George Miller Says He’s Done with ‘Mad Max’

George Miller has ruled out making any more Mad Max movies because they “take forever”.

The filmmaker directed the original Mad Max in 1979 and most recently returned with Fury Road, starring Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy, in 2015. A follow-up, The Wasteland, has been announced, but George insists that will be the end of the franchise.

“I won’t make more Mad Max movies,” he said in an interview with New York Post’s Page Six. “Fury Road with Charlize Theron, Zoë Kravitz, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and Riley Keough was forever getting completed. If you finish one in a year, it’s considered a leap of faith. Start, stop, start again.

“I’ve shot in Australia in a field of wild flowers and flat red earth when it rained heavily forever. We had to wait 18 months and every return to the US was 27 hours. Those Mad Maxes take forever. I won’t do those anymore.”

Maybe the director-and-producer is just feeling a little disheartened after he failed to win two Golden Globes at Sunday night’s ceremony. Fury Road was nominated in the Best Motion Picture – Drama and Best Director – Motion Picture categories, but lost out to The Revenant and its director Alejandro González Iñárritu. However, the Georgia Film Critics Association did award the film Best Picture and Best Director for 2015.

Including The Wasteland and Fury Road, George will have worked on five Mad Max films. It seems to be a franchise he keeps returning to, as he’d previously threatened never to produce another.

“The whole story started with a simple idea,” he told Britain’s The Guardian of Fury Road. “An idea pops in your head and you push it away – because the last thing I wanted to do was another Mad Max movie – but then it festers in the back of your mind.”