Honouring George Miller’s success as film director

Mad Max: Fury Road has reinforced the filmmaker’s influence on Australian society | Australian of the Year 2015 choices.

George Miller accepts the AACTA award for best direction in Sydney in December 2015.

Few people understood the ­impact director George Miller’s movie Mad Max: Fury Road, would have on the world stage ­because, by all accounts, it shouldn’t have worked.

The film had been in development hell for years, Mel Gibson couldn’t do the shoot and it was, essentially, one long car chase.

Yet the film set the industry alight, revitalised the sector in Australia and employed hundreds of locals even though the shoot was moved offshore after rain hit the region around Broken Hill in NSW’s far west.

It picked up the Australian ­Academy Cinema Television Arts award for best film last year.

Miller, 70, is a gifted director and writer with films such as Babe: Pig in the City, Happy Feet and, of course, Mad Max in his oeuvre, but he is also considered a “statesman” of the industry in Australia and is ­renowned for fostering new talent.

Miller won an Academy Award for best animated film for Happy Feet in 2006.

His latest Max film has been nominated for the Golden Globes in the lead-up to this year’s ­Oscars.

After winning the AACTA, Miller said he was blown away by the reaction to the film.

“You just don’t know what it is until it gets out there and audiences start telling you what it is,” Miller said.

“I never expected to get the kind of response we’ve had.”

Born in Queensland, Miller was a medical doctor before he turned his hand to film and used part of what he had seen on the job as inspiration for creating the dystopian Max films.

The first in the series was filmed in outback Australia on such a tight budget that Miller would sweep the roads of glass himself after smashing donated cars for the scenes he needed.

Readers can nominate influential people such as Miller who have left their mark on Australian ­society in the year past for this newspaper’s Australian of the Year award, which has been run since 1971.

The winner, announced on January 23, will be judged by a panel of senior editors.

* A nomination form for The Australian 2015 Australian of the Year is published on page 2 of the print edition of The Weekend Australian.