JOHNNY MNEMONIC IN BLACK AND WHITE Amazon link:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B6JRVYTY/ImportCDs:
https://www.importcds.com/johnny-mnemon ... 3396582958And re-posting this interview with Robert Longo about the genesis of his B&W version:
"Johnny Mnemonic in Black-and-White: Robert Longo Interview":
https://www.screenslate.com/articles/johnny-mnemonic-black-and-white-robert-longo-interviewI'm assuming you try to limit contact with the studio nowadays, but do you have any sense of how they feel about the black-and-white cut?
Originally, when I decided to make this black-and-white conversion, I ripped a Blu-ray and turned it black-and-white. I contacted one of the film’s original producers who was also a good guy, Don Carmody. I said to him, "I'm doing this, and I'm going to dump it on the 25th anniversary. I'm going to dump it on YouTube,” or something like that. And he said, "Wait, let me see it." So, I sent it to him, and he got really excited. "This is really great. We should show this to Sony." I hesitated to get Sony involved at first, but the problem with the Blu-ray version is that the quality would not be good enough to project it in a theater. So, Sony gave us the footage to work from, and they may release this new version on Blu-ray. There's never been a director's cut. Ironically, there is a version that some people misunderstand to be a “director's cut,” the Japanese version of it, but it's not a director's cut. It's basically got more Takeshi Kitano in it. That's basically what it is.
So, I got the hi-res footage from the studio, and we graded it into black-and-white. I worked with Cyrus Stowe, who was the colorist on this version. Basically, we went through it scene-by-scene, and he was really great. He's really a very talented guy.
Was that feeling of redemption there, throughout the process?
When I saw the first version of the black-and-white film, I was just so happy. It was so much closer to what I imagined it to be, for sure. I knew turning it black-and-white would get it closer to where I imagined it from the very beginning. In my work, I take inspiration from films like Alphaville, La Jetée, things like that. A lot of black-and-white movies are not really black-and-white. They're kind of gray. The contrast is really pumped up now [in this cut] so it’s very black-and-white.