For a cinematic visionary, it's only appropriate that George Miller is talking about sight: his own (those Le Corbusier-style specs are not only a style icon; more importantly for a man who spends much of his time writing and reading scripts, they're multifocals) and that of horses. When he learns from Time's photographer that equine eyesight moves constantly between monocular and binocular vision, the ever-affable and ultra-curious Miller moves forward in his chair: "So depending on which part of the eye they look out of they can see close or far away? That's amazing."
Here the Australian director could be describing his own uncanny ability to master the minutiae of moviemaking while never losing sight of the bigger picture—even if it's a picture that no one's envisaged before. With unerring prescience, Miller has zoomed Australian cinema out of a costume-drama past and into a cutting-edge future (Mad Max); beamed through the freckles and frizzy hair of a gawky Sydneysider to find the screen goddess within Nicole Kidman (as producer of Flirting and Dead Calm); and spliced live action with animatronics and CGI as creator of the beloved Babe franchise. "Somehow or other, his imagination is wired up to the future," says actor and comedian Magda Szubanski, who has added zing to three of Miller's recent films, including his latest hit, Happy Feet, "and he really seems to be able to bring back to us in the present day possibilities that most of us couldn't even imagine yet."
The 61-year-old filmmaker, whom Szubanski also describes as "a big cuddly bear with a brain the size of a planet," usually gives audiences and filmmaking rivals a five-year head start—the typical time it takes to get his notoriously painstaking projects (including his ongoing Sydney house renovations) off the ground. So in 2003, when Miller announced that following the stalling of his fourth Mad Max film, in part because of the war in Iraq, his next project would be an animated penguin musical, to be made in Australia with a production house relatively new to the game, Pixar must have rubbed its hands with glee. Reading the Happy Feet script for the first time, Szubanski became as fluttery as Esme Cordelia Hoggett, her farmer's wife from Babe: "You're going, Man, it's a frickin' huge gamble. But by crikey, if he pulls it off it will be brilliant."
Yet as audacious as a movie full of penguins seemed, Hollywood animators had been putting wildlife through the hoops since the days of the Road Runner and Pepé Le Pew, just after World War II. Perhaps not coincidentally, artist Chuck Jones was a particular favorite of the young George Miliotis, growing up the son of Greek immigrants in the town of Chinchilla, Queensland. But when it came time for Miller to concoct his first purely animated feature half a century later, the greatest inspiration came not from Warner Bros. but from wildlife documentaries. Tickled by the fact that Antarctica's emperor penguins distinguish their mates by the unique call of their "heartsong," Miller conceived a cartoon musical. But as always, it took technology a while to catch up with his imagination. At Sydney's Animal Logic production house, a system was devised to incorporate the amphibious moves of dancers filmed in motion-capture suits and weave them back into the computer-generated characters, so that the sight of 10,000 penguins gyrating to Prince's Kiss seems not only weirdly natural but also pretty cool. And being George Miller, he would insist that his tap-dancing hero Mumble (voiced by Elijah Wood) be composed of no less than six million CGI penguin feathers.
But despite the pyrotechnics, for Miller story is all. Ever since he sent Mel Gibson's disillusioned police officer Max Rockatansky down a Geelong highway in 1978, the former emergency-room doctor has claimed the mythological writings of Joseph Campbell as his cinematic touchstone. "The composite hero of the monomyth is a personage of exceptional gifts," wrote Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. "Frequently he is honored by his society, frequently unrecognized or disdained." From misfit Max, to a piglet who thinks he's a sheep, and a penguin who can't express himself through song, only dance, the stories remain essentially the same. "There's no difference between Happy Feet, Babe and Mad Max," Miller insists.
Also usually at play is a mixture of calm intelligence and charm—the winning bedside manner of this cinematic Dr. Feelgood. "Was there no place where a penguin without a heartsong could truly belong?" asks Happy Feet's narrator at one point. This being a George Miller movie, the answer is an entertainingly entangled double negative—together with a family-friendly environmental message as light on its feet as the dance work. "You can see that element of the healer in all of George's works," insists Szubanski. "And I think that's partly why he's drawn to the hero's journey, because it's ultimately very optimistic."
Though he's one of Australia's greatest cultural exports, Miller is less sanguine when it comes to the local film industry and its ability to send stories to the world. As just one example, he cites the late adventurer Steve Irwin, who recorded his elephant-seal role in Happy Feet just months before his September death this year. "Irwin was Australian not only in his persona but in his actions," Miller says. "And that's gone from us now. I think that applies a lot to our culture … We're exporting our talent but not our culture." While he might speak with an American accent, Miller's Mumble might beg to differ. Right now across the globe, this disarmer from Down Under is dancing as fast as he can.
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