The World's Fastest Indian (2005) on Netflix
PG-1320052h 7mBiographyDramaSport
Burt Munro has spent years tuning a 1920 Indian motorcycle, and dreams of riding it at Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats. After a heart attack, he mortgages his house to get there.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb7.7/1064,603 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes82%
Trailer
Plot summary
Burt Munro lives in Invercargill, at the southern end of New Zealand, where for twenty-five years he has worked at getting more speed out of a 1920 Indian motorcycle. He dreams of taking the machine to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah to learn how fast it will go. A heart attack sends him to hospital, where he is told he has angina and should take it easy and stop riding. He takes the medication and ignores the advice, saves what he can, mortgages his house and works his passage to Los Angeles as a cook on a cargo ship. There a motel clerk named Tina Washington helps him clear customs, and a car salesman, Fernando, lets him use a workshop and junkyard to build a trailer for the Indian.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The World's Fastest Indian (2005)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Munro was never known to actually urinate on his lemon tree; film director Roger Donaldson added that detail as a tribute to his own father, who did.
- The film's climactic speed record is dramatized: Burt Munro actually reached a faster 205.67 mph on an uncompleted, crashed run, rather than the 201 mph record shown at Bonneville.
- The empty section on Lithgow Street in Invercargill used for Burt Munro's home and workshop later served as headquarters for the notorious Black Power gang through the 1990s, until the house burnt down in 1998.
- Director Roger Donaldson pursued this project for more than two decades before finally making it, having earlier directed a 1971 short television documentary about Burt Munro called Burt Munro: Offerings to the God of Speed.
