They say the Mundi Mundi lookout near Broken Hill is on the edge of the world. I've been there a few times. It is. In fact, at sunset, it's as close to heaven (if heaven has emus) as you'll get. But very early one Saturday morning, 40 years ago, truck driver and sometimes big rig salesperson Dennis Williams, wasn't looking at the view.

Dennis is sitting in for Mel Gibson behind the wheel of a Mack R600 Cool Power cleverly disguised as a tanker which is about to crash into another truck-like vehicle called The Humungus Machine at about a million kilometres an hour, destroy it, turn left over a bank, put the tanker onto its side and slide towards the camera. What could possibly go wrong?

Miller's co-writer Terry Hayes explains the job to Den: "We're gonna have the truck side-strike the Humungus vehicle, wobble wobble, then hit the bank. Mel and the kid who is with him will jump out and run away. But mate, if we have a good head-on collision, then you roll the truck over for us, that's gonna look fabulous!"

Den has reasons to be nervous. This is his first stunt. Up to this point he had been a mild-mannered employee of a Kenworth dealer in Sydney's St Peters. And if it works, it will be one of the greatest truck crashes in movie history.

Then back up the top of the hill he gunned it. You can see the result on YouTube. Den later told the ABC: "We built a huge roll cage and we had an ambulance on standby, a chopper on standby and I hadn't eaten for 24 hours so they could operate which sort of freaked me out a bit."

Anyway, Den survived, the film grossed $35m and the truck driver was inducted into the road transport hall of fame in Alice.

But before Den was Remy Julienne. Remy died this week from the bloody COVID-19 aged 90. While he talked about his work "as science rather than stunts", his work behind the wheel of a Kenworth W-900 in Licence To Kill is all him. The former French motocross champion turned professional stunt person actually drove the all-American monster on its side.

Remy's Dad was a small-town cafe owner and truck driver. A shy boy, Remy found he could get kids to talk to him by doing stunts on his bicycle and then his father's 1000cc motorbike. He became a truck and military tank driver and at 27 was French motocross champion. In 1964, Gil gave Remy a small stunt role and before you can say bonjour Remy has made over 1400 movies and been stunt doubles for Roger Moore, Tim Dalton, Charles Bronson, Alain Delon, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Sophia Loren, Carole Bouquet and Gina Lollobrigida.

Out of all those movies, my fave is (of course) the Italian Job. It was Remy who came up with the idea for an 18m rooftop jump between two buildings 15m above the Fiat factory ground. Remy was a true petrol head. He was one of a kind. As he said: "What is beautiful about the job is that you can never be 100 per cent certain. If you could, then frankly it wouldn't be interesting."