They also follow the same ecological through line that informed the first movie. The oil crisis of the 1970s hit the Australian city of Melbourne particularly hard, Miller recalls. Eventually, only one gas station in the city remained open for business. As lines to fill up grew longer and tensions continued to mount, “it took 10 days for the first shot to be fired,” Miller says.
“It wasn’t fired at anybody,” he hastens to add, saying, “We don’t have a gun culture in Australia.” But still, the ostensibly nonviolent incident stuck with him. If it only took 10 days for gas-related gunfire to break out, “what would happen in a hundred days?” he says he thought. “What would happen in a thousand days?” The Mad Max movies attempt to answer that question.
Man’s eternal struggle to secure and protect resources provided the seed for the original 1979 film, with the great, roving hordes of Hannibal and Genghis Khan inspiring some of its most indelible images—mobile groups that “consumed everything before them.” But because Miller’s hordes are enabled by fossil fuels instead of elephants or horses, we’re back to that issue of scarcity. (Electric cars don’t work in the Mad Max universe, as “you can’t charge them anymore.”)
While Miller’s most recent Mad Max films share the DNA of the first film, 1981’s The Road Warrior, and the Tina Turner–starring Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the director acknowledges one major development that happened between the third film’s 1985 release and 2015, when Fury Road debuted to global acclaim. “The biggest shift in cinema after sound was the digital dispensation,” Miller says, citing Jurassic Park as the film that ushered in the digital-effects era.
Miller dipped his toes into those waters with the porcine fairy tale Babe, which he cowrote and produced, and then dove in with Happy Feet, the 2006 penguin saga that netted Miller his first Academy Award, for best animated feature. “Almost at the same time, I was thinking, Wow, these tools…we could apply [them] to action films or stories like Mad Max,” Miller says. “We can do things that we can never dream of doing in the past.”
An indelible image from Buster Keaton’s 1926 action comedy, The General, informed a memorable shot in Beyond Thunderdome. Technological advances allowed Miller to take the moment to its logical conclusion in Fury Road, which was impossible to safely shoot before the advent of digital. “Cinema, like all arts or all human endeavors—there’s a kind of cultural evolution. One thing builds on another,” he says.
Eve Batey
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