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So what made the monochrome edition of FURY ROAD matter to me as something I had to see? Well, for one thing, the use of color in cinema and the possibility of post-production manipulation of color that has evolved over the past 20 years has really changed how I am even allowed to think about this subject compared to how I thought of it in my formative years as a filmmaker. I grew up and did my first experiments as a filmmaker in an era in which, if you wanted something to look a certain way, it basically had to look that way on the set. There was no such thing as “color grading” as it is known today. All that stuff was controlled chemically or through color timing techniques that were all done painstakingly through physical processes and it was very limited. You had to know exactly what you were trying to get in post from the moment you started building a set or dressing a location. Because that was basically what you were going to end up with. There were tricks. Like getting that cool metalic look in TERMINATOR 2 by leaving a layer of silver on the film during processing – A technique I tried very hard to emulate in the digital processing of my own film, The Danger Element, but doesn’t come close because it simply wasn’t done the same way. Digital color processing just literally didn’t exist in my formative years.

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