George Miller: From Mad Max to Mythmaker

George Miller spent his mid-twenties working emergency medicine in Sydney, which in the 1970s meant a steady intake of people who had recently been in a car. Australia’s road toll in that decade was catastrophic by any modern standard, and the man who would go on to make the most kinetic car films ever shot had already seen, professionally and repeatedly, exactly what a vehicle does to a body at speed. He has said as much in interviews for forty years. It explains something the imitators consistently miss: in a Miller chase, every crash costs.

He funded his first feature partly by locuming in hospitals. The producer was Byron Kennedy, a technically obsessive young film-maker Miller met at a Melbourne University summer workshop; together they made the short Violence in the Cinema, Part 1 (1971), a gag about a lecturer being maimed while explaining that screen violence is harmless. The joke is the whole career in embryo. Miller’s own position is that screen violence is legible, and that the legibility is a moral act.

Four hundred thousand dollars and a genre invented by accident

Mad Max (1979) was made for a figure usually given as around A$400,000 — the leather came from a bike shop, the police were played by real bikies and locals, and Miller cut it himself on a Steenbeck in his flat after the first editor’s work failed him. It went on to be, for years, one of the most profitable films ever made relative to budget. American International dubbed the Australian accents into American ones for the US release, which is the single most ozploitation thing ever done to a film in the whole disowned boom.

Then Mad Max 2 (1981) — The Road Warrior abroad — invented an entire visual language that every post-apocalypse since has borrowed without paying. The shoulder pads, the fuel economy, the tribal salvage aesthetic, the lone driver who helps because he has nothing else to do: none of that existed as a package before Miller assembled it in the desert outside Broken Hill. Everything from Escape from New York’s successors to Six-String Samurai is downstream. It belongs near the top of the ozploitation canon even though it plays like a western that has been left in a fire.

Kennedy died in a helicopter crash in 1983, aged thirty-three. Miller’s production company still carries his name; the Byron Kennedy Award is still handed out annually by the Australian academy. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) was made in the aftermath and co-directed with George Ogilvie, and the split shows — the arena and the barter town have Miller’s ferocity, the lost children have a gentleness that reads as grief. In between, he made the fourth segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”, with John Lithgow coming apart at a window. It is a twenty-minute demonstration of pure control and the only reason anybody still discusses that film.

The mechanics: centre-frame, and the crash that costs

Miller’s action is the most copied and least understood craft in modern cinema, and the principle is embarrassingly simple. He puts the subject of interest at or near the centre of the frame and keeps it there across the cut. Your eye does not have to hunt. That is why Fury Road can average roughly two seconds a shot and remain perfectly clear while a hundred imitators cut at the same rate and produce mush: the imitators move the point of interest around the frame between shots, so every cut costs the audience a beat of re-acquisition, and after ninety seconds you have stopped watching and started enduring.

The second principle is that geography is a promise. Miller establishes where the pursuers are relative to the pursued and then never cheats it. When the War Rig turns, you know which way. When a pole-cat swings, you know what it is swinging over. He storyboarded Fury Road as several thousand panels — the production famously worked from the boards more than a conventional script — because the film is a chase and a chase is a spatial argument.

The third is undercranking, the oldest trick available: shoot at fewer frames per second and play back at twenty-four, and the action speeds up while retaining real weight. Miller has used it since 1979 and it is why his stunts land where digital speed ramps float. John Seale shot Fury Road, Junkie XL scored it, and Margaret Sixel — Miller’s wife, whose background was documentary — cut it and won the Academy Award. Miller’s stated reason for hiring her is the best editing note ever given: someone who had never cut an action film would refuse to make it look like other action films.

And the doctor is always in the room. Bodies in Miller films break in the way bodies break. Max’s leg after the first film. The gearshift knee-brace. Furiosa’s stump, engineered rather than pitied. It is the difference between an action director who has seen trauma and one who has seen action films.

The refusal to stay put

The strangest career move in genre cinema is The Witches of Eastwick (1987) — Nicholson, Cher, Sarandon, Pfeiffer, a studio comedy of manners with a devil in it — followed by Lorenzo’s Oil (1992), a film about parents researching a myelin disorder that only a former physician would have the nerve to shoot as a thriller about a library. Then he wrote and produced Babe (1995), directed by Chris Noonan, and directed Babe: Pig in the City (1998) himself: a children’s film so overwhelmingly sad and strange that it was mauled on release and now has a following of adults who suspect it is his best work. Happy Feet (2006) won him an Oscar for animation. Whatever else is true, the man who invented the wasteland spent two decades in the company of talking animals.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) arrived after almost twenty years of collapsed attempts and took six Academy Awards, none of them for Miller. It was shot largely in Namibia after rain made the Australian desert bloom, which is the kind of luck that only strikes a production that has already survived everything else. Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022), from A.S. Byatt’s novella with Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton, is a djinn story told almost entirely as two people talking in hotel dressing gowns — a seventy-seven-year-old director making his quietest film immediately after his loudest. Furiosa premiered at Cannes this week and reaches cinemas at the end of the month; the verdict on it belongs to whoever writes it once the lights have come up on a paying audience.

There is also a whole Miller most people outside Australia have never encountered, because he was busy running a studio. Kennedy Miller spent the 1980s producing the country’s most ambitious television — The Dismissal (1983) on the sacking of the Whitlam government, Bodyline (1984) on the cricket tour that nearly broke the Commonwealth, Vietnam (1987) with a young Nicole Kidman — and then handed Kidman her breakout feature in Dead Calm (1989), a three-hander thriller on a yacht that Phillip Noyce directed under the Kennedy Miller banner. Miller’s fingerprints are on the pacing of all of it. A man who trained in triage builds stories the way triage works: establish the threat, rank it, act.

The case against

The unevenness is real. Beyond Thunderdome has a mushy second half. Happy Feet Two (2011) exists. Three Thousand Years of Longing is a film of extraordinary craft that fails to generate any urgency at all, and the honest response to it is admiration rather than affection. There is a fair charge that Miller’s characters are functions — Max in the sequels is a plot device with a shotgun, and the emotional work in Fury Road is done almost entirely by Charlize Theron while the title character grunts.

Miller’s answer is that the films are myths, and myths run on function. Max is Odysseus with a V8; the sequels are told as legends recounted by survivors, complete with an unreliable narrator in Mad Max 2. Judge them as character drama and they thin out. Judge them as the thing they announce themselves to be and the design holds.

Start with Mad Max 2, which is the purest object, then Fury Road to see the same man solve the same problem with money. Twilight Zone: The Movie’s final segment is the deep cut. Babe: Pig in the City is the argument-starter. All of it is on disc and the Max films rotate through the streaming services constantly. For the wider context, Peter Weir came out of the same industry in the same years and went the opposite way, and Miller’s contribution to the killer-car film is the one that made the car a character with a pulse.

Spoilers below

Mad Max’s ending is the reason the sequels can exist. Max hands a hacksaw to a man cuffed to a burning wreck, tells him roughly how long the fire will take, and drives away — a punishment lifted, Miller has acknowledged, from a real cruelty he had heard about, and staged with the camera pulling back and away so you never see the outcome. The film ends on withdrawal. Nothing is resolved. Max is simply gone, and the sequels can therefore find him as a rumour.

Fury Road’s structural joke is that the film is a chase in a straight line, out and back along the same road. The Vuvalini reveal that the Green Place is a swamp, the convoy turns around, and the second half retraces the first with the geography inverted — the audience already knows every landmark, so the tension shifts from where to how fast. That is a chase film buying its own second act with nothing but a U-turn, and it is the cleverest structural decision in a blockbuster this century.