Go see The Hurt Locker and try not to emerge as a big fan of Jeremy Renner; I’d say that’s close to impossible. Then read his comments to his hometown paper (The Modesto Bee, via AICN) about one project he’s trying to move forward. “I’m also fighting to do the new Mad Max film with George Miller. That might be next summer. I’m screen-testing and meeting George Miller.” I got really excited reading that. Suddenly the idea of a new Mad Max movie seems a lot more tantalizing.

But are we actually going to see the project happen? A fourth film has been a possibility for a long time, with it almost going forward prior to the 2003 Iraq war, then being scrapped when that conflict made simple stuff like shipping cars and people to Australia a more difficult and expensive proposition. George Miller has said more than once in the past year that the project is still creeping forward, and his last note was that Mel Gibson is still definitely out and that the movie would happen as an R-rated 3D animated project. But if Renner is auditioning, that implies a live-action movie. Would this be the old Mad Max: Fury Road script, or something new? Right now, we don’t know.

Before this goes anywhere, Renner will take a supporting role in Ben Affleck’s new film The Town. All this noise around the actor is making me want to revisit his work in Asia Argento’s The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things (a movie I generally hated, to the degree I only vaguely remember Renner) and his Jeffrey Dahmer performance in Dahmer.

Meanwhile, what’s going on with the Mad Max game that was in development? God of War game director Cory Balrog was working on it, taking meetings with George Miller at the beginning of this year. In April a blog post said he’d moved to San Francisco to start an exciting gig that should keep him busy for a while. Is that Mad Max, or has that been back-burnered?