George Miller

George Miller rescued injured people on the roads of Queensland before winning an Oscar. He worked as an emergency room doctor in 1971 and saw mangled bodies from car accidents every day. That real-life carnage was the driving force behind an obsession that ended up on screen.

With barely 350,000 Australian dollars, he shot Mad Max in 1979. They had no money for permits, so they filmed the chase scenes illegally and ran away when the police showed up. The editing was done in his home living room over several months.

And the gamble paid off.

The film grossed 100 million dollars worldwide. But the death of his partner Byron Kennedy in a helicopter crash in 1983 nearly drove him out of film. Miller went on to finish Mad Max 2 and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome with a sense of emptiness that kept him away from violence for a long time.

From the Desert to the Brave Little Pigs

In 1987, he directed The Witches of Eastwick and discovered that the major Hollywood studios were more dangerous than motorcycle gangs. He had constant fights with producers over creative control. So he decided to return to his roots and produce his own projects from Australia.

In 1995, he wrote and produced Babe, and in 2006 he directed Happy Feet. These children's stories allowed him to refine his use of digital technology before the rest of the industry knew what to do with it. Miller always says that cinema is a pure visual language that doesn't need dialogue to work.

Nobody expected him to win an Oscar for a movie about penguins.

Chaos Under Millimeter-Perfect Control

The shoot of Mad Max: Fury Road in 2015 was a logistical nightmare in the Namibian desert. Miller used storyboards instead of a traditional script because he wanted a film that could be understood in any country without subtitles. The final cut required 480 hours of raw footage to be trimmed down to two hours of relentless action.

He didn't stop there.

In 2022, he premiered Three Thousand Years of Longing, and in 2024 he returned to the wasteland universe with Furiosa. On this latest production, the technical crew had to manage more than 200 real vehicles built from scratch. Miller turned 79 during the post-production of this film.

The production of Furiosa in 2024 employed more than 1,000 workers in the state of New South Wales.