays the older Furiosa across two of the film’s five chapters, is photographed against horizons that read, in 65mm anamorphic, as the same flat plain Mel Gibson rode across in 1981. Miller is not nostalgic about this country. He is precise about it. The film is shot, in its second hour, with the unhurried curiosity of a director who knows that he may not have another reason to bring two thousand crew members back to Hay, and who is therefore taking his time.

The two performances

Anya Taylor-Joy’s performance has been the centre of the conversation since Cannes, and it is the central craft achievement of the picture, but I want to spend a paragraph on the under-discussed half of it. The first hour of Furiosa is carried by Alyla Browne, who plays the abducted child, and whose work across the opening chapters is the kind of unselfconscious physical performance that Australian cinema has, historically, photographed very well (The Year My Voice Broke, Walkabout, the early Cate Blanchett work in Oscar and Lucinda). Browne is on screen for roughly thirty-five minutes before Taylor-Joy assumes the role, and Miller, who once said in a Senses of Cinema interview that the trick of casting a child is to find one whose face cannot lie, photographs her with the same long lenses he gives Taylor-Joy in the second half. The substitution, when it arrives, is not a recasting; it is a continuation. Taylor-Joy inherits Browne’s specific stillness and adds her own brand of held interiority on top of it.

Chris Hemsworth, as Dementus, is the picture’s commercial bet, and is doing the broadest, most theatrical work of his career. The performance has divided audiences in a way I find more interesting than the divide suggests. Hemsworth is playing a warlord whose authority is performance and whose performance is brittle, and the brittleness is the point. The character is a roadshow Caesar in a paddock empire. Hemsworth is camping the role at exactly the register the script invites, and the audience that wanted Tom Hardy’s Max-style restraint is looking for a film Furiosa is not.

What the box office showed

The picture opened in Australia on 23 May 2024 and worldwide the following day. Domestic Australian box office finished around $11.4 million, a respectable result on local turf. Worldwide it grossed approximately $172 million against a production budget that sat, depending on the source, between $168 million and $175 million. By the conventional studio rubric, the film lost money. By the rubric that matters for a sixth instalment in a forty-five-year-old franchise photographed largely on practical effects in a remote Australian shoot, the result was the inevitable outcome of the conventional studio rubric attempting to underwrite a Miller picture at full Hollywood scale. I am unsurprised by it. So, in his interviews since the release, has Miller suggested that he is.

Whether the result kills the announced Mad Max: The Wasteland is the open question. Warner Bros. has been quiet through 2025 and into 2026. Miller is eighty in March 2025 (he was born 3 March 1945) and has spoken in recent interviews about the Hay plains as country he is content to have photographed for what may be the last time. The conditional is the part of the sentence that interests me. It is conditional. He has not yet said it is over.

What the second look reveals

Two years on, the picture has clarified for me into a film about inheritance: of country, of injury, of method. Furiosa inherits her mother’s vengeance; Taylor-Joy inherits Browne’s stillness; Miller inherits the Hay plains from his own younger work and, in the process, gives them back to a younger lead who will have to carry them forward. The film is at its strongest when it photographs the inheritance directly. The opening chapters in the Green Place, the chase sequence that occupies the back third of the second hour, the silent confrontation with Dementus that closes the picture: these are the sequences where the picture’s argument and its photography align.

The second-tier action sequences, by contrast, do not hold up to a second viewing as well as I had hoped. The mid-film War Rig sequence is the kind of practical-effects spectacle that Miller can stage in his sleep and the consequence is that it feels, on rewatch, slightly automatic. The film could have been a confident fifteen minutes shorter without injury. The trims would have come from the second-tier action and would have left the country, the inheritance, and the two lead performances intact.

What this picture is

Furiosa is, I think, a major late film by a director whose late films matter. It is a picture made by a man who has been photographing the same country for forty-five years and who has chosen, with care, what to do on what may be his last visit. The patience of the photography is not weakness. The patience is the argument. If the film does turn out to be Miller’s last desert picture, it will read in time as the appropriate close to the cycle. If Wasteland comes through, Furiosa will read instead as the picture in which Miller, in his ninth decade, decided to slow down and look properly.

Either reading suits the picture. Both readings respect its country. The picture itself, two years on, has only grown in stature.