Who Rules the Wasteland?: A Conversation About the Original Mad Max Trilogy

The release of 'Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga' sent us back to first three Mad Max films. We talk them over below.

With George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga in theaters, going back to the origins of young Imperator Furiosa—a character played by Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road and as a young adult by Anya Taylor-Joy in the new film—it’s a good opportunity to go all the way back to the very beginning and look at how Miller’s Mad Max movies created and expanded on his singularly freaky, motorized, dystopic future. In this conversation, we’re looking at 1979’s Mad Max, 1981’s The Road Warrior, and 1985’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the first three features of the Australian director’s career and a world he’d revisit to spectacular effect 30 years later. 

Scott: When the word “post-apocalyptic” gets thrown around in connection to the Mad Max movies, particularly the original 1979 Mad Max, the pedants among us are inclined to say “well, actually…,” because there’s no evidence of any apocalyptic event that has thrown the world of the film into such terrifying disarray. I think it’s just the landscape that evokes that feeling: A violent and desolate (and very Australian) wasteland where law and order has broken down and gasoline is at such a premium that marauders treat fuel trucks like bandits in the Old West. Obviously, Miller would have the opportunity to broaden out this sandbox as he made more movies at larger budgets, but we can certainly look at Mad Max and see that savagery has destabilized civilization to such an extent that ordinary citizens are an endangered species, hiding from mortal dangers that come rumbling around the corner. 

To give a plot summary to readers who either haven’t seen Mad Max or need to refresh their memories, the film stars Mel Gibson as Max Rockatansky, the best pursuit officer within a police department that’s completely overmatched by lawless gangs. When Max succeeds in tracking down a particularly malevolent creep named Nightrider, chasing him into an explosive trap that kills him and his girlfriend, Nightrider’s gang, led by the sadistic Toe Cutter (the late Hugh Keays-Byrne, who’d play Immortan Joe in Fury Road), are keen on having their revenge. The danger facing Max, especially after the gang burns a close colleague alive, causes him to reconsider his job in the force, and he breaks away for a vacation with his wife Jessie (Joanne Samuel) and their young son. But when Toe Cutter and his boys go after his family, Max opts to take the law into his own hands. 

Remove all the weird names and the futuristic setting—which Miller ominously presents as “A Few Years From Now…”—and Mad Max is your basic vigilante thriller, a common exploitation-movie premise. The one uncommon thing about the premise is that the vigilante part doesn’t come into play until the final act of the film, when the gang kills Max’s son and badly (and likely fatally) wounds his wife, and he quietly resolves to take action. (That his “madness” is mostly wordless makes it so effective. He’s not really a talky guy by nature, but you get the sense that something has broken inside him and we’ve seen the last of the gentle humanity with which he related to his wife and child.) Miller was coming out of the robust Ozploitation scene—chronicled in a delirious documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation, which is one hell of a recommendation engine for sickos if nothing else—and drive-in/grindhouse audiences at the time would have felt easily situated in the film’s conventions, even if the accents (or the weird dubbing) were hard to track. And Mad Max was a huge hit and a cult favorite. 

It has also, in my view, been oddly underrated over time. Maybe that has to do with the consistent quality of Miller’s Mad Max movies, with the significant uptick in ambition starting right away with The Road Warrior, which makes the original seem like a rough draft. But I think Mad Max is about as good as exploitation movies get. There’s so much raw energy and invention here, and so much memorable style under a limited budget. This was shot beautifully at 2:35-1 and you can see that every aspect of production—the costumes and make-up, the custom design of the vehicles, the dynamism of the stunt work, the precision of the camera angles and movements—has been, well, maximized. If you’re a B-movie fiend in 1979 who’s been fed that gnarly diet of low-budget thrills, you would certainly sit up and notice the difference between what Miller and company accomplish with Mad Max and your typical vigilante sleaze. And that’s before you even get to the charisma of an unknown lead actor named Mel Gibson, whose career would lift off from here, too. 

There’s a right-wing bent to vigilante films, which are usually about decent men taking up arms against the (often non-white) criminal thugs, but Mad Max doesn’t have that agenda and I don’t think the other movies do, either. To me, the Furiosa movies have helped to clarify this dystopia as a worst outgrowth of the world of men, where unchecked aggression and hyper-masculine violence has overwhelmed and destroyed civilization. Mad Max catches it at the breaking point (“a few years from now”), where the Toe Cutters of the world have an edge and there appears to be quite a lot of early retirements in the police department. (Max is given a souped-up pursuit vehicle as an enticement for sticking around.) Small touches like a “Halls of Justice” gate that’s falling apart or a sign noting the number of fatalities on “Anarchie Road” tell the story. 

One of my favorite sequences in the movie takes place in a small town that looks unmistakably like one you’d see in a Western. Toe Cutter and his gang have come to town to pick up a package on the train, which is the coffin carrying what remains of their buddy Nightrider, and the one street is almost completely empty, which is typical of a Western when gun-wielding outlaws come through. The one unfortunate pair of onlookers is a couple that have taken a break from necking, leading to a harrowing chase scene later. But I was struck by how brilliantly Miller evoked the Old West torn in his near-future wasteland, which pays homage to the genre while also suggesting what the town looks like when order and safety have been thrown out the window. It’s eerie as hell. 

What do you think of Mad Max watching it again, Keith? Am I right in thinking it’s been a bit underrated lately or am I just lighting up a straw man? And how much (and how well) does Miller set the table for the movies to come?

Keith: I think Mad Max has always been a little underrated in America because it had such a weird release here. It was one of the last films put out by the low-budget specialists American International Pictures, who feared American audiences would not be able to penetrate the Australian accents and hired a voice cast to overdub the dialogue. This wasn’t really corrected until 2000, when it received a restoration and re-release and showed up on DVD. That means a lot of us first encountered a version with voices that didn’t match the actors (especially weird in Gibson’s case, since his voice had become well-known) and in a pan-and-scan version that didn’t do justice to the artistry. But you’re right when you say that the escalation in ambition, creative vision, and production design makes it easier to see The Road Warrior as the breakthrough, despite all the craft and emotional intensity of this film.

The leanness and efficiency of this film always surprises me no matter how many times I watch it. Maybe it’s best to think of it as the apex of ‘70s exploitation revenge movies rather than a rough draft of the post-apocalyptic vision to come. Miller just knows what he’s doing from the beginning, starting with the high-speed opening that starts the film and the slow reveal of our hero Max, who gets one of the all-time great movie introductions as Miller depicts him slowly putting on his gear before revealing his face. And maybe there’s a bit of commentary in that, too. This is the near future, but it’s one in which the police wear uniforms that suggest a totalitarian government.

Even with such details, I think I have to push back on your suggestion that this film is free of the right-wing revenge fantasy elements of the films that inspired it. I don’t think that Miller is right wing. But I don’t see that many ways Mad Max distances himself from other ‘70s revenge fantasies. We’ve got the Last Sane Man who has to take the law into his own hands. We’ve got courts that coddle criminals and tie cops’ hands. We’ve got horrific violence visited on the hero’s family that allows the film to justify a proportionate return volley. Who could argue that these bad guys have to die? At best, I think Miller brings some ambiguity into the formula, a la Dirty Harry. I also think one of the most fascinating elements of the Mad Max series is the way the politics shift with each entry. Here Max’s wife (R.I.P.? We never know for sure) is a spirited woman but ultimately a victim. Furiosa’s she’s not, yet the threat of sexual violence introduced here hangs over each subsequent entry, receiving a different treatment in each (as I’m sure we’ll get into).

But even if the politics are a little fuzzy—and that’s more an observation than a complaint—the filmmaking here is superb at every level. That’s most obvious in the action scenes. Every Mad Max film is filled with moments that make it hard to believe what you’re seeing. And though effects contribute to that illusion more and more as the series goes on, here it’s just raw stunt work and cinematic craftsmanship. It’s a neat, and apt, bit of trivia that Miller shot Mad Max using an anamorphic lens left behind by Sam Peckinpah. It feels a bit like a torch being passed, even if Peckinpah probably would not have included a borderline subliminal cut of eyes bulging out of their sockets at a key moment.

Other elements unite them too. You note that Max is a man of few words—his inability to express himself freely even to his wife is part of what defines him—but the bad guys talk and talk and talk. Beyond their love of violence, they’re bound together by a kind of flamboyant, borderline kinky, nihilism that they channel into acts of oppression. That’s pretty much true of all the Mad Max series’ bad guys, isn’t it? In the next entry, we’ll encounter Lord Humungus, a mask-wearing, barely clad, leather-favoring muscleman who delivers threatening speeches with the aid of a sniveling hype man. For all the ways the world changes between this bleak near-future vision depicted here and the post-apocalyptic wastelands to come, that remains the same.

Scott, what other connective tissue do you see between Mad Max and The Road Warrior (or, as much of the world knows it, Mad Max 2)? Miller’s said that the continuity between each film is loose at best but a lot seems to have happened to Max between movies, doesn’t it? And maybe we should get a handle on Miller’s style. Though the films would change, and the aggressive-but-thoughtful editing would grow even more instrumental in making the action work, they’re all grounded in a classic approach to action filmmaking, aren’t they? What other throughlines do you see here, as we move on to the The Road Warrior?