More than just a money-maker:

When Mad Max became an international hit in 1979, shag-haired Australians wore oversized lapels and danced to Lay Your Love On Me by Racey.

A six-pack of beer would set you back $3.10. And Twitter was just something the birds did in the morning as you thumbed down to the beach for a surf.

Four decades later, we're more likely to spend the early hours thumbing through social media, pick plant-based meat over a Chiko roll, and drop $20 for a single espresso martini.

A lot has changed in the last four decades, but has our national adoration of Australia’s first real action hero faltered?

Will the recently announced addition of Chris Hemsworth to the desolate wasteland stir up the same feelings in a whole new generation?

When production of the original Mad Max started all those years ago, the budget was so low that many of the film’s extras were paid in slabs of beer.

Undeterred by the minimal resources available in the Australian film industry at the time, cast and crew creatively skirted financial constraints (and, sometimes, the law) in their quest to get the perfect shot.

It was the type of operation that would almost certainly be shut down in today’s age of rigid occupational health and safety policies.

Partly inspired by the 1973 oil crisis, as well as the carnage he saw among victims of road accidents while working in the emergency department of a hospital, doctor-turned-filmmaker George Miller was armed with a vision and a can-do attitude.

He hoped the rest would fall into place.

Without Miller and other gritty, clever minds behind Mad Max, Australian cinema might have looked a lot different.

Now, as some leaders worry CBD streets have become a barren Mad Max-style post-COVID wasteland, the latest instalment in a multimillion-dollar series promises to get punters back to the cinema and inject at least $350 million into the Australian economy.

It's hoped the eyes of the world will again be on Australia.

Furiosa, which is a prequel to the fourth film, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), will be filmed in New South Wales and explore the backstory of the titular war captain-turned-renegade.

Production designer Colin Gibson, whose vision for Fury Road won him an Oscar in 2016, said the uniquely Australian feel of the Mad Max franchise is what has made each film so successful.

With four decades in showbiz, Gibson has witnessed first-hand the effect that big, blockbuster Australian films have on our cultural cachet on the global stage.

“There was a period when I started where there was a lot of really good work,” Gibson told The New Daily.

“And then there was a period where everyone was trying to make a film that would make money or that would sell.

“You started to turn out stuff that didn’t have a distinctly Australian voice, and that wasn't a specially exciting time to be working.”

LOOKING BACK ON A LEGACY

Shot with a meagre budget of $350,000 around Melbourne in 1978, the original Mad Max is largely credited with putting our modest film industry on the map.

Film critic and author of Miller and Max: George Miller and the Making of a Film Legend, Luke Buckmaster said the film was groundbreaking.

"The original Mad Max was like a bat out of hell that roared into the Australian cinematic scene ... ended up changing not just Australian film, but action cinema on a global scale," Buckmaster told The New Daily.

Oscar-winning director George Miller called it “guerrilla filmmaking” and reminisced on times when the crew illegally shut down streets without permits and forwent the use of walkie talkies so as not to alert Victoria Police.

In what could only ever happen in the ‘she’ll-be-right’ mentality of the 1970s, actors were obliged to break through solid wooden doors when the crew were unable to afford a breakaway prop.

One truck driver was paid just $50 and a slab of beer for his vehicle and driving, which poses the question: have we ever seen a more inherently Australian approach to filmmaking?

"The original films were part of an era when occupational health and safety essentially didn’t exist," Buckmaster said.

"You had incredible stunt driving, you had incredible explosions. You had a situation where the producers essentially borrowed a disused rocket and put it in the back of a car and fired it off, potentially creating a flying car-type situation, which was narrowly avoided.

"So the wild, crazy, kinetic feats of daredevilism and badassery you see in the Mad Max movies were more or less performed in real life."

The venture hit theatres six years before another early, iconic Australia film called Crocodile Dundee came about to cement our place in the global movie industry.

Colin Gibson didn’t work with Miller on the original film, but the pair have collaborated on multiple Oscar-winning productions such as Babe, Happy Feet, and of course, Fury Road.

“[The original Mad Max] allowed us to have a sense of who we were that wasn’t ameliorated by attempting to be for another market other than us,” Gibson said.

“It was a great stamp of Australiana – it definitely gave us a look of our own.”

It also catapulted emerging actor Mel Gibson, paid just $10,000 for the role, into superstardom.

The second and third films in the series stayed on Australian soil, but production for Fury Road was forced to relocate to Namibia.

“We had intended to shoot the last one in Australia but we were screwed by climate change, as everything turned fluffy and beautiful and green without seeing birds flying and bees f—ing,” Gibson said.

It wasn’t filmed in Australia, he said, but it was conceived here.

“A lot of the vehicles, the weaponry, the props, the vernacular and the graphic were put together here, and then everything was schlepped off by boat to Africa.

“The things that people touched, and the things that touched people were made here.”

Furiosa will see the franchise return home, in line with Miller’s desire to give the project a more Australian feel and tone.

LOOKING FORWARD

It’ll be hard to top the success of Fury Road, which was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and managed to take home six, so Miller and Gibson have their work cut out for them.

Furiosa slows things down, and takes a closer look at the character who was originally brought to life by buzz-cut badass Charlize Theron.

Fresh off the success of her Golden Globe-winning role in The Queen’s Gambit, Anya Taylor-Joy will take the reins from Theron and look into the one-armed war captain’s backstory.

“This time it’s a slower study of how Furiosa became Furiosa, while we track at the same time the fall of civilisation as it became the world we found in Fury Road,” Gibson said.

“It’s a little more exploratory and explanatory.”

Between a respirator-clad villain, five etherial concubines and a blind guitarist warrior strapped to a truck, you might find yourself wondering how our world crumbled into this steam-punk, desert dystopia.

At a time when it feels like our reality is lurching from one crisis to the next, fleshing out the fall of mankind couldn’t be more timely.

Gibson is particularly excited about his take to “put some flesh on the bones of the end of the world”.

“What we are attempting to do is to sort of say how man feels about how we got to this terrible position.”