Sign a petition to get a black-and-white version of Mad Max: Fury Road

Fans have started an online petition to see Mad Max: Fury Road as director George Miller prefers it: in black-and-white.

Mad Max: Fury Road was one of the delightful surprises of the summer. It was an action movie that actually delivered creative, pulse-pounding action scenes, not always a guarantee when you go to see a standard-issue action flick. Plus, it had a rich world, layered characters, and an interesting conceit that made it a lot more involving than a cursory look would suggest.

As good as it was, director George Miller thinks it could have been improved. If he had his way, the whole thing would have been in black-and-white. Here he is complaining about the lack of options he encountered when working on the film’s colorization.

"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 actually made a black-and-white cut he insisted appear on Fury Road’s Blu-ray release, but it didn’t happen. (He also wanted a silent version of  the movie to appear on the Blu-ray, which sounds odd until you go back and realize how little the characters actually say.) Now, a group of fans have thrown up a petition to have this black-and-white version released. They’re trying to get 100 signatures, which seems like a low bar, but if that’s all it takes to get to see this version of the movie, it’s more than worth it.

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