Sandy Harbutt on the film that paved the way for Mad Max: ‘I’ve been knocked back ever since’
To describe the 1974 Australian film Stone requires one to indulge in a certain kind of language. Expressions such as pedal to the metal, for example, or balls to the wall, or hell for leather, or cranked to 11, or crazy in the coconut, or set on fire then shot off a ramp and sent to outer space – anything that says “this movie is wild”.
Baiting audiences with a risque narrative about a bunch of bikies called the Gravediggers, writer-director Sandy Harbutt’s film became one of the most profitable Australian features of all time, collecting around $1.5m at time of release (about $10m adjusted for inflation) from a budget of $195,000.
To mark its 45th anniversary, Stone will screen at Melbourne’s Astor Theatre on 28 November, on a 35mm print that will be personally delivered by Harbutt himself.
The film was one of several productions discussed in the director Mark Hartley’s influential 2008 documentary Not Quite Hollywood, which explored the Ozploitation movement: a typically low-rent canon of hardcore Australian genre films. Harbutt, however, rejects the label as an inaccurate description of his movie.
“Exploitation to me means a picture that takes a subject and exploits it,” Harbutt, 78, tells Guardian Australia.
“But Stone was trying to send the audience out a better audience than the audience that came in. The idea that I was after their money so they could see some blood and tits – that was never the point. If I had known that was the attitude the [Not Quite Hollywood] film-makers had towards Stone, I probably wouldn’t have cooperated with that documentary. A misunderstanding on my behalf, perhaps.”
Stone is unquestionably ambitious and distinctive, balancing a turbocharged aesthetic with gritty realism. Despite being extremely weird (it opens with a man who witnesses a political assassination while tripping on LSD), it was embraced by many bikers as an honest depiction of their lifestyle. They have showed allegiance to it ever since; in the late 90s, around 30,000 motorcyclists gathered to recreate the film’s funeral scene.
Mad Max (which arrived five years later) is a much more famous car and bikie-themed production, widely heralded as a watershed action movie. But some credit – or at least a little kudos – should go to Stone, which may have been an inspiration for George Miller’s dystopian classic. One of the film’s characters is even called Bad Max.
This, Harbutt reflects, is not the only point of similarity between the two classics: “No other motorbike gang in the world had ever ridden Kawasaki 900s before,” he says. “And Max Rockatansky? ROCKatansky! Stone! Not to mention the four actors in his film that were in mine.” (These are Hugh KeaysByrne, Roger Ward, Vincent Gil and David Bracks).
Continues Harbutt: “Because George Miller became such a force in the Australian film industry, nobody had the guts to come out and say, hey, wait a minute! But I’m not criticising anybody for that. There is plenty of room to make movies about people who ride motorcycles. A lot of films made in Europe were probably a lot more like Stone than Mad Max. I was just disappointed that his [Miller’s] aims for the audience were so low. A story about revenge and, in the end, murder and death, with laughing as somebody rides off into the sunset. That’s a total cliche of the motorcycle movie.”
When Harbutt made Stone, there was barely any film industry in Australia let alone a subgenre involving daredevil drivers. Did any car or motorbike chase sequences even exist in a modern Australian movie before Stone arrived?
“You would have had to have watched Homicide Division 4,” Harbutt says, referring to the then-popular Australian TV police drama which ran from 1969 to 1975. “They always had a car chase in there, in probably almost every episode. These chases were staged by Peter Armstrong, who was their salaried stuntman and stunt supervisor, and who worked with me on Stone.
“As soon as you saw a really badlooking car – a really beat-up old vehicle – you’d know there was going to be a car chase, and that this car was going to crash. Peter Armstrong honed all his skills on those life-threatening stunts for probably about a $150 for a week. They don’t make them like that any more.”
Harbutt says the idea for Stone came about when he “started hanging out with people in this motorcycle cult” and realised that “I could get enormous amounts of cooperation for almost nothing and make a big picture from a small budget.”
Despite the film’s success, the director never made another feature. According to Harbutt, this was not from lack of trying: he goes into a lengthy backstory about the politics of Australian film-financing corporations and various disagreements over financial matters relating to Stone.
Harbutt says he has put in 10 separate submissions to corporations such as the Australian Film Commission and Screen Australia over the years “and I’ve been knocked back, without a penny, ever since”.
This has clearly left some ill feeling. The director describes Screen Australia as a “self-perpetuating, self-rewarding, giant bureaucracy” and believes control over it “needs to be put back into the hands of artists. And by that I mean successfulfilm artists.”
Now in his late 70s, it seems unlikely Harbutt will return to the director’s chair. His legacy however will always be tied to Stone, an indelible classic.
“I wanted to break all the rules of all the genres that we touched. I wanted to do something completely original. I didn’t want Stone to be an echo of anything else.”
• Stone is screening at the Astor Theatre in Melbourne on 28 November in celebration of its 45th year
dubbed into French, including Keeping Up With the Kardashians. I later learned that this was down to French laws that enforced quotas for how much television and broadcast music had to be French-language: on radio until 2016, for example, it was 40% of all output.
Record labels and DJs had to make sure there were enough French speaking artists to play, so throughout the 1990s and the 00s when the United States dominated the international music scene,young rappers were needed in France to fulfil the quotas, as well as the insatiable appetite of young people in France for hiphop. This is arguably why France now has the second-biggest hip-hop market in the world after the US.
Although there was a pushback from French radio to reduce the quotas – now 35% – the rise of streaming sites and the decline of radio means that the issue of quotas doesn’t really matter. The massive success of rap duo PNL, who were the first French group to have a single in Spotify’s Top 30 global streams, is an example of how French artists no longer rely on traditional radio plays to ensure their records reach an increasingly international audience. These brooding brothers refuse to do interviews with journalists or collaborations with other artists, which gives them an air of mystery in a world saturated with noise from social media and self-promotion; the video for Au DD was the first ever to be shot at the top of the Eiffel Tower.
French electronic duo the Blaze also know that music videos are an essential tool: they have racked up millions of views for their cinematic, poetic videos which address themes of youth, displacement and identity. Shot in Algeria, my country of heritage, the video for 2017 track Territory documents the homecoming of a young Algerian man with sensitivity, beauty and accuracy. There has never been a music video of that quality shot in Algeria before, and it was emotional to see English friends of mine sharing it on social media – something that I might have thought of as niche and personal was resonating with other people. The Blaze’s Jonathan Alric explained the video: “We all have a place we call home, and we often live far from it.” This tension is central to any immigrant experience, and is now a central tension in pop music, too.
Balvin, PNL and the Blaze’s kind of music – rooted in one place but dispersed across the world – can help build connections between communities at a time when younger generations are more mixed than ever. More than 18% of Americans (about 40 million) identify as Hispanic or Latino, the nation’s second-largest racial or ethnic group. African Americans and a global black diaspora similarly play a huge part in the global rise of African artists. When Nigerian star Burna Boy won a BET award this year, his mum went viral on Twitter when she said: “Every black person should please remember that you were Africans before you were anything else.”
While my dad’s generation grappled with satellite dishes and cassette tapes, mine is more smoothly connected, sonically and visually to whichever international community it wants, especially through curated playlists on streaming services. For this essay I totted up how many playlists I follow: around 70, including 10 dedicated to different African music alone. I can time-travel through my playlists to my uni days when D’Banj was representing Afrobeats globally and Wizkid was breaking out, or tap into the most recent music that will be playing at the Afro Nation festival in Ghana at the end of the year.
I have playlists of K-pop artists – like Balvin, Korean groups such as BTS have made themselves more palatable to English speakers by tacking on guests such as Nicki Minaj and Halsey, while themselves continuing to sing and rap in their own language. I have European playlists, and ones dedicated to fusions, including Arab X, which features Arab artists collaborating with others across the world. Global X has an even broader remit, “the sound of a new era”, featuring tracks like Human Lost, a collaboration between Balvin and Japanese rap trio M-Flo that has an anime video.
Artists such as J Balvin are representative of a multilingual, globally dispersed but interconnected generation, and they use every tool at their disposal to appeal to proximate identities – look at how Brazilian MC Fioti’s hit Bum Bum Tam Tam had Colombia’s Balvin alongside Future (US), Stefflon Don (UK) and Juan Magán (Spain), to ease its passage into different playlists and cultural identities. When I spoke to Roccio Guerrero, one-time architect of the Latin playlists on Spotify, she said: “The success of a song at a local level allows it to graduate.” The aim for artists wanting to be the next J Balvin was to move up through genre playlists to reach the most popular Latin playlist on Spotify, Viva Latino – which has 7.5 million followers and is effectively the biggest Latin music radio station in the world. It would then stand a greater chance of being picked up by local playlists in different countries, such as Hot Hits UK. “After that: game over!”, Guerrero said.
The secret is to balance these blunt approaches with authenticity, maintaining a strong idea of who and what they represent. Unlike many of today’s would-be immigrants, pop has total freedom of movement, but still needs to remain rooted in its home culture to retain its potency.
Last year, I was working in Balvin’s hometown, Medellín, during the week of the city’s annual flower festival. Medellin in particular has struggled to shake off its association with drugs and cartels and the festival is one of the annual highlights with two weeks of events celebrating Colombian culture. As part of that celebration, Balvin headlined an event at the Atanasio Girardot Stadium (where football teams Atlético Nacional and Independiente Medellín play home games) in front of 40,000 people, including me. He bounded across the stage in snazzy gold dungarees with the same youthful energy that I remember from Tranquila.
Now arguably Colombia’s biggest cultural export, he had been around the world but was welcomed home by fans waving Colombian flags, knocking back aguardiente and singing along to every word of the spectacular show. He later posted on Instagram: “Soy profeta en mi tierra … Los amo Medellin”: I’m a prophet in my land … I love you Medellín. As the world increasingly feels less tolerant, J Balvin and artists like him are a model for expressing positive, inclusive national pride, and making it resonate across borders. His music, incidentally, also remains perfect for dancing with cute guys.