By Ramona Zacharias.

George Miller

It’s been 36 years since writer, director and producer George Miller first introduced us to Max Rockatansky, the Road Warrior who became a cultural icon. Having graduated medical school in the late 1970s, the young Dr. Miller decided to explore a new career by combining his experience in the emergency room treating victims of car crashes with his passion for action films. The story of a unique hero in a desolate wasteland overrun by road gangs began to take form, the Mad Max franchise was born and Miller was credited with fathering the post-apocalyptic genre.

From there, Miller went on build an eclectic resume, garnering Academy Award nominations for films as diverse as Babe and Lorenzo’s Oil, and taking home the golden statue in 2007 for Happy Feet. Now, 30 years after Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, a 10-year effort sees Tom Hardy inherit the black leather jacket from Mel Gibson (the very same jacket, as it turns out), and Miller’s legendary character take to the road once again.

Mad Max: Fury Road has new heroes and new villains, and a wealth of new technologies utilized to create a viewer experience of the Road Warrior like never before. But what about the writing? How do you set about creating a screenplay for a two-hour film that is going to consist of non-stop action and take place almost exclusively on the road? I sat down with George Miller to find out about his intensely visual movie and the unusual approach to screenwriting that it required.

George Miller on set of Mad Max: Fury Road

Tell me was it like to revisit an iconic character that you created over 30 years ago. How did you approach the task of writing a new story for both your established fans and a new generation?

It was interesting, in many ways. Having done three Mad Max movies, the last thing I wanted to do was another one! But ever since I was a kid, I have lived the imaginative life. I’m hardwired for it now so I’m always coming up with stories. It’s about the only thing I can do.  And when the basic triggering idea for another Mad Max flashed into my mind, I just pushed it away and thought “No”. But as these things happen, they keep on coming back and revisiting unbidden and you suddenly find yourself playing it out. And then you find yourself getting excited by the idea of seeing it…and then you find yourself saying to your colleagues “I think we’re going to make another Mad Max movie”.

So then you have to sit down and render it in some form. In this case, we mapped out the story and its first iteration was an extended storyboard – 3,500 panels that we put around a room. And then we wrote an illustrated screenplay based on that, with the dialogue and so on. So it was atypical. But I wanted to do a movie that was almost like a silent film, where there wasn’t much dialogue. I was always struck by Alfred Hitchcock’s words when he said: “I try to make movies where they don’t have to read the subtitles in Japan”. That’s what we set about with this.

First of all, it was an extended chase film – one long chase over the course of three days. Secondly, the MacGuffin – which traditionally refers to the item over which everyone’s fighting – wasn’t to be a thing, it was to be human. The next step was that this human cargo needed a road warrior. This person couldn’t be male, so she was going to be female – Imperator Furiosa. Max is trapped like a wild animal and gets swept up into their journey and then the two road warriors, Furiosa and Max, somehow have to find a mutual regard and through their cooperation, survive. That was the basic idea. So by the time all that happened, suddenly I found myself making a movie!

Tom Hardy as Max Rockatansky and Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road

As a director, you obviously had a multitude of new technologies at your fingertips to apply to the Mad Max series…but as a writer, what was different? Did you work any type of social change into your new story?

Once you start working in this area where we kind of go forward to the past, as it were – 45-50 years into a post-apocalyptic world – you end up in a kind of near-medieval Dark Age. It’s very allegorical, like the American westerns were. Morality tales, figures in the wasteland playing out in this very elemental world where the rules are simpler. That’s very attractive because it’s easier to see resonances with the zeitgeist…maybe not easy exactly, but they pop up all the time in the subtext.

And then you start looking at the world. I remember the second Mad Max film, Road Warrior, was the result of an oil crisis and we referenced that in the opening “quasi-documentary” with a narrator. In the early 2000s I remember being in India at the Taj Lake Palace, this wonderful hotel in the middle of the lake. But when we were there the whole lake had dried up and there were elephants on the ground and kids were playing soccer. There was a big drought. It was the first time I heard the term “water wars”. That finds its way into this story. And so on. For example, there’s the commodification of all human beings, in particular women, so everyone has the brand of the warlord seal on their back. All of those things, you pick them up along the way and they find their way into the story.

Charlize Theron and George Miller on set of Mad Max: Fury Road

This fourth installment is obviously such a visual, action-oriented film – tell me about taking those thousands of storyboards and putting pen to paper, so to speak.

Well, we can compare it to the very first Mad Max, which was written in 1977. Believe it or not, we couldn’t afford a photocopy machine because we had such a low budget. So we used what they call a Gestetner machine, which uses a type of wax paper…it’s a bit like carbon paper. You type onto that and print it out and it was essentially like using a cheap printing machine. We couldn’t photocopy storyboards back then, which was fine because people weren’t really using them that much anyway. So everything had to be described. I visualized the movie, in a sense – every camera move, every crane move. So I’d say, for example: “The car moves left to right and then has an impact and spins”…and almost describe where every camera was. It was a very cumbersome screenplay! For a 90-minute movie, it was 180 pages.

So this setup allowed us to do the same thing, but this time in pictures, because we could photocopy them. And the information coming across was a very useful tool to the cast and crew; they could see where a vehicle was moving or where a camera might have been relative to something else. The syntax was visual more than anything else. Now of course there was dialogue, and that was written as traditional dialogue. And where the basic mood of the scene couldn’t be rendered as a drawing, that was written as well.

Tom Hardy as Max Rockatansky in Mad Max: Fury Road

I would imagine that you relied heavily on your cast’s understanding of their characters so that you wouldn’t always need words to convey meaning. What efforts did you make and what tools did you use to ensure they had a thorough knowledge of the characters you developed?

We dug down really deep. I had two other writers – the first was Brendan McCarthy, a brilliant artist who was one of the key storyboard artists and designers of the film. He designed and storyboarded on the run. And I also had Nico Lathouris. He and I wrote backstories, not only for each character, but for every vehicle and for every weapon. We wrote a kind of “Bible”, as it were. For example, for how Immortan Joe (the warlord) basically runs the dominance hierarchy in which he controls, through three citadels, all the water, all the gasoline and all the weapons. Every actor had something written for them; or we’d videotape a talk through all the characters. Nicholas Hoult, who plays Nux, was recently telling someone about how we talked his character through from the moment he was conceived and who his parents were all the way until the first day we encounter him in this movie. The big vehicle that Immortan Joe has – the Gigahorse – was the most powerful, most ostentatious one. We had to know the story of that. So we wrote it as a double Cadillac and a V16, not a V8…and so on. All of those things had to be developed.

So the cast got a script and then they also got all this other stuff with it. Now, you could put that in the script…but I think you can’t overload a screenplay. It should read, as much as it can, as an experience. It should reflect the experience you hope that the audience is going to get in the cinema. So you’re using the written word to create an impression of that. It’s just that in this case it would be very difficult to describe things that are very clearly visual. What you write is different for every film. And this was atypical.