George Miller’s Mad, Mad World

The emergency room doctor turned director never set out to create a cinematic universe, but in the end, his singular vision allowed the riveting world of ‘Mad Max’ to thrive

• By
  
  Miles Surrey
  
• on May 22, 2024 8:36 am

Riding a wave of buzz from its premiere at SXSW, The Fall Guy was set to kick off summer blockbuster season in style. Ryan Gosling, the film’s star, was already talking up plans for a sequel, for which a script has already been written. Alas, it seems far more likely that The Fall Guy will be a one-off. Following an underwhelming opening weekend, at least in relation to its $130 million budget, the film is already available on digital platforms, which feels like a waving of the white flag from Universal Pictures. Rather than kick-starting an exciting new franchise based on old IP, The Fall Guy looks destined to follow in the footsteps of another Gosling-led vehicle, The Nice Guys: a well-liked film undone because not enough people showed up to theaters to justify a follow-up.

Of course, The Fall Guy’s fate is nothing new: Hollywood is littered with potential franchise starters that failed to hit the ground running. Even with overwhelmingly positive reviews and a likable leading man fresh off of costarring in the biggest movie of 2023, nothing is a sure thing. But perhaps the best way to craft a cinematic universe—especially one that isn’t attached to any high-profile IP—is by never having grand ambitions to make one. After all, one of our greatest ongoing franchises started out with nothing more than a $350,000 budget on the back roads of Australia.

The making of the original Mad Max is the stuff of legend: a process that director and cowriter George Miller has described, not inaccurately, as “guerrilla filmmaking.” Miller, a former emergency room doctor, had to get creative with his shoestring budget when he made his feature-film debut, about a world on the brink of societal collapse. Miller and his producing partner Byron Kennedy would take emergency medical calls just to raise funds for the production. Instead of receiving wages, some crew members were paid in cases of beer. Some of the props were stolen from storefronts (and later returned). To make matters even more challenging, Mad Max’s biggest selling point was some truly audacious stuntwork behind the wheel, as the film’s protagonist, highway patrolman Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson), sets out for revenge after his family is killed by a sadistic motorcycle gang. (Miller and Kennedy personally swept the roads clean after shooting the stunts.) Mad Max’s kick-ass action is almost inconceivable given its scrappy origins.

Despite some polarizing reviews upon its initial release—The New York Times called it “ugly and incoherent”—Mad Max would make history, grossing $100 million and becoming the most profitable film of all time. (The movie would eventually lose that mantle to The Blair Witch Project.) A sequel, The Road Warrior, soon followed, at which point Miller got to work with greater resources to the tune of $3 million. That might sound like a modest budget, but it’s almost 10 times what the original film cost and was more than enough for Miller to execute daring set pieces coinciding with the Mad Max world’s descent into chaos. Even by the standards of modern moviemaking, the chase scenes in The Road Warrior—including a moment when motorcycle stuntman Guy Norris broke his femur (a sequence that made the final cut)—are genuinely mind-blowing. In retrospect, it feels like a minor miracle that nobody died during the production.

Though the third film in the original trilogy, Beyond Thunderdome, is a tad more commercialized—it had a bigger budget, a PG-13 rating, and a major costar in Tina Turner—Miller never stopped marching to the beat of his own drum. The closest thing this franchise has to “lore” is the death of Max’s family; the rest of the narrative takes on an almost mythical quality, with our weary, taciturn protagonist wandering off into the wasteland after saving the day each time. There’s hardly any sense of internal logic or continuity: Bruce Spence shows up in The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome as two separate characters … who both happen to be pilots. Villains are clad in glorified BDSM outfits; the scariest dude in The Road Warrior spends the entire movie in assless chaps. It’s madness. It’s perfect.

That these movies felt so singular plays a big part in the franchise’s enduring influence on pop culture. Miller didn’t have to compromise his vision, and because Mad Max started out so small, it didn’t exactly need to break a profitability record to merit sequels: It found a willing audience, and it grew. When it comes to Hollywood, this is a familiar trajectory for some of our great horror franchises, including Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Paranormal Activity, and Saw. (Strange but true: Saw masterminds James Wan and Leigh Whannell were inspired by the end of Mad Max, when Max handcuffs a biker to a burning car before giving him the option to saw off the cuffs or his own limb.) But it’s rarer for non-horror franchises to begin with such a small budget before expanding: Rocky and The Terminator come to mind, but in terms of more contemporary hits, something like John Wick seems like more and more of a unicorn. (Even then, John Wick barely got off the ground, as only one distributor put in an offer for it.)

Of course, the upside of taking things slowly means that filmmakers can reap the rewards with a bigger follow-up. At the time of its release, Terminator 2: Judgment Day was the most expensive movie ever made and more than justified the hefty investment; Rocky is still churning out new installments via the Creed spinoffs; and aided by a $100 million budget, John Wick: Chapter 4 emerged as one of the best action flicks of the century. And when Miller finally got major studio resources to create Mad Max: Fury Road—a film that far exceeds the budgets of the previous Mad Max entries combined—he more than delivered the goods. By all accounts, the Fury Road production was a nightmare, but the end result is a blockbuster that even other filmmakers can hardly comprehend: an orgy of vehicular carnage unlike anything before it.

In the aftermath of overwhelming critical acclaim and six Oscar wins for Fury Road, it’s hard to believe Warner Bros. didn’t fully buy what Miller was selling. In an effort to undermine the filmmaker, the studio created an alternative cut of Fury Road that, thankfully, never saw the light of day. But the fact that Miller had to deal with interference from Warner Bros. in the first place speaks to an underlying issue within the modern blockbuster ecosystem: Studios might not even know greatness when they see it, especially when there isn’t a single point of comparison for a movie of Fury Road’s scale and ambition. Time and again, major studios are so risk averse that they forget that risk-taking, more often than not, is what stands the test of time.

As Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga revs its way into theaters, it appears that Miller dealt with less studio oversight to execute his grand vision this time. Having already seen the movie, I’m floored by what Miller has accomplished. Furiosa is a very different beast than Fury Road, but one that retains its predecessor’s nonstop forward momentum. The world-building is exquisite, the story is by turns harrowing and riveting, and Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth give the best performances of their careers. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. All told, Furiosa is a film that reminds you why we love going to the cinema: to be transported, to be awed, to experience something we’ve never seen before. Whether or not Miller returns to the world of Mad Max down the road, this one-of-a-kind franchise should be treasured. Anytime a blockbuster with such an unmistakable sense of authorship makes it through the studio pipeline is a lovely day.