Mad Max (1979)
Mad Max is a 1979 Australian dystopian action film directed by George Miller and produced by Byron Kennedy. Mel Gibson stars as “Mad” Max Rockatansky, a police officer turned vigilante in a near-future Australia in the midst of societal collapse. Joanne Samuel, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Steve Bisley, Tim Burns, and Roger Ward also star. James McCausland and Miller wrote the screenplay from a story by Miller and Kennedy. Principal photography for Mad Max took place in and around Melbourne and lasted for six weeks. The film initially received a
polarized reception upon its release in April 1979, although it won four AACTA Awards. Filmed on a budget of A$400,000, it earned more than US$100 million worldwide in gross revenue and set a Guinness record for most profitable film. The success of Mad Max has been credited[by whom?] for further opening up the global market to Australian New Wave films.
The film became the first in the Mad Max series, giving rise to three sequels: Mad Max 2 (1981), Beyond Thunderdome (1985), and Fury Road (2015). In 2020, a fifth film, to be titled Furiosa, was announced.
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Plot.
In a near-future dystopian Australia that is facing a breakdown of civil order primarily due to widespread oil shortages, berserk motorbike gang member Crawford “Nightrider” Montazano kills a rookie officer of the poorly-funded Main Force Patrol (MFP)—one of the last remaining law enforcement agencies—and escapes with his girlfriend in the dead officer’s Pursuit Special. Nightrider is able to elude the MFP until the organization’s top pursuit man, Max Rockatansky, manages to break his concentration and steer him into a roadblock, resulting in a fiery crash that kills both Nightrider and his girlfriend. At the MFP garage, Max is shown his new police car: a specially-built supercharged V8-powered black Pursuit Special. A conversation between Max’s superior, Captain Fred “Fifi” Macaffee, and Police Commissioner Labatouche reveals the Pursuit Special was authorised to bribe Max, who is becoming weary of police work, into staying on the force.
Nightrider’s motorbike gang, which is led by Toecutter and Bubba Zanetti, run riot in a town, vandalising property, stealing fuel, and terrorising the populace. A young couple attempts to escape, but the gang destroys their car and rapes them. Max and fellow officer Jim “Goose” Rains arrest Toecutter’s young protégé, Johnny the Boy, at the scene. No witnesses appear in court and Johnny is deemed mentally unfit to stand trial, however, so, against Goose’s furious objections, he is released into Bubba’s custody.
While Goose visits a nightclub in the city that night, Johnny sabotages his police motorbike, causing it to lock up at high speed the next day and launch Goose off the road. Dazed, but uninjured, Goose borrows a ute to haul his bike back to MFP headquarters. On the way, Johnny throws a brake drum through his windshield, and he crashes again. Toecutter urges, and then forces, a reluctant Johnny to throw a match into the wreck of the ute, burning Goose alive.
Development.
George Miller was a medical doctor in Sydney, working in a hospital emergency room where he saw many injuries and deaths of the types depicted in the film. He also witnessed many car accidents growing up in rural Queensland and lost at least three friends to accidents as a teenager. While in residency at a Sydney hospital, Miller met amateur filmmaker Byron Kennedy at a summer film school in 1971. The two men produced a short film, Violence in the Cinema, Part 1, which was screened at a number of film festivals and won several awards. Eight years later, they produced Mad Max, working with first-time screenwriter James McCausland (who appears early in the film as the bearded man in an apron in front of the diner). According to Miller, his interest while writing Mad Max was “a silent movie with sound”, employing highly kinetic images reminiscent of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd while the narrative itself was basic and simple. Miller believed that audiences would find his violent story more believable if set in a bleak dystopian future.
Casting.
George Miller considered casting an American actor to “get the film seen as widely as possible” and even travelled to Los Angeles, but eventually opted to not do so as “the whole budget would be taken up by a so-called American name.” Instead, the cast deliberately featured lesser-known actors, so they did not carry past associations with them. Miller’s first choice for the role of Max was the Irish-born James Healey, who at the time worked at a Melbourne abattoir and was seeking a new acting job. Upon reading the script, Healey declined, finding the meager, terse dialogue unappealing. Casting director Mitch Mathews invited a class of recent National Institute of Dramatic Art graduates to audition for Mad Max, specifically asking a NIDA teacher for “spunky young guys”. Among these actors was American-born Mel Gibson, whose audition impressed Miller and Matthews and earned him the role of Max. An apocryphal tale stated that Gibson went to auditions with a beat-up face following a fight, but this has been denied by both Matthews and Miller.RELATED:
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Filming.
Originally, filming was scheduled to take ten weeks: six weeks of first unit, and four weeks on stunt and chase sequences. However, four days into shooting, Rosie Bailey, who was originally cast as Max’s wife, was injured in a bike accident. Production was halted, and Bailey was replaced by Joanne Samuel, causing a two-week delay. In the end, the shoot lasted six weeks in November and December 1977, with a further six weeks of second-unit work. The unit reconvened in May 1978 and spent another two weeks doing second-unit shots and re-staging some stunts. Miller described the whole experience as “guerrilla filmmaking”, with the crew closing roads without filming permits and not using walkie-talkies because their frequency coincided with the police radio, and he and Kennedy would even sweep down the roads after filming was done. As filming progressed, however, the Victoria Police became interested in the production, and they began to help the crew by closing down roads and escorting vehicles.