The Inspirations Behind 45 Years of 'Mad Max,' Explained by Furiosa's George Miller

[light music] Hello, I'm George Miller

and I'm the director of Furiosa,

which is a Mad Max saga.

And I'm going to be talking about all the inspirations

or many of the inspirations that led to this film

and how I work.

For me, movies are visual music.

They should almost be read purely with the syntax of cinema.

So I'm really excited to be doing this.

[light music continues] [shutter clicking]

Well, Mad Max, boy, it's a long story.

Way back in the mid 70s, I became interested in film,

not with any regard to any sort of career

or anything like that.

I was a kid who grew up with my twin brother in

rural Australia, before there was television,

before there was internet.

There was just play, school and the Saturday matinee.

And that had massive influence on me of course.

And the first Mad Max, which was the first feature

that we worked on, I really wanted it to be a film in which,

as Hitchcock said, they don't have

to read the subtitles in Japan.

That they're read purely as a bit of visual music.

I didn't really know what I was doing then.

None of us were experienced.

Even Mel Gibson, who's played Mad Max, he was straight out

of drama school, never really worked on a movie before.

But somehow,

somehow it tapped into universal archetypes.

For instance, in Japan, he was seen as a samurai,

in Scandinavia, some sort of lone viking.

And in particular, the French said, 'Oh,

these are westerns on wheels.

And in the way that the American Western,

they were allegorical, a very elemental world

with very simple rules, allowed you to get a lot

of story into it.

So from the beginning, those sort of stories,

figures in the landscape undergoing some sort

of fundamental conflict, which is the essence of all drama,

was the kind of staple of film storytelling.

Mad Max and Furiosa

and these Mad Max stories are kind of a progression along

that same continuum.

[drum music]

Oh, so here we are, Queensland, Australia.

This is very familiar.

This is kind of flat loamy earth.

As I said, there's nothing but the Saturday matinee.

So in Mad Max 2, it was really interesting.

There's the OPEC oil crisis in the early '70s.

In Melbourne where we were, a very lovely city.

None of the social pressures that lead

to violence and so on.

But it took 10 days of oil restrictions

for the first shot to be fired.

It wasn't fired at anybody.

We don't have a gun culture in Australia,

but it was fired in the air

where someone got ahead in a queue,

a long queue that went for blocks.

And I thought if it took 10 days,

what would happen in a hundred days?

What would happen in a thousand days?

And so on.

And that led to these sort of stories.

But that's been the story throughout history.

I have resources, you don't.

I have to protect them.

That's who we are,

the worst and the best of us, in these sort of things.

Story always has primacy.

Story is all, everything is driven by story.

But then to play with the technology

and kind of do things that you couldn't imagine doing

before is very exciting.

And the biggest shift in cinema

after sound was the digital dispensation.

But I think Jurassic Park was probably the first big

event in digital cinema.

63 shots of dinosaurs really kind of started it.

We were lucky enough with the first Babe film

to be at Universal who already knew

what this technology was doing.

And we were able to sort of make little animals talk.

That was really a exciting time.

The cinematographer of the Babe movies, Andrew Leslnie,

went on to shoot Lord of the Rings

and he came back from the very first one

and showed me the first motion capture of Gollum.

I'd never even heard of motion capture.

And I thought, Holy cow, we have the story of the penguins.

We can make these penguins dance.

That led to Happy Feet.

That was driven by the technology.

The story was the most important thing,

but the means to actually tell the story optimally,

was becoming available.

Almost at the same time, I was thinking, wow, these tools,

having done animation,

we can apply to action films or stories like Mad Max.

We can do things that we can never dream

of doing in the past.

Here, what's really interesting about these pictures here is

the image of Buster Keaton, 1926 silent movie on this train.

Incredible, incredible movie.

Not only that he's directing him,

but doing these real-life stunts, incredibly unsafe.

And then an image from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome in '85.

And it's the same image on a track with the front

of that vehicle.

Cinema like all arts

or all human endeavors, there's a kind

of cultural evolution.

One thing builds on another.

And when I see things like this, I realize, okay,

these are the influences that basically

we're all part of a continuum on.

Again, you've got another image here from The General

and then also from Furiosa,

which we've done almost a hundred years later.

We've got an image like that.

And here you have pictures of Once a time in the West,

Safety Last with Harold Lloyd

and then Lawrence of Arabia with trains and so on.

And then we start doing the similar things in this time.

Again, I guess vehicles, moving vehicles,

once they were horses and trains.

Now they've combustion-driven engines.

I mean interesting, the world of Mad Max, 45 years

after the fall of man, when all the institutions have gone,

the power grids and everything's gone.

And we go to the isolated center

of a continent like Australia.

There are no electric cars.

It's impossible.

They can only get so far.

You can't charge them anymore.

There's nothing you can use

and repurpose in those sort of engines.

So you end up going back to earlier technologies,

and that's why we have the kind of cars that we have.

And now I'm gonna talk about the production design,

which is really key.

On the very first Mad Max,

there are only 30 people in the credits.

On this film, this is shooting, there are a thousand people.

How do you bring everyone together with the same sort

of ideas and visions?

What are the guiding ideas?

So one of the most important things was to say

that everything that we see in the film,

every single detail, every utterance, every bit

of behavior had to be made of found objects repurposed.

That was really, really key.

And we had to understand

where those found objects came from.

If you look at any of the vehicles, particularly

in Fury Road and Furiosa they had

to be from existing vehicles, again, cobbled together,

repaired, put together in some way.

Just because we're in an impoverished world,

it doesn't mean people stop making beautiful things.

So if you've got stuff

and you put together this kind of, you know,

found object art, people take great pride.

It's in our instinct to do it really well.

Even the earliest times, you know, cave paintings,

that's something that we all do culturally.

You make the most of what you've got.

And we see that over and over again.

This was in the '70s.

We saw some footage of the '30s

where police were putting on these police pageants

with bikes, doing all these sort of formations and so on.

And there was a chariot race

where people had two bikes and a chariot.

And it was based on the first Ben Hur movie,

the silent version.

In the late '50s,

there was that big one with Charlton Heston,

that amazing chariot race in big wide screen.

And when we saw that footage, we said, Well, of course.

Dementus, the Chris Hemsworth character, sees himself

as some sort of glorified, I don't know,

Roman classical figure.

And so he rides across the wasteland

with his massive hoard of bikers in a chariot bike.

Here, we see it here.

So we have the police in the '70s,

We saw it from the '30s in Australia, Ben Hur in 1959,

and here he is doing the similar thing here.

One of the things I noticed

after I thought we'd let go of all the Mad Max world,

you know, back in the '80s, there were a lot

of dystopian stories and films and particularly games.

And the basic instinct was to desaturate everything

to make it very, almost more monochrome.

And I thought, if we keep doing what's been done,

it'll feel too familiar.

It's almost become a trope to make things look desaturated.

So that was a big influence on the look

of Fury Road and now Furiosa.

The other thing we picked up was, as I said,

when the French said

that these films are Westerns on wheels,

if you looked at the all the classic westerns,

they always shot day for night.

The main reason they shot day for night is

because horses don't have headlights.

So it's only when you have headlights that you need

to shoot night for night in order to see the...

Now in the wasteland, it's definitely not conducive

to your survival if you keep your headlights on

'cause people can see you from miles away.

So you don't want to draw attention to yourself.

So if you're traveling at night

as they were in Fury Road, escaping in the War Rig

across the wasteland, the last thing you want to do is

put your headlights on.

So we shot day for night.

When I went to Japan, they said, Oh, Max is a samurai.

You must have seen a lot of Kurosawa movies.

And to my shame, I said, Who's Kurosawa?

Which is terrible.

When they told me, I made it my job to immediately go

and see all the Kurosawa movies.

Of course, what was so amazing about him,

he took basically Hollywood cinema and reinterpreted it.

I'm following in that, sort of going down that path

because again, he was someone who's able to take cinema

and make it his own and master all this stuff.

And it's so great

that you've got these images here like this.

It's fantastic.

[drum music]

So characters.

How do we approach characters?

Characters absolutely drive the narrative.

If you go back to the earliest times, let's go back

to the Greeks and so on, it's all about what characters want

and how those wants bring them into conflict with others.

So we were lucky enough in Fury Road to have Charlize

who's someone who has that kind of stature,

just intrinsically as a person.

You know, it's purely an intuitive thing.

When you actually cast someone,

you can't really articulate exactly why someone feels right.

So she was this character in the story.

Almost a decade goes by

and we have to shoot Furiosa.

And I was really looking

to see whether we could use de-aging

and all these sort of techniques.

And I realized that wasn't working very well.

Some great filmmakers tried it,

and all you're looking at is the technology

and you're not suspending disbelief

and watching the story

and believing in the character.

So we had to cast somebody who could fill Charlize's shoes.

And when I saw Anya and her work, I realized,

Oh, there's something going on here.

There's something intense, kind of almost regal about her.

Timeless.

And I knew that she was someone

who was very rigorous in her work, like Charlize.

I mean, both of those actors started ballet

when they're very young.

I find dancers.

Having worked with dancers on Happy Feet.

I realized they have a great precision.

I mean, it's amazing what they can do.

The timing is just amazing.

And if you like are able to internalize all of that,

then you have a really fine actor.

The thing that defines the hero is that they come

to a moment where they have

to relinquish their own self-interest to a greater good.

That's the fundamental gesture or behavior of the hero.

Now Max does that, but in a reluctant way.

He doesn't want to be involved with other human beings.

Whenever he gets involved with other human beings,

somehow it's always too painful.

So he's a kind of a good man running away from himself.

That happened in Mel Gibson's version

and it also happens in the Tom Hardy version.

And that's interesting, quite different from the

Furiosa character who basically is driven

by some sort of obligation, a promise to her mother

to find her way home.

Despite all her Herculean efforts,

can't do it and becomes something else.

And then decides redemption's not for her,

but it's for others as she says, less corrupted.

And that's the wives.

They're very interesting characters to me,

'cause they're very, very sort of classic characters

that are timeless in a way.

And I mean these stories are allegories

and that's one of the big attraction for me

to work on those films.

[light instrumental music]

I mean, I'm surprised by some

of the stuff I've seen in here.

You know, it makes me want to keep sort of doing it,

stimulated by the very conversation we've had here.

I'm still doing it.

And people say, Why are you still doing it?

And I say, Well, I'm still really curious about it.

It's changing.

I'm surprised how everything is changing

and how you're engaged in something that is ongoing.

I mean, you could be making films for a thousand years

and never master it.

There's too much to understand.

So anyway, thanks so much for this.

This is a great experience.

Thank you.