“The big influence on me was Buster Keaton,”1 George Miller said to Robert Rodriguez back in 2015 during a filmed chat with the Texan filmmaker.
With Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) prequel, Furiosa (2024), revving its V8 engines in preparation for release (it will premiere at Cannes followed by theatrical runs starting 24 May), I thought this week I’d take a whistlestop gander at this influence Keaton on George Miller’s post-apocalyptic action series, and how in several instances Miller paid tribute to Keaton via direct referencing.
Miller’s post-apocalyptic mythology and Keaton’s work are major passions of mine, so it felt like the perfect time to do this. Also, back in 2019, I wrote a monograph on the original Mad Max (1979), which recently celebrated its 45th anniversary, for the Constellations series published by Liverpool University Press, which I’ll link to here, in case your interest is piqued (what writer doesn’t love an opportunity to plug their own book?)
Keaton served his apprenticeship with Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and went on to create, star in and co-direct a run of pictures, short and feature length, with action-led narratives, superb stunts and classical editing. They proved majorly important to Miller’s own conception for action cinema, but also action cinema in general: present vivid imagery that’s easy to follow, packed with excitement. He learned from the master. Despite Mad Max: Fury Road having CG-enhanced imagery up the wazoo, Miller filmed the hair-raising stunts for real - as he had done with the three prior Mad Max movies - once again proving there’s nothing like the real thing. It’s the reason Tom Hardy, now playing Max Rockatansky, described Fury Road as a cross between Slipknot and Cirque du Soleil.
In the Mad Max movies and the films of Keaton, you don’t need many words. In Keaton’s case intertitles, in Miller’s case dialogue. If the shots cut together and you understand what’s going on, despite the fragmented presentation of space and time and the camera’s ability to go anywhere, move anywhere, the craft has triumphed. You let the images sing. It’s why Miller is fond of calling this style “pure cinema”. Keaton was a maestro of pure cinema too, and what we receive as the audience is movies at arguably their most unique in the arena of pop art entertainment.
In Mad Max movies, you can easily follow the storytelling without sound or dialogue. When you consider the balderdash and piffle which gets passed off for kinetic cinema these days, complete with headache-inducing eye-strain, aided and abetted by disastrous overuse of handheld camera, the beautifully crafted works of Keaton and Miller will always stand out and be remembered. In Keaton’s case, some of his most revered titles are over 100 years old or pushing 100, and they still produce frissons of joy and artistic appreciation in both audience and critic alike.
When Mad Max: Fury Road was released in 2015, there was plenty of online and journalistic chatter about how influenced Miller was by Keaton. One film in particular mentioned a lot: 1926’s The General, the romantic tale of a Civil War train driver going deep into enemy territory. The film is of course a masterwork, and it set the template for all future chase movies. It also featured the single most expensive stunt staged in the silent era (a bridge blowing up and a train crashing into a canyon and river). It cost $42,000 dollars to execute. In today’s money, you’re talking close to a million bucks.
Miller has talked about Keaton and silent movies for years, though. A silent film book also led him to Keaton: Kevin Brownlow’s The Parade’s Gone By (1968).
“I was very influenced by a book written by a critic named Kevin Brownlow called The Parade’s Gone By. He said the main part of the parade has gone by the advent of sound in cinema. This new language that we call cinema has mostly evolved in the silent era. What differentiated it from the theater were action pieces, the chase pieces. And I really got interested in that.”2
He later elaborated on the silent era influence, again mentioning the Brownlow book, but adding extra info:
“Kevin Brownlow’s book The Parade’s Gone By wielded a big influence on me when I first started asking myself what film is. He said this new language, this new syntax, is basically defined pre-sound by the silent filmmakers, the closeup, the chase, the montage, cutting it together. The masters Buster Keaton and the Russians put pieces of film and fitted them together, all pre-sound”.3
In a 2006 sit down with the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia website, Miller again reiterated this notion of silent movies being the creative lynchpin for his own vision:
“So with the first Mad Max (1979) I basically wanted to make a silent movie. With sound. The kind of movie that Hitchcock would say, 'They didn’t have to read the subtitles in Japan’. A film that basically played like a silent movie and … because for me, once I got interested in cinema as moving pictures, I went back to the silent era. And I was particularly struck by the films of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd and those – and those kind of very kinetic action montage movies that they made. And they were the … I think they were the true masters in that era.
“And basically I saw the action movie, particularly the car action movie, as an extension of that. Just the way you could put little bits of film together and make up a kind of a whole sentence. The syntax of filmmaking was first discovered by those kinds of filmmakers.”4
While all eyes were on Fury Road and The General both being extended chase movies, it should be pointed out with Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) Miller got to directly quote from several Keaton pictures (The General, obviously, but also 1921’s The Goat). I’d also argue the lighter tone of Beyond Thunderdome sits closer to the action comedy shenanigans of Keaton.
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome ends with a big chase sequence, itself a reworking of the Mad Max 2 (1981) finale. The sequel’s big rig is now replaced by a makeshift train (it’s more like a flatbed truck on rails) and Tina Turner’s Bartertown hordes are chasing it down. Chase sequences are crucial to the Mad Max movies and by Fury Road, Miller clearly wanted to make an entire film centred around a chase (as is The General).
The Goat reference appears in Beyond Thunderdome, recreating the scene where Buster is sat on a cowcatcher, at the front of a train, moving within the frame from long shot to close-up. Buster on a cowcatcher also cropped up in The General (as I wrote last week, about the Keaton short One Week (1920), he wasn’t above reworking the same gag for different films). Miller’s tribute sees one of Aunty Entity’s goons, Ironbar (Angry Anderson), leaping from a vehicle onto the cowcatcher as said vehicle explodes.
Moving on from The General, Miller directly referenced the 1922 short, Cops, during the opening minutes of Mad Max: Fury Road. Cops is among the best remembered Keaton shorts.
In the short, Keaton gets into scraps with the LAPD and they chase him all over sites around Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles. Does 1922’s satiric Cops make Buster Keaton the OG of “ACAB” (All Cops Are Bastards)? Joking aside, Cops features one of Keaton’s most famous stunts.
From the now-famous alleyway just off Hollywood Boulevard - running from Cosmo Street to Cahuenga Boulevard and vice versa, and which still exists to this day (I’ve been there!) - Keaton is chased down by a platoon of pursuing coppers. He runs into the middle of the road and grabs the back of a car travelling down Cahuenga and is dragged away, almost vertically (Keaton would also re-used this gag later that year, in Day Dreams, this time using a streetcar).
Back to Mad Max.
Our thirty-year gap re-introduction to Max Rockatansky begins with the “road warrior” standing on a hillside overlooking a wasteland valley. The black-on-black V-8 Interceptor is still in his possession (but it won’t be for very long). Chased down by a posse of the Immortan Joe’s “War Boys”, Max is captured, chained and dragged to the warlord’s citadel.
Max being Max, his survival instinct kicking in, as he says in his gravel-voiced narration, “it is I who run from both the living and the dead,” he duffs up a few War Boys and runs around cave-like corridors in a desperate bid to escape. Max potentially finds a route out, but is then confronted by a 1000 feet drop to the ground and so he swings out into the open air, using his handcuffs to latch himself onto a chain dangling invitingly in front of him (part of a crane used to lift heavy objects around the citadel). Such is his desperation. But with nowhere to go and physics being physics, Max merely swings back into the War Boys and they drag him away all over again.
This prologue-style moment, right before the title card “Mad Max: Fury Road” appears, is a direct recreation of the Cops finale, in which Keaton, usually the hero who gets the girl and saves the day unscathed, is dragged away to his doom by the LAPD, his ruse (passing himself off as a copper) having failed, and the door to the police station slammed shut. It’s downbeat stuff for Keaton, though comically so.
So there you go. Without Buster Keaton there would be no Mad Max. Certainly not in the iteration it became.
Miller's series is indebted to the man they called “the Great Stone Face” (on account of his expressionless acting style and the fact he never smiled on camera). Keaton was a true genius of the cinema and Miller is no slouch himself.
Until next time!
George Miller on The Director’s Chair, 2015
George Miller quoted in Mad Max II: How George Miller’s Road Warrior Became One of the Great Action Movies of All-Time, Cinephilia and Beyond website
George Miller quoted in Far Out Magazine, December 2023
National Film and Sound Archive of Australia interview, 2006