Mad Max: Fury Road in black and white: a fascinating re-evaluation of a groundbreaking film | Luke Buckmaster

While the monochrome redux loses some of the aesthetic grandness of the original, it throws a psychological spanner in the works

Ted Kotcheff, the director of Wake in Fright, recently told me how he was inspired by what the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz called “petite perceptions”. Before rolling the camera on his 1971 masterpiece, Kotcheff purchased thousands of dead flies from Sydney university, spread them everywhere on set (on top of books, on the ground, on shelves and tables), and sprayed the air with a fine dust-like substance.

You can’t see these things on screen but, he argued, they have a psychological impact.