Doublefeatures:002-"Mad Max" and "The Warriors"
This week on Doublefeatures we have two low budget cult classic Action movies that came from obscurity in the late 70’s to change the world of action cinema.
In both films we see a world where society has started to break down, The Warriors, a tale based on an ancient Greek legend and set in a near future where gangs have taken over a majority of the city, has a striking similarity to the first Mad Max. Both movies have larger than life characters and action rooted in classic literature and storytelling. Both Directors use classic character archetypes and stories in an effort to ground their insane worlds in familiar themes and motivations. The original Mad Max has more in common with The Warriors than it does its subsequent films in the Mad max series.
The Warriors
Walter Hill and others on the Warriors basis in classic literature and storytelling:
‘THE WARRIORS’ AT 45: FILMMAKER WALTER HILL DISCUSSES HIS NEW YORK CLASSIC
Int :Why does “The Warriors” still resonate with people?
Walter Hill: One, it’s a good story. It’s different. It’s not like your usual movie. At the same time, it’s a very approachable, comprehensible story. It’s about the most fundamental of human values that led us out of the caves, which are physical courage, loyalty, questions about who we are, and codes of conduct about how we behave with one another — all of which go unstated in the movie.
Int: How is your movie different from Sol Yurick’s novel?
Walter Hill: The book is written in the style of social realism from a very left point of view. That was just not the movie I wanted. I wanted a dystopian, near-future sensibility with a comic book style. I wanted it to have a real sense of propulsion because it’s a simple story, and the best way to deal with simplicity is to keep it moving. Sol didn’t like the movie and didn’t like me. We only met a couple of times but that’s usually what happens when you change things in a story, and I made it a very different movie than the book. I wanted the movie to be in touch with the Greek literature that spawned it, so I went back and recreated things that were based upon incidents from Xenophon’s “March of the 10,000,” which is a great read, by the way. I guess I shouldn’t say this: It’s a lot better read than “The Warriors” novel.
Link: Warriors at 45
'Can You Dig It?' The Warriors, 35 Years Later
Walter Hill on making the gangs and their universe more fantastical:
WH: I felt very strongly that it certainly was not a very realistic book, and I wanted to make it even less so. I wanted to take it into a fantasy element, but at the same time add some contemporary flash. Those were some of the hard ideas we had to get the studio to understand. But we did not get along very well with our parent company. After the movie came out and it did well, everybody was sort of friends. But up until then there was a lot of misunderstanding. They thought it was going to be Saturday Night Fever or something.
ESQ: You mean there aren't a lot of street gangs wandering around in full baseball attire?
WH: That's right. [Laughs] It was meant to be a dystopian tale about the near future, but at the same time it was meant to be a lot of fun and have humor in it. The humor has always played, which I was happy to note every time I saw it with an audience.
LINK:ESQ Walter Hill
Walter Hill: The Hollywood Interview
Walter Hill on the kind of stories he likes to tell:
Hollywood Int: I’m a big Anthony Mann fan, and there are a lot of parallels between your bodies of work. Mann said his movies were about “the use of violence by thoughtful men.”
WH-The kinds of stories I like to tell are part of a tradition—and I’m not comparing myself to, or placing myself as the equal of some of the great storytellers I’m going to mention; I’m artistically modest, as everyone ought to be—but it’s the tradition practiced by Robert Aldrich, Anthony Mann, Don Siegel, Howard Hawks, Sam Fuller.
WH: I think there’s less room in the marketplace now for the kinds of stories I enjoy telling, and which I tend to think of as my strength; action movies today are more fantasy, exaggerated, comic book… That sounds pejorative… but tastes change. Audiences change. I think the older tradition was more intellectually rigorous, and the newer tradition is more pure sensation… and that’s not necessarily bad. It’s the old Apollonian vs. Dionysian controversy… Nietzsche might very well have liked the newer films more than the older ones… (laughs)
Visual History with Walter Hill Interview:
22:59
INT: Going back now to you and this theme. I realize now, its almost like you declared your career in the opening of THE WARRIORS. The prologue was ANABASIS, declared it was a fable. Almost, I'm overstating, almost as if so many films fall into that same point of view, that same sensibility?
WH: I would say it preceded that. HARD TIMES was a tale told around a campfire. Everybody used to have fights, this guy... you know. Kinda stories I used to hear as a kid. You read JACK LONDON as a kid. I think in THE WARRIORS you have reference to the tape that came out a year ago that had more of the ANABASIS stuff, XENOPHON.
[INT: Yes it was in the DVD.
WH: That was a point of roaring contention. I didn't think the film would work without the reference to Greek history. I thought you should say a bit of that. You also had to say this took place in the near future, science fiction a bit. And third that it was lurid and comic book. The best way to deal with it was to use comics to introduce the approach to character and narrative. The studio had agreed to this approach, but in post we did not agree. They wanted it to be just put out. I said the film wouldn't work, it was too crazy. I was wrong, the film did well. I also think the film did better than what I wanted it to be in this DVD when they came to me and asked if I wanted to do it that way. [INT: They saw it as WEST SIDE STORY without music?] Yeah, that and SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER.
30:32
INT: What were you trying to say in that film, if anything?
WH: I don’t, I always resist that kind of thing. I don’t believe you can reduce it down. What made it a success with young people, and I think this answer goes to your question, is that for the first time somebody made a film within Hollywood, big distribution, that took the gang situation and did not present it as a social problem. Presented them as a neutral or positive aspect of their lives. As soon as you said in the old days, it was how do we cure the pestilence and how do we fix the social waste. We want to take these kids, make sure they go to college. [INT: BLACKBOARD JUNGLE.] I suppose. They were perceived as social problems. I have full respect for that. This was just a movie that conceptually was different. Accepted the idea of the gang, didn't question it, that was their lives, they functioned within that context. And the social problem wasn't were they going to college, but were they going to survive. It's the great HAWKSIAN dictum, where is the drama? Will he live or die? That's the drama.
WH: I have had a lot of physical combat. Fistfights or gunfights or knife fights. I plead guilty. I think the cinema lends itself to physical conflict as well as other kinds of dramatic conflict. I tend to like action films though on the whole they are dumber and have a checkered history. But a good action film, as soon as somebody makes a really good action film they never call it an action movie. SEVEN SAMURAI becomes an epic. You don't say KUROSAWA's action movie. They get elevated if they work at a good enough level. As far as shooting action, what are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to impress the audience with one of the character's abilities? Show the audience the price that's paid by violence. I think the biggest thing about action is you must not separate it and think of it as action. What does it fit into the drama. How does it fit into sequence. Shoot it as an extension of the drama itself, probably with the same value system with dialogue scene. Hopefully the same approach to dramatic truth.
The other thing is you have to have a lot of patience. There is a tendency and I certainly have had some wonderful stunt coordinators but I think you have to get in there and do it yourself. There is a tendency to make a Hollywood theatricality that unconsciously copies other films. I think you have to get in there. I said earlier I was a frustrated ballplayer. But I liked this physical stuff. Getting in there and helping the coordination for effect. Nobody can know the drama like you can.
LINK: Walter Hill Full Interview
CAN YOU DIG IT: The Phenomenon of The Warriors By Sean Egan
Swann
CAN YOU DIG IT: The Phenomenon of The Warriors By Sean Egan
Walter Hill, Warriors Documentary
WH: “I always felt with the warriors that the tensions of the film. The comic book origins and the historical connection to the Greeks and the slightly futuristic quality to what I was trying to do had never been stated and never been presented to a large audience.
The Warriors : The Phenomenon (James Remar, Michael Beck, David Patrick Kelly)
Last Train to Coney island with David Patrick Kelly
“Walter always said he thinks of most of his movies as Westerns. I always enjoyed the fact that I had a native American headband and a Sheriff's star as sort of both sides of a Western.” - David Patrick Kelly
‘I think it’s lasted because of the writing because of these different elements in the writing. There was Sol Yurick's ideas that had influences from Milton to Chinese Classics, to Greek Classics and then Walter’s western sensibility, where its just this contest between opposing forces and an adventure, how do you get back from enemy territory.” - David Patrick Kelly
The Warriors – Last Train to Coney Island with David Patrick Kelly
Mad Max and Westerns/The Hero’s Journey
Mad Max: from the Ozploitation wilderness to the mainstream
George Miller’s post-apocalyptic classic emerged from the misfit band of trash cinema that was the byproduct of Australia’s art-movie boom. But his road warrior ended up defining a new, quirkier alternative to the Hollywood mainstream
Mad Max was released to a mixture of acclaim and disgust. A famous article by Philip Adams, titled The Dangerous Pornography of Death aired the opinion that Miller’s debut would appeal to “rapists, sadists, child-murderers and incipient Mansons”.
Made for $450,000 AUD, Mad Max was a massive hit at home and abroad and launched leading man Mel Gibson on the unexpected path to stardom. After the release of Mad Max 2, in December 1981 – which really is a landmark picture, not only of Australian cinema, but the action genre as a whole – Miller realized he had somehow tapped unconsciously into writer Joseph Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey. Max and his story went from a parochial revenge tragedy to the universal monomyth.
By the time of Max Beyond Thunderdome, released in the summer of 1985, everything was bigger. The inclusion of children in the storyline demanded a more mainstream appeal and a softer tone. Pop star Tina Turner was cast in a supporting role as the villain, Aunty Entity. A hit single was had with the saccharine We Don’t Need Another Hero. Once more Max, having saved the day as reluctantly as ever, is left all alone, with nothing but the clothes on his back. The films progressed from Ozploitation fodder to the portentous story of a broken man’s spiritual voyage back to humanity via death-defying heroic acts.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/may/07/mad-max-australian-cinema-ozploitation
Mad Max in a more civilized world:
Even Mad Max (Miller Australia 1979), an outlier in the franchise in more ways than one, exhibits this characteristic structure of feeling. Set just 'a few years in the future' – as the opening caption indicates – the first film plays like a slightly more futuristic variation on the 1970s Hollywood trend of cynical cop/vigilante action films, such as Dirty Harry (Siegel US 1971) and Death Wish (Winner US 1974), adding in more spectacular chases and more obviously batshit-crazy stunts. Considering the vaguely punk 'rags 'n leather' aesthetic that has flourished in the sequels, it is always surprising to find how the breakout Aussie hit that started the franchise is only minimally [End Page 301] science-fictional: for US grindhouse audiences – viewing the film in a rather hilariously dubbed American release version – it was surely the spectacle of lawless motorcycle gangs ruling over backwater towns surrounded by the unfathomable emptiness of outback roads that made it seem futuristic.
But even more than its depiction of its near-future dystopian landscape, Mad Max established a genuinely nasty worldview, and a politics of absolute nihilism. It depicts a Western society on the brink of collapse, the very first shot in the film unsubtly depicting a dilapidated and falling-apart Halls of Justice sign1 as Max Rockatansky (an implausibly young Mel Gibson) fights an obviously losing battle with irredeemably evil motorcycle gangs. Explicitly identified as the last remaining embodiment of law enforcement, Max initially represents the implacable last vestige of social order, combining his legal status as police officer with his symbolic authority as head of an idealised nuclear family. But of course the gratuitous murder of his wife and infant child transforms Max from stoic cop to vindictive vigilante, hunting down and sadistically killing the individual gang members who conveniently combine societal collapse and Max's personal loss.
Where this first film thus gives a revved-up depiction of the more general sense of fragmentation and social decay so prevalent in 1970s genre cinema, [End Page 302] the sequels would move into a more explicitly post-apocalyptic future where the collapse has become total. In this context, the subsequent films repeatedly attempt to reverse the first film's dynamic.
LINK: “Mad Max: between apocalypse and utopia”
Dan Hassler-Forest
Mad Max Classics and Western influences
“On the surface my approach seems far from original, as the Mad Max films, particularly part 2, have been repeatedly related to the Western in scholarly commentary, often by pointing to director George Miller’s own awareness of Joseph Campbell and his theories about universal mythological structures spanning many different cultures. In this view, Max, like other Western protagonists, is another ‘hero with a thousand faces’, and the films more general deconstructions of myths and their validities
The Mad Max films attack the Western myth of a functioning social model that America self-assertively tells itself as much as they project Australia as a place in which the failure of this myth is on display. The inversion of the myth begins by setting the films in the not too distant future, as opposed to the foundational past of the Western, a time in which a promising becoming of civilization has turned into a disillusioning decline. The shift towards modernity implies that, rather than civilization establishing itself against the savagery of the wilderness as in the classical Western, it is the advancement of civilization that causes savagery. In Mad Max the car replaces the gun as the expression and the tool of violence; the road, interweaving and connecting the settlements, replaces the wilderness as the location of savagery (Martin 13).
As Miller himself declares about the origins of the film, working as a doctor in an emergency hospital he sensed a social acceptance of violence in the ubiquity of road accidents he encountered (O’Regan 1996, 105). The dependence on the mobility of the car and the acceptance of the violence that comes with it is woven into the fabric of the society.
The opening scene of the film illustrates these points while echoing the scenario of the professional Western (Sharrett Citation 1985, 85). The group of professionals is the police force, and it is engaged in a pursuit of the villain who has violated the integrity of their group by stealing their best car, a V8. As police, their duty should be first and foremost to protect civilization, but their relation to society is at best one of ignorance, at worst one of threat. They basically use the roads for a private war against their enemies, with society becoming innocent bystanders and victims. The villain, who calls himself the Nightrider, seeks freedom on the road, the expression of an anarchic spirit defiant of social authorities. The confrontation with Max, the last opponent he faces after the rest of the police have wiped themselves out, leads to a profound and wide-eyed despair over the futility of existence, the limitations of freedom in modern society where ‘it’s all gone’, as he says (Miller Citation1979). It is that moment of realization that seems to cause his spiritual defeat and manifests itself in the subsequent crash into the obstacle on the road. By setting the cycle of violence and the vengeance plot in motion, the figure of Max is both hero and villain.
Subsequently, the bike gang’s terrorizing of a small town, which they enter in order to retrieve the coffin of their fallen comrade from a train station, echoes a classical Western scenario but is crucially not unmotivated and rather a direct result of their anger over the police brutality that led to his death. This cycle of revenge is perpetuated by the police. When the townspeople do not show up for a court hearing to convict the lone gang member found at the scene of the crime, Johnny the Boy, Max’s closest friend Goose attacks Johnny. Goose is the loose cannon of the police group, often failing to keep personal animosities, lustful violence, and masculine swagger within the boundaries of social responsibility and professional group membership. In turn, he is singled out by the gang as the victim of their revenge. Echoing the death of the Nightrider, he is at first made to crash, then burned alive. The man to do it is Johnny the Boy, whom Crago reads as counterpart to Goose, both failing to fully conform to group requirements, with Goose lacking restraint and Johnny lacking the cruelty towards the non-member (Citation 2020, 82). Johnny is forced against his will by the gang leader Toecutter to set the gasoline-soaked wreck in which Goose is trapped on fire. By demanding the expression of group allegiance in eradicating its enemies, Toecutter embodies the dark side of professionalism, the abandonment of ethical-social concerns in order to secure group membership.
Max’s seeming apartness from the lustful and reciprocal revenge cycle is essentially only a façade. What makes him an effective interceptor is his proneness to violence, which is kept at bay only as long as civilization maintains its tenuous hold on him, but the potential for monstrosity lurks within him from the beginning. He admits that he is scared of becoming like the ones he is after. The similarity between villain and hero are of course nothing new in a Western context, but where classical plot and vengeance variation advocate the social integration of the hero, Mad Max demonstrates with striking consequence the disintegration of the relationship between hero and society.”
Martin Holtz
LINK: Mad Max Classics and Western influences
Mad Max: Low Budget “Ozsploitation” Action
Illegal Stunts And Extras Paid In Beer: How They Made 1979’s Mad Max
According to Miller, who went on to direct every Mad Max movie including the upcoming Furiosa spinoff, “the film was a complete disaster to me in terms of what I wanted to do… My partner, Byron Kennedy, and I had raised a pretty meager budget from our closest friends from school. So there was an obligation to get them back their money.” This stress led Miller to worry that he had made a movie that failed to entertain and didn’t live up to his ambitious vision. Aware that he needed to make a return on the investments of his friends and family, Miller forged on, but he remained worried about Mad Max’s chances with critics and viewers.
In an experience that would stand to Miller during the troubled production of Mad Max: Fury Road decades later, the director was forced to face his imperfect creation daily due to a lack of funds. Miller noted that “We had no money for an editor, so I cut the film myself for a year. And every day for a year I was faced with the evidence of what I hadn’t done, what I’d failed to do. Why did I put the camera there? Why didn’t I ask the actors to go faster?” Of course, upon release, the reaction to Mad Max was far from Miller’s doom-spiraling in the editor’s suite
Links Mad-Max-Director-George-Miller-interview
MAD MAX MAKE-UP ARTIST: 'WE CREATED AUSSIE PUNK'
In this excerpt from an oral history with veteran make-up artist Vivien Mepham, she talks about developing the look of the characters in Mad Max.
‘It had some magic’, says Mepham, while conceding that the film was created on a very small budget.
Some ‘leather’ costumes were actually made out of plastic, and actors' heads were shaved and hair colored by a local Melbourne hairdresser. ‘It was punk before punk’. For wounds, Mepham sometimes used real meat and tripe!
Another indication of the low budget was that Mepham’s make-up caravan was memorably destroyed in a spectacular stunt.
Lorna Lesley interviewed Vivien Mepham for the NFSA Oral History program in 2018.
LINK: We created Aussie Punk
The Warriors- Night Shoots and No Budget
The conclave scene in Van Cortland Park was filmed using actual NYC gang members as a gesture of goodwill from the producers to allow them to be a part of the production taking place on their "territory". The NYPD expressed reservations about this arrangement fearing the close proximity of so many actual (and competing) gang members could lead to violence. They insisted on placing undercover officers throughout the crowd to handle any disturbances. So the scene features real gang members as well as real (and unknown) cops.
WH: We always felt that we were a bit of a beleaguered movie, in the sense that we were low-budget. There were quite a few other movies shooting in New York at the time and we were really the lowest-budget one. And the whole movie was shot at night. So this was the least attractive movie from a crew point of view. With the exception of a few people, we seemed to be the last choice. We also had a lot of bad luck. Our leading lady, Deborah Van Valkenburgh, fell and broke her wrist and had to wear a cast, so we had to figure out how to shoot around that. We had a few things like that happen. It was hard out there in the city at night. We had real gangs that we'd run into and sometimes our guys thought they were tough enough to take them on. So they had to be rounded up. We were shooting under an elevated train one night and real gangs literally pissed on us from up above! [Laughs] It seems funny now, but it was not at the time.
ESQ: Can you talk a little bit about shooting the gang summit at the beginning of the film and how that all came together?
WH: The conclave! Yes, that was our big production number. They went out to real gangs and basically said, "We have very little money. But if you'd like to be in a movie, then come on over!" We were worried that there was going to be trouble, but there wasn't. It had a good feeling to it and I always felt that that scene worked really well.
The producer of The Warriors, Larry Gordon has similar memories of the casting process. “There were thousands of actors and kids wanting to be actors, coming in to see us, we just kept looking until we found the best people”. The lead, Michael Beck, recalls getting the role. “I had been in an independent film […] and Sigourney Weaver was also in this movie. They screened the movie to consider Sigourney [for Alien], and Walter I guess, liked my performance”
As for the filming process, Hill noted that due to the abundance of films being produced in New York at the time, it was hard to put a production crew together, because some of the budgets on those other projects surpassed their own. “We were a low budget film, and we shot all at night, and there were about five other movies being made in New York that summer, and so nobody wanted to work on our film – so crew wise, it was very difficult for us to crew up”.
Deep Dive Resources
NATIONAL FILM AND SOUND ARCHIVE OF AUSTRALIA RESOURCES:
https://www.nfsa.gov.au/collection/curated/mad-max-original-movie
https://www.nfsa.gov.au/collection/curated/asset/99356-mad-max-home-movie-setting-stunt
https://www.eightieskids.com/20-things-you-never-knew-about-mad-max/
NYC Warriors shooting locations https://movie-locations.com/movies/w/Warriors-1979.php - -
The Warriors Movie - Deleted Scenes
Walter Hill: The Warriors Fest
Interview Joe Bob Briggs: The Warriors
Drive-in and B-movie aficionado Joe Bob Briggs (TNT's MonsterVision, The Daily Show) gives some in-depth background to the 1979 classic The Warriors, which he will be presenting at Alamo Drafthouse Yonkers on March 20th. We learn about the movies' connection to Xenophon's Anabasis, some background on the novel's author Sol Yurick, and a lot more surprising facts! Tyler Maxin conducts the interview.
Walter Hill Podcast Interview: It happened in Hollywood