Writing Visually With ‘Furiosa’

George Miller’s Furiosa is the fifth film in his Mad Max oeuvre, starting with Mad Max in 1979 starring Mel Gibson. Gibson played the character twice more in The Road Warrior (1981) and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). Then, thirty years later, George Miller brought us back to the post-apocalyptic desert wastelands of his fevered dreams with Mad Max: Fury Road. Fury Road was regarded widely as a masterpiece of visual cinema and a feminist take on the universe that Miller made famous. 

2024 brings us Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, and George Miller has done it again, matching Fury Road with a largely Mad Maxless prequel to his 2015 opus. These films are a unique world unto their own, but they can teach us a lot about screenwriting and I wanted to offer my thoughts about what Furiosa has to offer and why you should see it with an eye toward that screenwriting.

Furiosa documents the early life of Imperator Furiosa. She was played in Fury Road by Charlize Theron, and the duties for her role in Furiosa are split between Alyla Browne and Anya Taylor-Joy. As she’s taken from her home, a place of green trees and abundance hidden behind the desert wastelands of Australia, Furiosa gets adopted by Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) a petty warlord vying for control of some portion of the land that will allow him to feed his people and offer him some measure of control. Furiosa becomes a bargaining chip, but the only thing she has on her mind is revenge. As she goes on her quest for revenge, she encounters many challenges and obstacles and finds that she has to push herself to the limits to overcome them.

Film is a Visual Medium

“I've always been a follower of silent movies,” George Lucas once said. “I see film as a visual medium with a musical accompaniment, and dialogue is a raft that goes on with it.” This is something George Miller seems to have taken to heart with his work in the Australian Wastelands of the Mad Max films, with large swaths of each movie told in the silence of the whipping wind or the roar of vehicle engines as the various warring factions vie for control of the precious resources of the wasteland.

In that vein of silent movies, Alfred Hitchcock talked about how pure cinema is the ability to tell a story through the juxtaposition of images. We see how a story is constructed by putting together the puzzle pieces of imagery, one after another, until a story presents itself. We have a character viewing something, we see what they’re viewing, we cut back to their reaction, we understand intuitively how to construct that narrative.

When you watch a story told silently, you’re forced to put those building blocks together, creating a more engaged audience. They’re participating in the actual construction of the story as you tell that story with the building blocks of moving images. Too many writers think that the important part of screenwriting is the dialogue, which couldn’t be further from the truth. In David Freeman’s excellent book The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock, he documented Hitchcock’s process of working with screenwriters, and I found it to be really instructive. The two of them would collaborate on the images and scene ideas, figuring out the story beats and turns for the whole structure. They’d decide where scenes would happen and what would need to happen in them. Then, he’d send the writer off on their own to write the “unimportant bits”; the dialogue.

Hitchcock knew how his movie was going to work visually, so the dialogue almost didn’t matter. In Furiosa, there are definitely scenes of characters delivering high-falutin’ dialogue and speaking in odd dialects with made up words bespoke to this universe, but none of it really matters to understanding the story because the visual storytelling is so strong.

There’s one scene in particular where Furiosa and Dementus are having it out and yelling at each other in their climactic finale and I couldn’t remember what they said but it doesn’t matter, because the actions they take and how they’re shown speak louder than those words.

Applying These Lessons

As you sit down to watch Furiosa, pay careful attention to how the visuals tell a story during the long stretches of film that lack dialogue and think about how you can use images to better tell a story.

In the opening of the movie, as Furiosa is taken and chased by those who would rescue her and kill her captors to keep secret their place of abundance, the sand dunes themselves and the weather as well play parts in the visual narration of the story. We understand the tracks and the blowing sand that obscures sight. We understand Furiosa—who is mute to her captors—and her plan to escape thoroughly because of the imagery chosen.

We understand what is happening and why because of the actions Furiosa’s mother takes—not because of dialogue, but because the narrative is established around the visuals.

None of that is by accident.

All of it starts with the script.

In another sequence, Furiosa is thrown in with the other wives of Immortan Joe. She escapes a brutal fate and disguises herself as a young boy to prevent getting assaulted by Joe’s son Rictus. The scene plays out without meaningful dialogue, and she spends the rest of her life largely mute to that point until she finds someone she can trust. We understand what she’s doing because visuals, actions, and costumes—all things in the script—tell us that she’s hiding out as a boy. They tell us she’s capable, probably more so than the others in Immortan Joe’s thrall. They tell us that she’s driven to hide her identity. The story is hand-crafted around the fact that there’s no need for dialogue, and any dialogue that would tell us this information or reinforce it again would feel extraneous.

Chase that in your screenplays.

Eliminate every line of dialogue you can if it’s reinforced by the imagery behind the characters and the action they take.

Go See it

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a brilliant prequel and an utterly gorgeous film. There are so many of these silent sequences that help tell the story without the use of dialogue, though none may be more so than the battle for the Bullet Farm. Trust me, you’ll know it when you see it. As you watch the film, ask yourself what each character is thinking and what their motivations are. Ask yourself how you got that idea without the dialogue, and then ask yourself how you would elegantly write those moments into your own work.

There is a lot of advice about not writing in specific shots, but you can definitely write the idea of shots without actually adding camera direction. If you design your action so that every sentence is something that can be filmed in one shot and every punctuation mark is a cut, you’ll be in good shape to elaborate on this visual storytelling without annoying anyone who might otherwise bristle at camera direction in a script.

CLOSE ON: Furiosa’s hand on the wheel… She makes a hard left turn.

Just as easily becomes:

Furiosa’s hand grips the wheel and cranks it left.

They both invoke the same image, but one does it just a little bit more elegantly and allows the reader of the screenplay to have the image without having to suspend their disbelief that they’re reading the blueprint for a movie. They’re just reading a story at this point, and that’s what you want.

Paint images with your words, not necessarily the words that are coming out of the mouths of your characters. Lean on how to tell every bit of story you can in the most intriguing way possible with just the pictures and you’re going to have a much stronger movie, and a story that feels like it can only be told in this medium.

Trust that George Miller is a master of this silent storytelling and decoding how he might have written these elaborate sequences into his script is only going to make you a better writer.

So, go see Furiosa now. On the biggest screen with the best sound possible.

You won’t regret it.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is currently in wide release in cinemas across the globe.