Mad Max: An Australian Road Fable for an Ultraviolent World - Reactor

Max Mad (1979). Directed by George Miller. Written by James McCausland and George Miller. Starring Mel Gibson, Joanne Samuel, Steve Bisley, and Hugh Keays-Byrne.

Sometime in 1977, a notice went up in motorcycle shops around Melbourne, looking for bikers to appear as extras in a film. A few local “bikie” gangs answered the call: the Vigilantes, the Four Owners Club, the Barbarian Motorcycle Club. The guys who showed up were soon put to work revving their engines on camera and doing a series of impressive and rather dangerous stunts. They were probably not, as rumors often claim, paid in beer; they were likely paid like any other film extras or stuntmen. Nor did anybody die during the filming. From what the cast have said, the bikers generally had a grand, adrenaline-pumping time working on what nobody expected to become the first film in one of the most unique and iconic film series in cinema history.

The Mad Max films have so powerfully influenced cinema’s collective vision of the dystopian near future that it’s hard to speculate how we might imagine the future without them. Even stories that don’t explicitly show a Mad Max-style future, with the lawless wastelands filled with violent roving gangs and so on, will often contain a hint that those elements are out there somewhere, or have existed in the past as a necessary step between tearing down an old world and building a new one.

Sure, plenty of other films, both before and after, have contained the same elements: extreme violence driving reasonable men over the edge, the charismatic psychopathy of amoral sadists, the fine line between civilization and barbarism, the suffocating paranoia of impending societal collapse. But the Mad Max films combined those elements with a striking aesthetic and tone that have never stopped guiding how we conceive of a bleak near future.

That’s why I find it fascinating that Mad Max, the first of the films, didn’t start out that way. It was not originally imagined as a snapshot of a grim future, and it was certainly not intended to launch a series that would develop into changeable modern fable about human survival.

So let’s go back to the beginning. That’s pretty easy to do, because director George Miller and many others have spoken extensively about the origin and development of the Mad Max films. In particular, I’ve taken a lot of information directly from interviews with Miller, especially this extensive interview with Australian Screen, which is part of the Australian National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA), and this more recent interview with The New Yorker.

The beginning is in a town called Chinchilla, a rural farming community in the Western Downs of Queensland. The internet tells me that Chinchilla currently has a population of about 7,000 people. It is known as the “Melon Capital of Australia” because it produces a quarter of Australia’s total watermelon crop. It has a very large statue of a watermelon. It is also where George Miller was born in 1945.

Miller describes his home town vividly: “Completely flat roads. Loamy soil. Heat haze. Burnt land. And with a very intense car culture.” Intense car culture in rural Australia in the 1960s meant no speed limits, optional seat belts, and a lot of reckless young people. Miller notes that by the time he graduated high school, he knew several people who had died or been injured in serious car crashes.

Miller went to study medicine in Sydney, but even while he was working on becoming a doctor he was already interested in filmmaking. In 1971 he and his younger brother Chris entered a student film competition at the University of New South Wales; their one-minute-long St. Vincent’s Revue Film won first place, and the prize was a chance to attend a film workshop in Melbourne. Miller didn’t plan to go. He was finishing medical school and fully intended to become a doctor; it was a much more sensible career path than trying to make it as a filmmaker. But while he was working a construction job for extra money before his medical residency began, he had a close call with an on-site accident (falling brick, no hard hat) that made him think maybe life was too precarious to pass up a chance to do something he really wanted to do.

He didn’t quit medicine right away, but he did go to Melbourne to take part in the film workshop. The workshop was auspicious in two ways. It’s where Miller made his short film Violence in the Cinema, Part 1 (1971), and it’s where he met Byron Kennedy, who would later produce the first two Mad Max films. Kennedy died in a helicopter crash in 1983, but the production company Kennedy Miller Mitchell still bears his name. (This is, coincidentally, the first of two tragic helicopter crashes I will be mentioning in this column.)

As far as I can tell, we can’t watch Violence in the Cinema, Part 1 online. I’ve looked, and if it’s out there it’s beyond the reach of my internet search skills. It seems to be only available to watch if you catch it at a film festival or visit the NFSA in person.

There are, however, plenty of descriptions of it available. The film features a “clinical psychologist and media critic” (played by Arthur Dignam) sitting in an armchair and giving a talk about cinema’s preoccupation with violence. While he speaks, a man bursts into the room and shoots the psychologist in the face. The psychologist responds by holding up and bandaging the ruined remains of his face, then continuing his talk while committing acts of extreme violence himself, before finally being run over by a car and set on fire.

The monologue in Violence in the Cinema, Part 1 is taken from a keynote speech given by Australian “public intellectual” Phillip Adams at a psychology conference. Adams saw Miller’s film, as well as Mad Max when it came out, and wrote about them in that condescending way common to many public intellectuals. I haven’t seen Violence in the Cinema, Part 1, I don’t know what impact it has on the viewer, so I will only share what Miller himself says about it: “Violence in the Cinema, Part 1 (1971) was simply trying to make the point that whatever we think—in terms of intellectually, the way we basically cerebrate something—is quite different than the way we experience it viscerally.”

Miller didn’t immediately quit working as a doctor after making Violence in the Cinema, Part 1. He went back to his residency, which included working in the emergency room, where he got to see in agonizing detail what violence and road accidents did to human bodies. Meanwhile, he and Kennedy were developing the idea that would one day become Mad Max.

The story is a mixture of all the things that were stewing in English-language cinema in the ’70s: extreme physical and sexual violence, the failure of trusted systems and exposure of societal rot, and of course a whole lot of driving around in cars or on motorbikes. The American New Wave had started a decade earlier with films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969), and in the ’70s the world would be introduced to movies like Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971), Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1972), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). Australian filmmakers were playing along as well; Mad Max owes a lot, including a chunk of the cast, to Sandy Harbutt’s biker film Stone (1974).

The decision to set Mad Max in the near future seems to have come fairly early in the development, but it was largely one of practicality. According to Miller, because the story was “very, very intense in its incidents,” he thought it might be more palatable to shift the setting into the speculative. He doesn’t reference A Clockwork Orange specifically—although he does mention that film elsewhere, so he was aware of it—but the approach seems similar, wherein the story is set in a near future to allow for a very particular vision to develop without running into the audience’s kneejerk skepticism or defensiveness.

But, as Miller explains, they didn’t have the budget to set the film very far in the future. That’s how it ends up with the iconic opening words on the screen: “A few years from now…”

In fact, they didn’t have the budget for much of anything. Kennedy, as the film’s producer, hustled to scrape together about $350,000, which seems like a healthy amount until you realize how many cars they had to smash up. It wasn’t until after Mad Max’s surprise success that Miller was able to afford a bigger production, which was Mad Max 2, or The Road Warrior (1981). And the enduring success of that movie and the third, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1983), as well as his production company’s eventual financial boost from a friendly sheep-herding pig and some dancing penguins, meant that decades later Miller could finally revisit the story with an ample budget, and that’s how we got Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), which is one of the greatest movies ever made.

(Fun fact: Mad Max would be so successful upon release that it would hold the world record for the most profitable film relative to its budget until 1999, when The Blair Witch Project supplanted it.)

But that was all in the future. Back in the mid-’70s, Miller and Kennedy had to figure out how to create a near-future dystopian microcosm on the backroads outside of Melbourne.

Neither Miller nor Kennedy knew much about screenwriting, and they didn’t know any screenwriters either, so they hired finance journalist James McCausland to co-write the script. A finance journalist might seem a strange choice for a screenwriter—and Mad Max is McCausland’s only film—but some very obvious economic reality was woven into the fiber of Mad Max from the start. In a 2006 article, McCausland explained how the 1973 oil crisis influenced the Mad Max vision of the future, with particular focus on the extremely violent lengths people will go to keep the oil-fueled machinery of the modern world running, even when the social structures around that machinery are failing.

(There’s nothing I can say to comment on how that particular theme remains just as relevant today as it was in the ’70s. I’m tired. Call your members of Congress.)

That $350,000 budget did not stretch toward hiring a known actor, even though Miller had initially wanted an American lead to draw some attention to the film. The film’s casting agent suggested he check out recent graduates of Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Arts (NIDA). That’s where he met a fresh-out-of-acting-school Mel Gibson, who at the time had exactly one film credit to his name. (The story that Gibson showed up to the audition with a beat-up face is another Mad Max urban legend. There are a lot of them.) Steve Bisley was one of Gibson’s classmates, so that how Miller found Max and Goose, the film’s lead Main Force Patrol officers.

The budget also had no room for getting the primary members of Toecutter’s gang and their motorcycles from Sydney to Melbourne, so Hugh Keays-Byrne (who plays Toecutter), Tim Burns (who plays Johnny the Boy), and several others rode their bikes down to get some real-world practice at being a bikie gang. In costume.

I’m no film accountant, but I suppose most of the rest of the budget was used for smashing up cars on roads around Melbourne. Which is what they did. They didn’t have filming permits—Miller claims none were required at the time—so they would just go out and sort of block off the road and crash whatever needed to be crashed, then sweep it all up afterward. Eventually the local police noticed what was going on and offered to help, probably because they realized it would be safer for everybody if somebody was at least trying to direct traffic around the filming.

Mad Max is mostly thought of as a car movie, thanks to the souped-up Ford Falcon XB that stars as Max’s Pursuit Special, but most of the stunt work involved the motorcycles. It helped that both Miller and cinematographer David Eggby were motorcyclists themselves—although that also led to things like Eggby thinking it was a good idea to get some shots while physically strapped, without a helmet, to the back of a bike ridden by one of the Vigilante club members racing along at over 100 mph.

Filmmakers mostly aren’t supposed to do things like that anymore. There are now much more rigid guidelines regarding on-set safety during stunts, although how effective they are and the extent to which the industry adheres to them is a matter of much debate. It’s a grim but important sidenote in cinema history that some of those changes came about because of another film that Miller was involved with, which was Steven Spielberg and John Landis’ Twilight Zone: The Movie. Miller directed a remake of the episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”—you know, the one where William Shatner sees gremlins on the wings of a plane—and his portion of the production seems to have gone off without a hitch. But another portion of the production, the part Landis himself directed, infamously resulted in a horrific and completely preventable helicopter crash that killed lead actor Vic Morrow and child actors Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen. Reading about that incident will make your blood boil, because none of it ever should have happened and nobody was ever held accountable.

Back on those Australian roads, there were no accidents during the filming of Mad Max, and the story that a stuntman died is an urban legend. After filming was complete, Miller and Kennedy spent an entire year editing the film; Miller admits that a lot of it had to do with his inexperience as a filmmaker, as well as the fact that he was figuring out what kind of movie he wanted it to be as he edited.

He wasn’t happy with the end result, but it ended up being successful in Australia and amazingly successful worldwide, especially in Japan and Europe. It wasn’t a huge hit in the U.S., although it did well enough; it didn’t help that American International Pictures, the U.S. distributors, dubbed the entire film to replace the Australian accents and slang with American voices. (You might remember AIP from the previous column about Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires [1965].)

Confession: I did not actually know that before doing research for this article, and I definitely watched Mad Max long before the dubbing was rectified with the 2000 DVD release. I guess I never noticed that it was dubbed.

In my defense, it’s not a dialogue kind of film. I’m pretty sure a hefty majority of the spoken words in Mad Max are in Nightrider’s (Vincent Gil) ravings at the start of the film.

That is, in fact, one of its defining characteristics. If you’re familiar with Miller or the Mad Max films, you might already know that Miller has described the films as silent movies with sound, wherein the action itself is the primary tool of storytelling. It was during the editing process that he decided he wanted Mad Max to capture the feel of the old silent “kinetic action montage movies,” such as the films of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.

There isn’t much plot either, but it doesn’t need much of one. A highway patrol officer for a failing and ineffectual police force runs afoul of a motorcycle gang, which leads to the deaths of first his partner, then his wife (played by Joanne Samuel) and child, after which he goes on a rampage to kill those responsible. It briefly touches on the things we might expect from such a story: the desire for heroes amidst hopelessness, the nonexistent distinction between state violence and criminal violence, the enduring fantasy of a man finally having a reason to go apeshit on the world.

The film is starting from a place where all of those conversations have already been had, all those arguments have already been lost. In a scene with fellow MFP officer “Fifi” (Roger Ward), Max acknowledges the cops have always known they aren’t any different from the gangs. They are just pretending for as long as they can. Pretending that their badges mean something, pretending that their crumbling Hall of Justice has any impact, pretending that they are upholding something for a society that has long since given up.

The film is straightforward in its barrage of brutality, but it’s also amazingly weird. The juxtaposition between Max and Jessie’s warm domesticity and whatever the fuck Toecutter’s gang has going on at any given moment is disorienting, and the wild swings between mundane moments and explosive action keep us off-kilter. It gives the entire film a sense of existing in a sort of cinematic uncanny valley, where just enough looks familiar to draw us into this world, but everything is a bit twisted once we get there.

Miller describes this as a “fable-type quality,” and I think that’s as good a description for it as any. He was aiming for something just slightly offset from reality, but he ended up with something a lot more interesting—and, luckily for himself and for us, he embraced that when he went to work on Mad Max 2.

Mad Max is an origin story that wasn’t meant to be an origin story, but it works as one. It was made in exactly the right time and place to take advantage of the violence of ’70s English-language cinema as well as the weirdness that was to come in the ’80s.

Post-apocalyptic stories often carry a tinge of fantasy wish-fulfillment to them; a great deal of how we imagine societal cataclysm is influenced by the clean slate made possible by tearing everything down and beginning anew. Mad Max doesn’t allow that, because it isn’t a post-apocalyptic story. It’s a story set in the middle of a slow, ongoing apocalypse that feels like ordinary life for most of its characters. Max and Jessie try to live as though nothing is wrong. Raise a child, go on vacation, adopt a dog. It ends in tragedy, because the protective shell around ordinary life is already cracked. On the other hand, when Toecutter’s gang shriek and holler about living freely, it’s not even clear what they think they need to be free from. Everybody in this world is spinning without any real direction, grasping for strings in a way that defies our usual concept of society and civilization as something that marches forward or backward in straight lines.

Mad Max offers up a brutally familiar world without any escape from a very tired, careworn flavor of nihilism, while at the same time capturing the mythic feel of a story that might as well begin, “Once upon a time, there was a man.” We’re watching a personal tragedy play out in this film, with all the cacophonous noise and relentless action and visceral violence, all the crunching and smashing and shrieking with rage, but it already has the feel of something that can be reshaped into a myth. That’s what gives this movie and its sequels such enduring power.

What do you think of Mad Max and its legacy? Has your opinion on it changed over the years? Do you still think “The Toecutter” is the best gang-leader nickname ever?

We are absolutely going to watch The Road Warrior at some point. I know the second movie is a brilliant film; I know it provides so much more to talk about. You don’t need to convince me! And probably Beyond Thunderdome too, because I am always happy to talk about Tina Turner. Maybe I’ll figure out a month for watching great sequels to great films. Sci fi cinema has a few true gems in that category.

Next week: We get a psychic glimpse of a very different kind of near future in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report. Find streaming sources.