Immortal Miller
George Miller’s ‘world’ of Mad Max has grown quite a bit since its debut in 1979. When Miller started filming the first Mad Max he probably didn’t think it was going to be (at the time) the most profitable movie in history. The budget was an estimated $200,000, but by 1982 (one year after Mad Max 2: Road Warrior, was released) the first Mad Max had grossed about $100,000,000 worldwide! Fast-forward to 2015 and that’s not anymore than Miller’s budget for Mad Max: Fury Road at $150,000,00. This all coming from a guy who was a doctor in 1978 that started taking film classes in his spare time. In fact much of the physical violence in the movie was informed by what Miller learned treating car-crash victims in Australia. George Miller never thought he would become a filmmaker but he has created one of the most commercially successfully and critically loved series of all-time. The evolution of the Mad Max series is very interesting to say the least; each film speaks to a certain place that society was in at the time and to a certain story Miller wanted to tell at that time. George Millers newest installment in his Mad Max series evolved in theme, scale, and theatrics, thanks to the advances in technology and Miller’s budget, but the film also evolved into a more morbid and pessimistic outlook of a pending apocalypse, do mainly to the more pessimistic outlook that our future Earth has come to.
In the 1979 version of Mad Max, staring Mel Gibson, Max Rockatansky is a police officer in ‘the wasteland’ of post-apocalypse Australia. He has a wife, a child, and a nice home. There is some basic vegetation remaining and water and food aren’t incredibly scares. There is also still some basic government and stability in the world. By the end of the film most of that is taking away from Max and he goes to live in ‘the wasteland’ wandering alone. The 1981 sequel, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, George Millers portrayal of ‘the wasteland’ begins to get more and more dystopian. Max is all alone except for him and his dog. He is much more cynical after the events of the first film, but he still ends up helping a group of people survive, losing everything he has once again and ending up alone on the road once again. Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome was the most commercial and less ‘experimental’ out of all of the films. It has a big name star in Tina Turner as Aunty Entity and follows a much more structured and traditional storyline. That being said it is still the most dystopian and post-apocalyptic setting of the first three films. In Miller’s 2015 Mad Max: Fury Road the post-apocalyptic land of the Citadel is the most desolate and un-earthly setting in the whole series. There is no government of any kind. There is no law enforcement anymore. There are only dictator warlords, machines, and very scares water that is rationed from the citizens of the Citadel.
The budget of these films had a huge impact on how the settings were portrayed. The first 3 Mad Max’s were filmed in Australia, unlike Mad Max: Fury Road, which was filmed, for the most part, in the Namib Desert in Namibia, Africa. This had a huge difference on the overall feeling of ‘the wasteland’. The Namib Desert unlike the Australian outback has virtually no vegetation at all. This makes the world much less forgiving and much harder to survive. It also depicts that Miller’s interpretation of a pending apocalypse is much harsher than he had previously represented.
One way that the budget directly effected Miller in the first film was because he couldn’t afford to fly ‘the Toecutter and his gang’ from Sydney to location in Melbourne, they rode their motorcycles and “rehearsed being a biker gang on the way down,” Miller says. Which very well may have made a difference on how real and gang-like the characters felt. Another problem that arose from the budget was not being about to afford enough vehicles, in a world that was supposed to be ruled by them. The red, yellow and blue Main Force Patrol cars were V8-equipped Ford Falcon sedans that had all been police cars. There were only three used for the film and Miller often had them strategically moved around so it would look like there were more of them. Having to work like this definitely helps you as a filmmaker in the long run, being able to manipulate what the audiences thinks they are seeing is what separates great filmmakers from the average ones.
Miller has said when he set out to make Mad Max; his goal was to make a modern silent film with sound. “The kind of movie that Hitchcock would say, ‘they didn’t have to read the subtitles in Japan,’” All and all, in Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, Mel Gibson has only 16 lines of dialogue in the whole movie. In the new Mad Max: Fury Road, including the opening monolog Tom Hardy speaks exactly 52 lines of dialogue, it should also be noted the Fury Road is a longer film.
It amazing to me that George Miller was about to go back to his series 30 years later and still make a just as revolutionary film as his first Mad Max was. In an interview with Adam Sternbergh, Miller was asked about how influential the first three Mad Max’s were on the portrayal of a certain type of post-apocalyptic film and what his hesitations about returning to the series were, Miller replied, “[What] was very important to me was that there’s a strong aesthetic. Otherwise post-apocalyptic films can be very visually noisy and junkyard-y. There’s a tendency to make it look like a junkyard and chaotic, whereas I think the opposite would be true: Given enough time, people, no matter how impoverished, will still have an eye for beauty. So a steering wheel can still be lovingly made. It becomes almost a religious artifact.“ On his hesitations on being cliché he said, “The most obvious one is de-saturated color. [The typical look] became all very de-saturated, moody color, and as I said, that tends to look like a junkyard. That’s why we went for the saturated color. That was probably the biggest reaction to all that had happened in the last 30 years. And we worked very hard to create something authentic to all the ground rules in the world that we were creating. We have to do that as much as possible without working it too hard and overcooking it. That’s also a danger as well. To get that balance right was really tricky.” That is exactly what Miller was about the do in Fury Road.
In all four of the Mad Max films vehicles are incredibly important in the world of ‘the wasteland’. Production Designer for Fury Road, Colin Gibson, was quoted as saying, “Mad Max has always been about the cars. The cars were a metaphor for power the bigger more powerful the car you had the bigger and more powerful you were in ‘the wasteland’. George Miller says, ‘Just because it’s a wasteland doesn’t mean people cant make beautiful things.’” Miller thought that you would have to know these are objects that would last 50 years after some apocalyptic event. So the vehicles themselves had to be old school, they couldn’t be full of modern computer technology with microprocessors and air bags and all that. In Fury Road, Miller wanted the vehicles to be like an extension of the character wardrobes, which I found very interesting. All the vehicles in this film were real and working right down to the engines. If you saw a car with a V8 it had that V8. For example Immortan Joe, played by Hugh Keays-Byrne, who also played the Toecutter in the first Mad Max, his vehicle ‘the Gigahorse’, is basically his throne, it consisted of two super charged V8 engines locked together into one shaft and a pair of ’59 Cadillac coup de Villes stack on top of each other. If that doesn’t show power in a world ruled by cars I’m not sure what would. But the most important vehicle in the film is ‘the War Rig’ without a doubt. It is the heart and soul of the film really. Miller’s says, “After the human characters it is the next most important character. For the most part it is the setting of the movie.” What’s so insane to me is that there were three complete war rigs, all identical. It’s for the most part in 80% of the action. Colin Gibson explains more about how the rig was build, “We built pods, which could be mounted on the front, on the side, on the top or even at the rear of most of the larger vehicles so a stunt driver could drive them from many different positions. People are running over it, smashing into it, diving over it, setting fire to it, coming through the roof and, when you can’t come through the roof any more, tearing the side panels off with harpoons and chains. Fortunately, we knew that as we designed it.”
Another amazing thing George Miller did with Fury Road was he never wrote a real script for the movie, just storyboards. Miller and Gibson spent a lot of time creating what they called a ‘bible of tribal’ (basic rules that had to be followed in 'the wasteland) they divided their production team into groups based on where they lived. The thought was that it was about trying to design it the way it would have been designed by the people who were living in ‘the wasteland’. For instance the crewmembers designing the double-necked guitar, had to be sure it was all made of found objects, repurposed. This is another example of what separates George Miller from other filmmakers. He makes his cast and crew really embrace the world and their characters down to a point where they would never be able to express all of it in a 2-hour film. Someone who was able to do this incredible well was Charlize Theron with her character Imperator Furiosa. Here’s another quote from Miller about her performance, “I always wondered about a character like that. How does a female survive in a much more elemental world? It’s not just by aping a man. She had to be an authentic road warrior. Charlize really picked up on that early. She thought, Okay, what would I do to survive in a wasteland? One of the first things she did was she shaved her head. Then she had to have skill in driving, and with weapons, and she had to be strong, and so on. It all just arose out of the work. As it turned out, it felt like a corrective. But everything rose organically out of the story.” Even the crewmembers were doing work that wasn’t ever in the film. All of the cars were filled with trinkets and things that could be used by the character even if they were never going to use them on camera. The People Eater’s vehicle was an old wedding Mercedes, that they cut, shunted stretched and then mounted onto an old military truck. All of this you saw but what you may have never seen was in the back there were: expensive furs, fine liquors, books filled with fuel statistics, and even an abacus for the calculations.
George Miller may have single handedly influenced the post-apocalyptic genre more than any other filmmaker to date. Not only that, but what he was able to accomplish with Mad Max: Fury Road wasn’t just astonishing for the genre but filmmaking as a whole. He managed to make a science fiction/non-stop action film series that was beautiful cinematically, very thought provoking and relevant while still being packed full of extreme action, huge beautiful sets and production design, violence, explosions, and car chases. The Mad Max series is one of a kind and it will live on in cinematic history forever. Here’s hoping the next one comes in less than 30 years because when it comes to post-apocalyptic movies George Miller maybe Immortal Miller.
Bibliography
"The 10 Coolest Vehicles in Mad Max: Fury Road." ShortList Magazine. N.p., 13 May 2015. Web. 01 Nov. 2016.
Sternbergh, Adam. "Mad Max: Fury Road Director George Miller on His Unlikely Oscar Contender and Even Unlikelier Career." Vulture. N.p., 12 Feb. 2016. Web. 01 Nov. 2016.
Horn, John. "Mad Max's Production Designer on How He Made All Those Badass Cars." Vulture. N.p., 20 May 2015. Web. 01 Nov. 2016.
