It’s glad Max!
MAD Max is hitting the road once more with Chris Hemsworth playing the loner biker of the future.
The Aussie, left, says he’s “damn fired up” about the role in director George Miller’s follow- up to 2015 blockbuster Mad Max: Fury Road. It will be the fifth movie in the franchise, which began in 1979 and launched Mel Gibson’s career.
But how much do you know about it? NADINE LINGE reveals 15 fast facts.
1 The original film only had a budget of around £ 219,000 so writer and director Miller, right, worked as a doctor in Sydney to scrape together the money to keep it going.
2 That’s also why it was set “a few years from now” so they didn’t have to fork out for modern houses, cars and buildings and could use derelict properties.
3 Miller based parts of the film on the injuries he saw as a doctor, while he also witnessed many car accidents as the area of rural Australia where he grew up was notorious for crashes.
4 He named the main character Max Rockatansky after Carl von Rokitansky, a 19th century pathologist who created a procedure for removing organs in an autopsy.
5 Gibson, right, got the role by accident. Giving a lift to a friend who was auditioning and covered in bruises after a recent brawl, he was photographed to play a “freak” in the film.
6 Casting crew asked him to come back when he had healed and, when he did, Miller gave him the job on the spot.
7 With money so tight, Miller came up with the idea to pay the crew in beer. He offered ambulance drivers, a tractor driver and some of the bikers “slabs” – Aussie slang for a case of 24 cans of ale.
8 The bikers were not trained stuntmen but a real- life motorcycle club called The Vigilantes. They played Toecutter’s gang, who set Max out for revenge when they killed his family.
9 During the first film, 14 cars were destroyed. Max’s Ford Falcon was set to be sold but with no buyers it went to the on- set mechanic and Miller bought it back for the second film.
10 It was later put in museums in Cumbria and then Miami, Florida, before finally making a brief appearance in Fury Road.
11 Mad Max had to be dubbed for American release and the Aussie slang was replaced. So “Oi!” became “hey!”, “windscreen” became “windshield”, and “very toey” became “super hot”.
12 Mad Max 2 was inspired by the oil crisis of the 1970s. Miller wondered what might happen if people didn’t have access to oil for years.
13 Gibson says the second flick, released in 1981, was his favourite out of the three which featured him – although he only had 16 lines in the entire film!
14 Third movie Beyond Thunderdome featured Tina Turner, above. She was cast thanks to her positive persona, but has only made one acting appearance since – a cameo in 1993 film The Last Action Hero.
15 For two decades Mad Max was the most profitable film of all time, based on percentage of budget to box office receipts, taking more than £ 77million worldwide off a shoestring budget. It lost that title to 1999’ s The Blair Witch Project.