Get Involved, Internet: Sign a lovely petition to release Fury Road in black and white

This new Change.com petition is as simple as they come: Director George Miller previously stated that the “best version” of Mad Max: Fury Road is the one he edited in black and white. And now fans would like to see it, please.

Miller previously insisted that a black-and-white version, as well as a “silent” version with the film’s score but no dialogue, would appear on the Blu-ray. Since that didn’t happen, Chris Kotsovos, a fan from Seattle, is looking for signatures to send to Warner Bros. and the company’s CEO Kevin Tsujihara demanding the release of this “best version.”

Kotsovos thinks his request is quite reasonable, as The Mist got a black-and-white version on its Blu-ray release. (And, we would add, The Walking Dead also got a re-airing in black and white.) So this stuff isn’t that hard to arrange. In fact, it seems Warner Bros. might have already screened a black-and-white version, based on this tweet.

And Miller himself is adamant that black and white is the way to go with the film, all thanks to an old version of Road Warrior he saw. In an interview with /Film, Miller explained:

The best version of Road Warrior was… they used to do a “slash dupe” in music. To make a really cheap print, they’d make a black-and-white version for the composer. They used to put lines [across it], if you see old documentary footage of composers in the past, you’d see them looking at the screen and conducting, that was a slash dupe, and it was black and white. And you’d mix the sound that way [too]. And every time I saw the black and white I thought “oh, my god!” It just reduces it to this really gutsy high-con black and white, very, very powerful.

And so when it came time to work on the colors for his own film, Miller took the conversation very seriously:

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.

(For a look at the color adjustment process, check out this in-depth exploration of the film’s VFX shots, which spends a lot of time looking at Whipp’s work.)

Naturally, fans re-edited the trailer into black and white after hearing Miller’s comments. And this version that is both “silent” and black and white is the absolute tops:

Those inspired to demand the full-length monochrome version can add their voices to the lovely, lovely petition right here.