Mel Gibson stars as "Mad" Max Rockatansky, a police officer turned vigilante in a dystopian near-future Australia in the midst of societal collapse.

[4] The berserk motorbike gang member Crawford "Nightrider" Montazano kills a rookie officer of the poorly funded Main Force Patrol (MFP)—one of the last remaining law enforcement agencies—and escapes with his girlfriend in a Pursuit Special.

Nightrider's motorbike gang, which is led by Toecutter and Bubba Zanetti, run riot in a town, vandalising property, stealing fuel and terrorising the populace.

Fifi convinces him to take some time off before committing to his decision, so Max goes on a trip in his panel van with his wife Jessie and infant son "Sprog" (Australian slang for a child).

Driven into a rage by the attack on his family, Max dons his police uniform and takes the black Pursuit Special, without authorisation, to pursue and eliminate the gang members.

George Miller was a medical doctor in Sydney, working in a hospital emergency room where he saw many injuries and deaths of the types depicted in the film.

Eight years later, they produced Mad Max, working with first-time screenwriter James McCausland (who appears early in the film as the bearded man in an apron in front of the diner).

According to Miller, his interest while writing Mad Max was "a silent movie with sound", employing highly kinetic images reminiscent of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd while the narrative itself was basic and simple.

[6] He knew little about writing a script, but he had read Pauline Kael's essay "Raising Kane" and concluded that most major American scriptwriters, like Herman Mankiewicz and Ben Hecht, were former journalists, so he hired McCausland, the Melbourne finance editor of The Australian, with whom he had previously bonded at a party as a fellow film buff.

McCausland had never written a script before and did no formal or informal study in preparation, other than going repeatedly to the cinema with Miller and discussing the dramatic structure of westerns, road movies, and action films.

McCausland described taking the lead in writing the dialogue, while Miller was concerned with giving his thoughts on the narrative context of each part and thinking through the visual beats of how things would unfold on screen.

The ornate and hyper-verbal speech of Mad Max's villains, like the manic Nightrider in the opening sequence, which would recur through the subsequent films in the franchise, in this sense stems from McCausland's work, albeit under Miller's instruction.

[7] McCausland drew heavily from his observations of the effects of the 1973 oil crisis on Australian motorists: Yet there were further signs of the desperate measures individuals would take to ensure mobility.

... George and I wrote the [Mad Max] script based on the thesis that people would do almost anything to keep vehicles moving and the assumption that nations would not consider the huge costs of providing infrastructure for alternative energy until it was too late.Kennedy and Miller first took the film to Graham Burke of Roadshow, who was enthusiastic.

[5] Miller's first choice for the role of Max was the Irish-born James Healey, who at the time worked at a Melbourne abattoir and was seeking a new acting job.

[12] Casting director Mitch Mathews invited a class of recent National Institute of Dramatic Art graduates to audition for Mad Max, specifically asking a NIDA teacher for "spunky young guys".

Gibson's friend and classmate Steve Bisley, who had worked with him in his only previous screen role, 1976's Summer City, was cast as Max's partner Jim Goose.

[6] Three of the main cast members (Hugh Keays-Byrne, Roger Ward and Vincent Gil) had previously appeared in Stone, a 1974 film about biker gangs that is said to have inspired Miller.

[16] The March Hare, driven by Sarse and Scuttle, was an in-line-six-powered 1972 Ford Falcon XA sedan (this car was formerly a Melbourne taxi cab).

[17] Max's black Pursuit Special was a 1973 Ford XB Falcon GT351, a limited edition hardtop (sold in Australia from December 1973 to August 1976), which was primarily modified by Murray Smith, Peter Arcadipane, and Ray Beckerley.

The Concorde front was a fairly new accessory at the time, designed by Peter Arcadipane at Ford Australia as a showpiece, and later became available to the general public because of its popularity.

[20] The car driven by the young couple that is vandalised and then finally destroyed by the bikers is a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air Sedan modified to look like a hot rod, with fake fuel injection stacks, fat tires, and a flame-red paint job.

As filming progressed, however, the Victoria Police became interested in the production, and they began to help the crew by closing down roads and escorting vehicles.

The early town scenes with Toecutter's gang were filmed in the main street of Clunes, north of Ballarat; much of the streetscape remains unchanged.

[27] Miller's desire to shoot in anamorphic made him seek out a set of Todd-AO wide-angle lenses that Sam Peckinpah had discarded in Australia after they became damaged while filming The Getaway (1972).

Since Mel Gibson was not well known to American audiences at the time, trailers and television spots in the United States emphasised the film's action content.

[38] On 16 November 2021, it was reissued in 4K along with the three other films in the series as part of the Mad Max Anthology 4K set from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment (via Studio Distribution Services).

[39][3] Given its small production budget, it was the most profitable film ever made at the time and held the Guinness World Record for the highest box-office-to-budget ratio of any motion picture[40] until the release of The Blair Witch Project (1999).

In a 1979 review, the Australian social commentator and film producer Phillip Adams condemned Mad Max, suggesting it would promote violence, saying that it had "all the emotional uplift of Mein Kampf" and would be "a special favourite of rapists, sadists, child murderers and incipient Mansons".

[citation needed] On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 90% approval rating based on 71 reviews, with an average score of 7.7/10; the site's "critics consensus" reads: "Staging the improbable car stunts and crashes to perfection, director George Miller succeeds completely in bringing the violent, post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max to visceral life.