George Miller

Miller and his twin brother were born in Queensland to Greek immigrant parents, and George went on to earn a medical degree, working weekend shifts in a Sydney hospital emergency room even after he'd begun making short films with a friend on the side. He has said the ER work gave him an intimate, clinical familiarity with the physics of car-crash trauma that directly informed how he later staged vehicular carnage on screen.

An emergency-room doctor turned filmmaker, Miller brought a physician's knowledge of trauma and a stuntman's disregard for safety to the Australian wasteland, creating action cinema's most influential grammar of clarity within chaos. He shot the original Mad Max on a shoestring budget with mostly non-professional stunt performers, several of whom were injured for real during filming, and the film's outsized international success — on a budget of roughly $300,000 — helped put Australian genre cinema on the map.

Decades later he returned to the franchise with Fury Road, directing one of the most critically acclaimed action films of the 21st century well into his sixties, proof his eye for kinetic geography never dulled. He has also had an entirely separate, equally successful career directing family films including the Babe and Happy Feet franchises, an unusually wide creative range for an action-genre specialist.