Mad max beyond thunderdome box office movie#
Mad max beyond thunderdome box office tv#

Mad max beyond thunderdome box office tv#

After about 45 minutes he shook his head and said, ‘Man, compared to what you’re doing, Hollywood action movies look like TV sitcoms. “I asked him if he would come back to my studio and critique some of the rushes with me. One early fan was Kurt Russell, whom Miller met at an Australian film festival.

He received encouragement from actors and filmmakers who appreciated his wildly innovative approach to action films.

Mad max beyond thunderdome box office movie#

Mel used to kid me that if I had had twice as much money the movie would only have been half as good.” There was a rawness and immediacy to much of the footage that might not have been there if we’d had a bigger budget. “When I look at the film now,” he says, “I realize that this scene or that scene had made it into the final cut after just one take.

Shot on a budget of about $490,000 just a few miles outside Melbourne, Miller recalls that there wasn’t even time for rehearsals. It wasn’t until the prologue to 'The Road Warrior' that audiences learned that the events of the previous film occurred as World War III, caused by oil shortages, is about to break out. 'Mad Max' is so spare that it never even takes time to explain its own premise. I’m not sure where more of the movie was created - on the highway or in the editing room.” “The actions are illusions created by editing. “Every chase in 'Mad Max' is an illusion,” said Miller by phone from Australia before kicking off the publicity tour for the fourth Mad Max film and the first in 30 years, 'Fury Road.' Lacking even the minimal technical resources of the low-budget American International Pictures motorcycle flicks that had inspired him, George Miller, the director, a medical school graduate who got into films by way of a university competition, couldn’t afford to film a single extended chase sequence. From 1979 to 1984, in New York, “the Citizen Kane of cheap, post-apocalyptic biker movies,” as the East Village Eye’s Sebastian Dangerfield called it, could only be seen at one theater, a tawdry little 24-hour movie house on 42nd Street. Not until 1995, when 'Mad Max' and 'Mad Max II' (or 'The Road Warrior,' as American filmgoers knew it) were shown at the Museum of Modern Art did we get to hear Mel Gibson’s real voice in the role that made him an international star as Max Rockatanski (his last name is spoken just once in three films - at the beginning of 'Mad Max' over a police radio.)įor the first few years after the release of 'Mad Max' the overwhelming number of statesiders never had a chance to see it at all. in 1979, American voices were dubbed over those of Aussie actors with the intent that viewers would think it set in the Western U.S. In the kind of nonsensical move common to Hollywood studios, when the film was released in the U.S. All we’re told is that what we’re about to see happens “A few years from now.”Īmerican audiences must have been puzzled as to what country George Miller’s first feature film, 'Mad Max,' was taking place in. It all began with a shot of a vulture perched on a highway sign that read “Anarchy Road,” apparently the main highway by which Australia’s rapidly diminishing oil supply is transported.