George Miller reveals the scenes that shaped ‘Mad Max’: “I was always struck by that”
As good a movie as it is, George Miller will not be best remembered for directing Babe: Pig in the City. Instead, he will go down in cinematic history for helming the gasoline-guzzling, Wasteland-hopping carnival of chaos that is the ‘Mad Max’ series, having directed all five feature-length instalments in the franchise.
The first film, which stars Mel Gibson as the eponymous man of action, caught the world’s attention when it was released in 1979 and was followed up with two sequels over the next six years. Finally, after decades of going back and forth on the project, a fourth movie, Mad Max: Fury Road, saw the light of day in 2015. With Tom Hardy now in the lead role, the film blew everyone away. It won six Oscars and was nominated for even more, including ‘Best Picture’. A spin-off, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, hit screens in 2024.
It’s been a long and difficult journey for Miller’s violent, dusty baby, incorporating many different themes and influences along the way. Ahead of the release of Furiosa, he sat down with The New Yorker to talk about Max’s history. He highlighted certain scenes from across history that had contributed to his own brand vehicular madness, including some of the greatest car chase movies ever made.
“Obviously Hitchcock, Bullitt, the great action sequence in The French Connection,” he listed. “I was tremendously impressed by Steven Spielberg’s early film Duel. I thought, ‘Boy, he understands the syntax so well and how to construct it.’”
Though he admitted that he’d never done any action films, Miller conceded that some advice given to him by Roman Polanski had also shaped the world of Max. “He once said that there is only one perfect place for a camera at any given moment,” Miller recalled of the disgraced filmmaker. “I was always struck by that, and I’ve gone on to prove that for myself in animation. You can take exactly the same ingredients and by shifting the camera and adjusting the pattern of shots you can turn the scene around. You can make it something else.”
Another film, set in a radically different time and environment to ‘Mad Max’, was also given its flowers. “The chariot scene in Ben-Hur, in the William Wyler version, was huge for me,” Miller revealed. “It was so beautifully constructed – the contours of it and the camera positions and the cutting. It was an extended sequence, and it was very clear what everyone was doing at any given moment. They didn’t just put out a lot of cameras and decide what to do with the footage in post. And what was being played out was the central rivalry between two best friends.”
Though the two films seem very different on the surface, Ben-Hur – which takes place in the Roman Colosseum – and Fury Road have more in common than you might think. “When we were making Fury Road,” its director said. “I kept saying that the action sequences are the equivalent of dialogue scenes in other movies. When Max and Furiosa meet, no words are exchanged – I think he says, ‘Water’, and grunts. It was like a dialogue scene, except where you would usually have words you had fighting. But it had to be constructed in a way where you learn something in each moment. That’s certainly what came through in Ben-Hur.”
