One long week separates the world from the cataclysmic glory of “Mad Max: Fury Road.” In light of the film coming thirty years after “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” —not to mention an entire generation of filmgoers born in between— Warner Bros. is wheeling out George Miller like he’s going out of style. Though it’s nearly become a cliché to note that the same man responsible for Lord Humungus and Master Blaster is also behind four movies concerned with talking animals, a new interview with Collider has reminded that the Australian director’s filmography could have been even more eclectic.
Since before the novel was published in 1985, Carl Sagan’s “Contact” was destined to end up on the big screen when one of his closest friends, producer Lynda Obst, became a studio exec and pitched the movie to the production company she worked for, Peter Guber’s Casablanca FilmWorks. It took nearly two decades for the film to come to fruition under the watch of Robert Zemeckis, some twelve years after Sagan, fed up with his story languishing development hell, decided to turn it into a book based on the film treatment he wrote with his wife in 1980. But the “Forrest Gump” director originally turned down the film in 1993 because of his dissatisfaction with the screenplay’s conclusion, and the assignment went instead to Miller who immediately began pre-production.
It was Miller who originally cast Jodie Foster as the lead, as well as Ralph Fiennes in the role that would later go to Matthew McConaughey in Zemeckis’ film. As the long gestation period for “Fury Road” would suggest, Miller likes to make sure all his ducks are lined up in a row, so he demanded more rewrites —and intriguingly, a larger role for the Pope— and the budget got larger and pre-production stretched longer than anticipated with the studio’s planned Christmas 1996 release date looking more and more like a pipe dream. The way Miller tells it in the new interview, it was getting clearer by the day that the studio wasn’t’ “prepared to do the movie that I was interested in making. It was going to be safer, so we agreed to part ways.” So in 1995, Miller walked away from the project with the rights to the two “Mad Max” sequels WB had financed —“The Road Warrior” and “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome”— as a consolation prize.
Miller said that his “Contact” would have not been like "’2001,’ but it was much, much less sort of force-feeding exposition where most of the dramatic things in the script they eventually made was people talking about stuff they should be experiencing, which is seen too much in movies. I don’t think they trusted the audience enough. ”
In a move that will be perplexing to Christopher Nolan’s detractors who complain that most of his dialogue is expository (then again, isn’t all dialogue expository?), Miller went on to favorably compare last year’s highly divisive “Interstellar” to what his vision of “Contact” would have been, saying “ ‘Interstellar’ is much closer than [the final version of] ‘Contact’,” though Miller cautioned that he never actually got around to seeing what Zemeckis did with the film, feeling that reading the shooting script was enough to get gist of the much “safer” road the studio and Zemeckis took.
While you dream about what could have been with Miller and “Contact” —the Michael Goldenberg drafts at the time included aliens putting a laser lighting display around the planet and a wormhole transporting our planet to center of our galaxy— you can rejoice in the fact that Miller and the studio put aside any hard feelings they may have had and that “Mad Max: Fury Road” is finally crashing into theaters next week, following the premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. Watch the Collider interview with Miller below.
Criticizing the version of a film you\’ve never actually seen.
So! Go ahead and do a remake, George! Your production art for the film looked awesome!
@Ian how is someones opinion wrong it is their opinion, but he is wrong, im a geek and i hated the movie, so it wasnt just geeks that liked it, it was just people that like typical boring droned out sci fi with no point or real structure attempting to use decent movies like alien just to boost its audience.
Sorry @ Peter. But I agree. You are kinda, sorta, and so very wrong about Interstellar! It has done very well and lived up to the hype. So put down the brolly for a few months. The deluge will be over soon.
I know all about Lynda\’s involvement w/George on Contact, I would have loved to see him do it. After seeing his original artwork..
Sorry, Peter, but I\’m afraid you\’re the one who\’s wrong. The only people who didn\’t like Interstellar are elitist tryhards like you who can\’t sit back and enjoy a good mind-bending sci-fi film. I can guarantee in 10 years people will still be talking about Interstellar and will probably have forgotten about a film like The Theory of Everything.
Miller is worth gold now. Best movie in a long time.
Sorry @ Ian, comparing Interstellar to 2001 is a complete joke. Nolan, for all his darkness and complexities, is a total amateur when stood up against Kubrick. He doesn\’t understand subtlety, he doesn\’t properly understand framing, he didn\’t cohesively engender a sense of awe-inspiring wonder and majesty in Interstellar the way that Kubrick had brilliantly achieved within the first 30 seconds of the Blue Danube space-docking sequence in 2001. Nolan appropriated so many of Kubrick\’s motifs and ideas, it just felt like he was aping him. Not that Nolan doesn\’t deserve kudos for attempting something grand, no, it\’s just that his limited abilities as a film-maker were on full, sometimes painful to watch show in Interstellar.
Interstellar was a great movie but the hero could have opened his mouth more to deliver his dialogue. He appeared to be mumbling the entire film and in some scene wailing like a banshee.
Peter, like with all art, \’taste\’ is in the eye of the beholder. As a geek, I enjoyed "Armageddon", but I wouldn\’t label it a \’good movie\’ for the simple fact of how wrong the science was. But from a dramatic standpoint, it was fantastic. "Interstellar" was a good, solid \’science\’ and \’spec-fic\’ film. It\’s drama was mid-grade, except for certain shining moments (the Mann air-lock sequence). But I\’m hearing critics pan the entire film, not because of a lack of quality, but because of THEIR lack of understanding of, and patience with it. Well, ces\’t la vie. Chris Nolan delivered exactly what he said he would, and if people went to see it expecting different, they should pay closer attention to the run-up comments about the making of the movies they wish to view.
@peter. really? so 600k+ votes on imdb and a rating of 8.7/10 is not enough proof? i suppose all 600k users who voted were just geeks? or maybe just 87%? interstellar was an amazing movie and most who saw it liked it. you may not like nolan, but based on the consistently high ratings of pretty much anything he does, he clearly delivers what the audience wants.
Sorry @ Peter. You are already wrong and time will prove you more so.
Then again. 2001 when it appeared, also divided audiences & critics. Tremendously. Kubrick was also deemed "overrated." And look how that turned out.. So,let us just wait & see, d\’accord?
Sorry, @Jack, Interstellar stank, and the box office doesn\’t reflect the number of people who paid to see it and didn\’t like it. Geeks liked it, and they\’re a loud and social media-active bunch. That doesn\’t make it a great film. Nolan is highly overrated.
Interstellar was not divisive. Huge hit. Great film. Haters like to say it is though. It was not.
Interesting. Shame he didn\’t get to direct it. I loved Interstellar and Miller\’s comments about not liking expository dialogue but obviously liking Interstellar must throw Interstellar\’s critics for a loop.