Mad Max? “Boy, it’s a long story,” George Miller says. He’s talking about not just his 1979 feature directorial debut—which arguably set the tone for every cinematic take on the postapocalypse that came after—but also life before that Mel Gibson masterpiece, as well as his decades-later decision to return to Max’s sun-bleached and bleak world for Mad Max: Fury Road and this year’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.

Speaking with Vanity Fair for What Is Cinema?, a series of conversations in which directors frankly discuss their craft, Miller traces the origins of the Mad Max saga to his boyhood. The 79-year-old director and writer was born in Chinchilla, a small rural town in the Australian state of Queensland. He grew up “before there was television, before there was internet,” he says.

“There was just play, school, and the Saturday matinee,” he explains. That midcentury movie culture “had a massive influence on me, of course.” So when he went to make Mad Max, his goal was to produce a film that could be “read purely as visual music.”

“I didn’t really know what I was doing then,” Miller says of his iconic first feature. “But somehow it tapped into universal archetypes” across cultures, with audiences relating Gibson’s character to their own individual, mythical heroes. In Japan, Max read as a samurai, Miller says. In Scandinavian countries, he was perceived as a Viking. Americans saw him as a Western-style cowboy.

That solitary figure against the world, striding across the “flat, loamy earth,” transcended borders in the late 1970s, and 2015’s Fury Road and this year’s Furiosa demonstrate “kind of a progression along that same continuum,” says Miller.

They also follow the same ecological through line that informed the first movie. The oil crisis of the 1970s hit the Australian city of Melbourne particularly hard, Miller recalls. Eventually, only one gas station in the city remained open for business. As lines to fill up grew longer and tensions continued to mount, “it took 10 days for the first shot to be fired,” Miller says.

“It wasn’t fired at anybody,” he hastens to add, saying, “We don’t have a gun culture in Australia.” But still, the ostensibly nonviolent incident stuck with him. If it only took 10 days for gas-related gunfire to break out, “what would happen in a hundred days?” he says he thought. “What would happen in a thousand days?” The Mad Max movies attempt to answer that question.

Man’s eternal struggle to secure and protect resources provided the seed for the original 1979 film, with the great, roving hordes of Hannibal and Genghis Khan inspiring some of its most indelible images—mobile groups that “consumed everything before them.” But because Miller’s hordes are enabled by fossil fuels instead of elephants or horses, we’re back to that issue of scarcity. (Electric cars don’t work in the Mad Max universe, as “you can’t charge them anymore.”)

While Miller’s most recent Mad Max films share the DNA of the first film, 1981’s The Road Warrior, and the Tina Turner–starring Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the director acknowledges one major development that happened between the third film’s 1985 release and 2015, when Fury Road debuted to global acclaim. “The biggest shift in cinema after sound was the digital dispensation,” Miller says, citing Jurassic Park as the film that ushered in the digital-effects era.

Miller dipped his toes into those waters with the porcine fairy tale Babe, which he cowrote and produced, and then dove in with Happy Feet, the 2006 penguin saga that netted Miller his first Academy Award, for best animated feature. “Almost at the same time, I was thinking, Wow, these tools…we could apply [them] to action films or stories like Mad Max,” Miller says. “We can do things that we can never dream of doing in the past.”

An indelible image from Buster Keaton’s 1926 action comedy, The General, informed a memorable shot in Beyond Thunderdome. Technological advances allowed Miller to take the moment to its logical conclusion in Fury Road, which was impossible to safely shoot before the advent of digital. “Cinema, like all arts or all human endeavors—there’s a kind of cultural evolution. One thing builds on another,” he says.

“When I see things like this,” Miller adds, gesturing to the series of images, “I realize, Okay, these are the influences that, basically, were all part of a continuum.”

Another change is the sheer scale of Miller’s projects. The first Mad Max had a 30-person credit list, while Furiosa’s cast and crew numbered at least a thousand. But one thing is consistent: Everything in each of the movies had to look like it came from repurposed objects, rather than freshly manufactured ones. “And we have to understand where those found objects came from,” Miller says. “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.”

An example of that ingenuity, and the pride people take in their creations, can be seen in Furiosa antagonist Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) and the vehicle he pilots. “[He] sees himself as some sort of glorified, Roman, classical figure,” Miller says. So production designers used 1959’s swords-and-sandals epic Ben-Hur (presumably one of young Miller’s Saturday matinees) and images from 1930s-era Australian police “motorcycle chariot” races to design Dementus’s distinctive ride.

Speaking of Dementus, Miller is eager to emphasize that though technology and design are great, story and characters still matter most. “It’s all about what characters want and how those wants bring them into conflict with others,” Miller says. Charlize Theron’s carriage, height, and inherent self inspired Furiosa so iconically that Miller considered “de-aging and all these sort of techniques” to bring the actor back for the prequel nearly a decade later. “Some great filmmakers tried it,” Miller says. Ultimately, though, he decided against that approach. “All you’re looking at is the technology. You’re not suspending disbelief and watching the story and believing in the character.”

So time, it appears, is one of the biggest influences on Furiosa, as it prompted the casting of Anya Taylor-Joy in the title role. She was one of the only actors “who could fill Charlize’s shoes,” Miller says. “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.”

Despite their borderline sci-fi environments, Miller considers both Max and Furiosa to be timeless, classic characters. “These stories are allegories,” Miller says. “That’s one of the big attractions for me to work on those films.”