Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome

Enter Aunty 

Turner’s entrance is worthy of a noir heroine. Miller has us follow Max (Mel Gibson) as he experiences the full extent of Aunty Entity’s domain, Bartertown, for the first time. It’s part-bazaar, part-feudal village, part ’80s car dealership, with Maurice Jarre’s clanking percussion score evoking the grinding labour that underpins it.   

From the clamour and chaos of Bartertown, we ascend to the cool blues of Aunty Entity’s penthouse, where the soundtrack is provided by her personal saxophonist. She emerges from filmy chiffon curtains with the shoulder pads of a mutated Joan Crawford, the shaved forehead of a Tudor beauty and immense earrings made from auto springs. Turner, who was riding the high of a successful comeback on the back of her hit album Private Dancer (1984), gamely shaved her own hair for the role and wears over 30 kilos of chain mail with effortless swagger. Her body language and the visual setting of her in these queenly frames clearly establishes her power, even before she begins to bargain with Max. (The motion of her hand as she imperiously beckons him closer was Turner’s own idea.)  

This is the only moment in the film where we get an inkling of Aunty Entity’s backstory, and we’re never told how she established control over the chaos of the post-apocalyptic desert, but Turner’s charisma makes the character instantly believable. Even though Thunderdome’s cinema takings didn’t equal those of its predecessors, her name on the billboards and the success of ‘We Don’t Need Another Hero’, the single she recorded for the film’s soundtrack, carried the film to new audiences.  

Handmade Max: Sets And Costumes 

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.

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Thunderdome’s costume designer, Norma Moriceau, produced an inspired suite of outfits to evoke a warrior culture where scraps were salvaged and assembled with fierce pride and peacocking aggression. She used horse and cow tails, goat hair, car parts, gridiron pads, medals, gas masks and goggles to make the guards’ costumes, and soldered together dog muzzles, metal butcher’s aprons, chicken wire and coat hangers for Auntie Entity. Moriceau’s Mad Max styles – premiered in Mad Max 2 and brought to their apotheosis in Thunderdome – became an emblematic form of chic for the apocalypse-haunted ’80s, and would influence looks for artists from Duran Duran to Kesha. They also acted as a resource for Fury Road’s costume designer Jenny Bevan, who used Moriceau’s boxes of collected fragments in her own creations, and was awarded the Oscar that had eluded Moriceau.   

Method Filming: Heat, Dust And Pigs

Although Thunderdome had a huge budget compared with its predecessors, the production was gruelling. Its exteriors were filmed around Coober Pedy, a South Australian opal-mining town so hot that many of its residents live underground. The temperature during the action-scene shoots topped out at 48 degrees Celsius (118 Fahrenheit), and the stunt drivers were stripping off the wetsuits and other padding they usually wore as protection. Nine people collapsed from heat stroke; a towering dust storm rolled through the set.  

On top of the explosives, Miller was wrangling a cast that included more than 40 children, some of them toddlers, as well as dogs, chickens, goats, camels, a horse, 400 pigs and a monkey called Sally-Anne. Miller was still deeply grieving his producer and creative partner Byron Kennedy, who had died in a helicopter crash the year before. He brought on George Ogilvie, an Australian theatre and film director, to assist.  

Tomorrow-morrow Land

For a movie that features a brutal death bout in a metal cage and automotive fireballs, Thunderdome has a Saturday matinee feel, with a lot of its conflicts and come-uppances having slapstick elements and few real consequences. Like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, released the year before Thunderdome, it has a cast of children for the hero to save, and their resourceful tricks help outwit the baddies.  

The Lost Tribe are the descendants of vanished survivors, banded together in a concealed gully. Like the Lost Boys in Peter Pan with their Never Never Land, they dream of another place: Tomorrow-morrow Land, a paradise of progress and comfort they’ve dreamed up from salvaged remnants of the pre-‘pox-eclipse’ world. When Max stumbles upon them, he becomes their reluctant protector and guide, complicating an existence based on ruthless self-interest. While the children’s pidgin language and naïve misinterpretations of Western technologies can edge gratingly close to racial stereotyping, their presence does offer a relief from the dog-eat-dog desert world.   

Nestled within a chase-and-fight scene is a poignant sequence featuring two of the children, Anna Goanna (Justine Clarke, who would go on to be a Play School presenter) and Mr Skyfish (Mark Spain). Max shows them how to play a record that they’ve cherished for years, thinking it’s a communication device that will summon them help. In fact, it’s French lessons, which the two bemused children parrot until they find something that resonates: ‘I’m going home.’ Max takes an inexplicable break from the fight to orchestrate and register this moment, a culmination of the glimmers of empathy that his time with the children has stirred. Mel Gibson once referred to Max as a ‘closet human being’ – this is Max cracking the door, a softening skilfully conveyed by Gibson despite his near-total stillness.  

After Thunderdome 

With the trio of films complete, Miller told press that he was done with Mad Max. But a seed had been planted. In a 1985 interview with the film critic Anne Billson, she asked him if there could ever be a female version of Max; he told her that pondering the backstory of Aunty Entity had made him think that Max’s classic hero arc could work as well for a woman. Decades later, on a flight from Sydney to Los Angeles, he had a dream that would become the basis of Mad Max: Fury Road. The seed had become a peach pit: Miller got back to work, and Furiosa was on her way.  

Thunderdome may not attract the critical adulation lavished on Mad Max 2 and Fury Road, but the intricacy of its world-building, its emotional light and shade, Turner’s blazing presence and its sheer haute-’80s bombast make it a to-the-max Max to be treasured.  

Looking for more? 

• Explore more footage and stories from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and Fury Road
• Learn more about the work of Mad Max 2 and 3 costume designer Norma Moriceau
• Marvel at the incredible stunts in the Mad Max movies

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Main image: Mel GIbson (as Max) and Tina Turner (as Aunty Entity), the stars of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (George Miller and George Ogilvie, 1985). NFSA title: 596997