Mad Max
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- For other uses, see Mad Max (disambiguation)}}}.
Taglines:
- The Maximum Force of the Future.
- The last law in a world gone out of control. Pray that he's out there somewhere.
- When the gangs take over the highway... ...Remember he's on your side.
- The Film That Started It All.
Plot Summary
The film is set in a dystopian near-future Australia. The beginning of the film only hints that the story takes place "a few years from now" but it is obviously set in a society that is suffering from a prolonged fuel shortage which has resulted in a breakdown of civil order. (The sequel, , opens with a far more elaborate presentation of a back story describing a global disaster involving conflict over oil.)
The over-riding theme of Mad Max is revenge. A young and idealistic police officer, Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson), is the top driver (he is referred to as "your top pursuit man" at one point by a superior) for a rundown and poorly funded highway patrol called the Main Force Patrol (MFP). Their primary function is to secure the desolate highways of the outback from predatory motorized gangs. During a high-speed pursuit he inadvertently kills one of these gangs' chief lieutenants, the Nightrider. When the gang subsequently hunts down and burns his partner, Jim Goose, alive ("the Goose is cooked"), Max becomes disillusioned with his duty and quits the police force to settle down with his wife and infant son.
Meanwhile, the gang's vicious leader, "the Toecutter" (Hugh Keays-Byrne), still thirsts for revenge against Max. As the Fates would have it, the two once again cross paths when the now ex-highway patrolman and his family vacation in a remote beachfront area. The gang runs down Max's wife and son, leaving their crushed bodies lying in the middle of the road. Max arrives too late to intervene.
Using "the last of the V8 interceptors," a black supercharged V8 Ford XB Falcon "Pursuit Special," Max seeks to avenge the death of his family and hunts down the gang members and kills them. Johnny is the only one to escape, however, he is soon found by Max, who handcuffs him to a wrecked vehicle. Max rigs the gasoline tank to blow up on a time delay and hands Johnny a hacksaw. He gives Johnny a choice; he can try to saw through the chain on the cuff which will take a minimum of ten minutes. The other option Johnny has is his ankle, which will take perhaps five minutes. Max drives away as the bomb explodes, Johnny's fate unknown.
Conception
Whilst in residency at a Melbourne hospital, Dr. George Miller met amateur film maker Byron Kennedy at a summer film school in 1971. The duo went on to produce the short film Violence in the Cinema, Part 1, which was screened at a number of film festivals and won several awards.
Eight years later the duo created Mad Max, with the assistance of first time screen writer James McCausland (who appears in the film as the bearded man in an apron in front of the diner). George Miller was an M.D. in Australia who worked in a hospital emergency room. In his work he had seen many injuries and deaths of the types depicted in the movie, and felt that audiences would not believe such things were happening today, so he decided to place the story instead in a dystopic future.
The film was shot over a period of twelve weeks, between December 1978 and February 1979, just outside Melbourne. Many of the car chase scenes for the original Mad Max were filmed near the town of Lara, just north of Geelong (Victoria, Australia). The movie was shot with a widescreen anamorphic lens, making it the first Australian film to do so.
Due to the film's low budget, only Mel Gibson was given a jacket and pants made from real leather. All the other actors playing police officers wore vinyl outfits. The police cars were constantly repainted to give the illusion of more being used (Often they were driven with the paint still wet). The film's post-production was done in Kennedy's house, with George and Byron editing the film in Byron's bedroom on an editing machine that Byron's father, as an engineer, had made especially for them. The duo also edited the sound.
Success
The film achieved incredible success, holding a record in Guinness Book of Records as the highest profit-to-cost ratio of a motion picture, and only losing the record in 2000 to The Blair Witch Project.
The film was totally independently financed and had a reported budget of $300,000 AUD — of which $15,000 was paid to Mel Gibson for his performance — and went on to earn $100 million world wide. The film was awarded four Australian Film Institute Awards in 1979.
When the film was first released in America, all the voices, including that of Mel Gibson's character, were dubbed with U.S. accents at the behest of the distributor, American International Pictures, for fear that audiences would not take warmly to actors speaking entirely with Australian accents. Much of the Australian slang and terminology was also replaced with American ones (examples: "See looks!" became "Look see!", "windscreen" became "windshield", "very toey" became "super hot", and "preemie" became "rookie"). The only exceptions to the dubbing were the singing voice of the singer in the Sugartown Cabaret, played by Robina Chaffey, and Officer Jim Goose, played by Steve Bisley, singing as he drives a truck before being ambushed. The original Australian dialogue track was finally released in the U.S. in 2000 in a limited theatrical reissue by MGM, the film's current rights holders (it has since been released in the U.S. on DVD with both the US and Australian soundtracks on separate tracks).
Two sequels followed, ' (known in North America as The Road Warrior), and Mad Max 3 (known in North America as Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome) while a fourth movie, ', is in hiatus.
Vehicles
Due to the film's low budget, all the vehicles in the film were just modified vehicles of that era. Max's yellow Interceptor was a 1973 Ford Falcon XB sedan (previously, a Melbourne police car) with a 351C Cleveland V8 engine with many other modifications. The Big Bopper, driven by Roop and Charlie, was also a Ford Falcon XB sedan, but was powered by a 302C Cleveland V8. The March Hare, driven by Sarse and Scuttle, was an inline six-powered Ford Falcon XA sedan (this car was formerly a Melbourne taxi cab).
The most memorable car, Max's black Pursuit Special (often erroneously called an Interceptor after a mechanic in Mad Max 2 identified the car as "the last of the V8 Interceptors") was a limited GT351 version of a 1973 Ford XB Falcon Hardtop — sold in Australia from December 1973 to August 1976 — which was modified by the film's art director Jon Dowding. The Nightrider's vehicle, another Pursuit special, was a 1972 Holden HQ LS Monaro coupe.
Of the motorcycles that appear in the film, fourteen were donated by Kawasaki and were driven by a local Victorian motorcycle gang, the Vigilantes, who appeared as members of Toecutter's gang. By the end of filming, fourteen vehicles had been destroyed as a result of all the stunts, including the director's personal Mazda Bongo van (the small truck that spins uncontrollably after being struck in the film's opening chase).
References
- Mick Broderick, "Heroic Apocalypse: Mad Max, Mythology, and the Millennium", in Christopher Sharrett, ed., Crisis Cinema: The Apocalyptic Idea in Postmodern Narrative Film.
- Delia Falconer, "'We Don't Need to Know the Way Home': The Disappearance of the Road in the Mad Max Trilogy," in Steven Cohen and Ina Rae Hark, eds., The Road Movie Book.
- Peter C. Hall and Richard Erlich. "Beyond Topeka and Thunderdome: Variations on the Comic-Romance Pattern in Recent SF Film," Science-Fiction Studies, 14 (November 1987).
- Adrian Martin. The Mad Max Movies, Sydney and Canberra: Currency Press and Screenbound Australia, 2003.
- Meaghan Morris. "White Panic or Mad Max and the Sublime," Kuan-Hsing Chen, ed., ''Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. London and NewYork: Routledge, 1998.
- Jerome F. Shapiro, Atomic Bomb Cinema: The Apocalyptic Imagination on Film, New York: Routledge, 2002.
- To the Max - Behind the Scenes of a Cult Classic, Mad Max DVD (Village Roadshow).
- "Bury Me With It", track 6 of Good News for People Who Love Bad News. Modest Mouse. 2004.
External links
- [Mad Max Movies FAQ]
- [Mad Max Online] - Home to the original Mad Max movie, maintained by members of the cast and crew.
- [Mad Max Unlimited] - A company that makes replicas of the Interceptor and other Mad Max vehicles.
- [Mad Max Replica Stats] - Displays a comprehensive list of all known Mad Max Replicas in the world.
| Mad Max films |
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| Mad Max | | Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome |
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