Mad Miller: The philosophy of the doctor director

JAIME GANA

It’s difficult to distinguish where the madness of the titular Mad Max begins and where the creative genius of director George Miller ends. His latest film, Three Thousand Years of Longing, released early September is about a Djinn unleashed from his lamp by a taciturn woman who is reluctant to know what to wish for. The film travels back through history as it interweaves myth and reality, all with a cinematic panache that dazzles with its movement and colour.

Before this, he made movies about sweet talking pigs like Babe, animated tap-dancing penguins in Happy Feet and apocalyptic vehicular dystopias in the form of the Mad Max trilogy. In the cinematic industry where directors are usually so specialized to a specific genre, it’s very rare to see anyone trail blaze with a combination of such range and resounding success.

With such a filmography, one would assume the creation of such stories with acerbic intuition and skill would have come from the tongue of an individual with immense background in the arts. To the surprise of most however—though perhaps not to the man himself— medicine was in fact his first true profession.

So how did someone initially burdened with such a demanding occupation become one of today’s most pre-eminent directors? Did such a commitment to science and medicine lend a healing hand to his modern creative acclaim?

To produce a crispy clear 4k movie picture of his unique development, let’s take a trip through Fury Road and deeper down south towards George Miller’s past. At the age of eight, George Miller had already aspired to be a doctor. A child of immigrant parents, he grew up in the small Australian town of Chinchilla in South Queensland, at the time home to only two thousand people. He had no intention of making films, as there was no prospect of a future in what could only be a passion and nothing more. In a way, he claimed being unaware of its professional potential was actually a better method of learning. Despite having both feet entrenched in the throes of medical school, he would cut classes to attend cinema screenings by his university film society and local grindhouse during lectures. He would only keep up by reading the notes transcribed by his twin brother, who was also his medical school classmate. By the time he graduated, his obsession paid off as he was awarded a prize for a short film he made with friends. This allowed him to attend a film workshop that further propelled his career, and we can only be thankful he never looked back. It seems the passion, as it always does when fate is on your side, trumped obligation. are engaged with humans from varying points of view and in their totality. You look inside a person during surgery, inspect minuscule cells the lens of a microscope, and also take a wider macroscopic view on epidemiological trends and relationships. To Miller, the various perspectives of human investigation from the microscopic to the entire population mimic that of the screen in its use of wide and close-up shots. There are parallels for anyone willing to see it and are open to let fascination take hold of you with reckless abandon. In this way, Miller claims the investigation of the human element through medicine has made his cinema what it is.

However, when there has always been a perceived gulf between science and art, George Miller has substantiated the existence of a bridge in this gap through his own experience entwined in both. He has credited his medical life as somewhat of an apprenticeship for his film career and sees a parallel between them in the involvement of active problem solving. Both a patient in need of resuscitation and a pressurized film set must be treated swiftly before going limp.

Regardless of how indebted Miller is to science, it is intriguing to hear him contend, “in any case, no matter what your discipline, the process is the same.” In the same way a doctor treats an unknown illness, a mathematician finds the solution to an equation, or an actor figuring out how to perform his scene: the process is always the same. The best work is done with reckless abandon, and a trust in the intuition only gained through intense preparation. Reading between the lines then, it is not what profession you’re in that defines what you create, but the passion and dedication residing deep within that is quietly but not so patiently waiting to unravel and unleash

More importantly, the medical life demands human interaction, and these interactions give you a refined sense of what is contained within the human condition. In his own words, it offered him “ a very privileged perspective of other humans.” Medicine exposes you to the need to understand people’s histories in order to diagnose their ailment; to witness the extremities of life such as death and childbirth. Within it you

“In a sense, we’re all on our own Fury Road,” he says, and he has lived true to this maverick mantra to an extent even greater than Mad Max himself. The man, now seventy-seven with thick curly grey hair and a penetrating gaze through his distinguished set of polarized spectacles, inspires the look more of a wizened djinn that he himself would have created. Yet it must be said that based on what he’s achieved, it may be hard-pressed for anyone to be convinced otherwise.