Mad Max 45 years on 'MEL & I HAVE BEEN THROUGH A LOT'

Steve Bisley recalls the day he and mate Mel Gibson began filming the low-budget movie that would become a global phenomenon

- Glen Williams

Steve Bisley smiles fondly as he recalls the day he put on leather, straddled a custom-built Kawasaki and burned up the bitumen in outback Australia. It was an iconic moment.

It was 1979 and Steve, 72, had just transformed into one of Australian cinema's most endearing characters, officer Jim "Goose" Rains in a new movie called Mad Max, co-starring unknown actor Mel Gibson, 68.

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"It's hard to believe that was 45 years ago," says Steve, a much-loved fixture on our screens since graduating from NIDA in the mid-1970s.

"Mel and I had been at NIDA together and just before we graduated we were asked by director George Miller to audition for a new movie, Mad Max.

"We didn't know we were auditioning for a movie that would become a classic.

"We had no experience at all apart from the work we'd done at drama school, but we both knew we were getting involved in something special and something very different. No one had seen the likes of Mad Max before."

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