Main Crew: prod, Byron Kennedy; dir, George Miller; writ, George Miller & James McCausland (based on a sory by Miller & Kennedy); dop, David Eggby; ed, Tony Paterson, Clifford Hayes; mus, Brian May; art d, Jon Dowding; fx, Chris Murray; cos, Clare Griffin.
In many ways, Miller's first entry into the Mad Max trilogy can be seen as the most influential cinematic work produced in Australian mainstream cinema. Encapsulating aspects of the national mythology and intertwining these within a gothic, dystopic view of the near future, Miller's work abounds in social commentary. Miller's message is carried all the more effectively through his raw, hyper-kinetic editing style and his near-surreal abstraction of visual form and generic conventions. Just as the Australian nation originated from a haphazard blend of nationalities and cultures that found unity in their differences, Miller's work combines the most effective elements of a number of cinematic genres and visual styles in creating a raw and chaotic yet, in some way, harmonious balance to offset the film's unbalanced narrative.
As if to complement the film's post-apocalyptic, post-industrial setting in which the simplest material goods are valued as dearly as human life, Mad Max was produced on a minute budget of $380,000. Unusually, though, many of the film's most recognisable elements, such as the pseudo punk costumes, the sweeping shots of bare, desolate desert and the decaying cars of the Main Force Police seem to have resulted from such a low budget, yet have undoubtedly enhanced the film's visual style.
In addition, Miller and Kennedy sought a relatively inexperienced cast and crew. Approximately 60 per cent of the crew had never worked on a feature film, and most of the cast were unknown prior to this film. (Cinema Papers, May-June, 1979, p.367) This helped give the film a fresh look. The enthusiasm of the crew is clear in the experimental cutting and fast pace of the film's visual form. Shot in anamorphic format, primarily as a commercial consideration, the film's car-chase scenes are given an eery, dramatic feel that seems to place the audience behind the steering wheel. Despite its low budget, or perhaps as a result of such, Mad Max has a visual style, pace and vitality that distinguishes it from all action films of that era. As a result of this, Mad Max took more at the box office in Australia than Star Wars (1977) and found a place in the Guinness Book of Records as having obtained the highest cost-to-profit ratio of any feature film. (Pallot, J., 1995, p.492)
