White Line Nightmare: The End of the World and MAD MAX II:THE ROAD WARRIOR (Part Three) - John Baxter uncovers the film's mythological roots

Editor's Note: This is the third part of an essay by John Baxter devoted to the creation of George Miller and Byron Kennedy's Mad Max movies. PART ONE considered the cinematic antecedents of the films end of the world settings and PART TWO looked into the early life and influences of George Miller. Now read on....

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THE BIRTH OF MAX

Few Australians shared these perceptions of the auto culture, but Miller, Greek by extraction, had inherited a sense of life organised like a Mediterranean village, where tradition and ceremony ruled. He was also, as a twin, accustomed to seeing himself less as an individual than as part of a unit. In 1970, at a film-making workshop run by the Australian Union of Students, he met Byron Kennedy, another enthusiast for American movies. 

It was a turning point for Miller, who realised he’d missed his calling. He effectively gave up medicine - his total career as a doctor lasted only 18 months – and he and Kennedy began collaborating on some facetiously violent short films, starting with The Mad Meat Machine, made at the workshop. A later untitled film, screened at the Christmas party of St Vincent’s, the Catholic teaching hospital where Miller interned, showed nervous student doctors in white coats set upon and terrorised by gangs of the nuns who staffed it. In the most successful of their shorts, Violence in the Cinema Pt. I, an academic delivers a TV lecture against screen violence while being variously shot, stabbed and finally exploded. Watch a tiny clip here for a taste

In 1974, Miller and Kennedy, both by now, in Miller’s words, ‘addicted to the process’, decided to make a feature. It took them four years. To earn a living, Miller moonlighted for an emergency medical service; Kennedy fielded calls and drove him to his appointments. The rest of the time, they wrote screenplays. With journalist James McAusland, they developed a story set in a lawless future where idealistic cop Max Rockatansky, part of  the Main Force Patrol, also called The Bronze, metes out justice on the rural roads. When the biker gang of The Toecutter kills Max’s wife, child and best friend, Max hunts them down remorselessly.

Byron Kennedy

In the late seventies, the Australian government, belatedly recognising cinema as a source of prestige, began financing films it hoped might promote the national image overseas. These were mostly period stories, adapted from respectable literary works like Picnic at Hanging Rock, Caddie, The Getting of Wisdom or My Brilliant Career. The contempt shown by government funding bodies for the script of Mad Max, described frankly by its makers as  ‘a low-budget genre film involving action, a Roger Corman-type Grade 6 movie’, engendered a bitterness that, in Miller’s case, persists to this day. ‘It might be “exploitation film-making”,’ he said heatedly, ‘but I can tell you that Byron Kennedy and I absolutely sweated blood on that film for a long time.’ 

Miller never subsequently requested nor received government funding for any of his films. Once Mad Max made him rich, he bought a movie theatre in Kings Cross and converted it to offices and sound stages for Kennedy-Miller Productions – a gesture of contempt for the ‘official’ Australian cinema, but also an affirmation of his tribal heritage.

Metro Kings Cross, home of Kennedy Miller Productions

Kennedy and Miller raised the $350,000 budget for Mad Max privately. The largest single contribution was $15,000. The screenplay typist invested $2500, as did two of her friends. Finally, Village Roadshow, then a small company the main part of whose income came from managing drive-in cinemas, offered a distribution deal. 

Such slim financing didn’t allow for stars. To play Max, Miller chose Mel Gibson, born in America but living in Australia since he was 12. With one feature, Summer City, to his credit, Gibson wasn’t an obvious choice for an action role, but Miller was impressed when he arrived for his audition with bruises on his face. He assumed he'd made up for the role, but Gibson, in those days an enthusiastic drinker and pub brawler, had actually been beaten up the previous night, and the bruises were real. 

Mel Gibson, Steve Bisley

Other roles were taken by reliable but little-known Australian actors like Steve Bisley, who played Goose, and English actor Hugh Keays-Byrne.  Cast as The Toecutter, Keays-Byrne had some film experience but, more important, a hefty build and booming voice. Other actors agreed to take part only if they could shave their heads in case someone recognised them. 

The low budget complicated things later.  In particular, the sound track would be totally remixed for international release, and all dialogue re-recorded with American red-neck accents. Despite its crudities, however, or perhaps because of them, Mad Max quickly went into profit.  Acceptance was quickest in Japan, where its violence and the sweep of the rural landscape reminded audiences both of the American western and its own chanbara swordplay adventures. 

Once the figures were in, Warners were ready to invest in another film, as much like the first as possible. The sequel might have looked much the same as Max, and been less of a hit, had Byron Kennedy not, in 1979, won a scholarship to study film in Hollywood. Ironically, it came from a fund set up as a memorial to Sir Winston Churchill, an icon of the same British empire that had kept Australian cinema under its thumb for generations. 

Kennedy, always the more aggressive of the partners, and fascinated with technology – he would die in a  1983 air crash while piloting his own helicopter - met Steven Spielberg, as well as George Lucas and his producer Gary Kurtz, still luxuriating in the success of Star Wars. Through them, he encountered the work of anthropologist Joseph Campbell, psychologist Bruno Bettelheim and the 1920s ethnographer Vladimir Propp. 

Though Lucas and Spielberg paid lip service to these gurus, it’s debatable how much they really knew of their work and how much they relied on summaries supplied by colleagues who, unlike them, had majored in something other than Film Studies at college. From the successive drafts of Star Wars, it’s clear Lucas introduced that film’s mythological subtext relatively late in the writing. It was Gary Kurtz, who studied comparative religion in college and was a devout Quaker, who provided the film’s mystical structure and the crypto-religion of The Force. 

Until the early 1980s. when Lucas, by then a convert, invited Campbell to Skywalker Ranch to deliver a series of lectures, many who worked on the film had no understanding of the story’s tribal nature. ‘Until Campbell told us what Star Wars meant,’ says composer John Williams, ‘- started talking about collective memory and cross-cultural shared history – the things that rattle around in our brains and predate language, the real resonances of how the whole thing can be explained – we regarded it as a Saturday morning space movie.’

Campbell explained how the importance in tribes of the shaman or ‘medicine man’ was reflected in tales told round the fire – the origins of modern genres like the western – , while Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folk Tale, first published in 1928, articulated the classic stages of such stories. The villain must harm someone in the hero’s family, and maim or otherwise mark the hero, who then flees or is banished into the wilderness. During that time, he must survive ordeals, acquire a wise guide and/or clever helper, and set out to find some item crucial to his eventual victory, while the villain uses all his cunning to defeat him,  changing his appearance and committing bloody atrocities. All to no avail, however, since the hero must win, then marry. 

Soon after Kennedy’s return from the US, Miller began speaking in Campbellian terms. The sequel to Mad Max would be, he announced, ‘more consciously mythological, more focused’ – in fact a copybook demonstration of Propp’s structure.