Mel Gibson in ‘The Road Warrior’ (Everett)

As far as unlikely film trilogies go, there’s nothing quite like the Mad Max series. The original 1979 movie didn’t exactly have the hallmarks a global phenomenon — it was a post-apocalyptic Australian action flick made on a tiny budget with unknown actors. But that’s just what it became, thanks to brutal, daredevil stunt sequences and a baby-faced lead named Mel Gibson. Six years after the film’s release, director George Miller had made two sequels — 1981’s Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior and 1985’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome — and Gibson was on the verge of superstardom. The story of Mad Max was written.

Or so it seemed. This Friday the fourth installment hits theaters. To get geared up for Mad Max: Fury Road, we revisited the first three films and dug through director’s commentary and old interviews to compile this list of little known facts. Read it before you hit that Road one more time.

Mad Max (1979)

1. Director George Miller was a medical doctor who began taking film classes in his down time. Much of the physical violence in the movie was informed by what he learned treating car-crash victims.

2. Miller has said when he set out to make Mad Max, his goal was to make a modern silent film with sound. “The kind of movie that Hitchcock would say, ‘They didn’t have to read the subtitles in Japan,’” he says.

3. Gibson’s story about how he landing the role of Max starts with him showing up at the audition bruised from a bar fight. The filmmakers, he says, invited him back a few weeks later because they were “looking for freaks.” When he returned, healed and handsome, he won the leading role. According to TCM, that story has been refuted by everyone else at the audition, who say Gibson was immediately seen as leading-man material.

4. As Miller remembers it, he first tried to cast Max with an American star, but quickly found out he couldn’t afford one. So he began auditioning Aussie actors. After running through dozens of young men, Gibson arrived. “I remember watching through the video camera lens as he’s running this scene, and I suddenly started to believe it. And I thought, 'Oh my God, there’s something going on here,’” Miller says.

5. Rosie Bailey, the actress originally slated to play Jessie, was injured in a motorcycle accident four days before the start of shooting. Joanne Samuel was a last-minute replacement. Stunt coordinator Grant Page was also hurt in a pre-production motorcycle crash. He reported for duty anyway.

6. Production was pushed back a month because Gibson’s professors at Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art wouldn’t let him out of classes early.

7. Writer James McCausland, an economist whose ideas were influenced by the 1973 oil crisis and looming fears of peak oil, makes a cameo as the bearded cook outside of Fat Nancy’s Cafe.

8. The red, yellow and blue Main Force Patrol cars were V8-equipped Ford Falcon sedans that had all been police cars. There were only three used for the film and Miller often had them strategically moved around so it would look like there were more of them.

9. The supercharger poking through the hood of Max’s black Police Interceptor, a Ford Falcon XB Coupe, was just for show. It didn’t actually work.

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Hugh Keays Bryne as the Toecutter in ‘Mad Max’ (Everett)