Mad Max: Fury Road Director George Miller Joins AI Film Festival, Signals AI Is Here to Stay
Backlash builds as fans bristle at George Miller’s role in an AI event, sparking a fresh fight over creativity and the future of film.
Well, here we are: George Miller, the Mad Max mastermind who made his name on real cars flipping in real deserts, is about to judge an AI film festival. If that feels like whiplash, you are not alone.
What Miller is doing
Miller will lead the jury at Omni 1.0, which is being billed as Australia’s first AI movie awards festival. He told The Guardian he signed on out of curiosity and stuck around because he sees momentum here that he doesn’t want to ignore.
'It’s the balance between human creativity and machine capability, that’s what the debate and the anxiety is about.'
That’s his headline idea: AI is a tool, and tools change movies. He compares it to how oil paint once let artists endlessly revise their work, and says the current panic feels a lot like earlier tech shifts in art. Also, he’s blunt about it: in his view, AI is staying and it’s going to change how films get made. Coming from the guy synonymous with practical everything, that’s a statement.
The festival, in plain English
Omni 1.0 (via the Omni Film Festival folks) frames itself as a bi-annual snapshot of what’s possible with generative and AI-powered filmmaking. It’s not just screenings; there are panels and networking, and the winners play at the end of the event. Miller says he’ll be watching for what people call 'AI-slop' — the lazy, mushy stuff — which suggests he’s not giving anything a pass just because a model touched it.
- Event: Omni 1.0 AI film festival (Australia’s first AI-focused movie awards)
- What’s there: AI film screenings, panels, networking, winners screened at the end
- Schedule: Preview on October 21; main event in Sydney in November 2025
- Cadence: Bi-annual, with this being the second year in a row
- Jury: Led by George Miller
The reaction (and why people are prickly)
Fans are split. After Culture Crave posted the Guardian story on Twitter, some folks called the take naive and said it stings to hear it from a filmmaker they admire. That’s the fault line right now: a beloved practical-effects icon embracing a technology many creatives see as a threat. It’s a complicated vibe shift, and he knows it — hence all the talk about balance.
Why this matters
Miller has always been tool-obsessed — just usually the kind you can mount to a rig and launch off a ramp. Him stepping into an AI film jury is a big symbolic moment for people who care about how movies get made, not just what ends up on screen. Agree or not, he’s putting his name on the side that says: experiment, but do it with taste.