The Best Career Advice Ever Sung, #3

On Mad Max, the power of curiosity, and more Avett Brothers.

I’ve been thinking a lot about George Miller recently.

You may know him, the slightly off-beat, megawatt action movie director/auteur behind the Mad Max franchise. Here he is at CinemaCon:

It pains me, but I have not yet been able to escape the vortex of work and parenting this summer to see Furiosa. So, I’m not thinking about his current film exactly, so much as the phenomenon that is these films and the hold they seem to have on our (and his) imagination.

I had never seen any of these films prior to Mad Max Fury Road. Here’s the tagline: In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a woman rebels against a tyrannical ruler in search for her homeland with the aid of a group of female prisoners, a psychotic worshipper and a drifter named Max. It’s an odd tagline, which somehow doesn’t come close to capturing how very odd the film is. It was nominated for 10 Oscars.

When the film came out in 2015 it made a splash (and more than $300mm).

I had only a vague notion in the back of my mind that George Miller was a nutty Australian director who made nutty action movies. I never intended to watch the film. That is, until one day in 2016 when I went to turn the TV off before bed and Fury Road had just started. I sat down on the arm of the couch to watch just a minute of it, and then watched all two hours perched in that exact spot as if in a trance.

And yet, here’s what’s most interesting to me about George Miller: before he directed his first film (the first installment of Mad Max came out in 1979), before he became “Mastermind George Miller,” he was an ER doctor.

In fact, he practiced medicine for almost a decade before he got into filmmaking full time.

Here’s what he said about it in an interview on Fresh Air:

I realized, after about a decade, how much I'd lost the practice of medicine. So, by default I became a filmmaker at a time when I didn't think you could - there was no such thing as a career in Australia as a filmmaker. But I was just led to it out of a sense of inquiry, curiosity.

Think about that for a moment. That’s undergrad, med-school, residency; that’s long days and late nights and a tremendous amount of investment and energy and attention into a career path, and then just to hard pivot into a new field. And to no small effect.

It echoes, for me, my favorite quote from Reinhold Niebuhr: “Change is the essence of life; be willing to surrender what you are for what you could become.

I’m sure Miller’s decision at the time wasn’t as simple as it sounds now some 40 odd years in the rearview. In my experience, major life/career changes frequently bring a commensurate amount of excitement and doubt.

It’s a feeling that, to my mind, is perfectly captured in “Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise” by The Avett Brothers from their 2009 album I and Love and You.

The song is a reflection on the challenges of facing your doubts and fears while pursuing your dreams. It speaks to the journey of change and self-discovery, even when the path forward is difficult, unclear, and even unknowable.

My favorite line in the song comes early, the end of the second verse. It’s the Avett Brother’s call to be bold in the face of our doubts, to let our sense of inquiry and curiosity draw us out; or as they put it:

Decide what to be and go be it…