The 79-year-old director has helmed the new dystopian prequel Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and explained he never expected it to be captivating audiences more than four decades on from the release of the original movie.
Asked if he expected the appeal of Mad Max to span generations, Miller told IndieWire's Filmmaker Toolkit podcast: "Never!
"It's best expressed in John Lennon's notion that life is what happens when you're making other plans."
Anya Taylor-Joy plays the title role in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, directed by George Miller. (AP PHOTO)
Miller explained the demands of 1979's Mad Max had put him off from directing again and it was only when he began to gauge the world's reaction to the film that he was convinced otherwise.
"I began to realise that inadvertently, we had hit on something archetypal," he said.
"In Japan, he was a samurai. In Scandinavia, he was a lone Viking. In France, they saw Mad Max as a Western on wheels."
The filmmaker explained that Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga - which features Anya Taylor-Joy in the title role - follows many of the story conventions that are seen in Western and medieval tales.
The Witches of Eastwick director said: "They're basically a reflection on who we are today and on the ways that those same behaviour patterns are pretty constant in human beings across all time and space.
"The same stories, the same patterns are very, very common. So you can find those analogies throughout history that you see in Furiosa.
"It's very much about Furiosa and how she gets a crash course in becoming a warrior purely out of the necessity to achieve what she wants to achieve and survive."
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