Coober Pedy on Screen: Why Filmmakers Love This Otherworldly Town
Coober Pedy’s landscape is strange enough in person that it’s not surprising filmmakers have repeatedly used it to depict places that are supposed to look alien, apocalyptic, or otherwise not-quite-Earth. If you’ve watched a certain kind of Australian film and felt like the landscape looked oddly familiar after visiting Coober Pedy, there’s a good reason for that.
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
The most famous connection is Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), the third film in George Miller’s post-apocalyptic franchise, which used Coober Pedy and the surrounding landscape extensively as a filming location. The town’s stark, arid, otherworldly terrain suited the film’s vision of a devastated future Australia perfectly — no set dressing required, the landscape did most of the work on its own.
Locations around Coober Pedy, including areas resembling the Breakaways, provided the desolate backdrop for several key sequences in the film, and the connection remains a point of local pride and occasional tourism reference decades later.
Pitch Black
The 2000 science fiction film Pitch Black, which introduced the Riddick character later developed across several sequels, also used Coober Pedy and the surrounding outback as a filming location. The alien planet the film’s characters find themselves stranded on drew directly on the genuinely otherworldly quality of this landscape — proof that you don’t always need a studio backlot or CGI to create something that looks like it belongs on another planet.
Why the Landscape Works So Well
Coober Pedy and its surrounds have a specific combination of features that make them so useful for these kinds of productions: minimal vegetation, dramatic and unusual geological formations (particularly at the Breakaways), a colour palette that shifts from ochre to near-white depending on the mineral content of the soil, and an almost complete absence of the kind of infrastructure that would visually anchor a scene to contemporary Earth. It genuinely looks like somewhere else.
Other Productions
Beyond the two most famous examples, Coober Pedy has featured in various documentaries, television productions, and smaller film projects over the decades, largely for the same reason — a landscape that does a lot of visual work without requiring extensive art department intervention.
Seeing It for Yourself
Whether or not you’re a fan of the specific films, there’s something genuinely worth experiencing about standing in a landscape that’s convincingly stood in for another planet on screen. It’s one of the more unexpected layers to a Coober Pedy stop on our Lake Eyre tours — alongside the underground homes and opal mining history, there’s also this odd little chapter of film history sitting in the same red dirt.
