Being a bad boy can be a good career move, it turns out.
More than three and a half decades ago in Australia, Mel Gibson drove an actor-friend to an audition and waited for him with women from the project's casting agency.
"I'd had a very bad weekend, I got into a brawl and I didn't come out looking too pretty."
He had tangled with half of a rugby team but, serendipitously, was sporting the rough look the movie needed. Someone took Polaroids of him and when he later returned -- healed, prompting the question, "And you are?" -- he pointed to the pictures on the wall and was offered the role of Max Rockatansky in George Miller's Mad Max.
"It could've been a commercial for toilet cleaner, I would've gone for it to earn a buck," he says in an interview on a new Blu-ray copy of the 1979 movie. Fresh from drama school, he earned $900 a week and reckons, "I think they got a lot of bang for their buck."
Did they ever.
Mad Max, made for a reported $300,000, starred Gibson as a futuristic cop hellbent on avenging the murder and brutal injuries of his wife, young son and best friend at the hands of a savage motorcycle gang.
It spawned The Road Warrior, which gave way to Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and, now, reboot Mad Max: Fury Road by the same director. It stars Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult and Hugh Keays-Byrne, who was the vicious gang leader Toecutter in the original.
Miller never envisioned an initial trilogy.
"After we made the first film, I almost didn't want to make a film like that again," he said. "It was too hard. Before that I had only made two 15-minute films."
"What happens with these stories is they kind of creep up on you and we'd start talking," he said while promoting the 1985 release, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
"I remember with this one, [co-writer] Terry Hayes started telling the story of a lost tribe of kids. I said, 'Terry, do you realize that's Mad Max III?' He said, 'Oh no, not another one!' I really do believe in the workings of the subconscious. I have a feeling this film completes an unofficial trilogy, but it's very hard to say."
Miller is technically Dr. Miller, a medical doctor who practiced in a major Sydney hospital before joining forces with creative partner Byron Kennedy (later killed in a helicopter crash). They poured their savings into, and raised additional money for, what became Mad Max.
Based on early reviews for Mad Max, no one might have predicted its international box-office success, longevity and influence on all other post-apocalyptic action movies.
The New York Times called it "ugly and incoherent and aimed, probably accurately, at the most uncritical of moviegoers." The PG's review in May 1980 by Marylynn Uricchio, headlined "There's No Method Behind This Madness," called it a "disturbing cheapie ... almost pure and unadulterated violence, with overtones of A Clockwork Orange and The Wild One thrown in to keep it from being original."
Also not original: the accents. Or, as Gibson says, Americans couldn't understand the "Australian lilt, if you can call it a lilt."
The movie was dubbed for the States and Aussie actress Joanne Samuel, who played Max's wife, Jessie Rockatansky, says in the Blu-ray extras: "When they revoiced the film for the States, we were all a little bit upset about that. Gee, if they had wanted American accents, we could have given them American accents." Even today, though, triggering the English subtitles on the Blu-ray may prove useful.
By the time The Road Warrior sequel came along Gibson had become an international sensation and Miller was regarded as an exciting director who excelled at purely visual storytelling.
The late George Anderson opened his Pittsburgh Post-Gazette review this way:
"The Road Warrior comes close to being trash raised to the level of art, if such a thing is possible. It is a cinematic equivalent of pop or junk art -- devoid of intellectual content and conventional meaning but viscerally powerful."
No matter its faults, it left moviegoers feeling drained and its climactic chase sequence was, he wrote, sensationally staged.
"There may be little here in the way of plot and characterization, but action fans haven't had a wallop like this in a long time."
The third movie, however, was considered the weakest of the series. Max, played as before by Gibson, landed in Bartertown (ruled by the woman Aunty Entity, portrayed by Tina Turner), along with a makeshift fight-to-the-death arena and, eventually, a lost colony of children.
It also had an Underworld where methane gas is produced from pig excrement; it was enough to put moviegoers off their feed. The movie opened strongly but fell victim to poor word of mouth.
All is now forgiven or forgotten or celebrated, with a new Mad Max speeding across the desolate, post-apocalyptic landscape, in 2-D and 3-D.
MovieStyle on 05/22/2015