\n<\/p>\n
They also follow the same ecological through line that informed the first movie. The oil crisis of the 1970s hit the Australian city of Melbourne particularly hard, Miller recalls. Eventually, only one gas station in the city remained open for business. As lines to fill up grew longer and tensions continued to mount, \u201cit took 10 days for the first shot to be fired,\u201d Miller says.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt wasn\u2019t fired at anybody,\u201d he hastens to add, saying, \u201cWe don\u2019t have a gun culture in Australia.\u201d But still, the ostensibly nonviolent incident stuck with him. If it only took 10 days for gas-related gunfire to break out, \u201cwhat would happen in a hundred days?\u201d he says he thought. \u201cWhat would happen in a thousand days?\u201d The Mad Max<\/em> movies attempt to answer that question.<\/p>\n Man\u2019s eternal struggle to secure and protect resources provided the seed for the original 1979 film, with the great, roving hordes of Hannibal and Genghis Khan inspiring some of its most indelible images\u2014mobile groups that \u201cconsumed everything before them.\u201d But because Miller\u2019s hordes are enabled by fossil fuels instead of elephants or horses, we\u2019re back to that issue of scarcity. (Electric cars don\u2019t work in the Mad Max<\/em> universe, as \u201cyou can\u2019t charge them anymore.\u201d)<\/p>\n While Miller\u2019s most recent Mad Max<\/em> films share the DNA of the first film, 1981\u2019s The Road Warrior,<\/em> and the Tina Turner\u2013starring Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,<\/em> the director acknowledges one major development that happened between the third film\u2019s 1985 release and 2015, when Fury Road<\/em> debuted to global acclaim<\/a>. \u201cThe biggest shift in cinema after sound was the digital dispensation,\u201d Miller says, citing Jurassic Park<\/em><\/a> as the film that ushered in the digital-effects era.<\/p>\n Miller dipped his toes into those waters with the porcine fairy tale Babe<\/em>, which he cowrote and produced, and then dove in with Happy Feet,<\/em> the 2006 penguin saga that netted Miller his first Academy Award<\/a>, for best animated feature. \u201cAlmost at the same time, I was thinking, Wow, these tools\u2026we could apply [them] to action films or stories like Mad Max,<\/em>\u201d Miller says. \u201cWe can do things that we can never dream of doing in the past.\u201d<\/p>\n An indelible image from Buster Keaton\u2019s 1926 action comedy, The General,<\/em> informed a memorable shot in Beyond Thunderdome.<\/em> Technological advances allowed Miller to take the moment to its logical conclusion in Fury Road,<\/em> which was impossible to safely shoot before the advent of digital. \u201cCinema, like all arts or all human endeavors\u2014there\u2019s a kind of cultural evolution. One thing builds on another,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n