Cameron Manewell working on the replica Mad Max car
Cameron Manewell working on the replica Mad Max car
Stories & Ideas

Fri 30 Apr 2021

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ACMI

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The car fanatic's unique work sits at the heart of our new centrepiece exhibition. Learn how it was made.

Cameron Manewell has been around early Fords his whole life. He specialises in building Mad Max car replicas – you may have seen his handiwork in the groundbreaking Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). ACMI commissioned him to build a replica of the Ford V8 Interceptor from the first Mad Max film ... and cut it in half. Although this project brought forth some unique challenges for the car fanatic, his spectacular work now it sits at the heart of our centrepiece exhibition, The Story of the Moving Image.

Transcript

I've been into early Falcons virtually my whole life. I grew up in a family that had early Fords so then when I turned 16, I got my first car; it was an XB Falcon and I've had them ever since.

My name's Cameron Manewell, I do a lot of Mad Max replicas. This one's off to ACMI in Melbourne. It will be a Mad Max 1 Interceptor replica. It's a little bit different from my usual projects in that the requirement is only half the car. It's gonna be pushed up against the mirror, so it looks like a full one-piece car and as it turns out, about twice the work of building a full one. The main thing that most people notice is the body kits. The flares, the general body lines are all original. Some of the extra details that will then go into the car will be the GT side flute; they'll go on to here. Black XBGT interior with the blue strobe light in the dash. The big fiberglass nose cone and the fake supercharger.

It was great working on Fury Road. It was it was certainly a unique experience. Basically, the cars that we built, not just see them on film but to actually get them out in the outback and try and break them so that we knew that by the time I got to the point of filming that they were going to be reliable.

The Interceptor as we see in Mad Max 1 was fairly well a pristine, special one-off pursuit vehicle. Of course as we see it in Fury Road it's a much more dilapidated and worn and rusted, so, this one will still be you know sort of somewhat pristine more than its post-apocalyptic sort of later life.

It'll look as per the original throughout.

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