Mad Max (1979) – A Retrospective

As a raving fan of cinema, I’ve long been fascinated by the ways in which directors and auteurs evolve their technical skill and film craft; and how this evolution informs the narrative of their filmography. What are their first films like? Where do their recurring thematic ideas and visual signifiers first crop up? How does a filmmaker take the lessons they learned from one film into the next? The answers to many of these questions I think can be found most clearly in Doctor George Miller’s post-apocalyptic mythology of dust, metal, and adrenaline, the Mad Max franchise.

Across four films there is a clear trajectory of a man learning how to tell a story with a camera while gaining an understanding of how the stories he tells connect with an audience. Miller is one of my absolute favourite filmmakers and his series of Mad Max films have meant a great deal to me as a lover of the medium and an aspiring filmmaker myself, with the fast-approaching release of Miller’s prequel focused on the Imperator Furiosa, I thought it would be worth taking a look back to examine how the series developed and changed, how each film holds up, and how Miller himself grew as a cinematic storyteller. This journey of course starts with the very first Mad Max, the directorial debut of George Miller, one of the most successful action films ever made, and a milestone in ultra-low-budget independent cinema. 

The original inclination of what would become Mad Max began separately, in the minds of two men – George Miller and Byron Kennedy. For George Miller, the story of Mad Max starts as a combination of his love for silent cinema and his career as a trauma surgeon in a Sydney emergency room, a position that exposed Miller to many grisly vehicular injuries. This gave Miller a strong understanding of the gruesome reality of reckless driving and how these injuries affect a person’s mind. 

As Miller studied and practiced medicine, a young filmmaker, Byron Kennedy, making short films out of the University of Melbourne, had an idea for a chase film he called ‘road cop.’ Kennedy and Miller would eventually meet and become fast friends, developing their own short films and forming a production company alongside Doug Mitchell called Kennedy Miller Mitchell. This collaboration saw them combine their collective interests into one great idea, a story about a lone warrior in a bleak dystopian reality, struggling to regain law and order on the roads of Australia’s outback. 

For Miller, this film was a way to tell a story entirely through visuals, to make a modern silent film like those he enjoyed in his youth, a silent film that just happened to have a few words. Kennedy and Miller eventually hired first-time writer James McCausland to help them develop a script they could pitch and promote to find funding, talent, and distribution. To help develop ideas and to understand how a movie of this kind could even be developed, Miller and McCausland visited their local cinema to study any and all exploitation and genre cinema that was screening, which in turn gave what would become Mad Max a grounding in many disparate genres; be it westerns, action, or fantasy. The script took around 3 years to complete but the result was a story that played into the exploitation, B-movie craze of the 70s with a decidedly Australian feel. 

Upon completion of the script, Kennedy and Miller were able to raise between $350,000 and $400,000, a minuscule budget for a story of this scale, and with this many elaborate chases and set pieces, Miller and Kennedy would have to be extraordinarily creative. The story of Mad Max’s production is one of pure filmmaking grit and relentless creative energy triumphing over modest resources and restrictive conditions. Developing Mad Max was dangerous, reckless, and a constant uphill battle for Miller, Kennedy, and the entire cast and crew. Production ran into constant delays, injuries, and setbacks, forcing Miller and Kennedy to find inventive workarounds to any roadblock that came their way. 

Reading up on the production history of Mad Max will reveal no shortage of bonkers “how did they get away with that?” stories, such as Miller demolishing his own car when they couldn’t afford to buy one, closing public roads without permits, strapping military booster rockets to vehicles, attaching a painted shield to the front of a borrowed truck to protect it from damages and one scenario that gave us my favourite behind the scenes photo of all time, where cinematographer David Eggby rides passenger seat on a motorcycle going 110 kilometres an hour while operating a camera. It was a difficult, hellish shoot, a trial by fire for any filmmaker but a true test of endurance and creative spirit for a first-time director like Miller.

It would be very easy for a director, especially one as green as George Miller to get completely lost in all this mayhem, but what’s astounding about Mad Max is how much of his voice is already heard here. The 1979 film is a triumphant debut, a film that manages to rise above its limitations and make something that feels expansive, deadly, and completely thrilling within the confines of a low-budget project. 

For many, Mad Max begins and ends with Fury Road and the iconography that has been associated with the franchise in popular culture. Insane spikey cars, massive elaborate costumes made of metal and trash, and a vast, empty desert wasteland. So it can be shocking for many to come to the 1979 original to see Max with a family on a beach house, to see green forests and organised law enforcement, a far cry from the endless horizons of rust and dust established in the subsequent films. 

One of the great joys of watching Mad Max, especially retrospectively within the context of the whole series is seeing a civilization teetering on the edge of collapse. The world of the original is struggling to keep its grip on civilised life and order, as the outback starts to slide faster and faster in barbarity. How this society is decaying is where a lot of the colour and worldbuilding comes into play, introduced almost without dialogue, entirely through cinematic means, through the camera, the environment, and the performances of the actors.

Mad Max’s opening minutes tell you everything you need to know about what this civilization has become, with the very first shot showing a crumbling, decaying police headquarters – civility, it seems, is on the run. The following. now iconic. car chase sees Australian road police race after a lunatic calling himself the Nightrider, in his words a “fuel-injected suicide machine,” an adrenaline junkie rampaging down Australia’s roads. His pursuers though aren’t much better, they’re young, inexperienced, and are introduced spying on a young couple having sex through the scope of a sniper rifle. They are just as destructive, impulsive, and deranged as the criminals as they excitedly barrel after the criminals endangering everyone and anyone around them. And so we get a complete picture of the movie’s setting, a world where savagery is taking over, where police are forced to hire just about anyone whose feet can reach the pedals to try and keep the roads safe. 

George Miller today is thought of as a master of communicating ideas and character through action and that skill is evident right from his career’s opening minutes, with an opening set piece that is thrilling, feels genuinely dangerous, establishes the world, the characters within it and the larger thematic ideas at play. Mad Max is a messy film but it’s confidently directed and wonderfully edited, with each shot serving a clear purpose,  alternating between gorgeous wide-angle photography that isolates the characters within an indifferent world (I think George Miller is one of the absolute best people to ever film the horizon, shoulder to shoulder with David Lean, Sergio Leone and John Ford) and tight, piercing closeups. From the very start, it’s clear that Miller just knows where to put the camera.

This conflict between lawmen trying desperately to hold onto their humanity is core to the satire of the series and intrinsically linked to Australia, a link that is often lost when Mad Max is exported to overseas viewers. The film was made partially as a response to the 1973 oil crisis which saw limited oil exports across the globe, a crisis that significantly affected Australia, a country reliant on automobiles for travel, self-expression, and connection. In Australia, the obsession with cars as both an extension of oneself and a status symbol could be compared to America’s relationship with guns. In the Outback, where people were separated by large stretches of rock and desert, vehicular mobility is life, and without it, violence broke out, leading to motorists fighting for any scrap of oil they could get their hands on.

Miller, Kennedy, and McCausland took note of this and satirized it through Mad Max, creating a world where a lack of fuel and reliance on vehicles reverts humanity to screaming animals scrambling to survive and keep moving forward, perhaps best exemplified in the violent, savagery of Toecutter’s gang. The core of Mad Max then is a story about confronting our baser human urges and whether or not we can rise above them, which of course finally brings us to Max himself. 

Part of why I love this film so much, even amongst its messy structure and bizarre sense of pace is its commitment to the breakdown of one man, Max Rockatansky. The film’s narrative follows Max to a place of complete broken submission to the coming wasteland. We’re introduced to him as a capable, calm, and collected cop, trying to ignore the craziness around him and live a quiet, simple life with his wife and son. He’s living in denial, retreating to his green oasis after each day to try and forget the horrors out on the road. 

That denial eventually takes him further out into the green country following his retirement in the wake of the death of his best friend and partner, Goose. But even here he can’t escape as Toecutter’s gang murders Max’s family, driving the once collected and measured Max down a road of vengeance and madness. What makes the film’s third act so effective is that Miller allows Max to be genuinely frightening as he exacts revenge with a sadism and seething anger that a lesser movie would shy away from. It’s an upsetting devolution that Mel Gibson plays very convincingly, developing a grounded, blue-collar energy that gives way to mad-eyed ferocity, possibly aided by Gibson being a real-life crazy.

For all the messy plotting of the film’s second act, the entire piece comes together wonderfully in its final moments as we watch a good man concede to the darkness of the world, ready to take on the wasteland that will soon be coming. This character arc establishes Mad Max as a series about one man and the various ways he responds to the world that he exists in, a throughline that Miller would explore and elaborate on in its three sequels. 

Mad Max is certainly an imperfect movie, it’s messy, oddly paced, and has some definite plotting issues but one could never criticise it for lacking vision. Through an hour and twenty-five minutes, we are given the privilege of glimpsing a snapshot of a visionary filmmaker learning how to tell stories, adapting to the limitations of the film’s productions to create a film that manages to elevate itself far above the conditions under which it was made. To me, it is one of the most inspiring films ever made, a project made out of a pure desire to challenge its audience and to make something that’s just rad as hell, the kind of movie that makes you believe you can make a movie.