Mel Gibson: Max – Mad Max (1979)
Mel Gibson is a bit of a wildcard for this list, given that Mad Max didn’t exactly start out as blockbuster material. In fact, director George Miller, a medical doctor from Sydney, got the idea for the movie while working on road traffic accident patients. But Gibson’s story is just too good to not include.
It took Miller and his amateur filmmaker friend Byron Kennedy (who would go on to produce the movie) a lot of effort to get Mad Max on the road. They raised a large amount of the money themselves by doing emergency medical calls – Kennedy drove the vehicle and Miller administered the treatment. Even post-production was done at a friend’s apartment, on a home-built editing machine. Fortunately for Miller and Kennedy however, they knew they didn’t need the money to pay big actors. Because of the movie’s socio-economic comments on energy sources, the creators were adamant that they wanted unknown actors who had no prior associations.
Enter Steve Bisley – a student of Australia’s National Institute of Drama and Art. Bisley’s good friend was fellow student, Mel Gibson. Gibson had had a minor role on Australian TV, and made his movie debut in 1977’s surfer movie, Summer City (which was also mainly confined to Australia) – but unlike Bisley, Gibson was now considering pursuing something other than acting. Cooking or journalism, to be specific. He certainly had no intention of auditioning for some weird movie about psychotic motorcycle gangs and people sawing through their own ankles with hacksaws. But Bisley did want to audition – and he insisted on having Gibson along for company.
The night before the auditions, however, Gibson (and his now somewhat infamous temper), got into a fight at a local bar – and lost. A lot. By the time he and Bisley reached the audition venue the next day, Gibson’s face was, in his words, ‘a black and blue pumpkin,’ complete with stitches. But there was to be no escape for Gibson; given the nature of the movie, Miller and Kennedy needed actors who were a bit rough around the edges – or, as they politely described it, looked ‘offbeat.’ They noticed Gibson hanging around, and asked him to do a call-back on the (not so polite) basis of ‘we need freaks!” Gibson arrived for the call-back two weeks later, with the face that would go on to win People’s magazine first ever ‘Sexiest Man Alive’ competition in 1985 – and landed the lead instead (Bisley got the role of Jim Goose.)
Mad Max went on to have two sequels, and a third instalment, Mad Max: Fury Road (starring Tom Hardy) is due out this May. The first movie held the Guinness Book of Records for the most return on a film ($100million worldwide, against a budget of $380,000) for twenty years, until it was beaten by The Blair Witch Project. For Gibson of course, the rest is, well – slightly weird history.
Not bad for a couple of ambulance men and a wannabe-journalist with a bad temper.