Mad Max: Fury Road isn’t your average post-apocalyptic film, nor is it your average action movie, as I’m sure you know by now. Although the first set of promo photos from the film were de-saturated and had a more conventionally gritty look, the final product was gorgeously vibrant. But according to director George Miller, his preferred version ditches that bright, beautiful coloration entirely.

Slashfilm picked up the following quote from Miller, who discusses the coloring process on Fury Road and reveals that the best version of the film is actually in black and white:

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.

He’s not the only director to prefer a black and white version of his film, and just as Frank Darabont did with The Mist, the Miller will include the preferred black and white version of Mad Max: Fury Road on the Blu-ray release. In addition, Miller discussed his affinity for silent films, and there will be an option to play the black and white version with only the isolated score, removing the rest of the soundtrack to give viewers what Miller thinks is the most ideal experience.

To get something of an idea of how this might look, Renn Brown (again, hat tip to Slashfilm) put together this quick black and white version of the Fury Road trailer:

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