Marvel is tired, Star Wars is self-parody – now Mad Max is the last franchise standing

Ahead of the release of ‘Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga’, Geoffrey Macnab explores how Aussie director George Miller masterminded one of cinema’s wonderful anomalies

Sand by your man: Chris Hemsworth in ‘Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga’ (Warner Bros)

When George Miller was starting out as a filmmaker, he was known as “Doctor George”.  It’s one of the many paradoxes about Miller that the 79-year-old Aussie – ranked by many among the finest action directors in movie history – began his career in medicine. Since his early days working alongside producer partner and “filmmaking brother” Byron Kennedy (who tragically died in a helicopter accident in 1983), Miller has been uncompromising about health and safety. Not that you’d know it by watching his films.

There were no reported serious accidents or injuries during the shooting of Miller’s new feature, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (premiering in Cannes this week) – a remarkable feat, given the film’s frantic, stunts-heavy ethos. After all, Miller likes his action scenes to be as realistic as possible. He’ll hire Cirque du Soleil gymnasts to perform gravity-defying stunts rather than try to trick the audiences with visual effects. Like its predecessors, the new movie is awash with blood, carnage, mayhem, decapitations and disembowelling.

In one extraordinary 15-minute sequence that took a reported 78 days to film, Tom Burke as the legendary “rig driver” Praetorian Jack is shown behind the wheel of a huge oil juggernaut driving at breakneck speed down the desert road. The vehicle is being pursued by assailants on all sides, some of them paragliding high above it, others on motorbikes or in trucks. Furiosa herself (Anya Taylor-Joy) is clinging to the undercarriage, trying to stop the vehicle from blowing up. It’s like a hyper-charged version of a stagecoach chase in an old western. Such high jinks are what audiences have come to expect from a Max Max movie – but are only a part of what has turned the series into such a phenomenon.