Mel Gibson and the bloody birth of Mad Max: How did he emerge unscathed?

Mel Gibson wasn't a mythic, vengeance-fuelled road warrior in the first Mad Max yet, but a baby-faced cop and family man. Photo / Getty Images

Decades before Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, director George Miller broke laws - and limbs - in pursuit of action movie perfection.

“That mad circus out there, I’m beginning to enjoy it… any longer out there on that road and I’m one of them, y’ know? A terminal crazy.” Those are the words of Max Rockatansky - played by Mel Gibson - in the first Mad Max film. He’s not yet a mythic, vengeance-fuelled road warrior in apocalyptic Australia, but a baby-faced cop and family man - one on a collision course with a gang of murderous bikers.

By the sequel, Max is surviving the fall of civilisation in the Aussie wastelands, where tribes of marauders do battle over the most valuable substance in the land: “guzzolene” (or “petrol”, as us pre-apocalypse folks would call it).

Max’s words - “That mad circus out there, I’m beginning to enjoy it” - encapsulate the ongoing, always-accelerating pleasures of the Mad Max series, which cranks up the automobile carnage with each instalment. Following 2015′s Mad Max: Fury Road - essentially a two-hour chase with Tom Hardy taking over the role of Max –-the latest Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is out now. Max himself is absent, though the creator and original director George Miller is still very much at the wheel.

The original Mad Max - released in 1979 - set Mel Gibson on the road to stardom and once held the Guinness World Record for most profitable film of all time. It was produced for under A$400,000 ($433,000) and made US$100 million ($163.15m) worldwide. It was also made in the spirit of the turbo-charged lawlessness depicted on-screen. “It was a battle on every front,” says Terry Hayes, who wrote the first two sequels. Cars smashed into each other for real; the filmmakers hijacked freeways; and at one point a cameraman was strapped to a motorbike driving at over 160km/h.

Max Rockatansky wouldn’t have stood for their shenanigans. In the story he’s a Main Force Patrol cop - or a “bronze”, named for his bronze police badge - whose job is to chase down vicious but kooky roadhogs.

The initial idea came from real-life road carnage. George Miller had lost teenage friends to road accidents. Later, he worked as a doctor in A&E and was disturbed by how gruesome road accident injuries were processed so matter-of-factly. The carnage was normalised. “In Australia, we have a car culture the way Americans have a gun culture,” he later said. “The cult of the car. Violence by car.” Miller’s film-making partner Byron Kennedy - co-creator and producer of the first two Mad Max films - recalled a total of 23 people were killed on Australian roads during a single weekend in 1975.

There’s a base pleasure under the hood of Mad Max, too. “On the other hand, I just love action movies,” George Miller said in 2015. “For me, the most universal language and the purest syntax of cinema is in the action movies.”

The film was co-written with James McCausland, a journalist with zero film writing credentials - just one example of the cut-and-shut job that was Mad Max. Miller thought their story idea was “too hyperbolic” for the real world, but their paltry budget, raised through a consortium of friends, family, and investors, wouldn’t muster up an all-out futuristic setting. Instead, the first Mad Max is set “a few years from now”: a soon-to-be reality, where seemingly endless, desolate highways connect dilapidated towns. Normal suburban houses stick out in the background, belying the not-entirely dystopian landscape.

The most futuristic thing about the original Mad Max is the all-leather uniform worn by the cops, which were actually made from vinyl because the budget wouldn’t stretch to leather. “You had to wring your boxers out at the end of the day,” said Gibson about wearing the plastic gear in sizzling temperatures.

The film begins with Max - the Main Force Patrol’s top highway pursuit man - chasing down a cop killer named The Nightrider via some gut-crunching, lo-fi crashes. The Nightrider belongs to a gang of biker punks, led by the demented but oddly comedic Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who returned to play Immortan Joe in Fury Road). The gang terrorise people wherever they go, but they’re as revved up by stealing an inflatable pink elephant as unleashing wanton violence. They flick Max’s switch by burning alive his best pal, Goose (Steve Bisley), then cross the point of no return when Toecutter mows down Max’s wife and child - partly because she plonks an icecream in Toecutter’s face - which sets Max on a mission of ultra-violent revenge.

The Nightrider belongs to a gang of biker punks led by the demented but oddly comedic Toecutter. Photo / Getty Images

Miller and the crew smashed cars into each other and various road debris with scant regard for health and safety regulations. Death-trap stunts included a car with a rocket stuffed in its back end - which missed its mark and sped towards the crew - and a truck that rolled down an embankment and almost crushed a cameraman.

Production was so cash-strapped that instead of transporting the motorbikes from Sydney to Melbourne, the punk actors rode the bikes between the cities - all 440 miles. They recalled feeling real “loathing” from locals as they rolled into various towns along the way - very much like in the film - and got so into the roles that they behaved like a real gang off-camera. They sneered at the actors playing the bronzes and wrote threatening notes to Mel Gibson in blood (either real blood or fake blood, depending on who’s telling the story). With the noise-dampening baffles removed from the exhausts, their convoy of bikes could be heard roaring its way around Melbourne.

Production was thrown into chaos after just four days when the stunt co-ordinator Grant Page and actress Rosie Bailey, originally cast as Max’s wife, were injured in a motorbike accident. Bailey broke her leg and was replaced, while Page checked himself out of hospital after two days: “With his hop and his walking stick and his plastered nose and his broken ribs and his pissing blood,” said actor David Bracks in a 2015 documentary, The Madness of Max. Page directed the film’s stunts from his wheelchair.

The real road warrior of the original movie was George Miller. With little experience other than making a few shorts, he was unchained. He broke film-making rules and clashed with the crew, who came from a more formal background in TV drama. “It wasn’t like photographing action,” Miller said. “It was trying to get the camera inside the action.”

The production broke actual, legal rules too: the art director, Jon Dowding, later confessed to stealing props and returning them after they’d been used. The crew closed roads without permission - they simply jumped into the roads to hold up traffic and shot the footage they needed. The Melbourne police eventually became interested in the film and helped. Off-duty police blocked off roads and escorted vehicles around.

Miller wanted the action to work as a silent movie - one that happened to have sound. “I was particularly struck by the films of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd,” said Miller. “And those kinds of very kinetic action montage movies that they made… I saw the action movie, particularly the car action movie, as an extension of that.”

Forty-five years on, Mad Max remains a strange, disarming experience: unrelenting car chases and jolting violence combined with comedy and curious interludes. The film is both technically propulsive and pure trash (in the exploitation sense, that is. “Ozploitation” to be precise). All roads in Mad Max lead to unexpected destinations.

Behind the wheel of his V8 Pursuit Special - a souped-up 1973 XB GT Ford Falcon Coupe (Max is still driving a version of the car by the time he morphs into Tom Hardy for Fury Road) - Max eliminates the gang and doles out a Saw-like punishment to Toecutter’s protege, Johnny the Boy (Tim Burns). Cuffing Johnny the Boy’s ankle to a soon-to-explode car wreck, Max gives him a choice: hack off the foot or burn to death.

Mad Max had careened far from Miller’s control during production. Photo / Getty Images

“He is a person who does the very thing that he should not do,” said Tim Burns, speaking in The Madness of Max. “That is, that he’s a person that given a moral choice, he becomes a crazed killer. The cop kills more people in that film than anybody.” Ultimately, Mad Max is a ride into devolving morality. The viewer sits firmly in the driver’s seat for Max’s revenge - a crusade of violence that’s as disturbing as it is satisfying.

Mad Max had careened far from Miller’s control during production. Miller described it as “a terrible, bitter experience” and obsessed over every frame and mistake as he edited the film for a year. “I felt utterly defeated by the first Mad Max,” he told Australian Screen. “I felt that the film was un-releasable… it’s a mystery to me why the film still worked.” Mad Max did indeed work. According to the Australian Film Commission, it made more money than every Australian film from the previous 50 years combined.

Miller recalled the phenomenon of its success: “I watched the film go ‘round the world and become a hit virtually in every culture other than the United States [where it had limited distribution and was dubbed over with American accents]. In Japan, they called it a samurai movie and said, ‘You must know Kurosawa.’ I’d never heard of Kurosawa. In France they said, ‘Oh it’s a western on wheels.’ In Scandinavia they said, ‘He’s a Viking’… I began to realise that somehow there was something else going on there, and that was the realisation that there is a collective unconsciousness going on. That there’s a mythology out there, and basically Mad Max was a kind of a weird Australian version of that.”

For the 1981 sequel, Mad Max 2 - called The Road Warrior in the US - Miller and co-writer Terry Hayes ramped up the mythmaking. Miller took inspiration from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, an influential book about archetypal hero myths from around the world (the original Star Wars draws heavily from Campbell’s work too).

By Mad Max 2, Rockatansky is a lone hero - “a closet human being”, said Mel Gibson - in a world that’s since descended into a full-blown, fuel-starved apocalyptic wasteland: a drastic, creative gear shift.

Terry Hayes was a former journalist and radio producer and came aboard the series after writing the novelisation of the first film. Hayes, talking via Zoom, recalls a radio programme he produced, which was a faux report about an attack on an American oil tanker - a modern spin on Orson Welles’ panic-inducing War of the Worlds adaptation. “By hour two the nukes were being prepared,” Hayes recalls about his version, laughing.

It naturally led to complaints - and ratings - but Hayes noted the nerve his show had struck. “It was all about the oil,” says Hayes. “If we’d said, ‘The world’s going to end because of a virus’, everyone would have said, ‘What? A common cold?!’” says Hayes. “But we said it was a battle for oil - everyone bought that. I thought that was potent. A powerful thing that was latent in so many people.”

This was less than a decade after the 1973 oil crisis. “It was part of everyone’s consciousness,” says Hayes. So an unquenchable thirst for guzzolene became the narrative drive of Mad Max 2. Setting the story after the apocalypse - on a $4.5m budget, more than ten times the budget of the original - allowed Miller to fully bring his vision to life. Hayes credits costume designer Norma Moriceau and art director Graham “Grace” Walker for creating the post-apocalyptic style – a kind of industrial, junkyard futurism where everything’s cobbled together from the remnants of an extinct civilisation.

Rockatansky became a lone hero in Mad Max 2. Photo / Getty Images

“The way the costumes were developed for Road Warrior were quite extraordinary,” says Hayes. “And Graham ‘Grace’ Walker brought a fever-dream appearance to the vehicles. Obviously, there’s a ringmaster for this particular circus. That ringmaster was George.”

The story sees Max ride into town and save an oil refinery settlement from the fuel-hungry Lord Humungus (Kjell Nilsson) - like an S&M Jason Voorhees with a hockey mask and leather-strapped barrel chest - and a band of deranged, barbaric marauders.

Max leads the settlers to an apocryphal paradise - with their fuel tanker hitched on a Mack truck - for a thundering 20-minute chase. Watched now, it feels like a test drive for what Miller achieved with Fury Road, but it remains a juggernaut of an action sequence - unlike anything seen in action cinema at that point.

Stunningly shot by Dean Semler around the outback mining city of Broken Hill, Mad Max 2 features 200-plus stunts. A behind-the-scenes doc captured some stunts that went painfully wrong, including a motorbike crash by stuntman Guy Norris (who returned for Fury Road). Norris didn’t jump off his bike fast enough and spun out of control through the air, breaking his femur. Norris had a metal rod inserted into his leg from a previous accident, which bent at a 20-degree angle. The stunt still made the finished film.

Hayes was on-hand for production and witnessed the Mack truck chase first-hand. It was never a case of carnage for carnage’s sake. “We knew it had to be narratively strong,” he says. “It was never, ‘Let’s just throw a lot of vehicles at each other and see what happens.’ George doesn’t work like that at all. It was highly choreographed.”

The chase comes to a crunching halt when the truck and tanker collide head-on with Lord Humungus’ six-wheeler and then roll down an embankment. Even the stuntmen were reluctant to perform the truck roll. “There wasn’t much experience of doing a tanker roll,” says Hayes. “The stunt guys wouldn’t do it. They reckoned it was too dangerous. They couldn’t anticipate what would happen. It could have ended in a real tragedy.”

Dennis Williams, a truck driver working on the location transport crew, stepped up. “Dennis said, ‘I can roll that tanker’, and it was agreed!” says Hayes. Watching that stunt was “a harrowing experience”, remembers Hayes. Williams thankfully emerged unscathed.

“We were young then,” says Hayes. “I’m not sure I could participate in something like that at this age. I’m not sure my heart would stand it. I remember watching it and thinking, ‘Oh my god, this could be really, really terrible’. But it wasn’t. Dennis did a great job. To me, he’s one of the heroes of the film.”

Miller said with Mad Max 2 he “confronted [his] failure” on the first film. It’s certainly a rare sequel that outguns the original ­- a huge leap forward in vision, world-building, and budget - and one of the finest action films ever made. It’s also distinctly, brilliantly Aussie, with some Neighbours-level acting and a feral kid with a razor-edged boomerang.

At the time, Mad Max 2 was the most expensive Australian film ever made and became the highest-grossing Australian film of all time worldwide (Crocodile Dundee was still five years away from showing the world what a real man’s knife looks like and making mega box office dollars). Mad Max 2 was a significant moment for the Australian film industry - the country’s first proper blockbuster.

“In retrospect, I think that’s true,” says Hayes. “But it didn’t feel like that at the time. There was a fair amount of jealousy in the Australian film industry. Not about Road Warrior - about anybody! Road Warrior was about a fight for resources, but so was the Australian film industry.”

Miller has described how he always thinks the series is finished when he finishes a Mad Max film, but he always gets pulled back in with a new story. Which was the case for the 1985 three-quel, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.

Beyond Thunderdome is Mad Max at his most mythic. Photo / Getty Images

Miller went into the film reluctantly. Byron Kennedy, his friend and producing partner, was killed during the development process in a helicopter crash. Miller asked theatre director George Ogilvie to co-direct it with him, though Hayes thinks that Beyond Thunderdome is still very much Miller’s movie. Speaking in 2015, Miller admitted that he was grieving during the production of Beyond Thunderdome and doesn’t remember much of making it.

Speaking to Australian Screen, Miller also said, “In a way, of all the films, it’s the one I have the most affection for... even though most people wouldn’t agree.”

The story sees Max arrive in Bartertown - a fiefdom run, amusingly, by Tina Turner - where Max fights a hulking, helmeted baddie inside the eponymous Thunderdome. It’s a gladiatorial fight to the death, with both men bouncing on giant elastic bands. “Two men enter, one man leaves!” shout the spectators - a line that became a catch-cry among the film crew.

Max later discovers a tribe of feral kids and leads them to a new future via another (albeit less violent) desert chase. Beyond Thunderdome is Max at his most mythic. The film had drawn comparisons to Biblical stories and even Lawrence of Arabia. It has a softer soul and feels a step into more mainstream territory - toned-down and hopeful - with Tina Turner doing the tie-in theme tune and Mel Gibson on the cusp of becoming one of the biggest film stars in the world. Gibson’s even wearing a variation of the mullet that often adorned his peak years - somewhere on the mullet scale between Lethal Weapon’s Riggs and Braveheart.

And, like Gibson’s hair, the song is pure 1980s naffery – We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome), a number-three hit in the UK - but Turner is magnificent in her chainmail stockings and suspenders. “I spent a lot of time sitting around and talking to Tina and hearing about her past lives,” says Hayes. “About when she was an Egyptian princess. She was a very interesting woman, a very good soul.”

Was Mad Max deliberately softened for a more mainstream market? “I think subconsciously that was at play,” says Hayes. “My own feeling is that Thunderdome is full of terrific ideas but lacks the narrative drive of Road Warrior. I probably have to take more responsibility for that than anybody.”

There was plenty of hype for the film in Australia, where it had the biggest opening week in Australian cinema history. Aussie newspapers bragged that Mad Max had beat the American hero Rambo at the US box office. The initial box office buzz in the US petered out and - with a larger budget of $10m - was less successful overall.

Beyond Thunderdome seemed to be Max Rockatansky’s final adventure - until the character returned in Mad Max: Fury Road 30 years later, at least. “It wasn’t that anybody said, ‘Let’s [not] do another Mad Max’,” says Hayes. “It’s just that nobody said, ‘Let’s do it!’”

Hayes went on to write the Nicole Kidman-starring psychological thriller Dead Calm, as well as the Mel Gibson revenge action Payback and Jack the Ripper comic book adaptation From Hell. Hayes now writes novels, having become frustrated with writing screenplays in Hollywood. “I said to my wife one day, ‘I am so sick to death of trying to write good scripts for movies.’ You can’t get them made! It’s a very frustrating place to work.”

His debut novel, the espionage thriller I Am Pilgrim, was published in 2013. His follow-up novel, The Year of the Locust, which is to be published in paperback on June 6, tells the story of a CIA operative sent to the Afghanistan borderland, where he faces a mystery villain known as the Locust.

“You have to look at what is new, what the next challenge is,” says Hayes about his own creative drive. His words also ring true for the Mad Max series and Max’s 40-plus years of survival. “It’s a journey,” says Hayes. “If you’re involved in any creative endeavour, you die when you stand still. You have to keep going.”