George Miller is officially confirming his godhood today by dropping the news that he demanded for the Blu-ray release of Mad Max: Fury Road to feature a black and white version of the film that you can run with only the soundtrack to keep it company. This version, he claims, is the best as he explained to /Film.
We spent a lot of time in DI (digital intermediate), and we had a very fine colorist, Eric Whipp. One thing I’ve noticed is that the default position for everyone is to de-saturate post-apocalyptic movies. There’s only two ways to go, make them black and white — the best version of this movie is black and white, but people reserve that for art movies now. The other version is to really go all-out on the color. The usual teal and orange thing? That’s all the colors we had to work with. The desert’s orange and the sky is teal, and we either could de-saturate it, or crank it up, to differentiate the movie. Plus, it can get really tiring watching this dull, de-saturated color, unless you go all the way out and make it black and white.
It’s easy to see why black and white would work so well for this film. Stripping the movie down to its basics allows for the further ability to watch its stunning direction. And removal of the dialog may sound drastic, but considering the “lead” of the movie basically utters no dialog it actually isn’t that necessary. The fact is that Fury Road tells so much of its story visually that it’s probably a better silent film than the likes of The Artist. Going silent will only reinforce just how stunningly crafted this movie is.
/Film put together a trailer of what the movie might look like in black and white, but we’re guessing a bit more effort will be put into the task for the release. It looks great in the video below, but a true conversion, with proper adjustments for lighting, should be a true work of art and chalk up another reason it is actually the best movie ever.
