The Design Of Mad Max: Fury Road's War Boys Wasn't Always So Black And White
We can all agree that George Miller's "Mad Max: Fury Road" is a visual spectacle of the highest order. So much stuff is going on in every frame of that movie that you'd think the creative approach was to cram as much detail as they could into every corner of this universe, but according to Miller, that wasn't the case. Well, to be fair, it kinda started that way. But as the prep process went on, he discovered that sometimes it was better to strip away some of the detail and keep things simple.
Case in point: the look of the War Boys. In the movie, they are Immortan Joe's minions, an army of quasi-mutated and very thirsty people who are doomed to a short life and thus are looking to go out in a blaze of glory believing they will reach Valhalla shiny and chrome. Concept artist Brendan McCarthy's original illustrations for the War Boys were way more colorful, with intricate face paintings and showier costumes. You can see some examples of that on his site.
As the project developed, Miller decided to drain the color from them until they were all some combination of white, black, and gray.
"If you look at Brendan's original drawings of the War Boys, they're much more decorated and we kept on paring it down. That was one thing I learned about this movie as time went on. You know, it was simplify simplify simplify because it's a very spare world. You don't want clutter, you don't want to create visual noise. And knowing that the movie was going to play so super fast that you had to make it — some colors were muted, if you look at it, the brightest costume is the Doof Warrior's and so on and so on."
The color scheme played into one of Miller's favorite small details about the movie
George Miller said the key to this decision was looking at the concept of a "half-life" for this particular group of people. There are a few who are deemed "full-lives," which would be Max (an outsider) and the Imperators like Furiosa. The Imperator design is depicted as having the tops of their shaved heads covered in black — and the idea is if they start to get sick and prove themselves to be "half-lives" then they'd go full white.
Miller went into detail on this during a conversation at the Sydney Opera House, saying that the "half-life"/"full-life" detail was one that escaped even the biggest fan of the movie. It was something he hoped would be more apparent while watching, as it was one of his favorite small details about "Fury Road."
The War Boys having "half-lives" and a lower lifespan is key to their look and it made so much more sense to strip them down. Instead of colorful war paint on their faces, they instead adopted a skeletal look of sunken eyes and cheeks accentuated with black shade on a stark white base layer. Their scarification is also meant to emphasize the skeletal look as they did everything they could to embrace an early death, up to and including worship of car parts that would outlast their short life spans.
It's details like these that keep "Mad Max: Fury Road" an all-timer movie that you love to revisit over and over again.