Was Mad Max Meant to Be Black and White?

George Miller says his dystopian blockbuster should have been shiny and chrome. One fan did just that.

by Beckett Mufson

September 23, 2015, 2:30pm

Screencaps via

Shiny and chrome isn't just a Warboy vision of Valhalla in the summer's biggest dystopian blockbuster, it's also George Miller's ideal vision for the movie itself. Earlier this year he told /Film his ideas for portraying the apocalypse on the big screen:

"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."

One fan took Miller's message to heart, and created BLACK & CHROME, a fantastically noir-like, 100% desaturated version of the film with minimal sound effects and no dialogue, making it look less Michael Bay and more Ingmar Bergman. The fact that Mad Max: Fury Road can transition so easily between such disparate visual bedfellows is a testament to Miller's directing.

What makes the video—a full-length remix of Fury Road —even more delicious is that it's almost the exact premise of a version Miller had declared a desire to put onto the film's Blu-ray release. "BLACK & CHROME is an attempt to realize Miller’s alternate vision. The cinematography, the editing, the sound design, and the score, are now represented in a completely new experience," writes the artist, who goes by Nux and has suspiciously kept the Vimeo page hosting the video private… If that's you George Miller, all we can say is thanks.

Watch the full, killer, BLACK & CHROME below.

[Editor's note: the video has been taken down. Check out the screencaps we managed to grab while it was up below. Also, IGN made a black and white version of the trailer, which you can find at the bottom of the post. We'll keep an eye out for a restored copy of BLACK & CHROME, so check back later.]