To celebrate the 45th anniversary of Mad Max earlier this year, Aussie acting legends Steve Bisley and Tim Burns revved up their V8 Interceptors and attended both Supanova in Melbourne and Supanova on the Gold Coast to meet their fellow Road Warriors! During their Goldnova panel, they shared how they met director George Miller, auditioning alongside co-star Mel Gibson, and the impact Mad Max left on the Australian industry.
AUDITIONING FOR ‘MAD MAX’
As Burns tells it, he knew the script was something special as soon as he laid eyes on it, “George saw me in a play, and he gave me this big, fat script. I opened it and it gave me that shiver of excitement. It’s like when you meet a person that you fall in love with instantly, and you can hardly breathe. I just thought, ‘This is a good show.’ There was something that sparked off the page.
So, before the audition, I wrote every one of my lines from the film on a huge piece of paper and put it around the living room of my flat in King’s Cross. I played It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll (But I Like It) by The Rolling Stones over and over again. I just learnt all the lines in whatever order that they came. And then I stayed up all night. I walked from King’s Cross across the Harbour Bridge to the other side where the casting agent was. They rang after and said they like things that are a bit weird and off-key. That’s how I got the part.
For Bisley, he was plucked right out of university to audition for the role, “I was in drama school with Mel Gibson. We were in our third year and we’d just graduated. The head of the drama school got in touch with us, and said that there was a guy that had come to the school that wanted to talk to Mel and myself. I remember sitting with Mel and I said, ‘What do you reckon we’ve done?’ The guy happened to be the director, George Miller, who gave us the script and asked us to audition.”
THE TRIBULATIONS OF SHOOTING ‘MAD MAX’
As any Mad Max fan knows, one of the greatest appeals of the series is that it’s shot on location, with as many practical effects as possible, so all those insane stunts and explosions are forreal. Of course, this leads to a tumultuous process while filming, but that’s all part of Max’s charm! Bisley recalls, “I remember a night shoot for a scene where Max and Fifi are standing amidst this carnage everywhere. I wasn’t working that night, but I’d gone out to the location, just to see. And in all the colours of the night was the producer Byron Kennedy, who looked at me and said, ‘What am I doing? What am I doing?’
Burns elaborated, “Mad Max was much bigger than we had the money or time for. Basically, the film fell out of control on day two. It was raining, we had to cut shots, and everything was going wrong for George. About six days in, there was a meeting between George, who was also a co-producer, and Byron. The company was debating whether or not they should sack George as the director, because it looked like he didn’t know what he was doing. They talked about getting Brian Trenchard-Smith, who had made The Man from Hong Kong, and BMX Bandits with Nicole Kidman. They thought the film was ruined.
The film was shot in a very flat area called Werribee, where there’s a sewage farm, because they couldn’t afford to make the film in town. They originally wanted to make it in the middle of the city, like in Footscray. It was going to be about a doctor who followed car accidents around. In the script, these kids were the ‘road warriors’, and even though they killed their mates in a car accident, they’d survived.”
Burns continued, “And then it was going to be a journalist following them around. Then it was a policeman, and it was going to be shot in town, but they wouldn’t let them do it, so they went out to the country where it was really flat. Weirdly it turned into a spaghetti Western, like the films where the landscape was all empty.
And I remember Byron had grown up not far from there. One time when I was at the production office – which was just a house in Melbourne – he was sitting in the driveway inside the black car, and he was going, ‘VROOOM! VROOOOOOM! VROOOOOOOM!’ I was sort of thinking, ‘This is a grown man who’s the producer of the film, and this is how he’s spending his spare time.’
There were problems with the crew not supporting him and George. I said, ‘Listen George, whatever anybody else says, what you’re doing here is different to what anybody has ever done.’ I grew up in the suburbs where all kids wanted was to get a car and get out. I said, ‘This is what this film is about, and it will resonate.’
Now we know that Mad Max being rooted in Australia is key to its identity, but as Bisley says, some people didn’t really understand that at the time: “It had a very chequered release. In America they dubbed over all the accents. A friend saw the film there, called me and said, ‘You sound like a cowboy.’
Burns replied, “They didn’t believe that people would understand Australian, I couldn’t go to London because I was embarrassed to go back to meet my friends who had seen it like that.”
THE LASTING IMPACT OF ‘MAD MAX’
“George is a great film director, there’s no doubt about it,” Bisley says.
Despite Miller being totally green on the set, he had a vision for Mad Max that arguably changed film history. Burns recalled from the set, “There were times when he was trying to find the next shot in his mind’s eye, and he couldn’t achieve it, because he was just new. But what he could do is see when something was happening, when there was a spark going on, and that’s where he succeeded. A lot of other pictures copied Mad Max. All of those end of the world, apocalyptic things. Now you can’t turn on the TV without seeing a post-apocalyptic film or series. The only difference is, they have more zombies in them. And they’re all CGI zombies. We had no CGI.”
Bisley agreed, “What you see is what we did. Audiences identify with it when it’s real. In fact, there’s a scene where Max turns the black pursuit car around, the bikies are coming, and he drives back towards them. He hits one of them on a bridge, and every time I’ve seen the film, every time, over 45 years, the audience gasps.
I was 25 when we shot it, and if somebody had said to me back then, ‘You’ll be on the Gold Coast in 2024, and people will come to see you talk about the film,’ I’d go, ‘You’re crazy!’ Nobody – certainly nobody on the set – knew that what we were doing was going to be special. The deal was different.”
WILL THERE EVER BE ANOTHER AUSTRALIAN CULT HIT LIKE ‘MAD MAX’?
Bisley remains optimistic that yes, there will be more Mad Max’s in the future, “As bleak as we think it can be, there’ll always be films that cut through. To be involved in this industry, you’ve got to be a bit crazy to start with. There are 96% of actors out of work in Australia at any given time. You’re crazy to even begin this work. Trying to get a film out, or a book written, or anything in terms of the arts in Australia is a major hurdle. And if you want to get a feature film made and distributed, you’re probably looking at ten years of your life. So, if you’re that dedicated, you’ll do it, and there are dedicated people out there. It’s never been easy.”
Burns concurred, that the most important thing is to just keep going, despite the inevitable setbacks, “Generally, things that breakthrough have been rejected a lot. Mad Max, for example, never got any grants because there were too many people in the grant-giving world that thought it was just copying American exploitation rubbish. Critics like Philip Adams wrote, ‘Oh, this is just an American picture.’
Well, if you talk to any of the people I’m meeting today, they say it’s so Aussie. Will there be anything like it again? It’s nothing to do with doing stunts at speed, and not having safety protocols… it’s to do with imagination. We’ll cut through when somebody comes up with something that opens our imagination and makes us think about things that we haven’t thought about. That costs you very little.”
ON PREDICTING THE AUDIENCE REACTION TO ‘MAD MAX’
Did Bisley and Burns realise in 1979 that they were making cinema history? No, but that’s the most exciting part for the acting duo, the not knowing. In the gestation phase, a film can be anything, it has unlimited potential. Bisley compares the unknowable nature of filming to the certainty of performing in front of a live audience, “I was talking to someone yesterday about theatre versus film. They asked, ‘In terms of performance, how does that differ?’ If you’re in a theatre piece, the audience comes into the dark space, and you’re in the light. You enter into this contract with them that things will happen. There’s a journey that you’ll go on together, and they live and breathe in the space with you for a couple of hours.
Now in terms of film performance, you’re there, the camera is there… this sort of technological creation becomes your audience, so you have no idea what the reaction is. Over time in the theatre, you hear the reaction, and you go, ‘Oh, I see, they like that, I’ll push that a bit further,’ or, ‘I’ll pull back here.’ In film and television performance, you imagine the reaction.
There’s no way to know what is the potential of anything you do in front of a camera. That’s the most incredible thing about what we do, I guess.”
Burns agreed with the sentiment, adding, “There’s a great film writer, William Goldman, who wrote this book called Adventures in the Screen Trade. It’s all about making movies, and the opening line of it is, ‘Nobody knows anything.’ He’s saying that no producer, writer, or actor ever knows. So, if you have doubts about the thing you’re doing it doesn’t matter, because it might turn out to be Star Wars or Mad Max. You have to take every take as it comes. It’s like being a surfer; every wave is different.
