The blu-ray release of Mad Max: Fury Road will include a very different version of the film, if director George Miller gets his way. Speaking with /film, Miller explained how he chose to color the landscape, and what his favorite version of the film really looks like:
“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.“
Miller insisted that this black and white version appear on the blu-ray release, alongside a ‘silent’ Mad Max, in which audiences would hear only the film’s score, sans dialog. No color, no sound: the purest Mad Max imaginable. If you’re curious about what the film would look like without it’s ultra-saturated palette, check out this edit of the trailer – Miller’s definitely on to something.
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Text Isabelle Hellyer