GEORGE MILLER
White Fellas' Dreaming was your overview of Australian cinema and its effect on Australian audiences. How did you begin to plan and structure it?
I think I started with the belief that, if you look at the mosaic of cinema, particularly over a long period of time, you'll see definite patterns of the cinema both reflecting and distilling a culture. The films that impacted in some way did so for a reason that was more subtle and potent than the obvious ones. Looking at that and, perhaps, at a simplistic view of aboriginal songlines, they brought their cutlure into being, creating myths and stories that ultimately also served as maps in the landscape, moral maps and cultural maps. I think our cinema does that as well. So, I just tried to test the thesis by looking at all the films and looking at films which in one way or another impinged on Australian culture or
world culture.
You mentioned that you had been alive during the second fifty years of cinema. The films that you discuss are the films of your life.
Yes, exactly. The thing that was surprising to me about the renaissance of Australian cinema - or that which people like to call the renaissance of Australian cinema, films made from the early 70s - was that everyone seemed to be obsessed with historical, period films and there was no attempt to make
contemporary films. That didn't seem to go anywhere. It wasn't until after the fact that I took a broader view that it was Australia, a newly adult Australia, after the election of the Whitlam government, really catching up with itself or post-60s Australia catching up with its history and reinterpeting its history through the only popular cultural medium as young as the country. Theatre, opera and literature pre-dated the founding of Australia.
It was necessary in those years to look at issues of Australian identity. And it still is.
There were always academics and intelligentsia who tended to do it, did it wonderfully well and embraced it. But I think cinema did it and popularised it much more than Henry Lawson or Arthur Streeton.
The chapter headings of White Fellas' Dreaming indicate some of the principal cinema 'song-lines'.
By looking, not at individual films but at the cumulative effect of several films that impinged on basic, essential themes that Australia had to deal with, it seemed to follow the history pretty well. It was a map of the evolving Australian character which was pretty clearly defined through film. Most historians or social historians would no doubt pick up the connection between the convict, the bushranger and the digger and, in between, the larrikin, 'the working-class larrikins' who went off to war and became the diggers. That was probably the most quintessentially Australian experience between the two world wars, the last time that that kind of old Australian was really seen.
You remarked that Gallipoli was the 'apotheosis of the digger'.
For me and for a lot of people it was. Gallipoli is a very interesting film for me. I was growing up in the 60s and Gallipoli was treated as a kind of joke. There was the play, The One Day of the Year, which was the only time when that generational dispute was dealt with. But, since Peter Weir's film, something was recognised and it did create some kind of catharsis. It retrieved the Australian digger for Australian culture. He somehow became acceptable again. There is something particularly Australian once again about a war where men die heroically but somewhat foolishly, heroically but innocently. They did not glorify warmongering but glorified sacrifice.
Catharsis. You have used the word in the context of 'coming to terms with our shadow past'. Do you see that in other films, including your own?
I don't think enough Australian cinema has done this and Australians don't like to see confronting cinema. There is a hankering for a more child-like view of the world. Australia is never going to be a grown-up country until it can deal with its indigenous history in a mature way. We have
a conservative government who talk about the black armband view of Australian history - and those of us who disagree call it the black blindfold view of Australian history. When others refer to the 'Stolen Generation', the government refers to it as the 'Rescued Generation'.
But black armbands are a strong symbolic reminder to people to mourn.
Exactly. It's clear that somethat has been greatly lost. It's not unique to Australia and has happened in all the continents, not the least of which is in the Americas as well as in New Zealand, our close neighbour. But, in all those cases, they have been able to confront the past, try to atone for it simply by recognising it. But, in Australian we haven't. I see New Zealand as a much healthier country for having gone through the cathartic experience of popularly celebrating Once Were Warriors (which was one of the highest-grossing films in that country).
We, when we make films like that, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Dead Heart, Blackfellas, unfortunately, not many people go to see them. It's not that difficult a thing to do and , once it's done, we heal. I love that notion 'you're only as sick as your secrets'. So long as you try to hide it, disavow it or pretend it's not our responsibility, then you are going to remain a bit sick. I think cinema is one of the means by which that can be properly celebrated. There can be a great Australian film about it, I can feel it in the air, there are so many great projects around the theme of genocide. Somebody is going to end up making the great Australian film about it.
You made the point that until we face this issue we will remain 'morally and spiritually diminished'.
I'm quite convinced that's the case. One of the things that cinema does by stealth quite often is deal with these things. The most striking example is Gallipoli. By being aware of how powerfully the Vietnam films in the US helped deal with those issues, everything from The Deer Hunter, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and Apocalypse Now, that's why America, essentially, is a very powerful culture because it is able to deal with those things in its popular culture. Sure, there's a lot that's dysfunctional in America but, because of their First Amendment, they're able to bring a lot of stuff to the fore. No problem of telling stories about corrupt government or demonic big business - they're almost the cliched bad guys in the movies. But that helps the culture to be healthy.
When did you first encounter Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell?
With Jung I simply read about him at University, as part of medical studies. We had to do psychology and I came across him, read him with interest but it was just an overview along with Freud. I understood him an intellectual sense, the notion of the collective unconscious. But, really, with a lot of things, I didn't get into it too seriously. It was only when I became a film practitioner and actually had the experience with Mad Max I that was seeing this low-budget
genre film have resonances in countries that I'd never even been to and whose culture I knew nothing about. It seemed to speak to them in different ways.
Japan said Max was a Samurai and followed that sort of tradition. The French picked it up as a western on wheels and Scandinavia saw him as a Viking, as I said in the documentary. But, when these things were said to me, I thought this is a living example of what Jung was talking about. It was really through the practice of filmmaking that I had this awareness of the collective unconscious and sensed its power in some way. I realised that, as filmmakers, despite our personal vanities, as storytellers, we are the servants of the collective unconscious, serving that larger monomyth. Films like Mad Max should emerge out of Australia. To that extent they do contribute to that culture that some people call the monoculture, that broad global culture, rather than the
local, specific, regional, more national culture.
The Mad Max films could be seen as an Australian manifestation of the collective unconscious that resonates everywhere.
Yes. What I found interesting was that here it was in practice whereas, previously, it was in theory. And, if Jung described the territory, Joseph Campbell was its consummate guide.
He provided a language to guide people and, of course, popularised the hero myth.
He did two things. First of all, he had more scholarship than Jung. Jung was a practitioner but Campbell was a formidable scholar with his study of comparative religion. He spent a long time just trawling through the material and making comparisons. His other great talent was being able to synthesise and clarify, a great command of language, a great passion for his work. It's one thing to describe and another thing to make sense of its purpose. I think he described the function of mythlogy in a way that nobody else has ever done. To me, he explained most of the big questions. My life post-Campbell seemed a lot clearer. He not only explained what I did as a job, as a storyteller, but also explained to me an enormous amount about politics and about religion. So much of religion seems dysfunctional and achieves the very opposite of what it is meant to. He also explained in a way that nobody else has done for me this compulsion to understand the world through a spiritual dimension, this religious compulsion.
He had that wonderful description of mythology as being 'other people's religion' and that notion that is not only his but others, where a lot of religion loses its mystique and becomes dysfunctional. It is when we concretise the metaphor, when we take what is essentially a metaphorical expression of a powerful idea and make it an absolute. Then you're taking on a rigidity which doesn't leave much room for wonder and awe. You become brittle. What was heroic in the past now becomes tyrannical. When you read 'The Hero Myth', you see it's the face of almost every hero. They love too much the face of what they create and yesterday's hero becomes today's
tyrant. If you look at politics and, indeed, the histories of a lot of religions, those two things really seem to apply.
Some Church people so hold on to their understanding of their truth that they become overly dogmatic instead of realising that they need to appreciate the good and the beautiful, especially in the imagination and storytelling.
The other thing I learned from Campbell, and I say this with humility, not out of any arrogance - in many ways it's the opposite of arrogance - cinema has taken over from the Church. When you begin to realise that it's a bit scary if you are a film-maker. There is a responsibility. And you'd better put all your wisdom into your work. You can't treat it casually. In times gone by - and I think this was again Campbell who said it - as you approached a city and, still, some of the great cities of the world, the first thing you see is the cathedral because it reaches so high to the sky. Now you approach a city and you see the high office towers. But amongst them you will see the cinemas as bright and as lit-up and as attractive as once the cathedral was. You go into these places and undergo a kind of public dreaming. They are places of meditation. You congregate with strangers and you do have a shared experience. Often, if a film is very powerful, not empy-calory kind of stuff, but stuff that resonates and stays with you, it can have a very powerful. For me, and I dare say for most people, the greatest sense of awe I had as a kid and as an adult is in the cinema, a sense of dread, a great sense of inspiration, a great sense of love. You could argue that it's all artificial, but if you take the argument further, you can see that in fact film does work in that feedback loop with the zeitgeist and it does distil and reflect and affirm the zeitgeist, reinforces it and then spews it back - and that feedback loop keeps going on. So, it's not artificial. It's not imposed just by the filmmakers. The filmmakers are responding to what they have experienced. Storytellers respond to what they have experienced. So, in many ways, it does take some of the function of the church away, or at least it appears to. But, film has to have a moral underpinning otherwise the culture is in big trouble. That's what I'm beginning to understand.
So many cultures recognised Max in the context of their mythmaking. Someone referred to him as a 'Christ in leather'. Would you have seen him as a Christ-figure? Would you have intended biblical or gospel overtones when you were making the films?
No, not at all. Because you are dealing with the hyperbole of a future world where you can do everything, he's not a Christ-figure. He's too limited.
You referred to him as 'a lost soul who becomes an agent of renewal'.
I always think of Mad Max, especially Mad Max 2, as a closet human being. Basically, all he cares about is himself but, unwittingly, he becomes the agent of change. And that is true of the hero, whether the hero is Christ or Buddha or Moses or any of the great religious figures. With Christ, and this is one of the reasons he's so powerful, he is the one who exemplified this the most, the relinquishing of self-interest for the greater good. That's the classic in all hero mythology. And Max never quite gets to that stage. He never quite relinquishes his self-interest. And, so, he's not really a Christ-like figure. But he falls into the fairly
classic hero mould and, ultimately, he is the agent of change. That's the other thing that the hero must be. He must change the established order.
I must say that Babe is much closer to a Christ-figure than Max. Particularly in Babe, he does change the established order. In fact, in Babe, Pig in the City, he's much more of a Christ-figure because he turns the other cheek. He goes to save from drowning the one who was about to kill him. But in Babe, he relinqushes his self-interest in order to save Farmer Hoggart and to help fulful the dream for Farmer Hoggart and to show that a pig can, indeed, be a champion sheepdog. He does it in part for himself but it's mainly for the farmer. Yes, he's closer to Christ - not that a pig should be Christ but he's more Christ-like than Max!
Moving to Lorenzo's Oil, how important is that film to you?
That's my favourite. Of all the films I've worked on, it's my favourite. In the most extraordinary way, everything you saw in that film happened. We didn't have to bend the drama very much at all. It is true life and epically heroic. In fact, I would have to say Babe, Mad Max and Lorenzo's Oil are all in many ways the same story. It's the hero myth: you enter the dark, unknown landscape and, by courage, you undergo a number of trials and endure; then, in the darkest moments, where you finally realise that it's not for yourself but for the larger good, you relinquish self-interest, you come to that understanding and return with a boon for your society. And that's exactly what the Odones did.
There are children all over the world today who are alive because of Lorenzo's oil. They continue to live normal and healthy lives. For a while the medical establishment tried to say the jury's out but the jury's well and truly in on this now. Lorenzo himself is 21 and he's still in the state that you saw him in the film. They arrested his disease but he had so much loss of his myolin tissue that now they have to find a way to put that back. But, even in that, they've given thousands of people suffering from diseases so much hope. I found that to have that played out in a suburb of Washington DC and in a small suburban house, it's an epic drama in real
life and that was extraordinary to me.
As we go into the next century are you optimistic about Australian films and about Australian audiences responding?
Some things make me optimistic but in some ways I'm nervous. And I'm nervous because Australia is at a risk of becoming a skin deep culture. I think, for instance, when you look at White Fellas' Dreaming, the most interesting films came out of the times of most change or turmoil, when the national identity was being forged. So, it's not surprising to me to see films like Sons of Matthew - even though it was about cutting down big tress and taming the land - like Jedda, which is still quite impressive on the aboriginal problem, even though it was lurid in parts, it tried to deal with trying to preserve aboriginal culture and the conflict in that, like Gallipoli and other films that did impinge on the culture.
I was discussing this with David Stratton who is studying and lecturing on these developments in Australian and in world cinema. I asked what sort of patterns he picked up when cinema is most vital. 'It's always at a time when a culture's most under threat, the most interesting films arise'. I said, 'that's not so good for Australia then'. He said, 'No that's really good for Australia because people are trying to sort out and define the culture'. That's why I think films on the aboriginal question will come out and will be made pretty soon. But it's one thing to get them made, it's another for them to be seen by many, many people. So, the answer is 'I would like to be optimistic but I'm worried that Australian culture is a little skin deep'.
Phone interview: 8th July 1999
