In Service Of Story

It might come as a surprise that George Miller, the creator behind the Mad Max franchise, a series of high-octane, post-apocalyptic action films, is one of Hollywood’s most thoughtful writers. But George does not think of himself as a writer or even an action film director; he views himself as a storyteller. Whether it be a cheap, down and dirty exploitation film, a children’s cartoon, or a $150 million epic, he treats everything he works on with the same level of respect. He approaches each and every story with a degree of rigor and precision that is rare, even amongst the greats. His ambition, no matter what he is working on, is to tell the best story possible.

“What happened with Mad Max is that I didn't think I was slumming, doing an exploitation movie. I treated it as high [art].” – George Miller, Director, 2009

Serve the Collective Unconscious

George Miller found himself in an odd situation. He absolutely detested the film he’d made. After spending a year cutting the first Mad Max movie himself, all he could see were its defects. If you asked him, it had no merit; it was just a sequence of flaws edited one after the other. The only issue with his perspective on the film was that it became one of the greatest successes in cinema history. Made for less than $400,000, Mad Max ended up grossing over $100 million worldwide. This baffled the director, and he set out to learn why.

He started hearing similar feedback from different countries around the world. In Japan, they regarded the film as a Samurai story, in France, it was clearly a western, and in Sweden it was without a doubt, a viking tale. George realized that in making Mad Max, he had unintentionally stumbled onto an archetype that was used by storytellers throughout history. This led him to Carl Jung and his theory of the collective unconscious, which states that part of your subconscious is shared by all humans around the world. From there he discovered Joseph Campbell and the work he’d done to decode the monomyth, which points out that great myths and creation stories from cultures throughout time all follow a similar structure. It was after learning about The Hero’s Journey that George said Joseph Campbell made him forget about cinema altogether, and he just became a storyteller. He’s been on a quest to understand the great mysteries of storytelling ever since.

“Storytellers are the servants of the collective unconscious.” – George Miller, Director, 1985

Every George Miller film is the same. People like to discuss the eclectic nature of his filmography, from Mad Max to Lorenzo’s Oil, to Babe, Happy Feet, and then back to Mad Max. But if you look below the surface, they’re all Hero’s Journeys. He even acknowledged this in a 2011 interview, stating, “All of them, Babe, Mad Max, Happy Feet tend to fall into the pattern of the classic Joseph Campbell hero myth. You have the lone character setting out into unknown territory and exploring the edges of their society and who undergoes dark trials and returns with a burden to their community. Almost unconsciously, I’m drawn to the hero myth.”

While George has spent a large portion of his adult life trying to understand the alchemy of great stories, when he sits down to write one, he forgets everything he’s learned. You don’t want to intellectualize the process because, when you become too aware of the techniques, they lose all of their power. Studying storytelling and structure is important not so that you can play paint-by-numbers, but so that you improve your instincts. It is the knowledge you use to navigate the unknown, not a guide to a specific destination. You want these learnings to emerge subconsciously through your process while you’re focused on telling an engaging and emotional story, or as George puts it, “You have to find the poetry and let the other stuff happen underneath.”

“I don’t work intellectually. You don’t respond to a film only intellectually. You respond in the same way that you enjoy all stories; even when you’re a little kid listening to fairytales, it provokes something inside of you if it has any resonance at all. And I think that’s the way movies should work, and if we’ve done our job right, this one should work like that too.” – George Miller, Director, 1985

Serve the World Where the Story Takes Place

In his 1997 documentary about the history of Australian cinema, George referred to the moviegoing experience as “public dreaming.” It is a place where strangers congregate in the dark to escape their reality and indirectly process their own lives. But in order for that to happen, the audience has to be so immersed in the experience that they don’t even realize they’re dreaming. George’s ambition as a storyteller is to bring you out of your seat and into the screen; into the world that he has created. His goal when making Mad Max: Fury Road was to have people so invested in the story that, by the end of the movie, they hadn’t touched their popcorn.

“If a movie is a dream, then waking up from the dream is death to the movie. If you find yourself looking at your watch, or worrying about the guy who's rustling popcorn, or suddenly remembering you left the lights on back home, or whatever, then the movie dies for that. Your job as a screenwriter is to create a movie in which the plot is so arresting that you remain held in that dream for the whole 100 minutes. The best movie is when you go, ‘Oh my God, something just happened to me there. It's not just that I was entertained for a couple of hours, it's that I was changed in those hours.’ That's what we're aiming for.” – John Collee, Screenwriter, 2024

In order for people to believe in your story, they must believe in the world where your story takes place. As soon as people start to question the details of your world, they’ve woken up from the dream, and you’ve lost them. That is not to say that it cannot be fantastical. To describe the Mad Max wasteland as ‘bizarre’ would be an understatement, but you don’t question it because everything feels like it belongs there. You believe in this unbelievable world because it is guided by a set of rules that everything adheres to.

When coming up with these rules, you do not want to establish them arbitrarily. George’s guiding principle when worldbuilding is that everything must justify its existence. You’re not coming up with rules for the sake of it; you’re coming up with rules that make sense within the context of the world you’re creating.

When designing the world of Fury Road, two important rules that George established were: all items in the wasteland must be made from found objects repurposed, and just because it’s the wasteland does not mean that people can’t create beautiful things. Everyone, from prop builders to costume designers to set decorators, all followed these rules when creating the objects that would fill the screen. If they were to have made something that did not check both of those boxes, it wouldn’t have made it into the film.

Not only did the props have to follow these rules, but they also had to justify their existence. They had to both serve a functional purpose and have a coherent backstory. Why does this coat have a tear here? What caused this dent in the car? Where was this hood ornament salvaged from? Why did the driver of this car engrave this specific design into the steering wheel? You had to be prepared to answer questions like this from George because he wanted to ensure that everything you see in Fury Road was a logical extension of the world.

But your detailed and logical world means nothing if it is not inhabited by real and authentic characters. George, in addition to writing the story, along with co-writers Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris, came up with backstories for each and every character you see in the film. Even if it was an extra that you saw on screen for five seconds, they knew who he was, where he came from, and how he got there.

While you should know who your characters are when writing your story, it's important to remember that your audience has never met them. They learn who each character is based on the actions that they take. As soon as someone starts making choices that don’t fit within the pattern you’ve established, or if there isn’t a pattern to their decision-making at all, people will start to question the authenticity of that character. The second the audience starts analyzing a character intellectually, they’re no longer invested in the story emotionally, and it’s game over.

Knowing every person’s backstory is crucial to not only understand who they are, but what motivates them. Without having a clear idea of who each character is, you’ll be making decisions based on melodrama and not logic. Knowing these details allows you to write characters that feel true to the world; they make choices grounded in the reality of your story.

“Before we started shooting, George sent over hours of videos. You could log into this database that told [my character] Nux’s story from the moment he was conceived to the moment we see him in the film, basically every day of his life. It was this amazing in-depth backstory and a sense of the world as well.” – Nicholas Hoult, Actor, 2022

Just because you know all of this information about your world and its inhabitants does not mean that you need to share it all. You want all of these little details to feel obvious but not overt. The audience should be able to pick up on them on their own without you having to spell it all out. This only happens when you have not only rigorously established the rules of your world, but rigorously tested everything against those rules. If everything in your story has justified its existence with sound logic, the audience will buy in without needing an explanation.

“If you watched a documentary on some remote culture, you're going to see a lot of stuff in that documentary — you're going to see behavior of some indigenous African tribe, you'll see incredible costumes, and weapons, and rituals that you won't understand, but you know that the people in that documentary [are] deeply steeped in it — it's a long tradition and it's evolved over time. We have to take the same approach on Fury Road; it's not only important that I know what the spraying of the chrome on someone's teeth is but it's important that the actors know… they had to for the film to be convincing.” – George Miller, Director, 2020

The only information you should intentionally give to an audience is what is dramatically relevant – what they need to know to enjoy the story. The goal of a well-thought-out world isn’t for your audience to notice, but rather to immerse them even deeper into the story you’re telling. If they don’t have to question the world, then they can just focus on what is actually important. This is crucial because it is only when the audience is immersed in your story that they can find meaning in it.

Serve the Zeitgeist

George Miller is one of, if not the greatest action film director of all time. But his movies are not about action; the action is simply a vehicle to convey something greater. Part of Miller’s process is to spend time thinking deeply about existential questions, to confront massive problems that humanity is wrestling with, and find a way to subtly include them in his films.

“That's one of the deepest functions of mythology, to give us context, to connect us. To help us embrace the numinous – that sense of dread and awe we feel when confronted with the immensity of space and time.” – George Miller, Director, 1996

George does not confront these mysteries alone. He intentionally surrounds himself with people who are just as curious as he is, and he empowers them to explore life’s unknowns. It is through wrestling with big questions that George and his collaborators are able to push the form of storytelling into new places. They are not concerned with having all the right answers; rather they focus on asking great questions that will lead to interesting ideas that no one else is incorporating into their films.

“When I was working [at Kennedy Miller Mitchell] with Nico [Lathouris], at one point, every Wednesday, [George] had this philosopher come in and sit down and work with whoever wanted to work with him on these massive philosophical questions, just as part of the thing that you do. I think there's something in that approach to trying to go deeper, and more detailed, and think bigger.” – Nadia Townsend, Dramaturg, 2024

This is an important part of George’s process because he believes that storytellers are the servants of the Zeitgeist: “the defining spirit or mood as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time.” He takes these ideas and beliefs and lets them form the subtext of the stories he’s telling. He does this by making the existential questions he’s trying to understand the same ones that society is currently facing. This way, people feel a connection to the material because the core of the audience and the core of the story are attempting to process the same thing.

“There's an interplay with the Zeitgeist – you take from the Zeitgeist, interpret your version of it, [and] put it out there for people to accept, or respond to or not.” – George Miller, Director, 2023

George does not do this with the intention of manipulating the audience. He doesn’t look out at the cultural landscape, see what the issues of the day are, and reverse-engineer a story out of them. That’s disingenuous and doesn’t work. You want to respect your audience and not pander to them. George pushes beyond the surface-level issues, seeking out something that is less specific and more universal to the human experience. He does this because his aim isn’t to tell a literal story, but an allegorical one.

An allegory is “a story that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning.” George wants to leave the meaning of his stories ambiguous so that people can add their own, interpreting them in ways that are personal to them. This allows them to grapple with their own problems in an environment that is not directly related to their own lives. That is not to say that George has not put his own meaning into his stories, but he disguises it by having a plot that is so engaging, by having action that is so breathtaking, that people don’t even have the time to think about it until after they’ve left the theatre. They should be so invested in the characters and the world that their sole concern is how the story is going to end, not what it means.

To achieve that, George intentionally does not bring any of his beliefs into the writing process; his sole focus is on telling the best story that he can. Or, as he puts it, you want to “load up on as much cerebration and intellectual stuff that you can, but ultimately, in its execution, you just give over to your instincts.” But the thing is, during the creative process, you cannot completely decouple the art from the artist. What tends to happen when you give over to your instincts is that the things you care about, all of the intellectual stuff you’ve loaded up on, naturally starts to find its way into your story.

“You can’t ram it in; you don’t deliberately force it in because you think it should be there. Hopefully, it sits naturally in the story.” – George Miller, Director, 1985

Mad Max: Fury Road is a great example of this. Thanks to its strong female characters, it is viewed by many as a feminist film. But according to the writer-director, they did not set out with the intention of telling a feminist story, saying in an interview after the film’s release, “The characters take you along in the story, and the sense that [Furiosa] was a really interesting [female action hero] just arose organically out of the story. The feminist notions in the movie were the same. It was never the first agenda of the film. It was always story-driven, and the rest followed.”

Whether the feminist themes of the film were intentional or not does not deny the fact that they are there. George is a self-described feminist, so it makes sense that these ideas would naturally find their way into his story. And it is because they found their way naturally that they are so effective. He wasn’t trying to preach at people; he was just trying to tell the best story he could.

“Even in the few years since [Fury Road], studios and producers have zeroed in on that and they’re like, “We need these moments! We need to do what [Fury Road] has done! We need to trumpet things!” They’re banging a gong, right? “Look at what we did!” But what’s admirable and much more compelling about Fury Road is that it’s not doing that. The movie is not pleased with itself, is the best way to put it.” – David Sims, The Atlantic, 2022

You don’t want to tell people what your movie is about because you want them to be thinking about it long after they’ve stopped watching it. This is one of the ways George measures the effectiveness of his films: how far does it follow you out of the theatre? Empty-calorie action does not follow you home. The stories that stick with you are the ones that change you, the ones that help you learn something new about yourself and what it means to be human. That doesn’t happen when someone’s telling you what to think. The best teachers aren’t the ones who give you the answers, but the ones who help you learn them for yourself.

Serve Your Time

To be incredibly meticulous about the stories you are telling requires patience, and George Miller is an incredibly patient storyteller. Throughout his career, there’s been a consistent lag of one to two decades between when he has an idea for a film and when it makes it into the world. Babe had to wait for technology to catch up, Three Thousand Years of Longing didn’t fit in his schedule, and Furiosa was held back by lawsuits. No matter the project, getting it to the big screen has never been easy for George.

“The person who said it best was John Lennon, life is what happens when you're making other plans.” – George Miller, Director, 2013

Sometimes, it can feel like a miracle that any film gets made. There’s a confluence of issues that need to be overcome, an infinite number of things that have to go your way, the right people need to get involved, and it all has to happen at the exact same time. Even if everything does go your way, it could still disappear overnight. Mad Max: Fury Road was set to begin filming in the early 2000s; the money was there, the cast was in place, the cars were built, they were ready. But then 9/11 happened, the US dollar cratered, they lost a quarter of their budget overnight, and the studio pulled the plug. How did George react when he found out? He didn’t.

“Greg van Borssum, a close friend and colleague of the filmmaker, was in the room when the director received a phone call informing him the Fury Road deal had collapsed. ‘What was that all about?’ van Borssum asked. The director responded ‘We just lost Mad Max’—then immediately resumed what he was doing before the call.” – Luke Buckmaster, Miller and Max, 2017

What George Miller has known throughout his entire career is that nothing is guaranteed. His philosophy is to always have multiple projects on the go because when things go wrong, and they inevitably will, he has something to fall back on. He didn’t react when Fury Road fell through because Happy Feet was already in the works, and now he could devote more time to it. You become infinitely more patient when a setback on one film becomes an opportunity for another.

“It's impossible to predict what happens in the film industry… I don't know which of the three screenplays we've been working on will emerge as the next film to do.” – George Miller, Director, 1983

Another reason George’s ideas take a long time to come to fruition is that he doesn’t act on them right away. It would take multiple lifetimes to tell all of the stories he has in his head, so he has to choose carefully. In order to decide which ones to tell, he asks himself the same question that he asks others when evaluating the effectiveness of his films: “How long has it stuck with you?” He describes his selection process as a Darwinian conflict. If an idea is strong enough, it will fight its way to the forefront of his mind and demand to be told. It is only if an idea persists that he begins working on it.

When he finally does begin working on an idea, he works at a slow but intentional pace. Every single day starts over at page one. Before adding to his story, he reviews the script in its entirety to make sure that what is there so far is as tight as it can be. Your story should be full of different interconnected setups, and payoffs, which makes it difficult to go back and make large changes once you’ve finished. Writing in this way not only allows George to make corrections as they go, but to reimmerse himself in the world before continuing to explore the story.

For most of his career, George has written with writing partners, and one of the most important parts of his process is exploring the story through conversation. It is not uncommon for him to delay making progress on the screenplay to spend time going down side tangents. That can look like long discussions about the characters and the world, but it can also be deep conversations about who the writers are as people. Knowing who each other is and what they are about informs where the emotion of the story is coming from.

“What you normally do when you're co-writing a film is that you spend a lot of time talking about the characters, why they're here, what they represent, and what they are. But you've got to have the discussions that we had about Happy Feet where we'd talk about our own experience in relation to the characters. My own experience of life was I grew up, and trained as a doctor, it was a rather formal Scottish education. Edinburgh, where I grew up, was quite a Calvinist town. Mid-career, I abandoned medicine and ran off to join the circus – in that way, I'm totally on board with Mumble the penguin, who grows up in this very straight-laced society in which you're supposed to do things this way. And I go, ‘No, I'm going to do it that way.’ You go up and meet all the Mexicans and go dancing with them. In the normal process of writing, you tell these stories about yourself. It's amazing.” – John Collee, Happy Feet Co-Writer, 2024

To tell an engaging story in a well-thought-out world, with meaning, takes time. George Miller is comfortable taking that time; as a matter of fact, he prefers it. He’d rather go slow and get it right, than go fast and get it now. When you have more stories than time to tell them, you better make sure the ones you do tell are as good as they can be.

Serve the Story

George’s storytelling philosophy is quite simple: tell the best story you can. The best stories are the ones that grab us, bring us into their world, and change how we see our own. To think that that is something that can be achieved easily is arrogant. George has spent most of his adult life trying to understand how to tell a great story, and while he knows more than most, he still has a lot to learn.

You’ll never master it, but you’ve got to keep trying. By the time I got to Mad Max: Fury Road, it was an amplification of all of these things. I say to myself, ‘you can do this for a thousand years George and you’ll never master it, but you’ve got to keep trying.'” – George Miller, Director, 2018

Even though he’ll never quite master it, with each and every film, he gets a little bit closer. The original Mad Max unknowingly tapped into an archetype that humanity had been using for millennia. Mad Max 2 then placed that archetype in a rich and distinct world that would go on to influence culture for years to come. And Mad Max: Fury Road reimagined that world into one that is perfect for telling allegorical stories that wrestle with the human condition.

If George Miller’s aim is to tap into humanity’s collective unconscious, he can’t do it with filmmaking alone; he needs to access it with something deeper. This is why he says that he likes “to work in fables or myths” because according to him, filmmaking is just a 100 year old, high-tech manifestation of a storytelling tradition that’s as old as humankind. To write a screenplay like George Miller is, above all else, to be in service of that tradition.