“The question is, do you have it in you to make it epic?” There’s a reason this specific line, spoken by Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus, has been spliced into every piece of marketing material for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. It’s a good query, but perhaps a better one is: how do you make something epic?

That word has become synonymous with the Mad Max franchise. Starting in 1979, the first Mad Max was produced for less than half a million Australian dollars but went on to earn 200 times that at the global box office. The world was hooked by Miller’s vision of a dystopian Australia, where the inhabitants—who came sporting names like Toecutter and Lord Humungus—were certifiable, and the last frontier of order, a police officer by the name of Max, was succumbing to the madness of the degrading society he’d sworn to protect.

Riding the Ozploitation wave, the director released two more Mad Max installments in quick succession in the 1980s. Despite multiple attempts over the years from Miller to jump-start its engine, the franchise lay dormant for almost 30 years. That is, until Mad Max: Fury Road came screeching into theaters in 2015 with “a sense of confidence that hasn’t been seen in cinema in a very long time,” as Silent Dawn writes in their five-star review.

Fury Road went on to out-earn all the previous Mad Max movies and score six Academy Award wins—the most for any Australian film in history. As the Warboys would say, Mad Max lived, died and lived again.

Studio mergers, legal issues and conflicting schedules have resulted in us waiting just shy of a decade for the follow-up. This time around, Miller is realizing a vision that he developed prior to Fury Road: the origin story of the 2015 film’s breakout star, Imperator Furiosa, memorably played by Charlize Theron.

Unlike the almost real-time nature of Fury Road, Furiosa is truly a saga, spanning nearly twenty years of the character’s life. The film is no less of a ride, shadowing its eponymous figure from the moment she is snatched from the idyllic Green Place and following her brutal coming-of-age as she is traded between wasteland warlords for the next decade, fighting for survival—and eventually vengeance—at every turn.

Concerns with de-aging visual effects meant Miller chose to recast Theron in Furiosa, splitting the role between two actresses: Alyla Browne (a rising star whom Miller cast in his previous feature Three Thousand Years of Longing) and Anya Taylor-Joy, appearing in her second sand-heavy genre flick of the year following a surprise cameo in Dune: Part Two.

Miller suggested that Hemsworth write some journal entries as his character. This, it turned out, was the key to unlocking the, well, demented mind of Dementus. “I think what worked and helped me get there was more about the why of who he was, as opposed to who he was,” he muses. “It was a lot about backstory, and about his childhood, and about his own trauma and suffering. Now, here he is making these choices due to being a product of the wasteland and—not to excuse his actions—but different people react differently when put under stress. This was how this individual behaved, which was manic and chaotic and violent and disruptive.”

Dementus is decidedly against type for Hemsworth, who has spent the better part of his career donning a Thespian accent, cape and hammer as Thor in Marvel movies. Furiosa allowed the actor to drop at least two of those things (he still has the cape) and really draw on his inherent Australianisms to create a wildly unpredictable and delightfully evil villain. 

“The accent was a big one for me, and that really helped define a lot of the characteristics,” Hemsworth says. “I wanted it to be an Australian accent, but not contemporary Australian.” The actor drew upon the nasality of the older generation of Australians, something he saw exhibited in his own grandfather. “That immediately changed my posture and allowed me to move and present myself in a different way.”

The end result is something that numerous Letterboxd reviews have called a career best for Hemsworth—or, as T. Swish puts it, “[Chris], you make Aussies so proud in this role, ya nationwide wombat.”

Dementus is just one of the many aspects of Furiosa that’s dialed up to eleven to meet a standard set by the film’s visionary director, someone Hemsworth and Taylor-Joy clearly adore. “George is absolutely exceptional because he literally paints scenes. We had three full units running at all times and absolutely every single thing that you see has been hand-selected, hand-painted by George,” Taylor-Joy says.

“[He’s] just such an incredible artist who can create the most bombastic, violent, chaotic, visually stunning scenes, but is the most nurturing, kind human you’ll ever meet,” Hemsworth adds.

“We can go as far as we want to with that in of the technology. I take it to a certain point because I don’t want to have every nuance, every performance, there because you need to leave room. It’s just a working tool,” Miller explains.

Something interesting about this process is that it flips the script (pun intended) on traditional film development, which would see everything first outlined in a screenplay. A script is still a part of the process for Miller (he shares a writing credit on Furiosa with Nico Lathouris), but it serves more so as a communicative tool for the cast, crew and distributors. “You write it in the script not describing what happened but trying to evoke the experience of what happens, so that they can read it with a sense of the emotional flow of it,” the writer-director says. “It’s kind of a haiku, what people like Quentin Tarantino called ‘Walter Hill writing’.”

Another key component to Miller’s development of action is anticipating where the audience’s attention will focus. The director demonstrates a trick that he uses and asks me to hold my thumb out in front of my face. This naturally forces my eyes to focus on the object right in front of me. “You can only focus on your thumb; everything else is peripheral vision,” he says. “If you’ve got a moving screen, you can anticipate pretty much where the audience will be looking at any moment. That really becomes very, very important.”

Though the action may have been meticulously planned in pre-production, physical rehearsal is still crucial. One such sequence that required intensive rehearsal was Furiosa’s major set piece. Dubbed the “Stowaway to Nowhere”, the fifteen-minute sequence centers entirely around a moving vehicle convoy and took 78 days to film.

Abiding by Miller’s ethos of action informing character, I was curious to know what Taylor-Joy thought the “Stowaway” sequence revealed about Furiosa. “You’ve been seeing her resourcefulness throughout the film, but up until that point, you don’t really understand that she only ever has to learn something once. You don’t understand the level of her resourcefulness,” she emphasizes. “We used ‘Stowaway’ to give you a picture of who this person was, to understand what she had become in the time that she’d been away from the Green Place.”