CANNES, France (AP) ā Only recently has realized just how influential his medical education was to the world of āMad Max.ā
Miller was briefly a doctor before finding filmmaking and his twin brother, whom he attended university with, remained one. As a resident at St. Vincentās Hospital in Sydney, Miller saw people in birth and in death, in moments of, he says, āextremis.ā
Extremis ā a Latin word that literally translates as āat the point of deathā ā would be a fairly apt way to describe the post-apocalypse wasteland of āMad Max.ā It could apply to, well, all of the characters, or to the Earth, itself. The more you think about it, the more Millerās desert dystopia begins looking like a fantastical ER. The human blood bags of Furiosaās prosthetic arm. Immortan Joeās respirator mask.
āI donāt think Iād still be making films if I didnāt have that part of myself,ā Miller said of his medical background in a recent interview.
āYouāre looking at a human being from every point of view. As organs. As individuals,ā Miller says. āSometimes looking through a microscope and seeing their cells. Or an autopsy. Psychologically. In every way, youāre looking at the human being. Thatās what you do as a storyteller.ā
Millerās holistic eye could apply to the sprawling saga of āMad Max,ā too. Itās a world that has lived in his head for nearly half a century. Unlike most other long-running film franchises, itās exclusively Millerās. The 79-year-old filmmaker has written and directed every film, from 1979ās āMad Maxā to the new which opens in theaters May 24.
Also unlike most franchises, Millerās vision has grown only more kinetic with time. āFury Road,ā considered among the greatest action films ever made, moved like Buster Keaton on steroids, with madcap stunts and continual forward movement, all agonizingly spliced together from the briefest of shots amid an infamously troubled production. āFuriosa,ā a prequel to the events of that film starring as a young Furiosa, enlarges the saga, and, particularly in a few breathless sequences, maintains the same headlong momentum.
āI donāt do anything with my hands anymore,ā Miller says. āThereās always someone who can type faster than me. Thereās always someone who can cut faster than me. Thereās always someone who can operate a camera much better than me. So itās all in the head.ā
āI can quote some of the lines from the movie but I know virtually every cut of virtually every movie Iāve made ā and in many cases, the cuts of some of my favorite movies,ā adds Miller. āThatās my neurology.ā
But it took time to restart āMad Max.ā As sensational as the response was to āFury Road,ā which won six Oscars, its making was marred by production troubles and discord among its cast. Friction continued in the years after, too, as Miller and Warner Bros. sued each other in a pay dispute.
Those issues eventually got ironed out and attention turned to a pair of scripts Miller had ready. While āFury Roadā was stuck in delay, Miller had written treatments for both āFuriosaā and āThe Wasteland,ā a āMad Maxā film taking place a year before āFury Road.ā He hopes to make that soon. First came āFuriosa,ā which Miller first intended to be an anime.
āI had no thoughts of making it into a feature film,ā he says. āBut when āFury Roadā was delayed yet again by rains, there was no point in making an anime before we made āFury Road.ā By the time we made āFury Road,ā all the history of that, we decided to make it as a feature.ā
Miller reassembled much of the same team from āFury Roadā: editor Margaret Sixel (Millerās wife), co-writer Nico Lathouris, producer Doug Mitchell, production designer Colin Gibson, stunt coordinator Guy Norris. But his cast would be largely new. For a younger Furiosa, he turned to Taylor-Joy. As they discussed her casting, Miller asked Taylor-Joy to film herself doing the āMad as Hellā monologue from āNetwork.ā
How was her Peter Finch? āI got the part,ā , smiling. Then came the hard part: shooting āFuriosa.ā
āItās what I wanted. I knew I wanted something that was going to test me in every way, shape and form,ā says Taylor-Joy. āAnd I got that experience. Anybody thatās attracted to making a āMad Maxā movie, if itās not arduous in some way, I personally would feel cheated. Thatās not what you go to the wasteland for.ā
That included only some three dozen lines in the whole movie for Taylor-Joy. On the other hand, a staggering action sequence principally on the War Rig took 78 days to shoot. Taylor-Joy says it was an exercise of piece-by-piece filmmaking.
āI could kind of count myself down,ā says Taylor-Joy. āI was like, āOK, Iām below the vehicle. And now Iām on the side of the vehicle. And Iāve finally made it into the cow catcher. And, oh my God, Iām standing. This is better.ā"
, in one of the most colorful and transformative performances of his career, plays the villain Dementus with the flair of a deranged Roman conqueror. A key to unlocking the character, Hemsworth says, was a tip from Miller to try journaling in the voice of Dementus, a maniac with his own painful history who wears his Rosebud ā a teddy bear ā strapped to his back.
āIt was the most satisfying experience that Iāve had," Hemsworth says of the role. āThe script gave me so many more options and directions that I could take a character than I had previously been given. It was a big departure from everything else Iād done."
Lengthy as the making of āFuriosaā was, both stars went into the process determined to have a more positive environment than on āFury Road.ā
āWe all went in to make this ā not excusing any kind of behavior ā wanting to be extra kind to each other,ā says Taylor-Joy. āEspecially for me, Iām a big George Miller fan. I wanted to make sure he felt respected and heard and cared on set.ā
āMad Maxā has by now morphed into a kind of archetype ā a near-future Western with amped-up modern anxieties. As before in āMad Max,ā water is short and natural resources are brutally battled over in āFuriosa.ā
āYou could argue that depending on where you are in history, where you are in time and space, there is always a sense of potential chaos and a fallen world,ā Miller says. āItās always there in the zeitgeist.ā
But, Miller points out, these movies are largely shot outdoors, and the conditions heās made them in has markedly changed with time. Miller remembers visiting an area of the Great Barrier Reef in the early ā70s. When he returned decades later to the same beach, āthe difference was shocking to me.ā
āAll of that stuff is there," Millers says. āAnd it has to be expressed in any story you tell about the world.ā
Millerās brother recently retired as a doctor. But for years, theyād speak on the phone about his patients, discussing observations and diagnoses.
āThat was a way, I realize, of us both processing the chaos of the world,ā says Miller. āI like to think that thatās what Iām still doing.ā
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Jake Coyle, The Associated Press
