Mad Max

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga releases in cinemas across the world in just over a weeks’ time. The fifth instalment in the cult dystopian action series arrives nine years after Fury Road relit the enthusiasm of both audiences and critics for writer/director George Miller’s post-apocalyptic vision. As Furiosa approaches, we take a look at the enduring film franchise and how Mad Max went from a low-budget Ozploitation classic to resetting the standard for action movies and even becoming a part of the global vernacular.

With four instalments to date across 44 years - and no.5 just around the bend - the Mad Max film’s relatively modest global box office of over $0.5bn belies a notoriety that took Max from cult to global phenomenon. The franchise’s mix of raw, in-camera stunt work and brutal road based action, saw Miller’s vision of a society in free fall become a genre classic, inspiring a slew of imitators. As this fictional world’s war over resources played out amidst physical and ethical wastelands, Max and the film’s bleak outlook resonated across the world on first the big and then the small screen.

My own initial brush with Miller’s devolved world and its rising hero was in my local video store in the early 1980s. Above the store’s wood panelled counter was pinned a poster for Mad Max (see end of article) featuring a stern faced, helmeted figure pointing a double barrelled gun directly at me over a mean looking car with the tag line 'The last law in a world gone out of control. Pray that he’s out there somewhere.’ Long before I saw Mad Max or the world in which he operated, I was terrified by that poster and yet every time we went in to rent a tape, I would just stand and stare at it.

Mad Max (1979)

Gunning out of the Australian outback in the late 1970s, producer Byron Kennedy and director George Miller’s Mad Max was a low-budget, action anomaly. With the local industry primarily focused on producing period and arthouse pictures portraying the ‘true’ Aussie experience, the pair found it near impossible to secure production funding. Yet the film’s deadly roadways and air of impending violence were drawn directly from Miller’s time as an emergency room doctor in Queensland and the stark fallout of the of the ‘73 global oil crisis, the latter hitting the road reliant country hard.

Independently financed and with a production budget of just $350k, Mad Max embraced Australia’s vital car culture whilst aiming straight at the heart of the American mainstream. The film’s protagonist Max Rockatansky - played by a 23 year-old Mel Gibson in only his second film role - is an anti-hero police officer, charged with keeping order in a run-down corner of an Australia in full blown societal collapse. Following the deaths of those close to him at the hands of a nomadic biker gang, Max crosses the line, becoming vengeance incarnate, disappearing into the darkness of his own grief.

Production was the definition of guerrilla filmmaking, shot mostly on the run and without permits. Cinematographer David Eggby’s camera runs low and close to the road, eating up its white lines as if the audience is strapped to the front of a speeding car. Australian composer Brian May’s staccato, brass heavy score evokes the sharp grandiosity of Bernard Hermann, further elevating Miller’s visceral and haunting visions of a future in chaos. Gibson’s brooding performance shows the promise of a performer who would become one of the biggest stars of the next two decades.

On its initial Australian release through Roadshow in late ‘79, critics were divided over the merits of Mad Max, yet it was an immediate smash with audiences. Its restricted rating, rather than a hinderance to its box office performance, proved to be a promise to cinemagoers that the film would deliver a grown up, thrilling picture - although the film was banned in New Zealand and Sweden. Mad Max was keenly embraced by Japanese audiences, arguably for its samurai undertones, melodrama and western cool, subsequently opening the picture up to the wider international market.

By the end of 1980, Mad Max had grossed more than $100m in box office across the world and became the most profitable picture of all time, holding that record until the release of handheld chiller The Blair Witch Project (1999). A cult hit across the world - save for the US which we’ll come to later - Mad Max would go on to spawn three modestly successful sequels with a fourth, Furiosa, due for release in May 2024. As influential in sci-fi cinema as Blade Runner or Alien, Mad Max would transcend its fictional trappings, becoming a byword for extreme real world events that lent toward chaos.

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)

Although Mad Max had a burgeoning following, Miller was in no rush to return to that world having not enjoyed the experience of making the first film. Yet when a few projects fell by the wayside, he set about writing Mad Max 2 with novelist Terry Hayes. As with most sequels, the film was built around escalation. The dystopian world Miller envisioned was to have decayed further into post-war, environmental collapse with the briefly glimpsed fields and seaside retreats of the first film replaced by endless desert and deteriorating tarmac, with societal disintegration all but complete.

With a significantly increased production budget - $4m - large scale stunt-work engaging a broader cast of key characters became possible. At the outset of Mad Max 2, Gibson’s formally callow youth was now a grizzled loner, roaming the wasteland in his V8, scavenging for food and fuel with only a dog for company. Max agrees to help a well-appointed compound of survivors, besieged by a barbarian gang intent on stealing their ‘guzzolene.’ Max acts out of self interest at first, but after several set backs his inner altruism shines through as the catalyst for his transformation into legend.

Miller and Hayes were profoundly influenced by comparative mythology scholar Joseph Campbell’s work on the idea of the ‘monomyth’ - that stories of heroes are universal, dreamlike, with variations dependent on geography, circumstance and the time in which they are developed. Max’s mythology of the lone warrior, coming to the aid of those who need it most is demonstrated neatly in the film’s prologue/epilogue. Told in voiceover by a third party who witnessed Max’s deeds, these narrative bookends act as a traditional aural history, igniting and sustaining the mythos of Max.

The similarities between Max and the solitary heroes of Hollywood and Spaghetti westerns - in particular Sergio Leone’s ‘Man with No Name’ played by Clint Eastwood in the Dollars Trilogy - are not accidental. The hero’s destiny is to endure great suffering, returning with knowledge or gifts powerful enough to set a society free and ultimately fulfil his/her destiny. In Mad Max 2, Max brings in a rig big enough to pull the survivors’ tanker and facilitate their escape, whilst his destiny is to wander back out into the wasteland, wiser, more damaged, and eternally in search of both purpose and himself.

Mad Max 2 was a hit with audiences and critically outshined Hollywood productions with 10 times the budget. In the US, the first Mad Max had a limited release through AIP and so Mad Max 2 distributor Warner Bros. rebranded the sequel as The Road Warrior, feeling the first film hadn’t been seen by a broad enough audience. The gamble paid off and The Road Warrior remains a critical transitional independent film of the early 1980s, embodying the lurid thrills of exploitation cinema alongside explosive big screen action, laying the groundwork for more complex cinematic heroes.

The first Mad Max shares DNA with ‘70s vigilante revenge flicks such as Michael Winner’s Death Wish (1974) or John Flynn’s Rolling Thunder (1977), albeit with added cinematic flare and what would become series signature car chases. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is consciously more mythic, positioning Max as an archetype in a universal story in which he has just 16 lines of dialogue, allowing his actions to do the talking. As screen storytelling emerged from the more personal prism of the 1970s, the one-man-army would become a stalwart of 1980s mainstream action cinema,

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

The gulf in relative circumstances between the productions of Mad Max and Mad Max 2 were significant and when Miller set out to make the third film in the series, things couldn’t have been more different again. Unlike previous Max outings, Beyond Thunderdome would be fully financed by Warner Bros. brining with it a doubled production budget of $10m. Miller, despite having final cut, would have to answer to studio wranglers on the film’s tone, content and direction, whilst delivering a box office friendly PG-13 rating (UK-15) - the previous two pictures received an R in the US (UK-X).

Thanks in part to the success of Mad Max 2, alongside appearances in Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) - with Sigourney Weaver -and Roger Donaldson’s The Bounty (1984) - with Anthony Hopkins - Mel Gibson was well on his way to becoming a big screen star. Gibson apparently received his first $1m pay check for Beyond Thunderdome, a significant leap from his rumoured $15k for the first Mad Max. The clever casting of Tina Turner - one of the the biggest pop stars of the era - as the film’s main villain Aunty Entity also significantly increased the film’s budget.

Circumstances had changed for Miller too and this would be his first production without friend and producing partner Byron Kennedy - Kennedy was killed on 17 July 1983 when a helicopter he was piloting crashed in New South Wales. Miller was distraught and didn’t wish to continue working without Kennedy and yet felt he needed something into which he could focus his grief. Miller asked theatre director, mentor and friend George Ogilvie to help him make the picture. Miller would take care of the action sequences and Ogilvie would shoot just about everything else.

The result was a distinctly tame movie by comparison, still set in Miller’s off-kilter world but stylistically bifurcated between its directors. Mad Max and Mad Max 2 are stripped down, muscular films, made of and by the counter culture, capturing something in the ether that audiences instinctively responded to. Beyond Thunderdome was perhaps more ambitious, a big swing to bring Max’s story into the studio fold and in line with the increasingly adventure-centric Hollywood pictures of the period, yet what the film gained in scope and mainstream appeal it arguably lost in visceral economy.

Set some years after Mad Max 2, Max is roaming the desert alone when he is robbed, leading him to the remote settlement Bartertown, co-run by Turner’s Aunty Entity. She uses Max to help seize control of the town but ultimately betrays him. Early gladiatorial scenes set in the Thunderdome, where Max battles for his life and the return of his belongings, have MIller’s anarchic sense of fun, filled with both startling violence and gallows humour. As with the series previous outings, there is a keen sense that Max, the everyman turned vigilante turned scavenger, might not make it.

Yet this notion soon dissipates with the introduction of a tribe of abandoned children who Max, becoming christ like in his sacrifice, helps navigate the wasteland. These later scenes, including the train/car chase at the film’s climax, have an air of cartoonish serial adventure about them, similar to the previous year’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), but not nearly as compelling or successful. Max fulfils Joseph Campbell’s hero archetype and his legend is carried forward by the escaped children amidst Sydney’s recognisable ruins, with Max once again left wandering alone.

Beyond Thunderdome performed well at the box office and whilst contributing heavily to wider mainstream awareness of the series, it left many fans and critics unimpressed. The promotional video for Tina Turner’s hit single We Don’t Need Another Hero featured key sequences from Beyond Thunderdome with Turner performing in her Aunty Entity costume, further cementing Miller’s world in the 1980s zeitgeist. If Mad Max and Mad Max 2 belonged to the counterculture of the late 70s and its hangover, Beyond Thunderdome was Max fully immersed in the Hollywood machine of the 80s.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

30 years would pass before Max Rockatansky would reappear on cinema screens in Mad Max: Fury Road and it wouldn’t be from lack of trying. A seemingly endless carousel of shutdowns, postponements and cast changes alongside unforeseen world events - including the Iraq War, 9/11 and a global financial crash - meant Miller’s return to the wasteland would not arrive in cinemas until May 2015. These setbacks, alongside details of a gruelling eight month shoot and a lengthy post-production period, are documented in Kyle Buchanan’s book Blood, Sweat and Chrome.

Initially Mel Gibson was set to return as Max but by the time production was up and running, Gibson was not only considered too old for the role but the controversies surrounding his erratic behaviour had all but sunk a once dazzling career. Eminem, Michael Fassbender and Jeremy Renner were all considered for Max, with the role eventually going to British method man Tom Hardy. Hardy’s brooding physicality would prove ideal for the tight-lipped, extreme heroics of Max, yet in Fury Road, not only would Max be sharing the limelight throughout, he’d largely be playing a supporting role.

Enter Charlize Theron’s truck driving bad-ass Imperator Furiosa, Mad Max: Fury Road’s stand-out performance. Forged in a similar fire of expertise and grit as Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley from the Alien franchise, Furiosa’s name may have not been in the film’s title but the picture undeniably belongs to her. On-set hostility raged between Theron, the seasoned professional star, and Hardy, the unprepared, newly minted man of the hour. They have since reconciled but their antagonism made it to the screen and arguably the picture is better for it, toxic work environment aside.

Fury Road begins with a feral Max isolated in the wasteland, hearing the voices of the dead. He is captured and used as a human blood bank by lead villain Immorton Joe’s War Boys, and repeatedly attempts escape. Teaming up with Furiosa, Max moves to initially fight for survival, eventually battling for her and the Immorton’s wives Furiosa has sprung from reproductive slavery. Standing up for someone other than himself, Max again embodies Joseph Campbell’s hero archetype, eventually wandering away into the wilderness alone, barely reassembled, continually looking for redemption.

Fury Road is an arguably a feminist picture and with Theron’s Furiosa at the wheel, a general commanding her ragtag army, Miller managed to smuggle several prescient discussions of progressive politics - climate change, reproductive rights and wealth disparity/hoarding - into an epic, two-hour desert chase. With the the help of The Vagina Monologues writer and activist Eve Ensler, Miller reinvented the traditional back seat women had been relegated to in the franchises' instalments - Turner in Beyond Thunderdome aside - bringing their powerful contributions to the foreground.

It’s something of a miracle that Fury Road ever made it to cinemas. Critics praised its sheer brio and uncompromising pace, demanding audiences see it on the biggest screen possible. The film’s reported production budget - $150m - far exceeded its predecessors but every penny is up on the screen. Whilst box office remained modest by modern franchise standards -$380m worldwide sees it comfortably top the series - cinemagoers adored Miller’s crazy picture, in particular its guitar playing Doof Warrior and the half-life, droog-like War Boys personified by Nicholas Hoult’s Nux.

Whilst Mad Max: Fury Road naturally employed a plethora of effects in post to enhance certain scenes, it has been hailed as the pinnacle of real world in-camera action sequences, a modern touchstone for productions amidst a growing industry reliance on cost saving post-production CGI and its endlessly varying quality. For cinemagoers, 2015 alone saw new cinematic instalments on offer from Star Wars, Avengers, Jurassic Park, James Bond, Fast & Furious and Mission Impossible, and yet Miller’s darkly eccentric chase movie is still being talked about and arguably remains the the stand out.

Beyond Max

The Mad Max series has grown in stature throughout its instalments from indie counter culture hit to well respected action franchise. With its punk ‘make do and mend’ vision of a nightmarishly devolved future, it has inspired countless pieces of dystopian cinema, a plethora of modern music videos and several manga/anime titles. The mild mannered Miller, has created a lasting archetype in Max, an anti-hero every bit as effective and emotive as the likes of Han Solo, Ellen Ripley or Rick Deckard, surviving in a world just as well realised, where the future belongs to the mad.

Max has co-starred in his last two outings and entirely hands over the reigns in the upcoming Fury Road prequel Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, with Anya Taylor Joy and Ayla Browne as the younger incarnations of the eponymous Imperator, fighting to find her way back to the family from which she was abducted. Chris Hemsworth is on villain duties as crack-pot war lord Dementus with a pre-Fury Road Immorton Joe (this time played by Lachy Hulme following the passing of Hugh Keays-Byrne) and his devoted War Boys ready for battle. By all accounts, 24 May should be a lovely day!

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is released in UK and Irish cinemas on 24 May through Warner Bros.

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