George Miller Might Make A Whole New 'Mad Max' Trilogy

The expanding universe of Mad Max keeps on expanding. There was a point a couple years ago when it was surprising to learn that series creator/director George Miller had written a new Mad Max movie and would be bringing it to screens. That project, Mad Max: Fury Road, is set to star Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron and will hopefully shoot sometime in the first half of 2012.

Shortly after we learned of the existence of Fury Road, we found that it was actually the first of two new films, with the second potentially called Mad Max: Furiosa. And now Miller says that he's actually got three scripts. So if Fury Road ever gets off the ground, we might end up with a whole new Mad Max trilogy.

In a deep and excellent interview with the Financial Times, in which Miller talks about the financial prospects of his Australian studio space, and the possibility of making a Mad Max video game with L.A. Noire studio Team Bondi, there is this detail about the Mad Max series:

We started with [Fury Road], but we then started to do a second story and a third. We've written the script for the second and almost finished the third. We never intended to, they were part of the exploration of the characters.

There aren't any details on the second and third scripts, but one has to assume that a great deal will depend upon the financial fortunes of Fury Road. That movie is slated to shoot in Namibia next April, after rains and a subsequent explosion of decidedly non-post-apocalyptic foliage in planned Australian locations delayed the shoot.

Miller says,

We were out at Broken Hill with a huge number of massive vehicles – they were built and parked for almost a year there. Some of them are back here, in secret locations not far from here. A full?Australian crew picks up and goes there to shoot the desert scenes, and comes back here to?do other scenes, then all the post-production and digital work is done here.

And producer Doug Mitchell calls the budget of Fury Road 'massive.' He elaborates,

If it's above $100 million it's a big budget. This is a bigger budget. People have speculated around $200 million [which] I'd neither deny nor confirm. It's a massive film.

Finally, in the wake of Happy Feet 2 (which has underperformed, which hopefully won't put too much additional pressure on the budget of Fury Road) Miller is working on another animated film, this time featuring bears. The movie is called Fur Brigade, and Miller calls it "the most ambitious thing we've done."