If you want to know where the bodies are buried on a film shoot, talk to the crew. That's the approach Australian film writer Luke Buckmaster takes in his high-octane zoom around George Miller's Mad Max franchise, and to a significant degree it yields the goods.

Take, for instance, the story of day one on the original Mad Max (1979). John Hipwell, second assistant director, recalls arriving on location - a stretch of the Geelong Freeway outside Melbourne - just before 7am, and immediately realising there was nowhere for the cast and crew and all those trucks full of gear to park.

Then he realised it had been his job to make sure there was - only no one had told him. No one had asked permission to film there, either, or to shut down the freeway. "It's the first minute on set and it's a logistics nightmare," Hipwell says. "An absolute nightmare."

Such are the perils of low-budget guerrilla filmmaking, though it's not the sort of detail a director or star readily coughs up, or often even knows about. Often, people are employed to make sure they don't.

Over the course of the four Max films, made over 37 years or so, there have been plenty of nightmares and brushes with disaster. Here's a small sampling, courtesy of Buckmaster:

• A rocket is strapped to a car and fired at a truck, everyone sure she'll be right. Naturally, it veers off course and almost kills the camera crew.
• Semi-trailers are rolled - not in one film, but two - in pursuit of unforgettable images. At least one of the drivers had never done stunts before.
• A pop-up piggery sparks a legal stoush with a council that goes all the way to court over concerns a deadly infection could break out and kill humans.
• While "pissed as tits" (in the words of production designer Grace Walker), crew members take Tina Turner's stylised war-ready hot-rod from the third film for a midnight spin through the streets of Sydney.
• The leading lady of the first film is replaced after breaking her leg in a motorcycle accident while riding to set.

It's worth noting that no one has died on a Mad Max shoot. But reading the stories collected by Buckmaster, you can only conclude it's a miracle they haven't.

Fortunes have been made, though. Miller and his producer Byron Kennedy made the first film for $350,000, most of it raised from about 10 private investors. It took more than $100 million at the global box office, which "marked an unprecedented cost-to-profit margin for any film anywhere in the world", writes Buckmaster.

But the road has rarely run smooth. The Australian distributor, Roadshow, re-titled the first movie Heavy Metal; it only reverted to Mad Max a few weeks before release. Rather more shockingly, Kennedy "effectively sacked" his director and friend (those are Miller's words, but from another source - the director declined to talk to Buckmaster), and offered the job to Brian Trenchard-Smith instead.

BTS, as he is known, tells Buckmaster he declined out of solidarity with his fellow director. "Although, to be honest, perhaps if Byron had offered money I could not ignore, maybe I would have ??? taken it."

There's much to admire in Miller and Max, even if the war stories do start to wear thin. But there's something missing, too, and it's not just the voice of Miller himself.

Buckmaster is a reviewer for Daily Review and theguardian.com.au and is adept at producing very clickable opinions about movies. But his book is, curiously, almost entirely devoid of a critical voice.

He talks about the growing influence of Joseph Campbell's work on the franchise, but steers clear of the thorny issue of whether that has been a good thing or bad (Campbell's work on myths has had an enormous, and arguably stultifying, effect on Hollywood storytelling since the 1970s).

He acknowledges that the world at large takes a rather dim view of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (which was, Miller said at the time of its release in 1985, "the one I have most affection for of the three films") and acknowledges that its relatively disappointing box office "suggests word of mouth was not as strong this time around". But what Buckmaster himself thinks of it remains a mystery.

That's not a fatal omission in a book with so much lovingly detailed carnage up its sleeve. But it is a rather curious one.

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