Director George Miller discusses returning to the world of Mad Max with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga during the Global Press Conference.
During the global press conference in support of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, writer and director George Miller discusses the new film. He talks about why this world resonates with so many, what it was like returning, and how it feels to have such a positive reception at Cannes.
Jacqueline Coley, the awards editor at Rotten Tomatoes, moderates.
George Miller Talks Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
What do you think it is about a world like this that keeps audiences fired up and why does it still resonate with people years later?
George Miller: I don’t think you could come down to a fixed answer to that. But I think it’s why I’m still drawn to telling these kind of stories. They’re basically allegories. In the same way that the American Western you could argue is allegories. And indeed, certainly for everything from fairy stories to folk lore, mythologies, even religious stories, where the story is in the eye of the beholder, wherever you are.
Wherever you are in time or space. You’re responding to things in the story that has made it to you. And I think you can get a lot into the movies. There tends to be more to them than meets the eye. So I guess that’s the reason, if any. But you never know. You tell the stories, you offer it up to people, and they make of it what they will.
When did you know Chris Hemsworth was right for the role of Dementus?
George Miller: 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. And it proved to be the case. We also had some concept art. Because he’s a kind of a showman, a kind of almost a great marauder across the wasteland with a great horde, similar I guess to the Romans or Genghis Khan and so on.
So we had him in one bit of concept art with an aquiline nose. And he saw it and said, “Well, that would be interesting.” I said, “Oh, great.” Just, that sort of process happened. But mostly, mostly was the work 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 don’t know where he got it from, it was just like you’d prepare.
If the analogy is athletics, you’ve gonna great athlete. This applies, and, you know, all of them were like this, but you prepare them, you prepare with them, you guide them through as best you can. And however, the rigorous the preparation is, in the moment of performance, you don’t know what the basketball of 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 me 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 happened to me on this film. But particularly when they had to work together.
Why did you know Anya Taylor-Joy was perfect to take on the role of Furiosa?
George Miller: She definitely had big shoes to fill. And I’d only seen a few short clips of The Witch. And this was before she did the Queen’s Gambit. But Edgar Wright showed me a very early cut of Last Night in Soho. And I saw her for the first time. There was something very compelling about her. And I didn’t tell Edgar at that point, that I was interested in casting her. But he picked it up straightaway and said, “She’s got it all, George. Whatever you need her to do, she can do it.”
And I really trusted his opinion. And it proved to be right. I mean, it’s a difficult role. 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. 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.
People who speak the most are the warlords in this world. Immortan Joe, and indeed, Dementus. Because it’s part of their pageantry, if you like. And she had to do it. She had to do it. And of course, something about 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 is, you know, it becomes apparent without having to work itself hard and make it obvious.
I find it really, really interesting to work with these characters.
What do you think has been your philosophy that allows you to keep your passion and vision intact through mediums like Mad Max, Happy Feet, and everything in between?
George Miller: Well, to be honest, look, I have to say, curiosity definitely. No question. I’ve still got an appetite for it. And I’ve found when I started making, I was trying to figure out how to tell stories, and that’s become not only an inquiry, basically now lifelong. I never intended for this to be the case, but it’s a lifetime inquiry into not only how to tell stories, but why we tell stories.
And what is the function of the story? Somehow, whatever the medium always changes. But story is fundamental to who we are as human beings, there’s no question about it. We are hard wired for it. It’s the way I think that our brains work, both individually and collectively. And I know it’s been with us for all of time. I happen to be, one of the fortunate things about living in Australia is that we have in the Indigenous Australian culture, we’ve had the longest living continuous culture here in Australia.
People are now saying it’s probably 65,000 years old. And I’ve been able to actually get, by going out into some places in Australia and interacting with these people to some extent, I’ve got 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.
We’ve evolved, homo sapiens has basically evolved from the [indiscernible]. 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 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 quite anywhere else.
And to know that’s been happening, that somehow that’s deeply a part of us and basically it’s all over the planet. It’s in every family. It’s in every community. It’s in every nation. It’s in every belief system. And it’s at every age. From nursery rhymes to fairy tales to all the stories of your community, your local sporting team, to all the great mythologies and folklores and all the great religions, it’s there. And that’s the thing that we sort of participate in.
All of us. We can’t help it. It’s the way we are. The mediums always change though. Cinema is always changing, and the way we engage is always changing.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is playing in theaters now.
NEXT: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga Review: An Epic Tale of Revenge
About Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
As the world fell, young Furiosa is snatched from the Green Place of Many Mothers and falls into the hands of a great Biker Horde led by the Warlord Dementus. Sweeping through the Wasteland, they come across the Citadel presided over by The Immortan Joe. While the two Tyrants war for dominance, Furiosa must survive many trials as she puts together the means to find her way home.
Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth star in Academy Award-winning mastermind George Miller’s “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” the much-anticipated return to the iconic dystopian world he created more than 30 years ago with the seminal “Mad Max” films. Miller now turns the page again with an all-new original, standalone action adventure that will reveal the origins of the powerhouse character from the multiple Oscar-winning global smash “Mad Max: Fury Road.”
The new feature from Warner Bros. Pictures and Village Roadshow Pictures is produced by Miller and his longtime partner, Oscar-nominated producer Doug Mitchell (“Mad Max: Fury Road,” “Babe”), under their Australian-based Kennedy Miller Mitchell banner.
