For more than 20,000 years, the Anangu people of Central Australia have told a story about seven young women who were chased across the Western Desert by a lecherous old man called Wati Nyiru. He was a powerful sorcerer, and his pursuit of the women was so frenzied that he carved the landscape into new shapes as he went, leaving caves and watering holes in his wake. But the women were clever, and kept one step ahead of the old chauvinist, finally fleeing into the night sky and becoming stars when they ran out of places to run.

Some time ago, the director George Miller took his children on holiday to Cave Hill, around 60 miles south of Uluru in Australia’s dead, red centre. On the roof of the cave that gives the area its name, the journey of the women and the sorcerer is described in a vast, swirling storm of ancient rock art.

The tale, which is called Kungkarangkalpa Tjukurpa, is what’s known in Aboriginal culture as a songline: something that serves as both entertainment and a kind of transcendental satnav, giving you practical advice on finding sustenance and succour in a hostile world.

George Miller on the set of Mad Max: Fury Road, with Hugh Keays-Byrne as villain Immortan Joe Credit: Warner Bros

All of which is to say that if you found watching Miller’s latest film, Mad Max: Fury Road, a nigh-on spiritual experience, it was not without good reason. Fury Road takes place in a bone-dry future, where a group of six women – five escaped sex slaves, plus Imperator Furiosa, the battle-scarred liberator played by Charlize Theron – are tearing across the wasteland in a fume-belching, 18-wheel War Rig. Tom Hardy’s Max finds himself whipped up in the wake of this whirlwind pursuit, while the women’s former master, the slavering despot Immortan Joe, follows on with his fanatical War Boys in tow.

I meet Miller on a drab autumn day in a hotel in central London. It’s six months since we last spoke, when he had just finished work on Fury Road, and in the meantime, lots of things have changed. Miller’s outfit is not among them, though: the genial 70-year-old Australian is wearing exactly the same thick black leather jacket and owlish glasses he also favoured for the late May Los Angeles heat.

Back then, many wondered whether Fury Road – a long-delayed sequel to a cult action franchise whose previous instalment was released 30 years ago, during Rambo’s heyday – would find an audience. Awestruck reviews (top marks from everyone from The Sun to Cahiers du Cinéma) and almost £250 million at the global box office provided the decisive answer.

Personally, I’m now convinced it’s the best action movie of the last 15 years, and perhaps even longer. (This millennium, only Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has got close.) So with the Oscars and the Baftas now just around the corner, a new question presents itself: how much further can Fury Road go before it runs out of tarmac?

Nicholas Hoult and Charlize Theron in Fury Road Credit: Â© 2014 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. - - U.S., Canada, Bahamas & Bermuda Â© 2012 Village Roadshow Films (BVI) Limited - - All/Jasin Boland

For action movies, awards season can be a barren time. To find the last notable success story, you have to look back five years to The Hurt Locker, which pulled off a shock Best Film Bafta/Best Picture Oscar double – and then another six, to the final Lord of the Rings film, for the one before that.

But for Fury Road, the early signs are promising. At the San Sebastian Film Festival in northern Spain, three months after its world premiere at Cannes in May, Miller’s film won the Fipresci Grand Prix: an august honour, voted for by a panel of international critics, previously conferred on the likes of Michael Haneke, Jean-Luc Godard and Terrence Malick. (Last year’s winner was Richard Linklater’s Boyhood.)

The Fipresci award was “a surprise”, Miller chucklingly concedes. “Because when you’re working on each note, each chord progression, each sequence and passage” – he often uses musical metaphors for his work – “you won’t know until it finally gets out there if the whole piece works together. Does it have meaning? Does it have resonance? Do people get swept up into it?

“So when you realise, 'Oh my God, they’re digging down into the subtext of this story, not just seeing the surface,’ it’s very satisfying.”

George Miller directs Tom Hardy on the set of 'Mad Max: Fury Road' Credit: Warner Bros/Village Roadshow Films/Jasin Boland

That subtext is partly rooted in his fascination for indigenous Australian culture. Once Miller was free from Fury Road promotional duties, the first thing he did was take his family to the places in his home country he’d always meant to visit but hadn’t – “not quite a bucket list, but places I always felt quite ashamed at not having seen”.

One was The Kimberley, in Australia’s tropical north-west, where Miller was keen to track down an artist whose work he’d seen in a book by Geoffrey Bardon, a curator of Aboriginal art. The artist, Charlie Tjaruru Tjungurrayi, painted what he called “Ice Dreamings”: abstract multicoloured landscapes containing fields of white dots, which he told Bardon were images of a time “when ice made the mountains in my country”.

“They’re pictures of the last ice age,” says Miller, eyes aglow. “Passed down from artist to artist, and now painted by someone who’d only seen hail a few times in his life.”

The trip was bittersweet. Miller found the paintings, but not Tjungurrayi, who he discovered had died in 1999. But that visual short-circuiting of the present and the past electrified him.

The original: Mel Gibson played Mad Max in 1979 Credit: Moviestore Collection

Fury Road has the same passed-down, folklorish quality. Behind the spikes and tyres and flame-throwing guitar, it’s basically a campfire tale. It ends with a mysterious quote – “Where must we go, we who wander this wasteland, in search of our better selves?” – that’s attributed to The First History Man, a storyteller character in Miller’s early draft of the script but later written out.

“He was a walking Wikipedia,” he explains. “And because there were no computers, and all the books were probably burnt to make fires, the stories of the time had to be passed on orally.”

That’s why Miller went out of his way not to explain the film’s background details: the mourning rites, the weird incantations, even the chrome spray with which the War Boys ritualistically coat their lips and teeth before riding to their death.

“It would have taken away the poetry,” he says. “We’re watching a culture made up of repurposed found objects. You may not know what it means, because you’re a foreigner in the wasteland, but you know they know what it means. And there’s enough information there that you can interpret it according to your own world-view. That’s the value of allegory.”

Creating Fury Road itself became something of a dystopian legend. The film was 17 years in the making, with the original shoot, scheduled for late 2001, falling through when the financial repercussions of the World Trade Center attacks made it impossible to film in Australia with American money.

The leading man had to be recast twice: Mel Gibson, the star of Miller’s original Mad Max trilogy, was replaced by Heath Ledger in 2006, who was in turn replaced by Hardy, following the young actor’s death in 2008.

To cap it all, rainfall meant the proposed three-month shoot in New South Wales became five months in the Namibian desert, where Miller’s insistence on shooting the elaborate stunts “in camera” rather than using digital effects to create them from scratch, tested the crew’s talents, and sometimes patience, to their limits.

Carmageddon: George Miller's Fury Road Credit: Warner Bros/Village Roadshow Films/Jasin Boland

But finally pulling the thing off has turned Miller into something of a Hollywood hot property. He recently met with Warner Bros to discuss directing both their live-action remake of the classic Japanese animation Akira, and the Superman sequel Man of Steel 2 (sadly, the first is a definite no, and the second “probably not”).

In the works is another Mad Max picture with Hardy, subtitled The Wasteland, an idea for a science-fiction action film “with aliens”, and more. “But I have more films on my dance card than I’ll ever have time to make,” he says.

At first, while waiting for the stars to align, Miller busied himself with other projects. Some came to fruition, including the second Babe film, Pig in the City, and his Happy Feet animations – dancing penguins apparently being the ideal antidote to chaos in the desert.

Between 2007 and 2008, he was also agonisingly close to making Justice League: Mortal – a DC comics superhero team-up, with Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, that would have predated Marvel Studios’ lucrative Avengers film by three years, and Zack Snyder’s forthcoming Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice by seven.

“It had a very good script, wonderful designs, a good story, and a fine young cast,” says Miller. “And we almost got there! But a little bit like the 2000 American elections, the Supreme Court voted four-to-five against, and we ended up with George Bush instead of Al Gore.” He’s joking, although politicians were responsible. Following the 2007 Australian federal election, a planned 40 per cent tax rebate was cancelled, and the movie evaporated in an instant.

For Miller, the consequences of that penny-pinching can’t be overstated. “It did for the Australian film industry,” he says.

But who needs Wonder Woman when you have Imperator Furiosa, the heroine-by-stealth of Fury Road turned feminist pop-culture icon? The way Miller demoted Max to a sidekick role in his own film caused a stir among “men’s rights activists” and other faintly tragic figures, but his rationale is blunt. “The wives needed a champion who was a female road warrior,” he says. “And she had to be female. A male stealing wives from another male would have been an entirely different story.”

As Miller attended screenings and signings, he was initially taken aback by the number of Furiosa tattoos. “It felt such an additional responsibility,” he says. “I kept thinking 'Oh my God, what if the film has no enduring quality?’ ”

But six months on, it’s clear Fury Road is built to last. Miller has already spoken about how much his film borrows from silent cinema – particularly Buster Keaton’s own there-and-back-again chase movie The General, which, almost 90 years after its original release in 1926, remains as riotous as ever.

That’s the thing about the pleasure of pure speed: it doesn’t date. Miller tells a moving postscript to his visit to Cave Hill: while he had been marvelling at the artworks in the cavern, he left his children playing outside, where they pulled up handfuls of wild grass and used it to slide down a steep rock face.

When he emerged, he noticed that the rock where they were sliding was as smooth as glass – “which meant kids had been sliding down there for thousands of years,” he says. Whether we find it via songlines or by instinct, in the desert or the dark of the cinema, that sensation is irresistible.