George Miller (filmmaker)

• 1. Introduction

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  George Miller was born on the 3rd of March 1945 in Chinchilla, Queensland, the son of Greek immigrant parents. By the time he turned thirty, he had trained as a physician, completed a hospital residency, and was quietly teaching himself to make films on the side. The question his career poses is not how a doctor became a filmmaker. It is how one person could move from low-budget Australian genre films to family animation to operatic action cinema, winning an Academy Award in each chapter.

  Mad Max, the franchise that made his name, debuted in 1979 on an independently financed budget. Decades later, the fourth film in that series received ten Academy Award nominations, including one for Miller himself for Best Director. In between, he produced films that launched Nicole Kidman's career, directed Jack Nicholson and Cher, brought penguins to the screen in a film that earned more than $363 million worldwide, and attempted to direct a Justice League film that never got made. His production company, Kennedy Miller Mitchell, carries the name of a friend who died young, and that name has never been changed.

• 2. Roots and the Road to Film

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  Jim Miller, George's father, was born on the Greek island of Kythira near Mitata. Jim's own father had anglicised the family surname from Miliotis to Miller when he emigrated to Australia in 1920. George's mother Angela came from a family of Greek refugees displaced by the 1923 population exchange from Anatolia. The household George grew up in was shaped by two waves of migration across two generations.

  He attended Ipswich Grammar School and then Sydney Boys High School before enrolling to study medicine at the University of New South Wales alongside his twin brother John. In his final year at medical school, in 1971, he and his younger brother Chris made a one-minute short film called St. Vincent's Revue Film that won first prize in a student competition. That same year, attending a film workshop at Melbourne University, he met a fellow student named Byron Kennedy. The friendship that followed would define the next decade of his professional life.

  After completing his medical residency at Sydney's St Vincent's Hospital in 1972, Miller spent his spare time crewing on short experimental films. He and Kennedy founded Kennedy Miller Productions that same year. The company was the vehicle for everything that followed, and when Kennedy died in 1983, Miller kept his name in it.

• 3. The Ozploitation Years

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  Miller's first work, the short film Violence in Cinema: Part 1 from 1971, was so confrontational in its depiction of cinematic violence that it was placed in the documentary category at the 1972 Sydney Film Festival. Critics, audiences, and distributors were divided. The film announced a sensibility that was not interested in comfort.

  The feature script for Mad Max was written by Miller and James McCausland in 1975. Kennedy Miller Productions financed it independently, and the film was released in 1979. It became an international success and generated two further sequels starring Mel Gibson: Mad Max 2, also released under the title The Road Warrior in 1981, and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome in 1985.

  During the gap between the second and third Mad Max films, Miller directed a segment for the anthology film Twilight Zone: The Movie in 1983, a remake of the story "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet." A helicopter crash during that production, one Miller was not present for, shook him enough that he reassessed how stunt work would be handled in his future films. He also co-produced and co-directed acclaimed Australian television miniseries during this period, including The Dismissal in 1983 and The Cowra Breakout in 1984, work that showed his range beyond genre action.

• 4. Hollywood and Hard Lessons

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  The Witches of Eastwick in 1987 brought Miller to Hollywood with a cast of Jack Nicholson, Susan Sarandon, Cher, and Michelle Pfeiffer. It was a difficult production. "I quit the film twice and Jack held me in there," Miller later said of Nicholson. "He said, 'Just sit down, lose your emotion, and have a look at the work. If you think the work is good, stick with the film.'" Miller credited Nicholson as the most instructive collaborator of his career.

  Nicholson also taught Miller a practical lesson about dealing with producers: ask for 300 extras when you need 150, because producers will give you less than you request. The award-winning production designer Polly Platt collaborated closely with Miller on the film. Cher later recalled that Miller had called her at home the day after her 40th birthday to tell her that he and Nicholson did not want her in the film, on the grounds that she was deemed too old.

  After that experience, Miller pulled back from directing and focused on producing Australian projects. He was the producing force behind a string of films and television series all featuring Nicole Kidman, including Flirting, Dead Calm, and the miniseries Bangkok Hilton and Vietnam. His contribution to her early career was direct. He returned to directing with Lorenzo's Oil in 1992, a biographical medical drama he co-wrote with Nick Enright, starring Nick Nolte and Susan Sarandon. Variety described it as a "true-life story brought to the screen intelligently and with passionate motivation." The film earned Miller his first Academy Award nomination, for Best Original Screenplay.

• 5. Babe and the Family Turn

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  In 1995, Miller produced and co-wrote Babe, a comedy-drama about a sheep-herding pig directed by Chris Noonan. The film earned seven Academy Award nominations, including one for Miller for Best Adapted Screenplay. He then wrote and directed the sequel, Babe: Pig in the City, in 1998. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the sequel four stars, writing that it "outdoes itself with the sets and special effects that make up 'the city'" and praising Miller for extending and improving the ideas of the first film rather than copying them. Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune named it the best film of 1998.

  Also in 1995, Miller produced Video Fool for Love, a cinema verité documentary directed by film editor Robert Gibson that dealt with Gibson's personal life and was described as controversial and divisive.

  Happy Feet arrived in November 2006, a Warner Bros. animated film about penguins in Antarctica that Miller created and directed. It earned more than $363 million worldwide. Manohla Dargis of The New York Times wrote that Miller "shows a remarkable persistence of vision" and that he "brings an unusual depth of feeling to his work as well as a distinct moral worldview." The film won Miller the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, his fourth nomination and first win. The sequel, Happy Feet Two, was released in 2011 through Dr. D Studios, a Sydney-based digital animation company Miller co-founded in mid-2007 as a partnership with Omnilab Media. When Happy Feet Two performed poorly at the box office, the studio closed in 2013.

• 6. Fury Road and the Return

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  Principal photography on Mad Max: Fury Road began in 2012, several years after the project had stalled through repeated production delays. The film starred Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron and was released on the 15th of May 2015. Widespread critical acclaim followed. A.O. Scott of The New York Times called it a "Critic's Pick" and wrote that Miller "has always stayed true to his scrappy, pragmatic roots" and that "at 70, he has a master craftsman's intuitive sense of proportion."

  Fury Road received ten Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and a Best Director nomination for Miller. It won six Academy Awards. Miller himself was named in the Best Director category, a category in which he had never previously been nominated.

  In April 2017, Miller confirmed that he and co-writer Nico Lathouris had completed two additional post-Fury Road scripts for the Mad Max series, and that Hardy had committed to the next sequel. Miller said in 2015 and again in early 2017 that the fifth film would be titled Mad Max: The Wasteland. The announced Furiosa spinoff, starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth, premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Manohla Dargis of The New York Times awarded it a Critic's Pick and declared Miller "one kick-ass prophet of doom." Between the two Cannes films, Three Thousand Years of Longing, starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton, had premiered at Cannes in May 2022 and grossed $20 million worldwide against a $60 million budget, a significant loss that did nothing to slow him.

• 7. The Man Behind the Films

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  Miller was married to actress Sandy Gore from 1985 to 1992, and they have a daughter. Since 1995 he has been married to film editor Margaret Sixel, with whom he has two sons. Sixel has worked on many of his directorial efforts.

  In May 2015, Miller told Vanity Fair, "I've gone from being very male dominant to being surrounded by magnificent women. I can't help but be a feminist." He serves as patron of the Australian Film Institute and the Brisbane International Film Festival, and as a co-patron of the Sydney Film Festival.

  In 1996, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia. He received honorary doctorates from the University of New South Wales, Griffith University, and an honorary Master of Arts from the Australian Film Television and Radio School. In 2009, France awarded him the Order of the Arts and Letters. In 2010, he became the first non-American filmmaker to receive honorary member status from the Visual Effects Society. In 2016, he served as president of the jury for the Palme d'Or at the 69th Cannes Film Festival. He has said many times that the 1940 version of Pinocchio is one of his favourite films, a detail that sits quietly alongside a body of work spanning six decades.