George Miller has created a variety of different movies in his career as a director, so what's the major through line overall?

Miller is the director of last year's most pulse pounding action film Mad Max: Fury Road but he has also created some of the most beloved family films, like Babe and Happy Feet. While many directors tend to stay in a similar lane throughout their career (Tim Burton, Quentin Tarantino), Miller's filmography is varied.

The director spoke with The Business from KCRW, revealing his thought process behind taking various films.

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"There's gotta be story. Story is privileged above everything else," he explained. "But it's also gotta be combined with some sort of tool or something relatively new. So that in the case of the [Babe] movies, how do you make a pig talk? The interesting thing was that if you have kids, you don't get out much anymore in terms of going spontaneously to the movies, so you're tending to watch a lot of family movies - you're going with your kids so obviously my mind was prime for those sort of things."

"So when I read something like The Sheep-Pig which became Babe, I saw that it was a fully formed piece and it would be really interesting not for cel animation it wasn't a kinetic movie, but I thought if we could make this animal talk and make people believe."

Miller did admit, however, that the animation and effects in Babe look "a bit hokey now."

Miller also discussed how he combined his love of penguins with something new and innovative.

"A similar thing on Happy Feet - always interested in the natural history of penguins. When my friend Andrew Lesnie, who passed away last year, he went from the Babe movies as cinematographer to Lord of the Rings and he showed me the first ever motion capture of Gollum," Miller recalled. "The moment I saw that I thought ahh, the penguins can dance. So it was again, that combination."

Now, Miller is nominated for Mad Max: Fury Road in the Best Director category as the Oscars (as well as Best Picture). Will he take home either trophy? Find out when the Oscars air Sunday, Feb. 28 at 8:30 p.m. ET on ABC.

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George Miller, Movies