Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows Mad Max (Mel Gibson), hero of the Mad Max films, standing alone, with a voice-over by film director George Miller describing how the character was received by international audiences. Further footage from the Mad Max films follows, shown behind Miller, who continues to talk about his theories on cinema to the camera.

Educational value points

• George Miller, one of Australia’s most celebrated directors, is credited with reinvigorating the action genre and creating an internationally recognised hero in Mad Max. In this clip he shares his thoughts on Mad Max and on film in general, reflecting on some of the keys to his success. Miller provides some of the special insights that can come to light when artists describe their own creative processes.

• The clip offers an opportunity to view part of a documentary featuring a talented Australian director in the dual role of subject and director. In his role as subject of the documentary, Miller discusses his views on film and the role of the cinema. In his role as director of the documentary, he has been able to organise how his ideas are presented to the audience.

• In giving an overview of how his hero Mad Max was perceived in various places in the world, Miller contends that film can be interpreted similarly across cultures and that, beneath more superficial cultural differences, there are commonalities that viewers recognise and respond to. This cross-cultural recognition of the hero relates to the work of cultural theorist and public intellectual Joseph Campbell, who wrote about the similarities between hero narratives from myths of different cultures.

• Miller’s ideas about filmmaking and film viewing are linked to the theories of psychologist Carl Jung, in particular Jung’s theory of the 'collective unconscious’. According to the theory, beneath the layers of individual unconsciousness lies a deeper universal unconscious, which is ancient and common to all humans. The collective unconscious contains myths and archetypes, including the hero archetype, that are powerful and meaningful for each of us. For Miller, Max embodies the hero archetype, and Miller believes this helps to account for Max’s universal appeal.

• While filmmaking appears to be a series of deliberate and conscious choices it is at least partly unconscious, and this clip explores both conscious and unconscious choices. Miller describes the filmmaker re-creating, and the audience interpreting, patterns that pre-exist at a deep level of our psyches. His belief that the actions of a director have effects that are not consciously intended contributes to the viewers’ insight into the filmmaking process.

• Miller’s notion of cinema as 'public dreaming’ suggests that how we watch films influences our perceptions of them. Miller believes that viewing films in the dark, surrounded by strangers, is fundamental to the film experience, having an effect both subliminal and profound.

Footage from the Mad Max films plays with a voice-over by film director George Miller.
George Miller (voice-over) The French saw the film as a postmodern, post-apocalyptic Western. Max was a gunslinger on wheels. In Japan, he was an outlaw samurai – in Scandinavia, a lone Viking warrior. Everywhere the film was shown, it somehow resonated with the culture. We had tapped into the universal hero myth.

Miller is visible on screen as more Mad Max footage plays in the background.
George Miller And I got a taste of what Carl Jung was on about when he described the collective unconscious. Here it was in practice, and here was I its unwitting servant. When we congregate with strangers in the darkness of the cinema, it’s a kind of public dreaming. Now, that’s a very useful way to think of film, but it’s not the end of it.