Director George Miller has often compared his Mad Max films to visual rock ‘n’ roll pieces, where every image is a chord and every cut is a note. One of the titles considered for the first film was Heavy Metal, which might not have been a bad choice – after all, Miller distilled the purest essence of the moving image nearly 50 years ago and has been perfecting his recipe with each new production.

But let’s start from the beginning.

Back in the early 1970s, George Miller, a calm, quiet doctor, and his friend-turned-production partner Byron Kennedy (who played a significant role in Miller’s career before dying in a helicopter crash in 1983) were working on their first short films, during a period of creative effervescence in Australian cinema that produced directors such as Richard Franklin, Ted Kotcheff and Peter Weir, and saw the emergence of a counterculture movement, now affectionately and retroactively called Ozploitation – which brought about low-budget genre films filled with American-style heart-pounding action. So, while Max Rockatansky, the protagonist of the Mad Max series, may have appeared out of nowhere (but not out of nothing), Miller’s journey from the emergency room to $150 million budgets was long and improbable.

The Madness of King George

Funded by loans from acquaintances and medical services clandestinely provided by Miller, shot under gruelling conditions, without permits, and minimal safety measures, Mad Max (1979) had a disastrous production period – the first day of shooting was a complete failure because the logistics manager hadn’t come with a plan to (illegally) stop traffic on the highway where they were to film, the lead actress was injured in a bike accident during a break and had to be replaced, and the cameraman had to be strapped to a stuntman on a motorcycle, at 200 km/h, with a 15-kilogram camera in his arms to get the angle the director wanted.

From the start, George Miller got the shot he wanted from his collaborators.

Branded as “dangerous pornography of death” by one of the contemporary reviews for its violence, largely implied, and for the ease with which vehicles and stuntmen collide and blend into contorted metal, the film was a box office hit –  with a budget of $350,000, it grossed nearly 300 times more, totalling $100 million. But looking back, it’s no wonder that for twenty years, Mad Max was the most profitable film in history (relative to production costs) and directly responsible for two masterpieces. Using the hero’s journey tropes as defined in Joseph Campbell’s book of the same name, Max Rockatansky’s (Mel Gibson, Tom Hardy) path in each film follows the same phases of alienation from the world, trials and hesitations, followed by the revelation that he is providential to protect a helpless group. The key to his success is the “monomyth” (in Campbell’s terms), which every culture can easily identify with – Max is an avatar: the samurai (not coincidentally, the series was hugely successful in Japan), the crusader, the Viking.

In Mad Max, the sinister Toecutter’s (Hugh Keays-Byrne) motorbike gang terrorises passers-by (Like hungry rats, mad with the smell of gasoline) and kills the protagonist’s family, who turns from cop to vigilante. In a future where fossil fuel is the most valuable currency and all survivors fight over resources, Max has to protect: a tanker and the community whose survival depends on it (Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, 1981), a group of children in need of a hero (Max Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome, 1985), and the five pregnant wives of a desert warlord (Fury Road, 2015). With each film in the series, the legend of Max, with his V8 Interceptor and leather jacket, grows to abstraction – Tom Hardy ends up with 63 lines of dialogue (and a lot of grunts, but that’s another story).

The 1981 sequel, released as The Road Warrior in the US to hide from the American market (where the first film hadn’t been a big hit) that it was a sequel, is the template for all subsequent films in the series and one of the most imitated audiovisual products of all time. A thousand epigones and “homages” later, every post-Apocalypse depiction borrows freely from here – from B-movies (Cyborg), unofficial remakes (Waterworld) to music videos (California Love) and computer games (Borderlands, Rage, of course, Mad Max). Even so, almost impossible to separate from its cultural legacy, the film loses none of its impact when rewatched – the third act is a display of virtuosity comparable to the likes of Bullitt, The French Connection, and Sorcerer. Astonishingly, the tanker is overturned at the end not by a stuntman but by a truck driver doing it for the first time.

Four years later, with a blockbuster budget and Mel Gibson at a different stage of his career, saw the release of Beyond Thunderdome, now considered the black sheep of the series. Impressive today more for its production design and some of Miller’s eccentric choices (the pig farm for fuel, the Master Blaster character(s)), the film’s flaw is being irrevocably stuck in the ’80s, with Maurice Jarre’s Amblin-style soundtrack, Tina Turner as the big bad, and a dragged-out second act that takes the saviour myth too far. At least for the time being, Max’s saga seemed to end there – Tina Turner’s We Don’t Need Another Hero proved prophetic.

To Hollywood

Miller spent the following years on the periphery of Hollywood, making a camp classic, Witches Of Eastwick, and Lorenzo’s Oil, an honest melodrama now best known for helping you get this particular joke, then pivoting to children’s films – he wrote the script for the wonderful Babe, directed its sequel Babe: Pig In The City (my first contact with his filmography when the class teacher took us to the cinema in 1998), and the two Happy Feet films. While these juvenile allegories retained some of the director’s earlier visual flair, including the hero’s journey theme discussed above, nothing predicted the most meteoric comeback in recent cinema history.

Rumours of George Miller’s attempts to bring Max back to the big screen had persisted since the early 2000s, but his career trajectory, combined with Mel Gibson’s fall from grace in 2006, seemed to have sealed any plans or public expectations that the two had anything left to say. Miller had wasted a lot of time developing projects that ended up being rebooted and completed by other directors considered to have more pedigree: Contact and Justice League.

Beyond Fury Road

Yet in 2012, with Tom Hardy as an equally young Max, and a new character, equally prominent on the poster, Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron, filming began on Mad Max: Fury Road in Namibia. True to his work discipline from his days of making movies on credit, Miller already had an in-detail storyboard and backstories for each of the main characters – which he later decided to capitalise on, planning to film them.

What followed is already history: Fury Road is a film with no downtime that runs as if the death of the universe is taking place behind it and makes you dig your fingernails into the seat – Margaret Sixel, the director’s wife, spent three years in the editing room making sure of that. Miller expanded the series’ trademark chase, between the protagonists’ War Rig and the villain’s armada – here Immortan Joe (played by the same Hugh Keays-Byrne) –, to feature-length, offering the adrenaline shot that major studios had long been incapable of, along with characters and scenes that instantly became a sensation. Without Fury Road, even Petrolul’s supporters wouldn’t be capable of such spectacular displays today.

Forty-five years ago, George Miller rigged a rocket on a car to make it go faster and crash epically – a completely irresponsible decision that resulted in something beautiful. Today, at 79, he shows no signs of preparing for Happy Feet 3. Furiosa, the prequel that the true protagonist of Fury Road deserves, hits theatres on May 24, and Mad Max: The Wasteland is in the making. Long live the king.

Foto thumbnail: Getty Images

Dragoș Marin

Dragoș Marin published articles and film reviews on filmreporter.ro and colaborated in various specialized festivals and TV shows. In everyday life he's a prokect manager while continuing to stay connected to pop culture and to write about what he has to say.