Mad Max is one of the best known films of the 20th century, and tomorrow is the 30th anniversary of the film's release. Set in the Australian outback, the film's images of dust and powerful cars set the stage for post-apocalyptic films ever since. People wanted to be Mel Gibson, not least so they could drive that car, the matt black police interceptor. That car was largely down to Peter Arcadipane, who was working as a design consultant in Melbourne at the time. Born in Italy and raised in New South Wales, Australia, Peter has worked with cars in Australia, the US, France, Germany, Italy and Japan. He's a published author, has worked in journalism and designed houses in Italy and Kenya. Arcadipane now calls Germany home, where he talked about the film.
"It all started during my time at Ford Australia, when I was given a project to design a show car for the Melbourne Motor Show in 1977, which I named the 'Concorde'," he says. "It was a kind of street racer that you'd expect to see on the track at Le Mans. It was particularly interesting as something like this had never been done before in Australia." Instead of devoting working hours to the Concorde's design, it was more of an after-hours labour of love for Arcadipane. "There was no time to do the car at work, so we made it in a colleague's garage in Geelong [a suburb of Melbourne] in the evenings," he recalls.
"We made the moulds, mixed the paint and built the car in the garage, and this is the car that had the aerodynamic pieces that ended up on the Mad Max car." Arcadipane's bosses at Ford were delighted with the finished product, but when it was time to transport the car to the exhibition hall, it was too low to load on to the lorry and a hair-raising drive through rush hour traffic ensued. "I ended up physically driving it there - a valuable, unregistered, uninsured prototype, driving through busy Melbourne traffic, dodging cars, trams and shoppers and avoiding police.
"To make things worse, it ran out of fuel en route - as parts of the car were just centimetres off the ground, even getting it onto the service station forecourt was a nerve-racking experience," he says. Once the Concorde was safely ensconced at the motor show, it was a highlight of the exhibition and appeared on the covers of several magazines. After the phenomenal success of the car at the motor shows in Melbourne and Sydney, Arcadipane saw the potential to build aftermarket replicas of it for private customers and left Ford Australia to start up his own design consultancy business. He got into the business at the right time and, in some ways, was ahead of his time in the field of custom cars.
"This was a styling trend in Australia that was just starting to flower out. A lot of other companies were starting up as well. Stuff like Pimp My Ride became popular a few years ago, but we were doing it in Australia 30 years ago. So it was a pretty dramatic step in the whole car culture of Australia". When the Mad Max filmmakers first approached him in 1977 to design a car for the shoot, he had no idea that he was going to be involved in the birth of a cinematic car legend.
"I assumed it would be just another car," he said modestly. "Nobody could have known just how successful Mad Max would become. They had seen either the original show car or one of the replicas I'd been building and approached me to build it on that basis." Shooting on the film commenced on Oct 24, 1977, and was completed in January the following year, but it was not until April 12, 1979, that the film was launched in Australia.
The original car was a standard, white 1973 Ford Falcon XB hardtop, with a 300-horsepower, 351- cubic-inch V8 engine and four-speed manual transmission, but once Arcadipane had finished with it, there was nothing standard about it at all. Many of the parts used were in fact parts from Arcadipane's own styling kits, such as the fibreglass front end, roof and boot spoilers. Most prominent of all was the enormous Wieand supercharger protruding through the bonnet. Although the supercharger had no function on the actual car, it certainly grabbed people's attention.
"I was actually building a similar car for myself at the time, which I also painted matt black," says Arcadipane. "Although I got some odd looks, people were getting used to seeing lots of strange-looking cars in the area, as I was building modified cars for various people and companies." "Possibly the oddest look I received was when I was coolly cruising home one evening and saw a rather good-looking girl across the road. In retrospect, crashing the front end of the car into the kerb was not the best way to impress her."
But perhaps the pretty girl didn't realise she was in the presence of a unique motor. Mad Max was a low-budget film and the car Arcadipane was given to modify was second-hand. "We only made one car for the film, and it was also used in the sequel [The Road Warrior]. It's not like nowadays where six or seven cars are made for a single film." Arcadipane only met Mel Gibson once during production. He was living close to the location and a lot of the roads used in the film were just around the corner from his home. Rather than getting to walk the red carpet at a glittering, star-studded premiere, Arcadipane first saw the film at his local drive-in cinema while on a date. "I was sitting in a car and watching this radical police interceptor on a 60-foot screen - it blew my mind. I remember thinking, 'that's something I've done'."
But the spectacular moves of the interceptor did not drive his date quite so wild. "Sadly, my girlfriend was totally unimpressed. As a petrolhead, I realised this was one relationship that wasn't going to last," he remember wryly. What had begun as a $200,000 film, still a tiny budget even 30 years ago, went on to become a $150 million blockbuster. Today, Mel Gibson's $15,000 earnings from the film seem laughably insignificant, but it was the film that made him a star.
Since Mad Max, Peter has worked all around the world for companies such as Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, Ford, PSA, and Mitsubishi, designing a wide range of cars. Anyone familiar with Mercedes will know the previous-generation CL-Coupe and the CLS four-door coupé, which are two examples of cars he is credited with designing. Add to these the original Mercedes concepts, which became the SLK, M-Class, R-Class, and show cars for Ford, Vickers, Kia, among others, and it should give you some idea of Peter's forward-thinking reputation in the industry.
One of his latest projects is also movie-based. The "Stealth Interceptor", which can only be described as a cross between an endurance racing car and a world land-speed record-breaking rocket, is one of the cars he has designed for The Accelerator, a film that is in the early stages of development and currently seeking investors. "This was originally going to be a similar car to the one in Mad Max, but over time it has developed into a hi-tech supersonic car. It's strictly a one-off for the film and who knows, it may well turn out to be another Mad Max," says Arcadipane.
So what became of the original Mad Max police interceptor? Although contradictory accounts of its ultimate destiny exist, the Falcon was put up for sale in an attempt to recoup some of the costs of the first film. Astonishingly though, as a result of the energy crisis and consequent lack of demand for V8s, the car was not sold. This turned out to be advantageous in the long run as the Interceptor was then reused for the second movie. It was after this film, however, that the vehicle's active life on the silver screen came to an end, and despite being sent for scrap, along with other cars from the film, including the duplicate which was crashed in the film's sequel, the new owner was reluctant to destroy it and passed it on to a colleague.
Several years later, it was fully restored to its original glory and, after being put on display at the National Motor Museum of Australia, it was bought by a collector and now resides in the Cars of the Stars Museum in Keswick, England, along with other famous vehicles like the Batmobile, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the A-Team's van and numerous cars from James Bond films. Thirty years on, what began life as a modified Ford Falcon still has many fans all around the world. People as far afield as the US are working on replicas, trying to get that authentic look. Some of the moulds are no longer in existence and only one man can truly lay claim to having made the original: Peter Arcadipane.
Today, Arcadipane still works freelance on a number of confidential automotive industry projects. After a life on the move, he has settled down in Germany with his family. What about the future? "I've been approached on more than one occasion to design a car for a potential fourth Mad Max film and have put forward my ideas but, to date, no decision has been made on whether such a film will be made." If it is, and if Peter designs it, the car will certainly be in experienced hands.