Mad Max Game & Brendan McNamara's Whore Of The Orient

[keithlewis]

Sydney, Mid-October and summer has arrived in a day. By 10am, the skies have stormed and cleared, the bitumen steaming, the air drinkable. Not that you’d know to look at George Miller, a woollen scarf around his neck, tucked into a huge leather bomber jacket as he slumps in a chair at his Dr D Studios in Sydney’s CarriageWorks.

Gone is the trademark chilli shirt, adopted years back because it meant one thing less to decide each day. It’s four years since his last major roll of the dice, the penguin musical Happy Feet, which took out the Oscar and confirmed him at the pinnacle of his profession; six weeks before its sequel Happy Feet Two, opens in the US as Warner Bros tent-pole hope for the Thanksgiving weekend.

Miller has been the prototype of all his blue-eyed heroes, from Mad Max to the penguin Mumble, his landscapes always interior. “It’s almost embarrassing,” he says. “I live way too much in my head.”

Right now he is dressed for Antarctica. Or one last aerial raid. “At this point you’re always on a war footing,” he says. “When I made my first film, Mad Max, I was constantly bewildered, it felt so chaotic. I remember Peter Weir telling me a film was like a battle zone, and it’s true: you have to be alert, resilient, prepared for anything. There are lots of stumbling blocks along the way, but you have to prevail.”

Around him, out in the cavernous halls of what he calls ‘Penguin Prison’ (“but I’ll be on parole soon” ), geeks sit in the gloom adding feathers to bird carcases onscreen. They are the survivors of a workforce that peaked mid-August at 670. Pretty soon, however, even the stragglers will be gone. Some will be picked off by the the talent scouts who have already flown in from the northern hemisphere, while their handiwork flies north to lift (or not) the Warner Bros big top on a crucial US weekend.

The rest, the 50 or 60 on the longer-term contracts, will be made redundant within weeks. It’s the latest setback in a story that dates back to when George Miller last spoke to The Australian Financial Review Magazine in 2007. Back then, Miller deplored the creative brain drain under way, not least the computer-generated-imagery (CGI) talent he helped develop on Happy Feet, then watched disappear offshore to work on other international projects.

In the intervening years a director who has always kept Hollywood at arm’s length has done something about it, opening Dr D three years ago with his partner, Doug Mitchell, and Omnilab Media Group, to handle Happy Feet Two, their next project, Mad Max 4: Fury Road, and other animated-feature projects down the line. Even with most of the staff gone in mid-October, it’s a true Tardis of an operation. Outside the punters stream past from the Saturday growers market, eyes down as they navigate the puddles, oblivious to the dream factory lurking behind Dr D’s heritage facade.


Read the Rest: http://www.afr.com/p/george_miller_new_ ... cyZa4s97fI