Mad Max (film)
Mad Max is a 1979 Australian dystopian action film directed by George Miller, who co-wrote the screenplay with James McCausland, based on a story by Miller and Byron Kennedy. Mel Gibson stars as "Mad" Max Rockatansky, a police officer turned vigilante in a dystopian near-future Australia in the midst of societal collapse. Joanne Samuel, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Steve Bisley, Tim Burns and Roger Ward also appear in supporting roles.
This article is about the original film. For the eponymous character, the franchise and other uses, see Mad Max (disambiguation).Mad Max
- James McCausland
- George Miller
- George Miller
- Byron Kennedy
Byron Kennedy
- Tony Paterson
- Cliff Hayes
- 12 April 1979
93 minutes[1]
Australia
English
A$350,000–400,000[2]
US$100 million[3]
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 for further opening the global market to Australian New Wave films.
Mad Max became the first in the series, giving rise to three sequels: Mad Max 2 (1981), Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). A spin-off film titled Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is set to release in 2024, and a fourth sequel titled Mad Max: The Wasteland is also in the works.
Plot[edit]
A dystopian near-future Australia is facing a breakdown of civil order primarily due to widespread oil shortages and ecocide.[4] The 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.[4] Nightrider is able to elude the MFP until the organisation's top pursuit man Max Rockatansky manages to 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 V8-powered and supercharged 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 assaults 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. Against Goose's furious objections, Johnny 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 Goose crashes again. Toecutter urges and forces a reluctant Johnny to throw a match into the wreck of the ute, burning Goose alive. After seeing Goose's charred body in the hospital ICU, Max informs Fifi that he is resigning from the MFP to save what is left of his sanity. Fifi convinces him to take some time off before committing to his decision, so Max goes on a trip in his panel van with his wife Jessie and infant son "Sprog" (Australian slang for a child). When they stop to fix the spare tyre, Jessie takes Sprog to get ice cream and is molested by Toecutter and his gang. She escapes and the family flees to a remote farm owned by an elderly friend, May Swaisey.
The gang chases Jessie through the woods and captures Sprog while Max is off looking for them. May helps Jessie free the boy and the trio escapes in the van, but it soon breaks down. Jessie grabs Sprog and runs down the road until the gang catches up and runs them over. Sprog is killed instantly, while a comatose Jessie is brought to the ICU, where she is expected to succumb to her injuries. Driven into a rage by the loss of his family, Max dons his police uniform and takes the black Pursuit Special without authorisation to pursue and eliminate the gang. He kills several gang members before being caught in a trap set by Toecutter, Bubba and Johnny. Bubba shoots Max in the leg and drives over his arm before Max is able to shoot Bubba with a sawn-off shotgun. Toecutter and Johnny ride away and Max staggers to his car and chases Toecutter, whom he forces into the path of an approaching semi-truck.
After a long search, Max finds Johnny stealing boots from a dead motorist. Ignoring Johnny's desperate pleas that he did not kill the man and he is not responsible for what happened to Max's family due to his diagnosed psychopathy, Max handcuffs Johnny's ankle to the corpse's overturned vehicle and creates a crude time-delay fuse using leaking petroleum and Johnny's lighter. He gives Johnny a hacksaw, saying Johnny can either try to saw through the handcuffs, which will take ten minutes or his ankle, which will take five minutes, to survive. The vehicle explodes as Max drives away.
Production[edit]
Development[edit]
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.[5]
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.[6] He knew little about writing a script, but he had read Pauline Kael's essay "Raising Kane" and concluded that most major American scriptwriters, like Herman Mankiewicz and Ben Hecht, were former journalists, so he hired McCausland, the Melbourne finance editor of The Australian, with whom he had previously bonded at a party as a fellow film buff. McCausland was paid roughly $3,500 for about a year's worth of writing.
The basic concept for the film was already established when McCausland was brought on to the project. He worked from a one-page outline prepared by Miller, writing each evening from about 7pm to midnight. Miller would then arrive at 6am to confer on the pages. McCausland had never written a script before and did no formal or informal study in preparation, other than going repeatedly to the cinema with Miller and discussing the dramatic structure of westerns, road movies, and action films. McCausland described taking the lead in writing the dialogue, while Miller was concerned with giving his thoughts on the narrative context of each part and thinking through the visual beats of how things would unfold on screen. The ornate and hyper-verbal speech of Mad Max's villains, like the manic Nightrider in the opening sequence, which would recur through the subsequent films in the franchise, in this sense stems from McCausland's work, albeit under Miller's instruction.[7] McCausland drew heavily from his observations of the effects of the 1973 oil crisis on Australian motorists:
Reception[edit]
Box office[edit]
Mad Max grossed A$5,355,490 at the box office in Australia and over US$100 million worldwide.[37][3] Given its small production budget, it was the most profitable film ever made at the time and held the Guinness World Record for the highest box-office-to-budget ratio of any motion picture[38] until the release of The Blair Witch Project (1999).
Critical response[edit]
Upon its release, the film polarized critics. In a 1979 review, the Australian social commentator and film producer Phillip Adams condemned Mad Max, saying that it had "all the emotional uplift of Mein Kampf" and would be "a special favourite of rapists, sadists, child murderers and incipient Mansons".[39] After its United States release, Tom Buckley of The New York Times called the film "ugly and incoherent",[40] and Stephen King, writing in Danse Macabre, called it a "turkey". However, Variety magazine praised the directorial debut by Miller.[41]
The film was awarded three Australian Film Institute Awards in 1979 (for editing, musical score, and sound), and was given a special award for stunt work; it was also nominated for Best Film, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor (Hugh Keays-Byrne). At the Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival, the film won the Special Jury Award.[42]
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 91% approval rating based on 64 reviews, with an average score of 7.8/10; the site's "critics consensus" reads: "Staging the improbable car stunts and crashes to perfection, director George Miller succeeds completely in bringing the violent, post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max to visceral life."[43] The film has been included in "best 1,000 films of all time" lists from The New York Times[44] and The Guardian.[45]