The original Mad Max of 1979 couldn’t have been simpler or starker. This wildly kinetic revenge drama, “a silent movie with sound”, as its director George Miller claimed, was filmed in six weeks in and around dank Melbourne on a budget of just A$400,000 – with A$15,000 of that going to the 23-year-old Mel Gibson for his breakout role. Miller, then a doctor in his early thirties, had been influenced both by treating the gruesome results of many car crashes and by realising, in the 1973 oil crisis, how desperate and violent drivers became when queueing for petrol.
But the film’s vaguely futuristic ambience, which suggested societal breakdown “a few years from now”, was first conceived as a way to justify the derelict settings the film-makers could afford. After the original Australian voices were redubbed by American actors, Mad Max took $100m worldwide, becoming the most profitable film ever on a cost-returns ratio, until The Blair Witch Project in 1999. The terrific Mad Max 2 (overtly post-apocalypse now, with ten times the production budget) followed in 1981, the excesses of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome in 1985.
There was then a 30-year hiatus. The fourth film in the franchise, Mad Max: Fury Road , in 2015, was a relentless chase movie, ceaselessly in motion. Tom Hardy was perfectly tough as Max, Charlize Theron glittering as the one-armed, shaven-headed Imperator Furiosa, seeking the “Green Place” of her childhood.
Now here’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga , the .
