Jason Di Rosso: What is it about the idea of Mad Max that has kept its fascination for you, personally?
George Miller: Well, he kind of lives like an imaginary character in my head. I never really wanted to make another movie; I didn't even want to make a second movie, let alone a fourth. But somehow, he keeps popping back. When an idea came to me a long time ago, I pushed it away. But it came back, it grew in my mind, and pretty soon I got excited about the prospect of telling another Mad Max, going back into that world. I told my producing partner, Doug Mitchell, that we might get another crack.
Most of our stories, for most of our history, and indeed much of our cinema, have been man against the landscape.
GM: Two things drove this idea. One was to do a continuous chase and see what we could get out of the characters on the run, as it were: what we could learn about their relationship and about the world. Secondly, the classic Hitchcock MacGuffin should be human cargo, rather than a thing. So the five wives were the only pristine creatures in the Wasteland capable of breeding healthy heirs for the Immortan Joe, Hugh Keays-Byrne's character.
They needed a champion, a road warrior. It couldn't be male, so it was Furiosa. Once that foundation was there the architecture of the story just kept developing into what it is today. I was also really intrigued by the character Virginia Hey played in the second movie, who died in the climax of the movie, so it was an opportunity to go there with Charlize.
JDR: It strikes me in watching the Mad Max films that there's not a lot of sex in them, but they're so erotically charged, the costumes are so influenced by S&M and bondage. In a sense, especially in this film, they are a sort of lampooning of hyper-masculinity. I'm interested in how you feel about the tension between a surface eroticism and perhaps a more modest approach to actual lovemaking in the cinematic universe of Mad Max. How does that work?
GM: Well, I think this whole thing is very helter-skelter. There's very little time for recreation at all, very little time for people to get to know each other. It's only through the crucible of the events that happen. Every time we had any inclination to take the characters there, it just didn't make any sense.
It happens over three days, and it's a pretty wild three days. But also, you know, it's matriarchy-patriarchy. One thing that people might take from the subtext is that when you have Max and Furiosa essentially trying to kill each other at the beginning of the story, as things evolve, they find a mutual regard and survive only because of their co-operation. It's kind of a strange battle of the sexes coming to some accommodation at the end. The eroticism comes out of the world and I guess the pageantry. There's a kind of pageantry to warfare.
Related: Read Jason Di Rosso's review of Mad Max: Fury Road
JDR: It makes me think that there's a critique running through this film about men who have spent too much time tinkering in a shed. Are you making fun of that peacock side to masculinity?
GM: What's attractive in these movies is that they're allegorical in the same way that the American western was allegorical. It allows you to go back and in a bower bird way pick stuff that's attracted you through history, about how dominant hierarchies work, even the architecture of power, citadels and so on.
Even though there's a sort of a wild rambunctiousness to it, everything has to have a strong internal logic. People are paying a lot of attention to, say, the Doof Warrior, iOTA playing the guitar—but it came out of a logic. Before modern communications, there was always the music of war. There was the bugler, the drummer, the bagpipe player, calling people to arms. Here there was so much noise you couldn't have any of those, so you needed big, big amplifiers and speakers and a guitarist. But it also happened to double as a weapon, so it was a flamethrower. As bizarre as it seems, there is an internal logic to it.
The Immortan played by Hugh Keays-Byrne, he has to have a breathing device because he's an ailing old man who needs to look formidable and convince everyone that he's some sort of demigod. He wears this sort of very grotesque mask because it's very efficient. That applies to all wearing of uniforms; it does half the work for you, with all the language and pageantry that goes on. It's kind of ripping off what we've seen over and over again in the way that we play out history.
JDR: The idea of the road is there in the Babe movies and Happy Feet. Where does your attraction to the road come from? Is it an Australian thing, growing up amongst such large distances? Is there a kernel of the migrant Greek background of your family: this notion of the road and the long, epic journey?
GM: I think so. It's an unconscious thing. I grew up in Chinchilla in Queensland with great stretches of flat earth and the endless road. I think it's just part of the nature of this landscape. We are a vast continent, very sparsely populated, and I think it's just part of our culture. Most of our stories, for most of our history, and indeed much of our cinema, have been man against the landscape.
I think it's intrinsic to being Australian. It is in other cultures, but it's particularly stark in ours, I think. Cinema, to me, is moving images. Its syntax was forged in the chase movie, particularly, as Kevin Brownlow pointed out in The Parade's Gone By; it was Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Mack Sennett, the two-reel westerns that basically defined this new language, which was relatively young, which we can all read even before we can read words.
I think there's something in movement and the road movie that lends itself particularly to cinema. It's obviously metaphorical for life's journeys in some way, and in the Mad Max world what's very enticing is that in this allegorical world you can do that big time.
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