George Miller’s film career began with barely averted violence. In 1971, when he was a twenty-six-year-old medical student in Sydney, Australia, he took a job at a construction site while he waited to start an internship at a hospital. One day, he was standing next to another worker when a brick fell from fourteen floors above them and hit the ground between them with a crack.
“This was in the days before helmets,” Miller told me recently. “I got an existential jolt.” He and his younger brother Chris had won a student film competition at the University of New South Wales.
The first prize was a filmmaking workshop in Melbourne, but George had never thought to attend it; filmmaking didn’t seem like a serious career option. It was the falling brick that changed his mind. “I thought, Damn it, I shouldn’t be on this site,” he said.
The next day, he got on his motorcycle and rode the nine hundred kilometres to Melbourne. “Violence in the Cinema, Part 1,” the short film that Miller made at the workshop, neatly summarizes the themes that have preoccupied Miller ever since. It opens with a clinical psychologist sitting in an armchair, speaking to the camera.
He bemoans the “heavy saturation of violence” in modern movies, gets shot in the face by an intruder, and then commits a series of sadistic acts himself. When the short premièred at the Sydney Film Festival, in 1972, it was as shocking for its self-assurance as for its content. Miller went back to finis.