FILM · 1981 · AUSTRALIA
Roadgames
28 archived facts 5 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
All facts (28)
- #001
Stacy Keach learned to drive a 16-speed semi-truck in just two days for the role of Quid. During production he drove the truck roughly 1,600 miles.
- #002
The story Quid tells Hitch while they are camping is actually the true story of the shooting location. The camp scene was filmed at a ruined old telegraph station that had served an Australian town destroyed years earlier by a rabbit plague.
- #003
With a budget of 1.75 million Australian dollars, Roadgames was the most expensive film shot in Australia at the time.
- #004
Richard Franklin was hired to direct Psycho II (1983) on the strength of his work on this film.
- #005
In the original script Quid's dog was to be named Bosco. When Stacy Keach told Richard Franklin that Bosco was actually a chocolate drink in America, the dog's name was changed to Boswell.
- #006
American distributors asked Richard Franklin to cut the 360-degree pan shot of Quid talking on a roadside telephone. They felt the shot was too long and added nothing to the story, but Franklin refused to cut it.
- #007
The film's ending, in which the severed head falls into a mop bucket, was an afterthought. Distributors wanted the film to end on a more shocking note, so the production team went back to shoot the final scene in a butcher shop. Richard Franklin, however, disliked this ending, finding it too distasteful.
- #008
Lisa Peers was initially cast as Hitch, but AVCO Embassy Pictures, which contributed 500,000 dollars to the production, pushed for an American actress to take the role instead. Richard Franklin then asked his old USC friend John Carpenter to put him in touch with Jamie Lee Curtis, since the two had met briefly when Franklin visited Carpenter on the set of The Fog (1980). The move, however, upset the Actors Equity of Australia and nearly derailed the production entirely.
- #009
The executive producer credited in the opening titles is Bernard Schwartz. That is the real name of Tony Curtis, Jamie Lee Curtis's father.
- #010
The ruins where Quid camps at night belong to the Eucla Telegraph Station, near the Western Australia border. It is true that after the rabbit plague of the 1890s the sand dunes overran the town and it was abandoned, but it was re-established at its present site about 4 km to the north. According to Quid, its population was 98, not 700.
- #011
Pat's truck is a 1976 Mercedes-Benz NG73. Only one such truck was used in the film. Director Richard Franklin said the fact that there was no duplicate or backup truck in case it broke down or was damaged worried him.
- #012
The nickname of Jamie Lee Curtis's character, Hitch, is a tribute to director Alfred Hitchcock, who inspired the film.
- #013
Australian director Greg McLean said this film influenced his debut feature Wolf Creek (2005).
- #014
The film's climax was originally meant to be somewhat more detailed in reintroducing the characters Frita, Sneezy Rider and Captain Careful. The original plan had Sneezy Rider and Frita being randomly shredded by Quid's truck during the chase through the streets of Perth, with the motorcycle sliding under the trailer in an elaborate stunt. Captain Careful was then to reappear towing a new boat so that Quid could destroy that one too. Pressure to finish shooting, however, led to these scenes being cut from the film.
- #015
One of the most Hitchcock-inspired elements is not visual or thematic but dialogue-driven: Quid and Hitch discuss different methods of murder. Hitchcock's characters, going back to the 1930s when sound came to film, would discuss various forms of murder.
- #016
Richard Franklin, often called Australia's Hitchcock, makes 2 references to Alfred Hitchcock in the film. As noted earlier in the trivia, the character Hitch is a tribute, and while Hitch is looking at magazines, one of them is about Alfred Hitchcock's films.
- #017
In the men's toilet scene at the Roadhouse, behind Quid's graffiti on the wall you can clearly see a few frames reading "don't root abos mate". This either slipped through the American film crew's minds or was left in the final cut as a tasteless joke. Root is Australian slang for having sex, and abo is a racial slur used against Indigenous Australians.
- #018
A Bally "Playboy" pinball machine is visible in the roadhouse where Pat calls the police. Released in December 1978, 18,250 units were produced, making it the 4th most successful pinball machine of all time (as of 2022). The backglass depicts Hugh Hefner, 1976 Playmate Patti McGuire and 1977 Playmate Sondra Theodore.
- #019
Richard Franklin and Everett De Roche developed the character of Quid with Sean Connery in mind for the role. The film's budget, of course, would not allow it.
- #020
Jamie Lee Curtis's character Hitch mentions The Boston Strangler and her father being 67 years old in the same sentence. Interestingly, her real father, Tony Curtis, appeared in The Boston Strangler (1968).
- #021
Although Roadgames was deliberately made to echo Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), it also closely resembles Steven Spielberg's Duel (1971) — except that the truck driver is the good guy who never takes his eyes off the passenger car.
- #022
Roadgames is considered an "Ozploitation" film. The category covers low-budget R-rated comedies, horror and action films made after 1971.
- #023
The dark green van is a 1973 Bedford CF Mk 1 fitted with a custom Van Craft body kit.
- #024
Roadgames is Quentin Tarantino's favourite Australian film.
- #025
The wire the killer uses as a weapon in the film is actually a thick guitar string.
- #026
Jamie Lee Curtis had also played a hitchhiker the previous year in another horror film, The Fog (1980). Her nickname also stems from her being a hitchhiker — Hitch — rather than from a tribute to Hitchcock.
- #027
All of Quid's encounters with the police take place in Western Australia. In 1981 all traffic enforcement was carried out by a separate division of the police force called the "Road Traffic Authority". The cars they used had "RTA" logos on their sides (not POLICE, as in the film). The police cars in the film also have white-on-black Victoria state plates. All RTA cars in Western Australia had blue-on-white WA registration plates containing the prefix 'RTA' and three digits.
- #028
In the middle of the scene where they stop to use the roadside toilets, there is a sign outside the men's toilet with a picture of Fred Flintstone, and above the women's toilet a picture of Wilma.
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