We were talking one day and Terry Hayes [who co-wrote the screenplays of Mad Max 2 and Beyond Thunderdome with Miller] started talking about mythology and how where people are short on knowledge, they tend to be very big on belief. In other words, they take a few fragments of knowledge and, if you take like the Aboriginal tribes of Australia, they just take simple empirical information and using those little bits of the jigsaw construct very elaborate mythological beliefs, which explain the whole universe. Terry was saying if you had a tribe of kids after the apocalypse who had only a few fragments of knowledge, [they would construct] a mythological belief as to what was before. And what would happen if Max or someone like that…
So we were talking about that, and it kicked off the idea of kids who were Lord of the Flies-type kids, and that led to this story. So it automatically had a softer heart to it. Mel Gibson often describes the character as a sort of a closet human being who denied his humanity because he thought it wasn’t conducive to survival. And we said, well this is really a story about Max coming out of the closet. And because it’s a story like that, it has a softer nature.
We were talking one day and Terry Hayes [who co-wrote the screenplays of Mad Max 2 and Beyond Thunderdome with Miller] started talking about mythology and how where people are short on knowledge, they tend to be very big on belief. In other words, they take a few fragments of knowledge and, if you take like the Aboriginal tribes of Australia, they just take simple empirical information and using those little bits of the jigsaw construct very elaborate mythological beliefs, which explain the whole universe. Terry was saying if you had a tribe of kids after the apocalypse who had only a few fragments of knowledge, [they would construct] a mythological belief as to what was before. And what would happen if Max or someone like that…
So we were talking about that, and it kicked off the idea of kids who were Lord of the Flies-type kids, and that led to this story. So it automatically had a softer heart to it. Mel Gibson often describes the character as a sort of a closet human being who denied his humanity because he thought it wasn’t conducive to survival. And we said, well this is really a story about Max coming out of the closet. And because it’s a story like that, it has a softer nature.
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