Furiosa director George Miller on the function of stories and why Mad Max is a 'cautionary tale'
It took the success of Mad Max to make director George Miller understand the function of stories, nearly 50 years later, it informs his filmmaking totally
Furiosa is a new film but it’s an old, almost primal, story.
The feverishly anticipated prequel to 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, revs and roars into cinemas this week. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is the fifth film in the franchise, now spanning almost half a century and set in a dystopian wasteland where dwindled resources are fought over by rival – mostly vehicular-based – factions.
The first film, released in 1979, marked the arrival of one of cinema’s most original auteurs, George Miller. In a distant future that also feels increasingly familiar, characters battle for survival and redemption among the detritus of a collapsed society. The 45-year-old saga feels like it’s showing where we might end up in another half-century.
“They could be seen as cautionary tales,” Miller tells Big Issue. “These films are basically allegorical.
“Way back when we made the first Mad Max, I was just making a film I’d be interested in. I didn’t have much understanding of the function of stories. It wasn’t until the first Mad Max succeeded globally that I realised we tapped into archetypes. The French were the first to describe them as ‘westerns on wheels’.”
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Furiosa director George Miller. Image: Sonna Studios
The original film, made for next to nothing using real biker gangs with cars and costumes seemingly welded together from scraps, held the record for highest box-office-to-budget ratio for two decades until The Blair Witch Project came along. It was not only relatable internationally as a futuristic western; in Japan it felt like a Samurai story, in Scandinavia a Viking saga. Every culture has its equivalent.
“In a complex, chaotic world people tell stories, that are elemental with metaphorical resonances to be interpreted,” Miller continues. “They’re sort of timeless. They might be about the future but the behaviour goes back to the past. Sometimes the deep past. The world of Mad Max and Furiosa is medieval in many ways and yet they’re also somehow about what’s in the zeitgeist today.”
Miller was a doctor before making his directorial debut. Mad Max and its two direct sequels The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome made an international star of Mel Gibson, who was replaced by Tom Hardy in the 2015 reboot where Max unwillingly teams up with Charlize Theron’s Furiosa to escape the wrath of Immortan Joe.
As they are chased by a desperate convoy of crazies across the desert, there’s a sublime narrative stroke midpoint as they realise they have to turn around and motor back through the melee. It’s pure, visceral cinema. A film of fire, dust and insanity, simple and spectacular.
Miller has had a varied career. He was behind sheep-pig classic Babe and directed the all-singing, all-dancing, all-penguin Happy Feet animations. The return to Mad Max’s world was not an easy journey. Fury Road spent decades in development purgatory, its production was notoriously stormy – and its success defied all expectations. It won six Oscars, the most of any film that year. Metacritic, which tallies critics’ best-of lists found that Fury Road topped more lists of the best films of the last decade than any other. Furiosa has a hard act to follow. It does so by switching from taut action overload to grand epic.
Instead of Fury Road’s three-day timeline, Furiosa covers 15 years. A young Furiosa, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, is abducted from her family and, trying to get back home, is caught in the crossfire between two tyrants, one of whom – the warlord Dr Dementus – is played by Chris Hemsworth riding a chariot pulled by motorbikes.
Furiosa was filmed in the remote New South Wales outback. Of course, there’s nothing new about New South Wales or the rest of Australia. We may have only found it a few hundred years ago but the continent is home to the oldest extant culture on the planet.
“The Indigenous Australian culture goes back at least 60,000 years,” Miller says. “I was privileged to spend some time in Indigenous communities, particularly in Central Australia, and was struck by the power of their storytelling. They weren’t decorative, they were as practical as the GPS on our phone.
“In some parts, those narratives glue societies together and explain everything about the cosmos they live in. How the Earth and stars were formed, where they can find water, find food. All of that is in their paintings, their dance.”
Miller cites Joseph Campbell, the American academic who studied the parallels between the stories and myths told by different cultures across history. “He spent 40 years in a library collating all the stories of humankind and seeing where they overlapped and seeing what they have in common,” Miller explains. “He said that each story is basically in response to its times, but there are universal tropes and themes that go back to the earliest recorded stories.”
Miller gave Mel Gibson his breakthrough role as the eponymous hero in 1979’s Mad Max. Image: Allstar Picture Library Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
Miller has some ancient tales in his DNA. His family was originally from Greece, and anglicised their surname from Miliotis to Miller on emigration to Australia in 1920. Miller sees how his Greek heritage, mixed with the even older traditions of the ‘New World’ have shaped his work. “All those vectors certainly have an influence on my storytelling,” he says.
“The fact that I have Greek heritage has made me think about the early Greeks, from Aristotle and Plato. A lot of us are still working to the observations they made about drama and the purpose of drama. We’re still seeing in Marvel and DC movies the mythologies from all across the globe and across all time in new forms.”
The fact that humans are hardwired for stories has been Miller’s mantra for decades. You only have to scroll through any social media platform of your choice to see there are more stories being told by more people than ever before. But instead of making sense of the chaos, the sheer volume of stories has become the chaos. Has the noise of billions of people each with their own tale corrupted and polluted the power of storytelling?
“Our storytelling, whatever form it takes, has to reflect the very chaos we are dealing with. The way we negotiate and navigate the world is through story. Every person on social media is trying to engage through story – it only has meaning if it’s received. Our job is to find the signal in the noise.
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“I believe that’s why we resort to more elemental stories for that simple reason. It’s always been the case. How would you explain a tsunami or volcano in the past? If you didn’t know the basic physics of how the earth orbits around the sun, there’s no way to explain the seasons. So you have to invent stories about how they come about.
“I don’t think we have any choice – it’s who we are, it’s the way we exist in the world,” Miller continues. “Every footstep you take, every corner you turn, every cultural artefact you encounter – and even going back further the geological history of how the mountains you climb were made. All of that is part of the mosaic of the human narrative.”
Furiosa is in cinemas from 24 May.
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