Back roads and pig urine: the Mad Max mythology

FILMMAKING
The Legend of Mad Max – The Complete Saga from Mad Max to Furiosa
Ian Nathan, Hardie Grant, $50

The Mad Max story is indeed the stuff of legend. It began as a film shot on-the-run during the late 1970s on the western outskirts of Melbourne for around $400,000 and has grown into a massive Hollywood franchise, part five of which cost $US168,000,000 (almost $253,000,000, more than 60 times its original budget).

It launched the career of American expatriate Mel Gibson, who’d moved to Sydney as a kid with his family in the late 1960s before graduating from NIDA in 1977. His salary for Mad Max (1979) was a whopping $15,000; after Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985), the third film in the ongoing saga, it had skyrocketed beyond the million-dollar mark. At the same time, the series catapulted its co-creator, the mild-mannered former doctor George Miller, out of the casualty ward in Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital and into a Superman-tinged spotlight.

Written in the same snappy, helter-skelter style that the films maintain, British critic Ian Nathan’s handsomely illustrated book enthusiastically takes us through each of the films, detailing their production histories, situating them in the context of the Australian film renaissance of the ’70s, and appraising the evolution of a “Maxian mythology” through them. For him, the thematic thrust of the ongoing story – whose sixth part, if he’s correct, is on Miller’s to-do list – is about “stripping away civilisation to ponder what it means to be human”.

Nathan leaves little room for doubt about his view of the films. “They are as vital as the works of Chaplin and Keaton,” he proposes, “as inventive and ambitious as anything by DeMille, Kurosawa, Spielberg, or Cameron; as strange and funny and as non-conformist as anything by Bunuel, Tarkovsky, or Lynch.”

Phew! He’s not short of hyperbole in his assessments and his book is cram-packed with an intriguing mix of excess and insight. Sometimes, it’s a bit glib: the first Mad Max arrived like “a thunderclap over the tidy lawns of the Australian New Wave”!? Well, perhaps. But many films from that era, such as Peter Weir’s The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and Richard Franklin’s Patrick (both 1978) are hardly sunshine and roses.

Much of his commentary is astute, though, as he provides a list of how “hints of films past dance through Fury Road like dust devils”, or expounds on the always articulate Miller’s comments about the ways in which the silent cinema left its mark on the show-don’t-tell style he’s brought to the films. Or likens the remote township of Bartertown in Beyond Thunderdome to “Deadwood painted by Hieronymous Bosch”; or recognises how in Fury Road “the clouds of dust billowed up behind Immortan Joe’s shimmering armada (are) like a demonic twist on the ‘mirage’ in Lawrence of Arabia”, a film which Miller acknowledges as an influence.

He’s also spot-on in his description of the writer-director as unlike the kind of person you’d expect from the films, and more like “a genial sociology professor bemused to find himself orchestrating mayhem”. He accurately traces Miller’s growing fascination with the art of storytelling throughout his career and how it has impacted on the films he’s made. And, his captions for the abundant photos throughout the book have all been carefully drafted to expand upon the main body of text, a contrast to the throwaway descriptions routinely deployed in most film books.