Film & TV Now Revisits ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ With George Miller

“It’s a weird responsibility after a while…”

One of 2015’s most anticipated films had to have been George Miller‘s epic re-birthing of his 1979 cult classic MAD MAX in the form of revved up blockbuster MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, starring talent like Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and Nicholas Hoult. It tore down cinema screens in May, more than doubling its $150 million budget and both reignited the hearts of former fans and captured those of us new to the vast wasteland than fueled Miller’s epic vision. 

While films have come and gone this year, there have been few to quite reach the brilliance of this all out vicious adventure and films fans have done little but discuss their hopes for a sequel. In just a few days, the film will be released of DVD and Blu-ray and so director George Miller took the time to sit down and discuss the movie in its finer details, only continuing to wet the appetite of its biggest fans with yet another screening.

For fans of the original trilogy, a spiritual sequel, quasi-reboot felt like both a blessing and a curse and at times it felt like it came out of nowhere, with Miller planting this ticking time bomb of opinions in the laps of those faithful viewers. It appears the film came as quite the surprise to even Miller himself, as he opened up just how the idea for FURY ROAD came to him: “Well, it was really strange. Initially, I never wanted to make a second MAD MAX, but an idea occurred to me as I was walking across a street. I was half way across and an idea came for a continuous chase of a number of wives fleeing from a War Lord and they needed a champion who was a female Road Warrior. It need to be female, it couldn’t be a man stealing wives from another man because that’s a totally different story, and that’s really what it was about and then by the time I got to the other side of the road I thought there’s no way I’m going to go there.”

It appears an idea like thank doesn’t just disappear from the imagination over night as Miller continued to explain how the process truly began; “Eighteen months later I was on a long flight across the pacific and in a state between asleep and wakefulness the movie played out. I’ve been high-wired for the imaginative life since I was a kid so I got really caught up in this story; you get draw into this visualisation and just somehow you’ve got to get it out there”. Just like that, a movie was born!

Still, it takes a lot more for a narrative to truly flourish from idea to construction, but it appears the seed had been planted early on in Miller’s mind and he had always had a general idea for the story: “Initially they were just fleeing but then they run out of places to go and the only place in the Wasteland that they could come back to was The Citadel. I really wanted to do a chase where you’re picking up on the exposition on the way, you’re learning about the characters, the backstory, the interaction between the characters on the road and to see if that was possible without a lot of talk.”

As Miller talks, there is a casual sense of confidence that spills from his every world. It’s obvious that here is a man that loves what he does and knows his own capabilities, and yet he’s not afraid to talk about the worries that comes with film making as he goes on to discuss some of his least favourite responsibilities. “The thing I dread most as a writer is exposition because I feel it’s more about the withholding information and budgeting it out as you’re going along and seeing whether that will work, because it’s always an uncertainty, you just don’t know if it’s going to be read other than on the surface.”

One feature of the film that didn’t go unnoticed from fans nor critics was the lack of lengthy dialogue that ran throughout the narrative. This completely worked in the film’s favour and helped carve out the natural talent within the exceptional cast. When asked about its affect, Miller first shed some light on the state of audience reception today: “We’re at a stage where we read films very very quickly, we steam read films compared to how we used to two or three decades ago. So the smallest note or the smallest gesture, if we’re allowed to be attentive, can bring a lot of meaning. That’s the hope, that why we try; in the hope to be able to pull it off.”

The director went on to describe just how important it is that film is seen as a collaborative piece and how each department is important, moving on to discuss how this effected his decision to include less dialogue: “Film is a mosaic art, it’s made up of little bits of information and each piece of information really counts. Often we make analogies of film being like music but it really does apply in this sense. There has to be a strong connection between one shot and the next for it to flow, just as it is with music there’s almost a mathematical quality to it, a structure and tone and melody.” He continued, “Often it’s within a look or a gesture that you’re picking up on, enough behaviour that allows you to read some subtext from that. Just as we do if we walked into another culture, you see behaviour and you’re not quite sure what it means, but if it’s authentic culture you know that the people doing it know what it means.”

While we’ve had the likes of BABE and HAPPY FEET from Miller since the original MAD MAX days there have always been other projects on Miller’s plate and he did shed some light on a JUSTICE LEAGUE project that had almost made it off the ground earlier in his career before the real Superhero boom took over Hollywood cinema: “It’s hard to gauge how different it would have been (from today’s typical Superhero movies). It had a very good script, wonderful designs, a really good story and a fine young cast.”

There was a very inexperienced board who voted against the film going through and we couldn’t do it, we were also running up against a deadline for a writers strike in America. We just missed out, which was okay for me because I had HAPPY FEET to make and this movie (FURY ROAD) to make, I’ve got more films on my cards than I’ll ever have to time make, but it was not a good thing for the cast and the people who worked on the film.”

Miller went on to think a little about some of the themes that might run through a Superhero movie within his imagination and teased as to how one might play out: “I’m into mythology so for me, Superheroes are the modern incarnation of the Greek and Roman Gods, therefore very interesting but my favourite saying is John Lennon’s “Life is what happens when you’re making other plans”, and so it wasn’t mean to be”. 

With no JUSTICE LEAGUE movie, Miller really did steer completely away from any high-octane action films and took a moment to reflect on how it felt to jump back into the genre with such flare: “Having been away from it, it was like revisiting youth in a way but with the wisdom of age. When I first got into cinema and I started to struggle with my early films, the more I went on I started to realise this is a craft you could learn a thousand years and never master. But, you do gain some skills and knowledge and so it was really exciting to revisit somethings. For me it was really familiar yet unique. In the years that have passed everything has changed, the world has changed, cinema has changed, the way we read movies has changed and I dare say, I changed. So all of those things allowed for the film; providing we went through a rigorous process to fulfill something to some degree fresh”.

Replacing Mel Gibson as the lead was never going to be an easy task as fans utterly idolised the effortlessly cool original Max with that leather jacket, but Miller took some time to really approach his reasoning behind casting none other than the poster boy for British talent, Tom Hardy, as his new Max: “We initially started off with Mel, back at the beginning of the millennium and then basically the American dollar collapsed against the Australian dollar and we couldn’t recover from the budget cut so we all moved on.

Miller continued, “We regrouped and by that time the person that walked through the door and reminded me of Mel Gibson thirty years before was Tom Hardy. He had that same energy, the same qualities that I recognised back then. Tom was six weeks old when we first started to shoot the very first film and he was willing to take it on, he brought a different quality to it. The character was different, he starts off as a wild animal who’s trapped, looking for his freedom by any means. Finally he finds some degree of his humanity and his honor, some ability to regard another in Furiosa.”

Tom Hardy made a brilliant impression as the stoic Max, but it was Charlize Theron‘s Furiosa that made the biggest impact to the film’s narrative. Furiosa quickly became a beacon for the representation of women in action films and, in such a short space of time, has come a cultural icon for feminism in contemporary cinema. Theron’s performance was astounding, with Furiosa being both strong and vulnerable in equal measure, leading to the creation of such a refreshingly fierce representation of a female hero within an action film.

When asked about such cultural importance within Furiosa’s character, Miller was exceptionally humble in his answer, claiming that much of her success was down to both the natural flow of the narrative and Theron’s own initiative:  “It’s a weird responsibility after a while, I’ve been stopped in the street with people showing me their Furiosa tattoos. She arose out of the mechanics of the story, five wives needing a women to help them escape, suddenly the architecture of this story reveals this character and then you get really lucky and there’s an actor like Charlize who’s got the stature both physically and spiritually. She was the one who shaved the hair, she said the character wouldn’t mess with hair in the dust and the heat.”

Miller continued: “It comes out of story, even though unconsciously I do think we interact with the zeitgeist and it’s in the air anyway. Even though I had no sisters, I grew up in a family of boys, I went to school with all boys, I did end up having a very very strong daughter, spouse and a Mother and somehow they all crept into these stories. Also, I’ve learned both as a doctor and a father that the best fuelling possible in the world for a human-being is mother’s milk so that was the most precious commodity.”

It is utterly impossible not to feel completely jacked up as if high on guzzoline when Miller talks so eloquently and passionately about FURY ROAD. There is such love and wisdom in his words and it’s so clear just how proud of the film he is. Shedding light on his thought process behind the film settles the lingering questions behind motive and it has become clear that this is just as much a passion project for him as it is a gift to both fans old and new. 

It’s within one sentence that Miller sums up his love for great creativity that bury themselves deep in our imagination and it’s within that that one is able to understand his thought process: “I said to my family, if I’m the guy sitting in a nursing home in a wheelchair staring at the ceiling; I’m playing a movie in my head.” And with that he left, in the most casual manner of humble brilliance. A passer by thanks him for his time and with great surprise, he say’s “thank you” right back. 

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD is released On DVD & Blu-Ray October 5th. Read Our Review Here. 

Please follow and like us: