Mad Max inspired by doctor turned filmmaker George Miller’s childhood in Chinchilla
WITH little to do in the isolated Queensland town he grew up in, it’s little wonder Hollywood director George Miller became a filmmaker celebrated for capturing extremely dangerous, death-defying stunts.
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THE small rural town of Chinchilla, in southern Queensland, has a population of about 5000 residents, up from the 2000-odd folks George Miller, 72, grew up around. Located almost 300km from Brisbane, it has seen an influx of new homes in recent years thanks to a boom in the mining and coal seam gas sectors. Chinchilla’s long-term survival stems from the introduction, around the time George was born, of irrigation, integral to its fruit and grain-based economy.
The town’s heyday arrives once every two years, with its Chinchilla Melon Festival. Drawing a crowd three times the size of the town’s population, the festival goes through about 20 tonnes of melons, with about a quarter of that amount actually ending up in the festivalgoers’ stomachs. The “melon skiing” event is more or less as it sounds. Participants slide down a ramp, watermelons attached to their feet in lieu of skis, as a jovial crowd cheers them on. Despite this burst of fleshy-fruit enthusiasm (which began in the mid-1990s, and draws interstate and international visitors) much of the town remains more or less the same as the miles-from-anywhere community George grew up in.
Most of the properties from the 1940s and ’50s remain in their original structure. One of them, a quaint white-and-blue weatherboard in Glasson St, was where the Miller family resided. Their house would have been unremarkable were it not for a single distinguishing feature that made it extraordinary: Chinchilla’s first flushing toilet.
In a town where phone calls were still operator-connected and the introduction of televisions was several years into the future, the Millers’ dunny drew the attention of neighbours and strangers from Chinchilla and beyond. Visitors would enter and a member of the family, standing beside the otherwise average enamel commode, would very theatrically flush the toilet.
George’s father, Jim Miller, was born Dimitri Castrisios Miliotis in the village of Mitata on Kythera, an island in Greece. In the early years of the 20th century Jim got on a boat and left, his mother waving a large white scarf at him as he departed. Jim remembered watching the scarf until it disappeared from sight. He arrived in Australia when he was nine and never saw his mother again. Jim would later take up poetry; some of his poems reflected on this poignant moment when he left everything he knew behind.
Jim Miller owned and operated a cafe in Chinchilla with his wife, George’s mother, Envangalia (Angela). She was born Envangalia Balson to refugees who fled Turkey in 1922 in the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish war, migrated to the town of Mytilini in Greece, and from there on to Australia. Jim and Angela had met in Kempsey, on the north coast of New South Wales, when Jim was in the Australian Army. The pair fell in love, later married, moved to Chinchilla and opened a store. The Millers’ cafe was a popular place for social meet-ups and famous for its syrup-swirled sundaes, ice-cream sodas and fish.
George Miller and his twin John were born in Chinchilla on March 3, 1945. Later his parents had two more boys, Chris and Bill. When the family visited George’s grandparents in Sydney, George would speak what he later described as “kind of a baby Greek” – enthusiastic if incomprehensible. Hosting family meals, with an array of familiar faces feasting around the dinner table, is a proud Greek tradition. And so it was in the Miller household. With no relatives outside their immediate family in Chinchilla, but inspired by plenty of old-fashioned Greek hospitality, Jim and Angela re-created the kind of community they remembered from their childhoods. On Sunday afternoons they would host epic lunches, two to three dozen people from all over the countryside seated around the dinner table.
Even by plane, Chinchilla is a long way from everywhere. On road trips George would sit in the family car, staring out the window at the sparse landscape around him: long, flat roads with white lines that seemed to stretch out for eternity, glimmering in the high heat of summer. “I often wondered why my dad moved to Chinchilla of all places,” Miller later said, “but when I finally went to Kythera it made sense to me. The light was the same, the grass.”
There in the family car, George became occupied by something most people would describe as daydreaming. His adult self came to reflect on the activity in a different way, as “hypnagogic dreams”. Moments, which have fuelled inspiration for several of his films, experienced during transition from consciousness to the onset of sleep: “That unguarded moment when you’re in a kind of dissociated state.” The Millers’ drives familiarised George with the farmland, roads and even carnage that would go on to characterise his most successful franchise, Mad Max. With little to do in Chinchilla, many teenagers and young adults took to the road, sometimes with disastrous results. “I guess any work is a sum total of what your experience is at the time,” the filmmaker once reflected, discussing how his early years in rural Queensland influenced him. “The main street of town on Saturday night was just the kids in the cars. By the time we were out of our teens, several of our peers had already been killed or badly injured in car accidents. There was just those long, flat roads, where there was no speed limit,” he said.
Mostly his memories of the picturesque, long-way-from-anywhere place he grew up in are pleasant: “Looking back it was an incredibly privileged childhood,” the director later said. During the week, George spent his after-school time getting up to mischief with John and their pals in the bush. They built forts and cubbyhouses and dug underground tunnels and pits. They played cowboys and Indians and painted garbage bin lids to make pretend shields.
Reading comic books and listening to weekly radio plays helped stoke the fires of George Miller’s imagination, as did trips to the local cinema. Aside from hooning down the main road of town and beyond, the other option for entertainment in Chinchilla was there, in the sort of venue that would dominate George’s dreams for decades to come. The Star Theatre, a thousand-seat picture palace, was built when George was six. The town finally had a major attraction and everybody, at some point, went to see a film: it was one of those things you just did.
Weekends were all about Saturday matinee screenings at the Star. Being a kid has certain drawbacks, of course, and George and his mates couldn’t always get in. When films on the bill were considered too violent for children – or if George and his mates didn’t have enough pocket money to buy tickets – the group would revert to a backup plan. Beneath the hulking building was a small gap that led directly to space below the floorboards, from which the sounds of the film could be heard (even if the screen could not be seen). George and his brothers and friends would crawl through that hole to follow the movie above them with their ears.
Years later, an adult George Miller would edit his first feature film, Mad Max, starring Mel Gibson, without sound. He could see the film but he couldn’t hear it: a reverse of those formative experiences at the Star Theatre. George approached the task of editing the film as if he were, in his own words, “assembling a melody or a piece of music”. His work has been praised for a highly linear visual style that judiciously avoids displacing the audience’s grasp of geography – their knowledge of the whereabouts of characters. Perhaps the genesis of this skill lies in those early moments when, huddled in the dark, young George was unable to see the moving pictures above him and began to imagine his own.
When the Miller family moved to Sydney, scaling up from the modest surrounds of Chinchilla to the big smoke, George first attended Ipswich Grammar School as a boarder for a year, and then Sydney Boys High School. It was a ritual at Sydney Boys High for older students to grab hold of the ties of younger students and yank them off their necks, a tradition called “tie tagging”. When George and John got off the bus on the first day of school, the senior boys were standing around and waiting like vultures. His bacon was saved by a small but feisty fellow student, Michael Johnson, who grabbed George and escorted him through the phalanx of older students. An instant friendship was born. Johnson later became a pharmacist and chipped in some of the money to finance Mad Max in 1979.
George had always wanted to be a doctor. Being raised in a small country town, he shared the belief that the most influential – and seemingly most magical – person was the local GP. “Also I was intensely curious about who we are as human beings,” he later reflected, “and I believe a medical education was probably, for me at least, the best way to get to understand who we are.”
After graduating from high school, George and John attended medical school together at the University of New South Wales. They commenced in 1966, the same year George taught himself portrait painting, completing a series of paintings for The Australian Ballet the following year. Miller embraced the romantic ideal of campus life: university as a wide and varied playground of competing ideas. In his third year of study he was profoundly affected by a lecture from the visiting American architect and inventor Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller, exploring how different people think with different sides of their brain.
One day, George, who was supposed to be in class, was walking past a Sydney cinema when his gaze was drawn like a magnet to a poster stuck on the window. It showed a hand making a peace sign, with an American war helmet dangling from one of its fingers. And, impossibly, two high heel–fitted legs coming out of the wrist: the kooky key art for director Robert Altman’s satirical Korean War comedy from 1970, M*A*S*H. Moving into the cinema instinctively, like one of Pavlov’s dogs salivating for a feed, George bought a ticket and was blown away. He emerged after the screening high as a kite. He was in no mood to return to school and instead walked into another theatre and watched another war film: the Italian–Algerian historical drama The Battle of Algiers.
George wasn’t all that worried about keeping up with his classes; he had John to take notes. After all, his brother – a more conscientious student – had better handwriting, so surely it was fair he scribbled down lessons for them both. This wasn’t the only time he skipped medical school in favour of a cinematic education, but George was no dropout: he graduated, became a doctor and took up residency at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, where he was exposed to various aspects of the human condition, inside and out – including traumatic visions that would never leave him.
On one such evening at St Vincent’s five people were rushed to the ER after a horrific accident. “There was a young girl they brought in,” George later recalled. “She had a rubber blanket around her, and I lifted it and couldn’t even make out what should have been her legs, she was so badly crushed.” He looked around for a place to insert an IV but couldn’t find a vein in her arm, so he inserted it into the young woman’s neck. She remained conscious the whole time, repeating two words over and over again: “Die me. Die me. Die me.” A priest was there, shouting out for her to repent. She was wheeled into the operating room and died that night.
There is certainly something rare, if not unusual, about a trained medical doctor becoming a filmmaker celebrated for capturing extremely dangerous, death-defying stunts. George’s transition from doctor to filmmaker was not a quick cut, however; more like a slow dissolve. And it might never have occurred if another of his brothers, Chris, hadn’t become aware of a short film competition run by the University of New South Wales in 1971, just as George was undertaking his final exams. The prize was admission to a film workshop held at the University of Melbourne.
The challenge was to shoot and edit a one-minute short film in an hour. Chris and George’s entry, with a running time of 57 seconds, comprised a tracking shot slowly approaching a man with long hair, a hat and an overcoat. As the man turns towards the camera, the filmmakers cut to a cartoon caption that reads, “What’s so wrong about movies is that they’re not real”. In the last couple of seconds, the man’s hat and hair suddenly pop off and his coat falls to the ground – as if nobody was actually there. They won.
The brothers’ short was subsequently screened on ABC Television. One of the judges was the great Australian director Peter Weir, at that time an emerging filmmaker. Weir’s 1974 feature film debut, The Cars That Ate Paris would influence the making of Mad Max. Because Chris was the one who had officially entered the competition, George had to talk his way into the workshop – not the last time he would have to convince the film gods to believe in him. If he hadn’t been successful, or if he hadn’t bothered, his career – and the history of action cinema – may well have turned out very differently. ■
This is an edited extract from Miller And Max, by Luke Buckmaster, published by Hardie Grant Books, RRP $35. It is out on June 1
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