In the Australian outback, where the dusty soil of the plains extends to the blue line of the horizon as far as the eye can see, time leaves no imprint, just touches of color. There are splashes of green when plants, benefiting from rainfall that's a little less sparse than usual, emerge from the cracked earth. It's golden when the overpowering sun over a cloudless sky finally dries out the surrounding tufts of grass. Red when it burns everything.

In Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, released in 1981, the arid heart of the island-continent, suffocated by years of drought, was a dark ochre as captured in the post-apocalyptic universe created by director George Miller. The desert was the backdrop for the dystopian Western that revealed a then-unknown young actor, Mel Gibson, in the role of Max Rockatansky, a solitary, taciturn anti-hero.

Forty-three years later, on a cold April morning, the January showers have given a green tinge to the vastness. Wind turbines sweep their steel arms across the silence. Nothing else has changed in the wild expanses of the Mundi Mundi plains, on the western fringes of the state of New South Wales, a 13-hour drive from Sydney, where the filmmaker set up his cameras in the early days of his career.

Even the signpost indicating a panoramic viewpoint, Mundi Mundi Lookout, the only element in the film that designated a precise location, is still there, standing upright, facing the wind. Over the years, fans have turned it into a pilgrimage site. In the austral winter of 2022, Miller also returned there to film scenes from Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. The fifth installment of the Mad Max series was unveiled on May 15 at the 77^th Cannes Film Festival in an out-of-competition screening and will be released in cinemas on May 22.

Five kilometers away, the filmmaker's arrival was awaited with feverish excitement in the former mining bastion of Silverton. The settlement escaped its otherwise inevitable ghost town fate thanks to the Mad Max franchise and the film industry. In 2010, the director's teams had already scouted the area for Mad Max: Fury Road, the fourth film in the series, but torrential rains had soaked the desert with water, transforming the devastated land into verdant meadows. Discouraged, the film crews flew to Namibia.

A museum dedicated to Mad Max 2

This time, the enormous filmmaking endeavor, employing some 800 people, didn't miss out on meeting the locals, commandeering all the surrounding hotels for over two months. "There was a steady stream of cars," recalled Adrian Bennett, a British fan who moved halfway around the world to settle in Silverton, where he opened a museum entirely dedicated to Mad Max 2 in 2010.

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