The Actor Behind Mad Max's Nightrider Barely Knew How To Drive A Car
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I like to think that I am a pretty good driver. I first got my license over 13 years ago, and in that time, I have never been in a car accident or even been given a speeding ticket. Driving is fun for me. But I've never been the kind of person who has wanted to drive some highly powered sports car really fast down an open highway or go off-road in some behemoth to prove how rugged I am. A nice drive at a reasonable speed. That's good for me.
So I could never work on a "Mad Max" movie. The amount of skill, dexterity, trust in your collaborators, and love of thrills required to succeed in George Miller's high-octane apocalyptic world would be far too much for most people. I know I couldn't deal with the pressure and would never put myself in that situation. It's why I'm not a stunt performer. But not everyone behind the wheel of a car in "Mad Max" is a stunt performer. Sometimes, they are just actors, and their experience with driving can vary wildly.
In fact, you even had an actor who didn't even have a driver's license. That would be Vince Gil, who takes on the small role of the Nightrider in Miller's 1979 original film. Actors are called on to do a lot of things in movies they might not know how to do: horseback riding, speaking a certain language, or even juggling. These are skills that you need to seek out to learn. Driving, on the other hand, is a fairly common thing that you'd almost expect an actor to be able to do. But because they had an unlicensed driver in tow, they needed to get creative with how to have him behind the wheel.
'The legality of it'
A lot is riding on Nightrider, as he's the first character we see driving crazily fast in the opening minutes of "Mad Max." He's the wild tone-setter for the picture, and on a pure performance level, Vince Gil cackles and yells with the best of them. Shot towards the end of the shoot, Gil recalls in the book "Miller and Max: George Miller and the Making of a Film Legend" by Luke Buckmaster that his being someone without a driver's license could have caused so serious problems for the production, saying, "When I told them that I didn't drive they got me sixteen lessons with a driving school ... Apparently I needed a license for the legality of it."
Though he went and got his license for the role, Gil ironically ended up not doing the driving himself, as the driving sequence was deemed to be too unsafe for a non-stunt driver to perform. Instead, stunt coordinator Grant Page awkwardly wedged himself between Vince Gil and his scene partner Lulu Pinkus to where he couldn't be seen on-camera, and unfortunately for him, he says in the book that the handbrake he was seated on "was sticking up [his] arse." Not ideal. They also went into it without any rehearsal, which was just fine by Page:
"If you've got a machine like that around you, you build in all the protections you need. It's all in theory. I used to be a physics teacher. It's all action, reaction, inertia and momentum."
Obviously, things worked out, but it's rather funny to me that they were worried about safety when it came to Vince Gil but didn't blink twice about just jumping right into the scene. That's the wild world of "Mad Max" for you, I guess.