We tell ourselves stories in order to live – or, if you're Australian director George Miller, to smash up post-apocalyptic monster trucks, put a witchy Cher and Michelle Pfeiffer into a duel with the devil, or have computer-generated penguins shimmy and shake to a jukebox of pop bangers.
If anyone can rescue Joan Didion's maxim from the clutches of earnest literary types, it's the director of Mad Max, a man whose career has tangled with primal myth and metaphor at every turn.
For all the breathless, breakneck action of Miller's most celebrated work, it's his films' fable-like qualities that make them resonate – one of the reasons that his maligned Beyond Thunderdome, for example, with its eerie passages of dream-time storytelling, remains one of his most memorable movies (at least to this writer).
