Everything we learned about Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga from new CinemaCon sneak peek

Furiosa is back — and the road ahead of her looks tough.

At Warner Bros.’ presentation at CinemaCon in Las Vegas, director George Miller and stars  Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth introduced five minutes of new footage from Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the upcoming prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road.

The extended sneak peek began with a single car cutting across the wasteland as a narrator threatens, “If you find him, he's mine." Enemies kidnap a young Furiosa from her mother, who chases after her while holding a rifle in an eerily similar fashion to Charlize Theron in Fury Road. A voice echoes, “Protect the Green Place” — the mythic oasis that plays a key role in Fury Road, which we actually see glimpses of in this footage.

From there, the villain Dementus (Hemsworth) demands to find the Green Place. Furiosa’s mother bursts onto the scene to save her, but the titular heroine must watch helplessly as Dementus essentially crucifies her mom. "Promise me you'll find your way home,” Furiosa’s mother says desperately. “Plant this seed. Protect the Green Place."

We then see Furiosa locked up in a similar manner to Max (Tom Hardy) in the opening of Fury Road as Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) negotiates with Dementus to take her for himself to prevent a war. Several scenes of Furiosa training alongside War Boys as she grows up follow.

Later, Furiosa meets Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), with whom she appears to have a romantic connection. Jack seeks to help Furiosa in her quest to find the Green Place and return home. Toward the end of the footage, Furiosa cuts off her hair, saying, "My mother, my childhood — I want them back.”

At the end of the footage, a character (presumably Dementus) says, “This is the history of the wasteland whispered to me by Furiosa herself. The question is, do you have it in you to make it epic?" Someone refers to the titular heroine as “the darkest of angels,” and the footage concludes.

Before premiering the footage, Miller explained to the audience that Furiosa initially materialized as he was building the world and lore of Fury Road. “In order to tell the story in Fury Road, we had to know everything that happened,” he said. “[That] story was told in three days, this story is told in 10-13 years.

“We wrote the backstories for everybody for Furiosa for all those years, and then also for Mad Max in the years before,” he continued. “When Fury Road had enough traction, we thought, ‘Oh we gotta do Furiosa. And here we are — just finished last week.”

Taylor-Joy also expressed her enthusiasm for the project. “The way that Charlize portrayed her — I never imagined I would have this opportunity,” she said. “It's unlike any experience you will ever have... George is fully running and completely in control of three full units. Absolutely everything you see on screen has been painted by George.

“Anya needed to be someone who you could spend all those months in the wasteland with — someone who is really resolute, very disciplined, and very, very smart,” Miller said of the actress. “If the apocalypse came, she is one of the people I'd like to hang out with.”

Hemsworth also briefly broke down his character. “A twisted cruel character on one hand, but in order for him to lead this horde of bikers across the wasteland and inspire them… there needed to be an element of charisma,” he said. “We wanted to interweave elements of charm and wit and humor, but there had to be a spontaneity to it… the way he moved, the way, he spoke was about manipulation, but also grabbing groups of people and saying, ‘I know what your problems are and have the answers to them.’”

“We'd had the script for a long time and I couldn't really think of an actor to do it,” Miller said of Dementus. “It is an unusual character... I knew of Chris, and we somehow met and we talked, and in that conversation, which was very far-reaching and multi-leveled, I thought ‘God, this guy's got basically a lot of dimensions to him.’”

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga hits theaters May 24.

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