George Miller’s journey from Mad Max to Three Thousand Years of Longing

George Miller’s lavish fantasy movie Three Thousand Years of LongingIt begins with an important warning. Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton), the film’s protagonist, warns viewers that the story she’s about to tell beggars belief — and yet it nonetheless happened to her. So to better present it to an audience inoculated against wonder, she decides to tell it as a fairy tale: one of the oldest kinds of stories, where the veracity of an account has little bearing on whether it’s true.

Much like Alithea’s story, the career of the director telling that story is difficult to believe, and seemingly unreal. The breadth of George Miller’s filmography is staggering and slim at the same time. You could watch all of his movies in a weekend and find gonzo comedy, seminal action cinema, brutally intimate drama, and landmark children’s movies. The soft-spoken, eccentric director, who has been around a dozen times since 1979, presents a unique, polarizing film in every case. What is the secret to the director who presents one of cinema’s most iconic and violent wastelands? Happy FeetOr Babe: Pig in City?

Three Thousand Years Of Longing is another curveball from a man who doesn’t know how to throw any other kind of pitch. Miller was a hero in this stage of his career. His reputation has grown through his wild success with the Wild Ones. Mad Max: Fury Road. The 2015 movie is widely considered to be the best in its decade. It’s a thrilling, thoughtful action movie that was received with amazement and enthusiasm — and has since steadily grown in estimation to become regarded as an easy addition to the canon of cinematic greats.

Miller’s latest movie is nothing like Fury Road. Three Thousand Years Of LongingThis is a silent film. It’s a reflection on storytelling and stories presented in the same way that the first stories were shared: two people sitting together and discussing each other. The film is almost a decade old. Fury Road, Miller now has the world’s attention, and he’s cashing that check by making a film to reflect on why he does what he does.

Photo: Elise Lockwood/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios

“Stories are a question,” Miller tells Polygon. “They’re how we as human beings, with the neurology that we’ve evolved since we’ve become homo sapient, make meaning. Our stories make the world coherent. And we do that just as certainly as we have a pulse and we breathe and we do all the other things that we do in life.”

Questions are some of the most potent aspects of George Miller’s work. Who was responsible for the end of the world? The scenery is marked in Mad Max: Fury Road. In Babe: Pig in City, a friendly pig is chased by a vicious pit bull, only to turn around and ask, “Why?” When Alithea discovers a real-life djinn will grant her three wishes, like in the fables of myth, she tries to out-game the rules of storytelling, wondering, Do I need to be a cautionary tale for my children? Even Happy Feet sends Mumble — a penguin who dances in a culture where everyone sings — out alone into the arctic, where he wonders why everyone around him thinks there is only one way to live.

They are all the same question. But they’re asked in different ways. That question, married to an aesthetic molded by the language of silent cinema and a fiendish devotion to doing as much as possible in front of the camera, gives Miller’s movies an uncommon urgency. Miller’s message gives viewers the feeling that they are part of something. Must When they reach the ending of the movie, it seems like they also have to find an answer, no matter how familiar the question might be.

George Miller asks the following question over and over: Is it doomed that we will continue to kill each other while also killing the Earth? Is it foolish to dream of a world where we aren’t?

Dreamer in the bush

George Miller, in his core, is an Australian. He is deeply influenced by his life and his method of filmmaking. Miller was born in Chinchilla, a small rural community. He says that his family had the first flushing toilet. Miller also trained to become a doctor.

Miller’s heritage has also been at the forefront of his mind creatively. In the early ’80s, between the wild success of Road WarriorAnd his feature-length Hollywood debut. Eastwick’s WitchesMiller wrote or directed several miniseries on Australian history. The first, 1983’s The Resignation, chronicled the events of the country’s 1975 constitutional crisis. Another, The Last Bastion, reflects on Australia’s role in World War II.

Miller directed the hour-long documentary “A Hour of Television” in 1997. The Dreaming Life: 40,000 years of dreaming, a survey of Australian film history that uses the Aboriginal concept of the Dreaming — a collective consciousness of story — to make sense of the world and humanity. Miller draws out his broad themes from Australian cinema, drawing inspiration from this idea. Miller argues that Australian films are a predominantly white Dreaming but is inextricably linked to incontestable truths about Australia. The country’s history bleeds into its artists, all telling one story that feeds into the wider story of humanity.

Miller is soft spoken and thoughtful. His talk about Australia is filled with care and awareness. He addresses its colonial roots as a debtor’s colony, its indigenous history and tradition, its beautifully harsh landscape teeming with tough and varied life, and the collision between all this and more. He’s cognizant that he and his art are borne of its earth, part of the bush’s great mosaic. A tragically accurate perspective has also been given to him by his origins.

“I, like everyone else, have anxiety about what we’re doing to ourselves, and what we’re doing to this little tiny planet in the immensity of space and time.’” Miller tells Polygon. “We’re suffering right now in Australia — we’ve had unprecedented rains and cold, where I think in the Northern Hemisphere, they’re having unprecedented heat and loss of water. There’s definitely something crazy going on. It’s there.

“We have a thing called the Great Barrier Reef, which is a great coral reef, which I got to know quite intimately when I worked on a documentary many, many years ago, on an island. After diving there for 40 years, I was shocked at the extent of the destruction. I’m not a marine biologist, or in the sciences anymore, and yet I was really shocked about that. In my 20s I went with young tourist guides and had no clue what the experience was like 40-years ago. I’m one of those who’s not only concerned, but really worried about the prognosis. Having once been a doctor, it feels like we’re sort of one big patient who is denying that they have a really serious illness, and hoping that somehow there’s a magic pill that can make it go away.”

All of Miller’s films, in one manner or another, confront an oblivion of our own making. Our desire to conquer the world, and end its mystery, to the ecological disasters of Mad Max’s films. Three Thousand Years Of Longing, human greed fosters narrow-mindedness, and it’s up to the dreamers to expand that vision — and hopefully, put it right.

The mad world has gone crazy

“Who killed the world?” is the most widely recognized articulation of Miller’s ethos in one of his most complex films. It’s the first of several lines in Mad Max: Fury RoadThese have been ingrained in culture over the years, more like mantras than quotes. Things aren’t us. Everything hurts out here. You can see me.

Warner Bros. Pictures

Fury Road is so propulsive and singular that it’s easy to pore over endlessly and find rewarding aspects to interrogate: its ambitious craft, carefully built yet lean characters, and the way it gestures at more ideas in passing with those spare quotes than most blockbuster franchises get across in their entire storytelling sprawl. Its movie-length chase is a masterpiece. Fury Road runs headlong into the evil of patriarchal power systems, the sorrow of a dying planet, and the guilt of those holding the gun — just to name a few of the thematic ideas that can be found in its blue-orange hellscape.

But Fury Road is an extension of what came before, both in Miller’s wider filmography and in the prior Mad Max films he wrote and directed. It’s a franchise tied up in Miller’s biography, as an Australian who began his professional life as a doctor. As he’s discussed over the years, the original 1979 Mad MaxPartly, it was his experience in emergency rooms. He also saw the dark side of Australian car culture. Wide-open desert roads without speed limits resulted naturally in horrific wrecks. Layer in the 1970s’ fuel crises and the budding environmental movement, and you have a potent tinderbox of cultural forces that only became more potent as the years went by.

Viewers come to Mad Max after seeing Fury RoadYou might not be able to believe that Australia’s socioeconomic freedom fall grounded assumption would lead eventually to Fury Road’s postapocalyptic fantasy society. But even as Miller’s exploration of a world gone mad became more extreme in Road Warrior Beyond Thunderdome, the root cause of the franchise’s despair never went away.

The sequel to the original film. Road Warrior This video shows what happens to nihilism. Mad MaxThe world is overtaken. Society quickly loses the few remaining trappings of modern life — nice suburban homes, diners, green fields — and focuses on the easiest form of survival. The world is awash with the world of Road WarriorIt is shocking in its brutality, as the communities are constantly at risk of being destroyed by strongmen or those who follow them. It all calcifies to the society of Beyond Thunderdome, where shrewd, cruel people who hold the levers of power force entire communities to bend to their will, and humanity’s dependency on limited resources instead of each other makes slaves of them all.

Miller has produced three decades of Mad Max films, but the world they’re made in remains the same. It’s one where people in power would rather accelerate toward destruction than abandon their thirst for gasoline, one that still must obey the dictates of social entropy, where fascism will assert itself unless humanity consciously turns away from it.

It’s all there right at the start of the series. Max Rockatansky leaves at the conclusion of Mad Max, hollowed out by his confrontation with the horror of what humans will do to each other when they’re reduced to survival without hope. Miller worked for 36 years and three more films to demonstrate the immense effort required to help Max escape from his madness. It is difficult, and he never fully does it — every film ends with Max on the road again, searching for something — but he never settles. He leaves the world better off for having been involved in connecting and getting to know other people, even if it is difficult.

“Why?”

To put it another way, filmmakers are born to tell stories. Making a movie takes a long time and requires many craftspeople and artists to focus on the details. Without a primal drive and determination to see the story through, it would be nearly impossible for you to stay focused throughout all that work. Filmmaking’s magic lies in its ability to make a story feel effortless. When a unique sense of urgency and personality emerges at other ends of the filmmaking process, that is what we call the magic of art.

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Miller is referring to the insatiable, persistent drive to answer unanswerable questions. In Miller’s work, the cause for this self-made destruction is clear: greed, which when succumbed to, smothers community. However, what is the root cause of our greed? That’s a more difficult question. “Why?” is a powerful question, but ask it enough, plumb deeply enough, and you’re eventually met with silence. Miller is a great doctor who works for the good of humanity. He must now face the inevitable: death.

Even his lesser-known works contain an examination of the desire to destroy. According to Kyle Buchanan’s expansive book Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road, Miller’s Eastwick’s WitchesMiller was forced to quit filmmaking after this terrible experience. Its darkly comedic story was adapted from a John Updike novel, with a screenplay by Michael Cristofer — the only film Miller directed and did not write. But it’s a familiar Miller story. It’s the struggle for dominance and uplift that is being explored in Miller’s examination of patriarchy. Fury Road.

Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, Susan Sarandon portray three disillusioned women in Eastwick (Rhode Island), struggling against suburban femininity. Release comes in the form of Jack Nicholson’s Daryl Van Horne, who may be the literal devil. His attention unlocks their secrets and seduces them. But like most men who rule the prim and proper patriarchy of the suburbs, Van Horne isn’t as altruistic as he appears. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong about what ails the film’s heroines.

Like most seduction done with selfish intent, Van Horne’s efficacy springs from a kernel of truth. “Men are such cocksuckers, aren’t they?” he says during a monologue midway through the film. “You don’t have to answer that. It’s true. They’re scared. They become frightened of women with obvious power. They don’t know what to do. They can call them witches and burn or torture them until all women are afraid. Afraid of herself… afraid of men… and all for what? Fear of losing their hard-on.”

Similarly, Miller’s return to feature filmmaking in 1992’s Lorenzo’s Oil doesn’t initially seem in step with the interrogation of destruction best signified by his Mad Max films. Based on true events, the film follows parents Augusto and Michaela Odone (Nick Nolte and Susan Sarandon) as they seek a cure for their son Lorenzo, diagnosed with what was then a newly discovered condition: adrenoleukodystrophy, or ALD.

It is about normal people trying to resist the forces of nature. Lorenzo’s Oil An antagonistic energy is directed towards institutions and egos. Augusto and Michaela wish to save their son. But first, they need to overthrow a system which would otherwise allow them to lose him. At the same time, they’re combating the true villain of the story Miller is telling: their own despair.

Lorenzo’s OilIt is meant to show viewers the struggle of parents to resist the forces of fate and disease. It’s a difficult, unpleasant movie, but every step of the way, it challenges viewers to hold on like the Odones and continue to dream, and not just for selfish reasons. In the film, the Odones’ plight reaches a turning point in the third act when they realize the cure they helped discover might not cure their son, but it may help future sufferers. It is important to work for others, as well as yourself, to make a difference and to share your dream with the community.

Through this lens, Miller’s animated children’s movie Happy Feet This is less unusual than you might think. What seems like a tried-and-true cartoon fable about being yourself soon intersects with the dire state of the world at large, as penguin protagonist Mumble (voiced by Elijah Wood) is blamed for his colony’s food shortage, because his tap dancing puts him at odds with his singing community. In exile, Mumble discovers the true cause of the shortage: human overfishing and pollution has impacted the colony’s food supply. He’s captured and trapped in a Sea World exhibit, but his gift of dance encourages humans to reconsider their impact on his colony and release him back into the wild. The only way to prevent destruction is to make the world more beautiful.

Rewind to this scene Babe: Pig in CityBabe is entrapped by three chimps to be used as bait for their guard dogs. Chased through the streets in terror by a truly frightening pit bull and doberman pair, Babe flees until he reaches a bridge where, in what New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis calls “one of the great moments in movie history,” Babe turns around and quietly asks: “Why?”

Babe is thrown into the water by his dog. He swims up to the surface and continues on. He and his dog have been made into who they are by the world, but he still questions why, can question whether it is true and dreams of a better future for them both.

Imagine a green space

In the late evening Three Thousand Years Of Longing, Alithea is shown in her London home, surrounded by the harsh sounds of modernity that the quiet of her flat can’t quite keep outside. It’s hard for her to hear stories in London. She is easily distracted by the technology all around. The neighbors she lives with are loud, nitpicky bigots. The magic is very difficult to believe. In London, her work as a Narratologist (a scholar engaged with cultural anthropology and stories’ role in history) seems absurd and frivolous. The city is like her. Babe: Pig in CityHer hometown can be used to shut out the collective humanity. Machines like this are deliberately designed to encourage ownership and profit, while separating those with a lot from the ones who don’t. It’s a useful tool for those who wish to kill the world.

Three Thousand Years Of LongingAlithea is hungry for more. She wants to feel known, connected to the cosmic fabric of the universe like the stories she’s devoted her life to studying. But from her London flat, the distance between that world and the one she inhabits seems too great, and maybe she’s past the point of her life where she feels capable of changing her world. It is absurd. She needs to ask the question and tell the story. Then she must ask why. As Furiosa, Mumble, and Babe discover before her, that’s the first necessary step to making the world different. Although it might not make a significant difference, we may be able to find a solution to our suffering if there are enough people who choose that path.

Image: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios

In George Miller’s body of work, all suffering is a tragedy: a child’s, an animal’s, a planet’s. In his films, the camera’s power lies in its function as an unblinking eye, and the only real crime is looking away. The common thread of his filmmaking is this: His characters are honest about the dark truths in their lives. They are able to accept the dignity and power of dreams and use them to push forward to try and make it real.

In the Western world — the one largely canonized by white people in power, the one that thinks it’s the cultural center of the planet — there are no new fairy tales, or at least, none like our original shared stories: fables passed down from person to person, taking new shape in different cultures, communities, and eras. Miller may be onto something when Alithea tells her fairy tale. Without shared fantasies what is there to connect us? Telling stories is a way to ask questions and gain insight into the world. Dreaming is essential. Then we must wake up, and try and realize that dream — for ourselves, but more importantly, for others. Even if it seems impossible to succeed.

George Miller’s movies demand — urgently, creatively, and in a dozen different modes and voices — that we confront the reality of the world around us, and acknowledge how we’ve helped shape it. He asks the following question: It has to be like this. Do you have any dreams about solving this problem?George Miller believes it is beautiful to fail even when we make mistakes, and even if it’s a fairytale,