George Miller : Why His Mad Max Fury Road Deserves These Oscar Nominations

Kyle Buchanan from Vulture sat down with Miller in Los Angeles and asked him to make his case for why his talented cast and crew warrant recognition in some of those key nominations. Below the excerpt related to best director and picture:

" Miller developed Fury Road for nearly two decades, and several false starts delayed production until 2011. “It was a very, very long labor, and it gets quite intense at the very end because you’re working long hours and it doesn’t come without pain,” he said. “When you start getting some feedback back, you think, Oh, wow. All the stuff we hoped was there, seems to be there. And it’s palpable enough that people are really, really getting into it. You don’t know if it’ll have any resonance, but when you see people doing fan art of such a high order or doing cosplay so imaginatively with such wit…” Miller trailed off, grinning, as he remembered a Japanese critic whose passion for the film bordered on the fanatical.

“He told me that he’d read all this stuff into it — and it is, after all, an allegory, so it’s in the eye of the beholder — and I said, ‘Did you get all that from one viewing of the movie?’ And he said, ‘No, no. I walked out of the cinema, I thought about it, and I went straight back into the cinema and asked the distributor if I could see it again.’ And then he took me aside and pulled open his shirt, and he had the Immortan’s little branding symbol tattooed on him!” Miller laughed. “I thought, Oh my God, I hope this movie lasts long enough to justify the tattoo!” 

That, ultimately, is why this awards-season leg has been so fruitful for Miller. “You work very hard in the tunnel of the movie you’re making, and then you emerge and put some effort out there, but when you get home and now there’s all this new stuff coming back at you, it’s one of the greatest delights,” he told me. There’s nothing more gratifying for Miller than to have people realize that there’s more to Mad Max than meets the eye. “You can see it on the surface,” he said, “but we tried to put a lot of iceberg under the tip.” "

Read here for Miller cases on : Best Actress (Charlize Theron) , Best Film Editing (Margaret Sixel) , Best Visual Effects, Best Cinematography (John Seale) , Best Costume Design, Best Production Design(Colin Gibson) , Best Make-Up and Hair-styling.