In 1978, a young emergency room doctor from Sydney named George Miller had a few thousands dollars and a dream. He ended up making one of the most profitable films in history.
The Mad Max film franchise has become a source of Aussie pride. From the first installment in the late ’70s, it was a runaway hit that no one expected, least of all Miller.
Growing up in Chinchilla, a rural town in Queensland, Miller was just one of the teens taking part in the “intense car culture” there.
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“The main street of town and Saturday night were just the kids in the cars,” the now 79-year-old recalled in an interview with Australian Screen.
“By the time we were out of our teens, several of our peers had already been killed or badly injured in car accidents. And there was just those long flat roads where there was no speed limit and people would just go. And that obviously… impinged on me.”
This interest was compounded during his early days as a doctor in the emergency room, where he saw first-hand “the kind of carnage as a result of car accidents or bike accidents that it kind of got into me. It kind of disturbed me quite a bit.”
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Mad Max wasn’t his first foray into film. He first began when he met amateur filmmaker Byron Kennedy at a summer film school while he was still a resident at a Sydney hospital. Together they produced a short film Violence in the Cinema, Part 1 in 1971, which was critically panned and won several awards.
After their success they began planning what would become Mad Max, enlisting Melbourne journalist James McCausland to write the screenplay.
A first-time screenwriter, McCausland was in fact the finance editor of The Australian at the time, with he and Miller bonding over film after meeting at a party.
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With the journalist’s expertise in the 1973 oil crisis and seeing it’s effects on Australian motorists, together they conceived of a story set in a post-apocalyptic Australia set in the near-future.
“A couple of oil strikes that hit many pumps revealed the ferocity with which Australians would defend their right to fill a tank,” McCausland wrote in The Courier-Mail in 2006.
“Long queues formed at the stations with petrol – and anyone who tried to sneak ahead in the queue met raw violence.
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“George and I wrote the [Mad Max] script based on the thesis that people would do almost anything to keep vehicles moving and the assumption that nations would not consider the huge costs of providing infrastructure for alternative energy until it was too late.”
McCausland was paid $3,500 for the year he spent writing the script. He worked from a one-page outline of the plot prepared by Miller and worked from 7pm to midnight on the script. Miller would arrive at 6am the next morning to check the pages, later delivering the scripts on the back of a motorcycle to the cast and crew.
Kennedy and Miller exhausted all outlets looking for money to make the film. They relied on donations from family and friends and even did three months of emergency medical calls, with Kennedy driving the car while Miller helped patients.
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They used members of motorcycle clubs in the film, getting them to drive their bikes from Melbourne to Sydney since they couldn’t afford to fly them out, telling them to think of the ride as rehearsal.
Eventually, they gathered a measly $350,000 to finance the film, chump change compared to the whopping $US100 million profit it made worldwide.
This led to it becoming the most profitable film ever made at the time, holding the Guinness World Record for the highest box-office-to-budget ratio of any motion picture for 20 years, after which it was usurped by The Blair Witch Project in 1999.
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In the almost 50 years since the release of the first film, Mad Max has spawned four more sequels and prequels, turning into a franchise grossing over a billion dollars.
Miller has since gone on to direct critically acclaimed films such as The Witches of Eastwick, Three Thousand Years of Longing, Babe and Happy Feet, but decades on from Mad Max‘s success, all he sees in his debut feature film are flaws.
“I felt utterly defeated by the first Mad Max (1979),” he shared, “I felt that, that the film was unreleasable… it’s a mystery to me why the film still worked. All I see is its defects.”
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