Miller mad again:
When it comes to vehicular chaos and warfare, George Miller was the first to be fast and furious. The Australian writer/director’s new action film
Mad Max: Fury Road opens Friday.
When it comes to vehicular chaos and warfare, George Miller was fast and furious before anyone.
The Australian writer/director returns to a hyperactive, overthe-top version of the dystopian wasteland he dreamed up in the late 1970s with the new action film Mad Max: Fury Road (in theaters Friday).
Miller was 34 when Mel Gibson starred as highway cop Max Rockatansky in the original Mad Max in 1979 and reprised the role in The Road Warrior (1981) and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). Miller moved on to other projects, including Babe (1995) and Happy Feet (2006). But 12 years ago, on a flight back to Sydney from Los Angeles, he got the idea for a trip down Fury Road.
Tom Hardy is the new Max, an antihero who’s thrown into a two-hour epic chase across the desert to help get a group of women away from a powerful warlord (Hugh Keays-Byrne).
“Mel’s Max was 30 years ago, and he’s a different person to some degree, and I’m a different person to some degree,” says Miller, 70. “And I’ve spent so long with Tom that it’s now Tom in my head as Max.”
Made for less than $400,000, the original grossed more than $100 million worldwide and at one time held a Guinness world record for most profitable film. (The record was broken in 1999 by The Blair Witch Project.)
But “the first one wasn’t fun at all, to be honest,” Miller says. Not only was the budget limited, but he had never been on a movie set and was admittedly bewildered by the whole process.
“I thought if you had a film all mapped out in your head, you could just go out and it was just a matter of executing it,” he says. “I didn’t realize you’d get all sorts of weird land mines in the way, like the weather is not how you expected on that day.”
Fury Road is bigger and crazier than the first Mad Max, and Miller gets just as caught up in the details, from the filming in Namibia to editing in L.A.: “I don’t know if I’m losing my mind or the movie’s working.”
Now that he’s done, “I’m going to sit in a beanbag somewhere and reboot the brain and get on with the rest of my life.”