Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome: miniature Sydney

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), the third instalment of the Mad Max series, dialled down the violence of the previous films in its portrayal of a post-apocalyptic world, with threads of humour, hope and compassion.   

In this age of CGI and AI, it’s difficult to remember the days when every effect was ingeniously wrought by human hands. This photograph, taken by Su Armstrong, the film’s Executive in Charge of Production, shows a crew member working on the set for one of the movie’s last moments, a flight through a dust storm over the ruins of a future Sydney. It’s a double-take moment as the eye scans over the horizon, the sea and the Sydney Opera House sinking in the sand, and then takes in its tiny scale by way of the human standing beside the skyscrapers. Sadly, these sets would never be excavated from the sand, as the sets for Cecil B de Mille’s The Ten Commandments (1923), buried in the Californian desert after the film wrapped, had been in 1983. The Thunderdome sets were deemed too big for storage and destroyed after the shoot.