PROFILES

One will be 70 next year, the other is in his 72nd year, but age doesn't mean a thing for either the Cannes Film Festival or this year's jury president, Australian filmmaker George Miller. The International Film Festival that launched in 1946 in a small seaside resort on the south coast of France continues to command more media attention worldwide than anything but the Olympic Games, while the filmmaker born in 1945 in a village in Queensland cultivates without distinction a taste for desperate characters, middle-class witches, cute pigs and tap-dancing penguins! George Miller is quite a character himself, hard to pin down, a genuine free spirit in the sometimes too-standardised movie world. The man has always experimented with genres, his only watchword being enthusiasm, as the creator of the mythic Mad Max saga demonstrated when he received his invitation: "What an unmitigated delight! To be there in the middle of this storied festival at the unveiling of cinematic treasures from all over the planet. To spend time in passionate discourse with fellow members of the jury. Such an honour. I'll be there with bells on!"

Post-apocalyptic epic
George Miller may not have had any films in Cannes's Official Competition but he must have good memories of the Festival. An active producer and big-hearted movie lover, he sat on the 1988 and 1999 juries and last year created a big buzz on the Croisette when he presented Mad Max: Fury Road out of competition. This fourth chapter of the post-apocalyptic epic that in 1979 kick-started his career, and that of one Mel Gibson, had the privilege of opening the 68th Festival before becoming a world-wide smash hit (see box). Which may well have incited Pierre Lescure and Thierry Frémaux, respectively the Festival's President and General Delegate, to entrust him with the job of leading the 2016 jury, thereby making him the first Australian to play that role. New Zealander Jane Campion, the 2014 president, was the first female filmmaker to occupy that "dominant male" position.

On the road again
We can surely count on the integrity of one the most discreet and least consensual filmmakers to produce some surprises when the winners are announced on 22 May. Jury presidents often vote for films outside their own genres, but in Miller's case it's hardly possible to define his genre! Over a 40-year career punctuated by long breaks, he has explored many paths, always at full speed with no concern for fashions or figures. Mad Max fans must have eaten their leathers when in 1995 their esteemed director adapted and produced Babe about a little pig who wants to be a sheepdog, then in 2006 directed his first animated film, Happy Feet, starring a penguin who can't sing! After Cannes, George Miller will return to preparing two further Mad Max films scheduled for 2017, turning his hand once more to what he knows best. On the road again...

MAD MAX FOREVER

With 1979's Mad Max, George Miller, who was practising as a doctor in Sydney, opened the way for a new cinematographic genre: the post-apocalyptic action movie set in a dystopian future of dust and flames, where men are reduced to fighting to the death for fuel. The portrayal of this dying world devastated by heat and violence was a planet-wide success: having cost $350,000, the film made $100 million and shot its director straight to Holly­wood. Two sequels followed, then the most recent episode, conceived as a tribute to the first, was released 36 years on in Cannes before taking the world by storm. The writers' salaries can't have made much of a dent in the budget since the few words spoken in Mad Max 4 are purely accessorial, the only real language being the visuals. And the music. Like a modern space opera, this film starring Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron is pure adrenalin. At the Oscars ceremony last February, George Miller took six awards (out of 10 nominations) in technical categories, the biggest score of these 88th American awards, but which feels a little like a consolation prize.