Stop me if I’m rambling, says the director George Miller, perched on his stool like some saloon-bar raconteur, half-drunk on the joys of film history and lit theory. He has covered Buster Keaton and Joseph Campbell, Indigenous art and the Queen of Sheba. He says we don’t even know whether the Queen of Sheba was real, but she’s real in the legends and what’s more real than a tale? “We’re creatures of story, we’re hardwired for story. That’s how we make sense of the world.”
Miller – soft-spoken and stocky; 77 as of last March – is best known for his dystopian Mad Max pictures, but his CV is eclectic and he has tackled all sorts. Tearjerkers (Lorenzo’s Oil, 1992), comedies (The Witches of Eastwick, 1987), kids’ capers (Happy Feet, 2006; Babe, 1995), you name it. Most good movies, he reckons, come from a similar place. Look closely enough and you start to see links and bridges; the wider pattern.
