Few summer blockbusters can hold a candle to the high-octane action pizzazz that is Mad Max: Fury Road. George Miller’s sequel may have been a long time coming, and persevered through a series of trials and tribulations during filming, but the general consensus is that it was absolutely worth the wait, cramming in enough show-stopping set pieces to make a Michael Bay film seem like a Saturday cartoon by comparison.
But the genius behind Fury Road is that despite its eccentric, over-the-top sequences, each is as coherent as it is jaw-dropping, and it’s a testimony to Miller’s astute directing that the film is being hailed as a masterclass across the board. Strip away all of this, though, and you’ll soon find that Mad Max: Fury Road adopts an actions-speak-louder-than-words approach, but what if the little dialogue was taken out altogether?
According to /Film, that’s an option that Miller will include in the film’s Blu-Ray release, along with a black and white cut. Select both of these options and you’ll soon be venturing into the Wasteland with only Tom Holkenborg’s pulse-pounding soundtrack for company.
“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.”
Mad Max: Fury Road will roar onto Blu-Ray later this year.