Do we like George Miller?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A clean harm check and a decent working record, held back from the top by a thin record on how he treats his crews and a divisive AI stance.
Miller grew up in Chinchilla, Queensland, and studied medicine at UNSW. He worked as a doctor at St Vincent's in Sydney after his residency, making experimental shorts on the side. That odd double life led to Mad Max in 1979, one of Australia's biggest local hits.
The rest of the CV is a wild range: Fury Road took six Oscars, he co-wrote and produced Babe, and he directed Happy Feet, which won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Few directors go from talking pigs and tap-dancing penguins to a flame-throwing guitarist in a desert, and he made it look easy.
The big stoush on his record is a money fight, not a character one. After Fury Road, his production company sued Warner Bros over a bonus of about $7 million, which it claimed for bringing the film in under budget. Warner Bros disputed that, and the studio reportedly won an appeal in 2018. The fight stalled a planned prequel, The Wasteland.
On the harm test he comes up clean. We found no harmful statements from him about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet, and no run of work with people who push that kind of thing. That's the whole list, and the record is thinner than for most celebs because he doesn't do culture-war commentary.
The one thing that might make you wince is AI. In 2025 he told The Guardian that AI is here to stay, and he judged an AI film festival in Sydney. The A.V. Club called AI-generated work slop and argued it relies on scraped work. Where you land depends on whether you see a veteran who's curious about a new tool or an artist cheering on something that undercuts other artists.
On how he treats people, the clearest thing we found is how he talks about a rough set. Asked about the Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron feud on Fury Road, he praised both as performers but said there was no excuse for the behaviour, and he criticised an industry that lets great performances excuse avoidable disruption. We found no allegations against him, though some fans have wondered about Furiosa's tough shoot.