when you win 6 Oscars, but could've won more...

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) is one the best looking movies of the last 50 years, but director George Miller preferred a different version. Here's why.

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This video contains copyrighted material from the feature films/TV shows listed below. I believe all content used falls under the remits of Fair Use (see below), but if any content owners would like to dispute this I will not hesitate to remove said content. It is not my intent in any way to infringe on their content ownership.

Mad Max
Mad Max: Fury Road
George Miller
Tom Hardy
Charlize Theron
Movie Editing
Video Essay
Black and Chrome
Monochromatic
Colour Grading
Black and White
Logan
Parasite
Schindler's List
Casino Royale
Pleasantville
Justice League: The Snyder Cut

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[SceneItReviews]

So what's YOUR favourite use of black & white in a movie?? Or are you #teamcolour?

[jamesgeorge]

I thought the vibrant colors they used in Mad Max were part of what made the visuals so good. The vibrant reds and yellows turn what should be a boring wasteland into something akin to grinding a sunset down into powder and coating the ground with it.

[medardbitangimana]

The irony is that fury road has become a mainstay in essays about color grading 😅

[captainbean]

Speaking as a 3D Artist/Game Designer, what makes black and white so evocative and *raw* feeling is that it's a pure light-study at that point. No more colour theory, only lighting and shot composition.

A great example in my opinion, the Parasite example you used at 1:23 shows how you look at the shot differently. You see the shadows and silohettes pop-out with much more definition, and it changes the feel of the scene to seem much more sinister than it already was. The focus moves away from the chaos, which is more apparent in the main cut, and refocuses on his shadow looming over the aftermath - it's much more foreboding and it contrasts the background much harder as a light study.

Black and white gives you a more "raw" view of the frame, so flaws *and* strengths come through - you can't hide behind anything. Anything you choose to put in the frame becomes bespoke in black and white, which I think is why *some* movies are incredible in B&W and some are just gimmicks. And then you have situations like Sin City where a colour version would be tantamount to heresy lol

[Crunchy_Punch]

I did a black and white zombie short film project in University, and there's two things covered in the video that I lived through back in 2013. First, for black and white to really pop, what you shoot must have contrast. The second, having a vision and getting everyone to understand that vision is difficult. My zombie makeup was really quickly applied, deep red under the eyes to get that sunken-in look, and blue to contour the cheeks to get really gaunt. Walking onto set after doing the makeup, the production team thought it looked stupid and clownish (university group work always sucks) until we got it into the editing bay and converted it to black and white. Obviously my crappy student film doesn't compare to George Miller, but it was vindicating hearing the most vocal group detractors finally get it.

[rottensquid]

I saw the double-feature of Logan and Fury Road at the Castro Theater in San Francisco, and it was astonishing. However, as a professional visual storyteller myself, I could see there were little key elements of story that were lost, because somethings are expressed primarily, almost exclusively, through color.

Blood, for example, is a massive storytelling element in both stories, especially Logan. The scene right after the opening massacre, where Logan is covered in blood, struggling to heal, loses the visceral impact of a man spattered head to toe in red. His suffering ends up feeling more existential than physical.

In Fury Road, the bright red of the blood Immorten symbol on that cloth map, or in the tube feeding Furiosa, bringing her back to life, becomes a dull grey, losing some of its impact. But even more, the green of Immorten Joe's rooftop garden is startling, giving a visceral sense of paradise and hope in the baked, blackened world of Fury Road. When the characters speak of the green place, that's the green you picture. And when it's established that the only true green place left is Immorten Joe's stronghold, your mind goes right back to that one glorious explosion of lush green we saw early on. But that's conveyed entirely through color. As the Coen Brothers proved in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou, " all it takes to turn a rich, lush landscape into a bleak one is the removal of the color green. So removing that color from that scene in Fury Road stripped that key plot point of its visual language. We're only left with the idea of the rooftop garden being a paradise. And in such a visual film, it was crippling.

Of course, film had to make due without these key elements for the first 50 years of its history. I'm reminded of the opening scene in The Big Sleep, where Bogart's Philip Marlow meets General Sternwood in a lush orchid-filled greenhouse. It's supposed to be like eden, perversely contrasting the sorry tail-end of the general's debauched life. But without color, we just have to imagine the lushness of the scene. Black and white is no palette the glory of the mother nature.

Regardless, I adored both films in black and white, and I'm dying to see the Soderberg edit of Raiders. It reminds me that the film as much a noir as it is an action adventure, the key element I've always felt was missing form its lackluster sequels. After all, its ending almost feels lifted from Kiss Me Deadly. But I digress.

[filmbuff]

The Mist I think I like more in B&W. With the shadows, particularly in the chemist scene, I think there is more atmosphere & makes it more unsettling.

[peanutnutter]

Black and white makes what you have been focusing on harder to see and track throughout the scene. This forces you to concentrate harder and take in more of the scene, adding to the intensity,

[Nkillerkid]

I'm not a filmmaker but as a painter I can give my two cents on this: many illustrators start their sketches in black and white because working with essentially 3 values allows you quickly discern where the focus should be, a color's hue can provide contrast but it's not as effective in communicating form, so if you were to simply switch a picture to black and white you might find a lot of the colors having very similar values and the result coming off as "flat". Basically it's easier to start with a monochrome sketch and add hues afterward rather than trying to adjust your values after picking your palette, that could be true for movies that were shot with color in mind trying to go B&W too.

[GuineaPigEveryday]

Okay I love that you approached this topic because the video by Cinemastix on Indiana Jones black and white is also brilliant. I used to think of it as a gimmick, but Soderbergh's experiment really highlights the pure technique and artistry put into work by Spielberg into framing, blocking, and staging every single shot, and always supporting the scene with visual storytelling regardless of whether its action or dialogue. A perfect example being the scene with the two CIA guys and Indy and Marcus (as explained in CinemaStix' video, lots of camera movements there and all purposeful without over-cutting). Black and white can be just fanciful gimmicks but it can also distill and hone your focus in on how every shot is crafted. The same way The General is timeless, or a dozen noirs don't need colorisation, nor many Hitchcock films, the black-and-white can really just sort of strip away the layers of colour to look at pure technique, and if a movie can work without colour or dialogue such as in Soderbergh's Raiders cut, that goes to show how well a film is crafted.
Sorry if that's rambly, just want to emphasise that B&W is like taking away one of your senses, so the others are heightened.

[Zinga]

Did you confuse the release date for Logan with Wolverine Origins? Origins was a 2009 release, which you have Logan marked as. I had to do a double take because I knew that movie was more recent than that.

[beetlegoose]

when the title starts with *when the* like its a meme (every single video)

[antoinepetrov]

I think that what Joon-ho expressed about not being able to make a full-blown b&w film isn't true anymore. Cuarón made a film for Netflix in complete b&w and it won all the Oscars, both of Pawlikowski's great films - Ida and Cold War are in b&w, and they did pretty well. The Lighthouse as well, of course.

[SimonLaudati]

You can make Fury Road in any colour grade you want... it'll still remain a masterpiece

[db]

00:19 Logan did not come out in 2009 lol, you gave an existential crisis there for a moment

[RtB]

I liked the way Sin City gave colour to the fleeting but critical elements - Alexis Bleidel's eyes, the red scarf, the yellow/orange of a cigarette burn - it was really well done.

[TheJacklikesvideos]

Sin City obviously makes interesting use of black and white (and red.) someone else mentioned Kill Bill as a good example. George Clooney's Good Night and Good Luck did the whole period piece B&W thing which helped to integrate historical footage. Clerks was a budget issue and i don't know if it really adds anything to the film, but the lack of color certainly doesn't detract from the dialogue driven humor.

[_Majunior]

I'm running out of your videos to binge. You're becoming one of my favorite film channels

[MildMisanthropeMaybeMassive]

The only film shot in color which I felt was improved by a monochromatic version was _The Mist_ because it feels like a classic horror B-movie and helps in hiding the artificiality of the effects.

[ainttrash]

Kill bill also did a good job with balancing color and b/w