Mad Max (1979)

"You and me, Max, we're gonna give them back their heroes!"

It’s impossible to watch Mad Max without the context of the long-running franchise it kicked off, not to mention the productive career of Australian director George Miller. And yet that’s what I’ve tried to do: I’ve never seen a Mad Max film prior to this. The only Miller-directed film I’ve seen is the excellent Three Thousand Years of Longing from 2022, though I’ve also watched (and loved) Babe, which he produced. I suspect I might have half-watched Happy Feet when it was on at my parents’ house one time. So here we go: the reactions of someone who is about as much of a Mad Max and Miller neophyte as a movie fan can be.

My main conclusion watching Mad Max is that when you got it, you got it. George Miller’s got it. Mad Max is only barely coherent as a story and thrown together on a micro-budget such that the set pieces barely exist, but Miller brings to it a panache and frenzied energy that is deeply inviting. This is especially true in the off-kilter opening act, which throws us into a half-formed cinematic world and dares us to try and figure it out. The film’s second half is a bit more conventional as dirt-cheap and slightly trashy exploitation, but it never quite loses the glint and the verve. Miller called the film “a silent movie with sound” — i.e., the narrative is driven by kinetic energy rather than verbal energy, the film’s script secondary to its propulsive motion. This is not quite the same as being an image-driven film; Miller simply did not have the means to make many real images. But there’s a whirlwind quality to Mad Max that I find commendable.

The flip side is that there’s very little substance to the film, and when the ramshackle charm starts to wear off in the closing act, there’s not much of anything to latch onto. The sense that we’re watching a spit-and-bubble gum miracle diminishes once the concluding arc takes shape: As Max (Mel Gibson) chases down the goons who attacked his family (and, indeed, goes “mad”), Mad Max starts to resemble a dollar-store, feel-bad revenge B-picture and not an oddball lark.

The franchise’s much-lauded “dystopia” setting isn’t really all that dystopian in this outing. If I hadn’t known what the series becomes, I’d have just told you that we were hanging out in Australia: The desolate landscapes, mismatched technology, strange culture, and bizarre argot feel like they’re from an alien planet, and yet 1970’s Australia might just as well be an alien planet. Oil shortage was a genuine part of ‘70s Australian life. And Mad Max isn’t the only film to capitalize on this unusual national tenor: it is merely the most famous “Ozploitation” film — a cottage industry of cheaply-produced pictures leveraging the country’s geographic and cultural quirks.

Every indie Australian film I’ve ever seen, including Mad Max, regardless of genre — a total of about five spanning the ‘70s to the 2010s — has had a similar energy to its dialogue. I don’t know if this is how Australians actually talk or just how they write, but there’s a strange flavor to it: it’s abrasive, unmodulated, and bantery. Characters will talk more than you expect them to without saying much of meaning, with weird turns of phrase and unexpected bits of nastiness tossed in. Check everything from dance film Strictly Ballroom to teen dramedy The Rage on Placid Lake and you’ll hear something similar.

The making of Mad Max is just as interesting a story as the film itself, if not moreso: Miller was a doctor and a film buff in his early 30s when he and a bud who had once made a short film together for fun, Byron Kennedy, decided to make a feature together. They hired a bunch of locals to help them piece it together. Miller read Pauline Kael’s famous (and largely discredited) book Raising Kane about how Citizen Kane’s screenplay was actually more attributable to journalist Herman J. Makiewicz than to Orson Welles. He decided he would hire his own journalist to write the script for his story, and connected with James McCausland who had no past screenwriting experience. The pair watched and discussed a bunch of movies they wanted to mimic, then cobbled together their own screenplay.

When it came time to cast the lead, Miller and Kennedy wanted to hire an established American actor to increase the likelihood of international distribution, but they didn’t have the budget for it. So they hit the local acting schools to find an unknown and encountered an American-born kid who gave a great audition: Mel Gibson. Gibson is charismatic in Mad Max but ultimately doesn’t have enough to do as an actor to suggest the career he’d go on to have. Even though we don’t see too much of what makes Gibson special in this outing, it’s an obvious casting home run for the Mad Max team.

The shooting itself was a roller coaster. Miller went a little bananas. He could only get one camera lens working — an anamorphic 35mm lens — and he used it for everything: close-ups, wide shots, tilted angles, strapping it to vehicles, etc. Everything. An actress was injured four days into filming, so they scrapped their progress, recast, and restarted. The crew closed roads without police permission (though the Melbourne police reportedly found the project endearing and eventually assisted). It was so hectic and stressful that Miller briefly quit the project.

Vehicle stunts were orchestrated not by a professional stuntman or technician but by a local motorcycle racer, Ian Goddard. He did such a good job that there were no vehicle-triggered injuries or unexpected accidents despite some stunts that are rather incredible (and presumably dangerous) relative to the budget.

Miller and Kennedy hired an editor who couldn’t finish the project, so they completed it themselves on a homemade film editing device that Kennedy’s dad jury-rigged in a friend’s apartment. They spent day and night editing it for over four months.

And when it was done, four years after Miller and Kennedy first commissioned the script, the movie was distributed by AIP and WB across the globe and became an absolute smash. It made over $100 million in box office receipts against a budget of about $400,000. It was the most profitable film in cinema history until The Blair Witch Project. Miller’s answering machine was flooded with Hollywood offers. He bounced around a few American projects but ultimately decided to fly back to Australia to make a sequel to his breakout, this time with a bigger budget and more ambitious scope. Mad Max 2 would be released barely two years later.

Mad Max remains a fascinating, terse little film. If I really followed through on my promise to try and view the film “context-free,” I might give it a soft thumbs down as a quirky, cult B-pic with some haywire energy that’s too rough around the edges to recommend. But the context inevitably draws me in. Understanding it as an icon of low-budget filmmaking and the seed of a fascinating, groundbreaking directorial career makes it worth the watch.

Is It Good?

Good (5/8)

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