how Mad Max prophesied Britains fuel crisis

“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.”

Speaking in the first Mad Max film, Mad Rockatansky – played by Mel Gibson – was not yet the mythic, vengeance-fuelled Road Warrior of the sequels. Rather, Max was still a baby-faced future cop and family man. But one on a collision course with a gang of murderous bikers in near-apocalyptic Australia.

Mad Max’s “terminal crazy” warning may have been scarily prophetic – for us too. Few would say they’ve recently enjoyed the mad circus of British roads (particularly those roads around petrol stations), but comparisons have been made between Britain and the Mad Max films: a merciless dystopian wasteland with an unquenchable thirst for fuel.

Those comparisons come in the light of resurfaced comments from the former Brexit secretary, David Davis. In 2018, he assured business leaders that Britain wouldn’t be plunged into a “Mad Max-style world”. Alright, we’re not quite that bad yet – less apocalyptic carnage, more long queues at the garage and lots of horn-honking.

It’s in Mad Max 2 that the scarcity of petrol begins to really fuel the action. Tribes go to war over the black stuff, dubbed “guzzolene” in that peculiar way that Aussies like to nickname things. But the original screenwriter, James McCausland, confirmed that even the first Mad Max film – which became the most successful Australian film of all time – was influenced by the oil crisis of 1973.

“A couple of oil strikes that hit many pumps revealed the ferocity with which Australians would defend their right to fill a tank,” wrote McCausland in 2006. “Long queues formed at the stations with petrol – and anyone who tried to sneak ahead in the queue met raw violence.”

When James McCausland came onboard to steer the screenplay along with George Miller (Mad Max co-creator and director), McCausland was a journalist with zero film-writing credentials – just one example of the cut-and-shut job that was Mad Max. 

The film, which turned Mel Gibson into a star, was made in the spirit of the turbo-charged lawlessness that it depicts on-screen: cars smashing into each other; freeways hijacked; and a cameraman strapped to a motorbike going at 100mph-plus.

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 filmmaking partner Byron Kennedy – co-creator and producer of the first two Mad Max films – recalled that 23 people were killed on Australian roads during a single weekend in 1975. 

There was more to it, however. “On the other hand, I just love action movies,” George Miller told Wired in 2015. “For me, the most universal language and the purest syntax of cinema is in the action movies.”

Miller thought their story idea was “too hyperbolic” for the real world, while their paltry budget of $350,000 – raised through a consortium of friends, family, and investors – wouldn’t muster up an all-out futuristic world. Instead, the first Mad Max would be set “a few years from now”: some not-too-distant reality, where near-endless, desolate highways lead to dilapidated towns. 

Normal suburban houses stick out in the background, belying the not-entirely dystopian landscape. Indeed, the most futuristic thing about the original Mad Max is the all-leather uniform worn by the cops – 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 Mel Gibson about wearing the plastic gear in already-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-wrenching, lo-fi crashes. Miller and co smashed cars into each other and other debris on the road, with scant regard for health-and-safety regulations. Cases in point: a car with a rocket stuffed in its back end that missed its mark and raced towards the crew; a truck rolling down an embankment and almost crushing the cameramen; and a stuntman launching into a makeshift landing pad of mattresses and cardboard.

The Nightrider belongs to a gang of bikers, let by the demented-but-oddly-comedic Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who returned to play Immortan Joe in the 2015 sequel, Mad Max: Fury Road). Terrorising people wherever they go, the gang are as revved up by stealing an inflatable pink elephant as they are by wanton violence – such as burning Max’s best pal, Goose (Steve Bisley), alive. When Toecutter mows down Max’s wife and child – setting Max on a mission of ultra-violent revenge – it’s partly because she plonked an ice cream in his face. 

The production was so cash-strapped that instead of transporting the motorbikes from Sydney to Melbourne, where the film was shot, the punk actors rode the bikes all the way. They recalled feeling real “loathing” from locals as they rolled into various towns along the way – much like in the film.

They got so into the roles that they behaved like a real gang off-camera: they sneered at the actors playing the cops – or “bronzes”, named for their bronze police badges – and wrote threatening notes to Mel Gibson in blood (real or fake blood, depending on who’s telling the story). They also rode around in a convoy. With the noise-dampening baffles removed from the exhausts, the bikes could be heard roaring their way around Melbourne.

Yet the film was thrown into chaos after just four days, when the stunt coordinator 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 Grant 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 p--sing blood,” as actor David Bracks put it in the documentary The Madness of Max. Page directed stunts regardless of his injuries – even from a wheelchair.

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

The production broke legal rules too: the art director confessed to stealing props and returning them after they’d been used; and the crew closed down roads without legal permission – they simply jumped out to hold up traffic and shot their scenes – until the Melbourne police became interested in the film and helped. According to Miller, 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,” Miller said. “And those very kinetic action-montage movies that they made… I saw the action movie, particularly the car action movie, as an extension of that.”

More than 40 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 – or Ozploitation, to be precise). All roads in Mad Max lead to unexpected destinations.

Ultimately, Mad Max is a journey into devolving morality. The viewer sits firmly in the driver’s seat for Max’s revenge – a crusade of violence that’s as deeply disturbing as it is satisfying. 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 in Fury Road) – Max eliminates the gang and doles out a Saw-like punishment to Toecutter’s protégé, 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 a foot or burn to death.

“He is a person who does the very thing that he should not do,” reflected 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.”

During production, however, the film had careened out of Miller’s control. He 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. It made more than $100,000 and once held the Guinness World Record for “most profitable film”. The Australian Film Commission said that 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. That there’s a mythology out there and basically Mad Max was a weird Australian version of that.”

Drawing on The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell – about the archetypal hero and their journey – Miller cranked the myth-making up a gear for the 1981 sequel, Mad Max 2 (The Road Warrior in the US). By now, Max is a lone hero – “a closet human being” said Mel Gibson – in a world that’s plunged into a full-blown, fuel-starved apocalypse.

Shot stunningly by Dean Semler in the outback desert of Broken Hill – described by a behind the scenes doc as “Australia's last frontier town” – Mad Max 2 is an amped-up Western, cobbled together from the junk and remnants of a now-extinct civilisation and gagging for guzzolene, in which Max, riding into town in his V8, saves an oil-refinery settlement from deranged, barbaric marauders who want their fuel. 

Co-writer Terry Hayes recalled being inspired by a petrochemical plant that he and Miller walked by in Western Port Bay. “We imagined that isolated plant in a world that had broken down, where oil was the only means of exchange,” Hayes said in a 1981 interview.

Max leads the settlers to an apocryphal paradise, with their fuel tanker hitched to the back of a Mack Truck, while pursued by Lord Humungus (Kjell Nilsson) – like an S&M Jason Voorhees with his hockey mask and leather-strapped barrel chest – in a thundering 20-minute chase across the desert. It’s a juggernaut of an action sequence, though now it feels like a mere test drive for Mad Max: Fury Road.

The documentary captured two stunts that went painfully wrong during Mad Max 2. One stuntman flew off a motorbike in the wrong direction and damaged his leg; a metal rod inserted into his leg from a previous accident was bent at a 20-degree angle. It still made the finished film, one of 200-plus stunts overall.

Miller said that with Mad Max 2 he “confronted [his] failure” on the original film. It's certainly a rare sequel that outguns the original ­– a huge leap forward in vision, world-building, and budget. A (comparatively) whopping $4.5 million was more than ten times the original’s budget, making Mad Max 2 the most expensive Australian film ever made at that time. 

Max returned in 1985 for a three-quel, Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome – complete with a cameo and theme song from Tina Turner. George Miller went into the Thunderdome reluctantly. Just two years earlier, his friend and producer Byron Kennedy was killed in a helicopter crash. 

Mad Max has been on a strange journey, from trash violence to Tom Hardy reboot, via the naff warbling of Tina Turner. Johnny the Boy himself – aka Tim Burns – gave an insight into why we continue to invoke the world of Mad Max, which likely rings true for anyone on the edge of fuel-starved craziness right now. 

“It has become a kind of a catchphrase that means something somewhat out of control,” he said. “Half in reality but spilling out into this chaos.” 

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbHLnp6rmaCde6S7ja6iaJ6Zobq0e49onaKfmKm2r7OMq6CgoKRis6q4y2armqabYrGqsIymmJ1lnZbFbrzRnpuim6RivabA0aijZpuinsCqv44%3D