TSPDT

Key Production Countries: Australia, USA
Key Genres: Action, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Sci-Fi Action, Children's/Family, Drama
Key Collaborators: Doug Mitchell (Producer), Margaret Sixel (Editor), John Seale (Cinematographer), Mel Gibson (Leading Actor), Susan Sarandon (Leading Actress), Hugh Keays-Byrne (Leading Actor), Judy Morris (Screenwriter), Byron Kennedy (Producer), Bill Miller (Producer), Richard Francis-Bruce (Editor), Brian May (Composer), Tom Holkenborg (Composer)

“Mad Max, a big money spinner, proved that an Aussie film could out-bike, out-stunt, out-Corman, out-cult any Yankee exploitation movie… Derived, no doubt, from his medical days, Miller has a dramatic cutting technique and doesn't flinch from blood.” - Ronald Bergan (A-Z of Movie Directors, 1983)

"It’s a great stretch to go from the very stylish, utterly cheerful mayhem of Mad Max to the harrowingly small world of Lorenzo’s Oil. Has there ever been another qualified M.D. who became a movie director? And then recall the beautiful, playful, and very idiosyncratic view of New England, Updike, and modern sexuality in The Witches of Eastwick. The range is so great that no one may have an adequate sense of Miller yet from his work. But this is spectacular versatility with a true eye for action, whether on the large or very small scale. Added to which, Miller did the best episode from Twilight Zone, with John Lithgow as a desperate passenger on a plane… Then, out of the blue, he made two films about a sweet pig—one warm, and a hit; the next darker and alarming." - David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2010)

"In most of his movies a master of pace, Australia's George Miller, who made the Mad Max films, has probably had too many fingers in too many pies in his 20 years in mainstream cinema, resulting in too few visits to the director's chair." - David Quinlan (Quinlan's Illustrated Guide to Film Directors, 1999)

"His films, though technically sophisticated, are also not particularly dense texts – plot, character, and theme are typically sketched in clear lines and broad strokes. His films are, fundamentally, machines for affect; finely calibrated to make their audience feel something, and to elicit an almost pre-conscious, primitive response. His work doesn’t necessarily offer much food for analysis – which is perhaps appropriate: it is not enough to intellectualise his filmmaking, if, indeed that is possible. George Miller’s cinema is felt in the gut." - James Robert Douglas (Senses of Cinema, 2017)

"In his first feature film and its two sequels (the 1979 original Mad Max, 1981's Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior and 1985's Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome), George Miller created an endlessly adaptable icon: the leather-clad desert combatant roaring through a post-apocalyptic landscape. As Australian critic Adrian Martin wrote, "No other Australian films have influenced world cinema and popular culture as widely and lastingly as George Miller's Mad Max movies… Miller has cited Akira Kurosawa's samurai films, Joseph Campbell's mythological archetypes and Buster Keaton's The General (1927) as the inspirations behind his dystopian adventures in the near future." - Jessica Winter (The Rough Guide to Film, 2007)

"Originally the slightly unhinged mind behind Mad Max (1979), Australian filmmaker George Miller has broadened his palette to take in mischievous porkers (Babe, 1995) and idealistic penguins (Happy Feet, 2006)." - Tim Evans (501 Movie Directors, 2007)

"Action aficionados will be forever indebted to Miller for his magnificent Mad Max duet starring Mel Gibson - Mad Max (1979) and Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)… Miller took action sequences that had been done a thousand times before - the car chase, the helicopter after the runaway truck, the escape by night, the idyllic lull before the storm - and transformed them into something utterly different and surprisingly original." - Mario Reading (The Movie Companion, 2006)

"I see filmmaking as a strange journey. In mythology, the trickster leads you into the forest. Film is, to me, the trickster. I think I can be around a thousand years and never understand the process." - George Miller