LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: By whatever measure you use - box office, strike rate, awards - George Miller is Australia's most bankable film director. And now the Oscar winner is back where it all started, with Mad Max. The 1979 original that made Mel Gibson of course, was the start of a stellar career for George Miller. Any director would be lucky to have one franchise as successful as Mad Max; Miller also created Babe and Happy Feet. Now he's decided the time's right for another instalment of Mad Max, Fury Road, a reboot of the original with all the special effects and polish that $150 million budget can provide. I met George Miller at his Sydney office.

George Miller, thanks very much for joining us.

GEORGE MILLER, DIRECTOR, MAD MAX: A pleasure.

LEIGH SALES: How does this new Mad Max film relate to the previous Mad Max instalments, particularly the original shot in 1979?

GEORGE MILLER: Well, it's - I like to call it revisiting the world. It's not chronologically exact. That was made over 35 years ago. This one's set about 45 to 50 years from next Wednesday when all the bad things we read in the news happen all at once and we end up in some sort of apocalypse.

LEIGH SALES: You mentioned it was 35 years ago. Does it feel like 35 years ago?

GEORGE MILLER: It's strange, you know, you always wonder - as you age you wonder where the time goes. It happens to all of us. But I had - in South by Southwest, a festival in Austin, Texas, a couple of weeks ago, they showed a brand new print of Mad Max II and it's the first time I'd seen the film for 32 years with an audience. I was really surprised how affected I was. Seeing Mel as a 24-year-old and looking so fine and doing that work.

LEIGH SALES: Did you contemplate having a cameo role in this film for him?

GEORGE MILLER: Well, I never - I didn't for Mel because it would have been too dissonant. We're trying to invite an audience into the world and believe it and you have this - Tom Hardy playing Mad Max and then suddenly if you see someone, it's Mel Gibson, you're just suddenly pulled out of the movie.

LEIGH SALES: The look of this new film was so amazing and it's so striking in the way that it's shot. How did you conceptualise all of that visually?

GEORGE MILLER: Well, the first thing is after the initial Mad Max, there've been a lot of movies, a lot of video games, a lot of manga comics, a lot of anime working in this area and almost all of them desaturate the film so it looks very, very bleak and I realise if we did that, we'd be sort of almost falling into cliche all this time later. So one of the things we realised is we actually cranked up the colours. The other thing was is that people tend to design these things as a kind of junkyard. But we had a mantra which was, "Just because it's the apocalypse, it doesn't mean that people can't create beautiful things."

LEIGH SALES: Did you have any sense at the time when you were making the original, that it was something culturally significant because very quickly it became, I guess, a touchstone of Australian not just cinema culture, but just Australian arts and culture generally? Was there any sense of that at the time?

GEORGE MILLER: No. You were just - you were just making the film and at the time when - you know, I was lucky - I felt lucky that it was released, let alone had a resonance. We put a lot of work into it, it was very low budget. I'd never really been on a film set before. So - and we put it out there and it was only later - it's only later that the audiences really tell you what your film is.

LEIGH SALES: So how old were you when Mad Max came out in 1979?

GEORGE MILLER: 34.

LEIGH SALES: So you're 34, you've made this low budget film. As you say, you haven't been on a film set really even before and then it comes out and it's this absolutely monster international hit. I mean, what was that like?

GEORGE MILLER: Well, I didn't get too carried away because I had to spend a year cutting the film. We ran out of money and for one year I was confronted with all my mistakes. And so - and really, that taught me a hell of a lot. So, when it did come out, I just sort of thanked the movie gods and said, "OK, next time, I'm not going to make the same mistakes." And of course, I always make the same mistakes or new ones and you keep doing it until ...

LEIGH SALES: So is that still your experience even when you're cutting something like Fury Road now?

GEORGE MILLER: Oh, oh, shockingly, yeah. It still happens. It still happens. You say, "Who was that fool director who did that? Why did he do that?" But that's what you do. You can never - cinema - I doubt there's much in life you can master, but cinema is certainly one of those that no-one will ever master. It's too comprehensive in its skill set. It's vision, it's sound, it's music, it's spoken word, written word, it's colour, it's composition - it encompasses so many of the arts.

LEIGH SALES: Are you in a position in your career where whatever you want to do, it's a green light because you're you?

GEORGE MILLER: People say that that's the case, but for me, making movies is not - I still don't see it as a career. Somewhere in the back of my mind I feel I'm still a doctor because - you know, when we started making movies back in the '70s, it wasn't a proper career.

LEIGH SALES: You studied medicine when you were a young man and you worked for a while at St Vincent's Hospital. Do you ever think back to that fork I guess where you were at in your life, early in your life and how different things ... ? - I could be interviewing you down at St Vincent's about Saturday night at the emergency room.

GEORGE MILLER: (Laughs) Well, I sort of think about it a lot because I have a twin brother, John, who's a doctor, we went through medical school together and our paths were quite divergent and - but I never - it was never a fork in the road for me, it was a slow dissolve. It was never like a decision - "Oh, do I go this way or that way." And John Lennon said it best when he said, "Life is what happens when you're making other plans," and I think that's true of everything.

LEIGH SALES: Do you think for kids these days who want a career in creative arts that they'd need a fallback option?

GEORGE MILLER: I think definitely. Two reasons why you need a fallback option. It's changing so rapidly, you have to be very agile and very adaptive - that's number one. Number two, the more multiskilled you are, the more - if you master one area, it really informs you in another area. People say, "Well what's a doctor - what got to do with making movies?" For me it's got everything to do with making movies: problem solving, I've spent my whole life observing other human beings, sometimes really intimately, and film making is all about perspective shifts and so on, so ... .

LEIGH SALES: Well a body tells a story in a micro way.

GEORGE MILLER: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And even literally in a micro way. You can look at the cells of a person. So you - so all of that certainly inform the way I try to make movies and try to solve problems in movies. The creative life is an unpredictable one, but it's really important to have a fallback, not just for safety, but to broaden your bandwidth and broaden your perspective.

LEIGH SALES: George, it's been so fun to talk to you. Thank you very much.

GEORGE MILLER: Thank you.