When George Miller was growing up in Queensland, Australia, in the mid-1950s, he and his twin brother John were gifted a vinyl record. On it was American film director Orson Welles narrating Oscar Wilde’s dreamy children’s fairy story, The Happy Prince.

“We played it a thousand times, over a year, two years,” he says. “It’s basically where I got my politics from, where I got the notion of the heroic gesture from. It just had everything in that story. That had a huge influence [on me].”