Mad Max And The Birth Of Low-Fi Action Movies
The series returns with George Miller's post-punk, post-apocalyptic masterpieces.
There’s no disguising the subtext of some action movies. James Cameron’s Aliens is clearly a film about the horrors of Vietnam. The same also goes for Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. And Tony Scott’s Top Gun? Well, it’s all about homosexuality, isn’t it? But while you could tentatively make a case for fetishism based on car-worship and bondage costumes, Mad Max and its first sequel, released in the US as The Road Warrior, defy in-depth analysis. They are quite simply movies about people driving vehicles into things. And they are all the better for it.
Max Rockatansky was dreamt up by George Miller, a qualified doctor who quit his practice when he realised he was born to make rather than watch movies. Together with screenwriter James McCausland and producer Byron Kennedy, Miller came up with a story which, in the tradition of all the best action movies, can be summed up in a single sentence: cop takes law into own hands after bikers slaughter his family.
To play Max, Miller hired Me Gibson whose only other film - 1976’s Summer City - had earned him the grand sum of $20 (AUS). Miller wasn’t too flush himself in 1979 - his budget was so small that he hired real-life bikers to play the minions of the villainous Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne) and he allowed his own truck to be written off by the stunt department. With such scant resources, simply finishing the film was an achievement. That Max Max transformed its $400,000 (AUS) into a profit of over $100m (AUS) was a feat for the attention of Norris McWhirter.
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