Miller, George
Entry updated 26 October 2021. Tagged: Film, People.
(1945- ) Australian film-maker (his Greek parents changed their name from Miliotis soon after his birth). After a satirical short film, A History of Violence in the Cinema, Part One (1975), Miller made an international impact with Mad Max (1979), a Near-Future cop/vigilante car-chase movie that introduced Mel Gibson to stardom as a leather-clad highway patrolman in an anarchic Post-Holocaust Australia. It success was great enough to fund a more elaborate, more effective sequel, Mad Max 2 (1981; vt The Road Warrior). Influential enough to generate an infestation of Italian and Filipino imitations, including I nuovi barbari (1983; vt The New Barbarians; vt Warriors of the Wasteland) and Stryker (1983), Mad Max 2 led to a sequel of its own, which Miller codirected with George Ogilvie: Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). This was a more expensive, less gritty retread of the earlier film, with themes imported from Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker (1980). He collaborated pseudonymously [see Checklist] on a novelization of the first film, and under his own name on the sequels.
Miller's films since the Mad Max trilogy have included The Witches of Eastwick (1987), a successful adaptation of John Updike's 1984 novel; a remake of Richard Matheson's Twilight Zone episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" as a segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983); a stint as producer of Philip Noyce's thriller Dead Calm (1988); and he then directed Babe: Pig in the City (1998). Miller should not be confused with the other Australian director of the same name, Scottish-born George Trumbull Miller (1943- ), who made The Man from Snowy River (1982) and The Neverending Story: Part 2 (1990); nor should he be confused with George Miller (1959- ), author of The Buzzards of Zinn: A Story of War and Peace (2010), a fantasy. [KN]
see also: SF Music.
George Miller
born Brisbane, Queensland: 3 March 1945
works
series
Mad Max
- Mad Max (Melbourne, Victoria: Circus Books, 1979) with Terry Hayes and Brian Hannant, all writing as Terry Kaye [tie to the film: Mad Max: pb/]
- Mad Max 2 (Sydney, New South Wales, QB Books, 1982) with Terry Hayes and Carl Ruhen [tie to the film: Mad Max: pb/photographic]
- Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (Sydney, New South Wales, QB Books, 1982) Joan Vinge [tie to the film: based on the script by Terry Hayes and Miller: Mad Max: pb/]
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