by Gill Pringle
Talking over zoom, he still has more to say and indeed, thanks the post-release interview process as a way of gathering his thoughts on the film.
Addressing the fact that Anya Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa has just 30 lines of dialogue in the 148-minute film, which bears her character’s name, he says: “It’s a difficult role but it proved to be right. Like a lot of these classic sort of characters, particularly in the Westerns, you could argue that the Mad Maxes are Westerns on Wheels. The lead character is often quite iconic. Yet Max, throughout all these stories, hardly ever says anything. Furiosa, in Fury Road, hardly said anything,” he argues.
“And in this story, she can’t. As a child, she can’t say much because she’ll give away ‘the green place’, or people are trying to get her to talk about the green place, this place of abundance from which she was taken. And at a certain point in the story, she has to kind of hide in plain sight by pretending she’s male. So, she can’t reveal herself. And then also in the wasteland, words don’t mean much. Basically, you interact by action. It’s a world in extremis,” he says.
Instead, he relied on Taylor-Joy’s commanding presence and those mesmerizing eyes.
“There’s a timelessness to her. Something about her face; the way that you know there’s a lot of stuff roiling inside, and it somehow becomes apparent without having to work itself hard and make it obvious,” he says of the British actress whose films include The Witch, The Menu, Last Night in Soho and The Northman as well as popular series, The Queen’s Gambit and Peaky Blinders.
At 79-years old, Miller shows no signs of slowing down and there is already talk of a sixth Mad Max film, The Wasteland
“Well, to be honest, I have to say, it’s about curiosity definitely. No question. I’ve still got an appetite for it.
“And, as time goes on, I began to realise that probably the reason I’m still making films is because it’s the same reason why I was first interested in being a doctor when I was a little kid. I was very curious about who we are as human beings. And you have the opportunity to really think about, to actually look at ourselves as human beings, from every point of view,” Dr Miller says.
“These are things that just occurred to me in recent years: The first thing that you do as a doctor is to take a history. You basically want the history or the story of the patient, let’s say. Because, first of all, you’re looking at the whole human being. And then you narrow it down on the specific pathology, if there is one. That’s number one.
“And you’re also seeing people in extreme situations. People don’t turn up to a hospital, where I mainly worked, unless there’s something serious going on. Sometimes it’s childbirth, which has got its own issues. Each of us were born to our mothers, and yet there’s something heroic about childbirth. Particularly for a woman, who basically relinquishes her own self-interests for another which, as Joseph Campbell said, is the essential quality of the hero.
“And then, there’s just the practice of it. To really do medicine well, you have to work in really well-coordinated, like-minded teams. There’s no question about that. Surgical units and so on. And that’s exactly what a film crew does. And then there’s things that became very familiar to me when I was a young doctor dealing with problems, triaging problems. It’s exactly what you’re doing every day on set, really,” he says.
For anyone who’s ever been on a film set, it’s hard not to see his point: “It’s trying to find out where to focus everybody’s energy and your own. And then being able to understand, or try to understand, the underlying behaviour; what underlies the behaviour of us as humans. So that’s the things that I think are going on there.”
Just as Miller found a muse in the young Mel Gibson 45 years earlier with his first Mad Max, it is clear he has come to feel the same way about Chris Hemsworth, making his debut in the Mad Max universe as Dementus.
“I knew nobody else who could play him. When we wrote him, he was a certain way. We even had concept art on him because Dementus is a kind of showman, a great marauder across the wasteland with a great horde, similar I guess to the Romans or Genghis Khan and so on,” says Miller.
“But the only thing common to what we saw in the film, ultimately, was the teddy bear. We had the teddy bear, and Chris made more of it than we originally had.”
Reflecting on his original meeting with Hemsworth, he says, “I talked to him, and I saw that he is a multidimensional person in every way, both who he is as a human being, and his approach to acting. And I thought, ‘gosh, whatever happens, this could be really interesting’.
“But mostly, it was the work and that he understood something in this character – far more than I did, ultimately, it proved. Because there were times when I was watching that performance, and I didn’t know where he got it from.
“If the analogy is athletics, you’ve got a great athlete. And all of them were like this, but you prepare with them, you guide them through as best you can. And however rigorous the preparation is, in the moment of performance, you don’t know what the basketball player is going to do; you don’t know what the actor’s going to do. You basically hope that in that moment when they surrender to the intuition and let it happen, stuff comes out. And it’s really a wonderful thing to see. You have no real control. You can guide it. But the performance is theirs. And so that’s what happened to me on this film, particularly when they worked together,” he says.
Talking about the scenes between Hemsworth’s Dementus and Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa, he says: “It was there in the screenplay, but not as deliberately as it was done there. The exchange of it; the way it played, it didn’t figure till right to the end.
“In all stories, everyone carries their backstories with them. It’s not really specified what he [Dementus] went through, but everyone in the Wasteland had to endure great trials. He did and somehow, he recognised it with her. The way that he saw himself, in a wacky sort of way, as a mentor on how to survive the Wasteland, that he expressed through his teddy bear and the things that he said. He just saw it more accurately,” says Miller who believes Hemsworth’s understanding comes as a function of his own childhood, growing up with brothers Liam and Luke.
“Their parents were social workers who, in Australia, pioneered working with abused children. And Chris saw that and experienced it in his childhood just through the work that his parents were doing. And so, he’s got a lot of wisdom about that for someone so relatively young. And that ultimately came into his work,” he says.
One of the biggest sets ever mounted in Australia, Miller can’t disguise his pride in his country and its stories, particularly those handed down among the indigenous nations. “One of the fortunate things about living in Australia is that, in the Indigenous Australian culture, we have had the longest living continuous culture here in Australia. People are now saying it’s probably 65,000 years old,” he says.
“And I’ve been able to actually get into some places in Australia and interact with these people to some extent, I’ve gotten to understand that their way of being through story is incredibly powerful. It’s always been throughout most cultures, but to know it’s been going for so long, I mean, you can argue that modern man is probably 140,000 years old, only that young essentially.
“Homo Sapiens have basically evolved, and to know that there is a culture still today, and there are places you can go where it’s still practiced in the art, in the narratives, in the song and story lines of the Indigenous Australians – because it’s a continent that broke off very early. That’s why we’ve got animals like kangaroos and the platypus and things like that, which basically you can’t find their equivalents anywhere else,” he says.
It’s Miller’s curiosity in the world around him that has fed into such a diverse body of work. Not just the Mad Max series but having also directed the biographical medical drama Lorenzo’s Oil, supernatural comedy The Witches of Eastwick and the Oscar-winning animated film Happy Feet as well as the beloved Babe films.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is in cinemas now.
