The film-maker George Miller told me over the telephone in 2015, during an interview conducted for the Guardian, “I think all stories should come with a warning: hazardous material.”

I wonder how that relates to the story of his own life, including his most famous work – the extraordinary Mad Max movies. Perhaps it should come with an additional warning: “Don’t try this at home.”



One such moment arrives smack-bang at the start of the first film: a hell-for-leather chase scene in which a speed-loving vigilante, having escaped police custody, tears down the highway while being chased by the Main Force Patrol (the Mad Max world’s equivalent of cops). This is Nightrider, a maniacal member of a motorcycle gang led by the notorious criminal named Toecutter. Nightrider is – in his own words – a “fuel-injected suicide machine”, brilliant and reckless on the road.

But in real life he is the actor Vince Gil, and he cannot drive. Or at least he couldn’t before signing on for the role. “When I told them that I didn’t drive they got me 16 lessons with a driving school,” Gil says. “Apparently I needed a licence for the legality of it.”

“Legality” is an interesting word, given that by the time Gil entered the car (this scene, while first in the running time, was one of the last to be filmed) the crew had broken just about every road law in the book. Probably also several that hadn’t been invented.

Gil’s small but memorable performance is thoroughly and exquisitely shit-eating: a hit of adrenaline right at the start, Miller using him to set a roaring nothing-by-halves momentum. But the fact he didn’t know what he was doing behind the wheel posed a problem, particularly because this scene involved reasonably complicated driving. A decision was made for the stunt coordinator, Grant Page, to operate the vehicle. To do this Page awkwardly positioned himself inside the car, but out of frame.

His nose was hard against Gil’s shoulder, crammed next to co-star Lulu Pinkus, who was sitting shotgun. She plays “Nightrider’s girl” or – according to the somewhat ominous name assigned to her in the script – Lobotomy Eyes. Tilted back, Page could just look over the top of the dashboard and his hands clutched the bottom of the wheel. His feet were on the controls and, he says, “I’m also sitting on the bloody handbrake, which was sticking up my arse.”

There is a blink-and-you-miss-it shot capturing Nightrider’s car spectacularly careening out of control just before it bursts into flames. The magic of the movies makes viewers think this is the same vehicle he’s been driving – a banged-up Holden Monaro – but in fact, it is not. This is a very different and special contraption. One that vastly eclipses, in sheer grunt, momentum and firepower, any of the beastly fuel-guzzlers constructed in this or any of the subsequent Mad Max films.

To say this highly modified thing – truly a fuel-injected suicide machine – was “fast” or “super-charged” is putting it very lightly. Few tales better encapsulate the ethos of the Mad Max movies – a combination of great art, innovation and temerity bordering on outright recklessness – than the story of the rocket car.

These days, Chris Murray is a MacGyver-esque figure in the explosives and pyrotechnics industry, providing detonations for film and television productions and controlled blasts for mining companies: less a gun for hire, perhaps, than a bomb for rent. Back then he was greener, brasher, far less experienced and – like most of the Mad Max crew – prone to a bit of experimentation in one form or another.

So when Murray suggested that one of the film’s high-octane shots be staged by swapping out a car engine for a military-grade rocket, then igniting said rocket and pointing the vehicle in the direction of a semitrailer, he was sort of joking and sort of not.

Nightrider’s Holden Monaro in Main Force Patrol’s sights. Photograph: Roadshow Entertainment

There aren’t many people out there who know where to get a rocket, but Murray is one of them. From the now-dormant Maribyrnong munitions factory, he and producer Byron Kennedy obtained an empty rocket motor casing to use as a template, with the promise that a representative from the factory would bring a live Rodinga Booster – an Australian-made rocket used to shoot homing torpedos off the decks of destroyers – to the set of Mad Max on the day of filming and ignite it.

Murray asked a mate for help: David Hardie, who worked in special effects at the Australian Broadcasting Commission (later renamed the Australian Broadcasting Corporation). In a nearby garage they took the engine out of a Holden Monaro and created a template to insert the rocket, which was to be mounted at a slant in a steel-made cradle in the boot of the car. The pair welded down the car’s suspension so that (in theory) it wouldn’t bounce on the road as it shot forward at 200km/h, projecting 6,500 pounds of thrust in 1.5 seconds.

“When Chris told me he wanted to put a fucking rocket in a car I said, ‘Oh Chris, don’t be stupid,’” Hardie recalls. “He went, ‘Yeah yeah yeah, let’s do it.’ I went, ‘Oh fuck, this will never happen. But OK, I might as well help.’”

“Every night I’d go down there and help weld this bloody car up. We did the whole chassis with a handyman’s welder. It was a lot of work to prepare it. I secretly built whole amounts of it at the ABC. I used to smuggle bits into the building under a blanket.”

We were surprised that we didn’t hear the vehicle colliding with the semi Chris Murray

A cousin of Murray’s nicknamed Brains, because of his resemblance to a scientist character of the same name in the TV show Thunderbirds, was a wiz in computational mathematics. Brains took to the task of making rocket calculations, weighing up velocity and propulsion and such matters, like a fish to water, regarding it as the mother of all high school or university science projects.

Two steel eyebolts – big bolts with holes in them – were fixed to the underside of the car, with a guiding cable run through them. The cable was attached to cross cables, one at either end, tied to concrete support beams drilled six feet into the ground. If you imagine the shape of an “H” stretched out, the horizontal line is the guide cable and the verticals are the cross-lines. Where the horizontal line meets the vertical line is a “T” fitting.

A rigging company was commissioned to do the drilling, with Murray and Hardie taking their advice about tensioning the all-important guide wire. One can only imagine how Kennedy – the loquacious producer with a selling-ice-to-Eskimos gift of the gab – explained over the phone that he wanted them to help launch a Monaro with a rocket in it.

The idea was that the rocket car would fire off, with two dummies riding in the front seats. It would hit a pressure mat that would fire a cutting charge, freeing it from the cable and sending it hurtling forward into the semitrailer.

In the seconds preceding this, three roadside cameras positioned to capture the action would be activated by three different people: Miller, Kennedy and camera operator Tim Smart. All would then jump into a car driven by Bill Miller, George’s brother, who would floor it – moving as fast as possible away from the rocket-propelled vehicle.

Behind the scenes of Mad Max. Photograph: Andrew Jones

When the day finally arrived it was still and hot. Sure enough, a representative from the munitions factory, Dr Geoffrey Hunt, delivered an unused Rodinga. The naval markings had been sprayed over, and the words “Rocket Power with Rocket X –Good Luck Boys” stencilled on to its white exterior casing.



“It was pretty funny,” Hardie says. “Geoff the rocket scientist was like something you see in the movies. The grey hair and all that.” The crew had expected Hunt to bring a spiffy Nasa-type rocket-firing contraption complete with automatic countdown, and were bemused when he instead retrieved a torch battery from his pockets and jammed a couple of wires on it.

In the heat of the moment, the esteemed scientist got the jitters as the crew looked on impatiently. Then, recounts Murray, “There was a tremendous bang and a great big grey cloud of smoke appeared. What we then expected to hear was Whoosh! Crack! Smash! Something like that. But we were surprised that we didn’t hear the vehicle colliding with the semi. And we couldn’t see anything because of the smoke.”

I remember afterwards it was suggested that we could have shot down an airliner with a Monaro Stuart Beatty

Things had kind of gone roughly to plan, in the sense that the rocket car had fired forward at a bone-rattling speed. In another, perhaps more accurate sense, things had not gone to any plan whatsoever, in that the vehicle almost immediately dislodged from the cables that were intended to guide it and went charging off on its own.

The men stood there, behind a wall of smoke, dumbfounded. Hunt, the rocketeer, broke the silence: “I think it’s gone airborne,” he said.

The group simultaneously lifted their heads, looking into the sky for a flying car. This scene took place in the Victorian suburb of Avalon, at a location close to an airport. “We were filming in a low flight path,” Stuart Beatty, traffic coordinator, recalls. “I remember afterwards it was suggested that we could have shot down an airliner with a Monaro.”

Despite Brains’s calculations, the vehicle had behaved erratically. Instead of slamming into the semi, the now-detached rocket car had turned left, left and left again, spitting bitumen while taking a 180-degree turn. This bounced it around its intended point of impact.

The vehicle then miraculously corrected itself and barrelled straight down the road. The rocket car had not gone airborne. The Millers, Kennedy and Smart were aware of this, given that they were now looking out the back window at a rocket car hurtling towards them at an incredible speed, two mannequins staring straight at them.

In a documentary interview recorded several years later, Bill Miller, the driver, recalled the scene: “I got a running commentary from the guys peering through the back of the car window. It ran something like this, ‘OK, there it goes, I can see the smoke. Oh it’s, fuck! It’s heading towards us! Go faster, Bill!’”

But Bill was at top speed: no juice left. The rocket car was approaching at about 150km/h. Smart remembers it as a near-death experience: “I tell you, every one of us saw our lives flash in front of our eyes. Within two seconds we considered ourselves dead.” But the rocket car and its lifeless passengers took another sudden turn. The vehicle veered off the road and into a paddock, taking out a fence on the way.

George Miller on the set of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. Photograph: Lloyd Carrick

If George Miller and Kennedy were grateful to be alive, they didn’t show it. “They were furious. Both of them told me, ‘You’ll never work in this industry again,’” Murray says. “Then David Hardie said, ‘Hang on, let’s wait and have a look at the footage before jumping to any conclusions.’

“The rushes were incredible, just incredible. All of a sudden we went from hero to zero to hero again.”

Beatty remembers that, a few days later – after the team had watched the footage again and again to try to ascertain what went wrong – Kennedy told him a guilt-riddled man from the rigging company had called him up, drunk, at three o’clock in the morning. Kennedy said the man had confessed that “he thought it was all a joke until the rocket went off”.

Quite a lot of effort – and risk – for a few seconds of footage. The most iconic don’t-try-this-at-home moment, perhaps, in the history of Australian cinema.

Murray, the explosives expert who came up with the idea of the rocket car, is nostalgic about the science experiment that almost killed them, admitting he wouldn’t do the scene like that nowadays.



“I realised later on we could have just towed the car in with a pulley and wire rope,” he says. “We really didn’t need the rocket.”

• This is an edited extract from Miller & Max by Luke Buckmaster, out now through Hardie Grant in Australia, and available globally as an ebook. It is released in the UK in July