George Miller never would've made Furiosa if not for Peter Weir's advice

The Master & Commander filmmaker gave some helpful advice after Miller finished the original Mad Max and considered quitting the business

By Matt Schimkowitz  |  May 7, 2024 | 4:11am
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George Miller never would've made Furiosa if not for Peter Weir's advice
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What a lovely day for George Miller to return to the Wasteland. With Furiosa, Miller’s fifth visit to the putrid remains of humanity sometime in the not-so-distant future, the action filmmaker who has consistently redefined action filmmaking returns to the Mad Max world more prepared than ever. After the infamously difficult production of Furiosa’s predecessor, Mad Max: Fury Road, Miller speeds back with a sprawling epic that anyone would be foolish not to witness.

That doesn’t mean it’s been easy. “Fury Road was a difficult movie to make,” Miller said at tonight’s screening of Furiosa. “We had a bad relationship with the studio, Tom and Charlize—it’s well documented—we’re fighting. That didn’t get in the way of the filmmaking, but there are the difficulties that you have to cope with. It happens on every film. You don’t know where it’s going to come from.”

But that’s after directing four of these things. When Miller finished his original Mad Max in 1979, he was ready to hang up his bullhorn and puffy directing pants for good. “When I made the first Mad Max, I had never been on a set before. We had such a low budget. And even though the film worked, I really thought I could never make another movie. It was too bewildering.”

Before starting work on Mad Max 2 and deciding to keep directing instead of returning to medicine, Miller spoke with fellow Australian auteur Peter Weir. Weir had already made two classics, the proto-Mad Max demolition derby, The Cars That Ate Paris, and the hallucinatory wonder, The Picnic At Hanging Rock. Who’s going to have better advice than him?

“I remember I spoke to Peter Weir, who had just done his second or third feature, and I explained to him how difficult it was. He said, ‘George, don’t you realize, it’s like that for every movie.’”

“This was about the time the Vietnam War was finishing. He said, ‘Think about it as if you’re in patrol in Vietnam. You’ve got to get through it. You’ve got your platoon. You’ve got your mission. But you don’t know where the snipers are, you don’t know where the landmines are, you don’t know what’s going to happen. But you have to be agile enough to go with the flow and still get the end result.’ That stuck with me. It still sticks with me.”

On Furiosa, Miller wasn’t battling argumentative co-stars or a studio that didn’t trust him. Instead, his fights were against the forces of nature that his film predicts will wipe us all out: Extreme weather and pandemics. “On this film, the worst things you had to struggle with were really inclement weather and COVID.”

Still, his “army” training came in handy. Though it rains in the desert regularly, Miller was prepared, having already made four Max movies. “We traveled with a big tent, so even though we were always shooting on location, we always had a backup plan to shoot interiors inside this massive tent, so we had lights and everything there. And we just keep shooting.”

Furiosa opens everywhere on May 24.

 
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