International Man of Myths

Unlike a fair number of his countrymen, Miller has also remained steadfastly committed to making films in his native Australia, on his own terms and far from the prying eyes of Hollywood. His one foray into studio filmmaking — the 1987 adaptation of John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick — he readily describes as the worst creative experience of his career. “The time that I spent in Hollywood — it was kind of old-school Hollywood, where I found myself rewarded for bad behavior and punished for good behavior,” he says. “It brought out the worst in me. I didn’t like myself. Actually, I can see why it happens, why people start bullying, getting vengeful. I can see why actors who cop so much shit on the way up can turn into real assholes. The most graceful of them [like Witches star Jack Nicholson, without whose support Miller says he would have quit the project] don’t need to. It’s the other ones who are really insecure. So, you know, that’s the reason I’ve stayed in Australia.”

Miller, who was born George Miliotis to Greek-immigrant parents in Brisbane and spent his childhood in the farm town of Chinchilla, Queensland, fell under the spell of movies at an early age, especially silent films — “pure cinema,” as Miller calls them — and their emphasis on visual storytelling. (To wit, there is perhaps 15 or 20 minutes of dialogue in the entirety of The Road Warrior, which also features some of cinema’s most lyrical action sequences.) He was already making shorts (many of them in concert with his creative partner, the late Byron Kennedy) from the time he was in medical school, one of which, the parody educational film Violence in the Cinema Part 1, created a small scandal during its premiere at the 1971 Sydney Film Festival and offered early evidence of how those hours spent in the trauma ward had left Miller with a keen understanding of our simultaneous attraction and revulsion to human carnage.

...and his penguins

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“I was seeing people in extremis, in the aftermath of all kinds of violence,” he says. “And one thing I noticed is that what we do with the new brain, the cerebral cortex, is quite different from what we do with our reptilian brain. What we say and what we do are quite different. I’m baffled by the fact that the United States basically swept the Nobel Prizes this year, and yet at the same time there’s this descent into a very dark period [brought on] by your leaders. That’s why I was very interested in violence, because I was very conflicted myself about it, this conflict between the early brain and the late brain. You’ve got to see the two working in harmony. You’ve got to find a way to reconcile them.”

So perhaps the time is only fitting for a fourth chapter in the Mad Max series, a movie Miller had hoped to direct prior to making Happy Feet and to which he now plans to return, albeit without the participation of former Max star Mel Gibson (who passed on the project the first time around in order to direct The Passion of the Christ). “I never thought there would be a story,” Miller says. “Then, about 10 years ago, I was walking across the street and a story flashed into my mind and I pushed it away — I said, ‘No, I’m never going to make another Mad Max film.’ Then, six years ago, I was traveling from Los Angeles to Sydney, and as I sat on the plane, suddenly the movie started to play in my head. I got about two-thirds of the way through the story, and I thought, ‘Holy cow!’ Somehow, in that unconscious mind, you’re working this stuff through.”

As to the specifics, Miller won’t say much except that, like its predecessors, Mad Max 4 will unfold against a future devastated by oil wars and the depletion of natural resources — a future, Miller admits, that seems less of a fantasy now than it did back in 1979. In the meantime, he’s also managed to “download” onto paper three other screenplays that had been “banging around” in his head, which suggests that, with Happy Feet now behind him, one of contemporary cinema’s special visionaries may be poised to enter the most prolific period of his career. “It’s just a question of having a good rest now,” he says with a smile, “and then getting back to work.”