Mad Max: Fury Road was announced as the best-reviewed film of 2015 by the website Rotten Tomatoes, and is also gunning for Oscars glory. But the director George Miller has signalled that it will be his final film of the long-running dystopian saga.



Speaking at the Golden Globes, Miller told the New York Post’s Page Six column that a troubled production process on the much delayed Fury Road had convinced him never to return to the dusty badlands of post-apocalyptic Australia. “I won’t make more Mad Max movies,” the newspaper quotes Miller as declaring. “I’ve shot in Australia in a field of wildflowers 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 any more.”

Mad Max: Fury Road, starring Tom Hardy as Max and Charlize Theron as the one-armed warrior woman Imperator Furiosa, was in development for two decades, and is the first new episode in the futuristic saga since 1985’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Miller had planned to film in the New South Wales outback in 2010, but had to abandon the shoot when the desert location sprouted grass and wildflowers following unprecedented levels of rainfall. It was eventually filmed in Namibia, where it caused controversy after environmentalists accused the film-makers of damaging the sensitive ecosystem of the Dorob national park in the Namib desert.

Miller’s comments stand in apparent contrast to those he made in an Entertainment Weekly interview earlier this month, when the film-maker suggested Theron’s Furiosa was a “pretty compelling character” and would make a great subject for a Mad Max spin-off. The latest comments suggest the director may consider allowing other film-makers to take charge of the cameras for any future instalments of the saga.