The star hated it, the author hated it, and even audiences weren't amused when
it debuted back in 1982. Here's the story of how, 40 years later,
"Blade Runner" became regarded as one of the greatest sci-fi movies of all time.
Warning: This video contains fast, flashing images. Viewer discretion is advised,
especially for those with photosensitive epilepsy.
"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" is a hard title to fit on the poster, so when the "Blade
Runner" team adapted Philip K. Dick's novel, it makes sense that they changed the name.
But after that, it gets complicated because the term "blade runner" never even appears in the
original novel. Instead, it dates back to the obscure science fiction author Alan E. Nourse,
who used knowledge obtained in his medical doctor day job to write a dystopian future
full of eugenics and black-market medical care in "The Bladerunner." In this novel,
"bladerunners" are the middlemen who smuggle scalpels and other surgical
tools to rogue doctors. Which makes sense... but why port it over to a
completely different future and use it to describe android-hunting cops?
Well, the term for these middlemen had a crucial middleman of its own:
off-the-wall genius William S. Burroughs, the author of "Naked Lunch." Burroughs
loved Nourse's original novel so much that he wrote a legendarily weird film treatment of it,
which found its way into screenwriter Hampton Fancher's library. When Fancher, Ridley Scott,
and producer Michael Deely were trying to brainstorm a more unique job title
for Deckard — in Dick's book, he was just a cop, plain and simple — Fancher took a
look at his shelves for inspiration. There was "The Blade Runner," and his problem was solved.
Ridley Scott shouldn't have been available to make "Blade Runner." If everything had gone according
to plan, he would've been too tied up adapting "Dune." In fact, when Scott was first offered
the chance to direct "Blade Runner" he turned it down. It sounded intriguing, but his plate
was already full. He was only going to take on one major science fiction movie at a time.
But tragically, everything got upended. Frank Scott died of skin cancer, and losing his
beloved older brother sent Ridley Scott into an emotional tailspin. Scott told Vanity Fair,
"I was so down. I needed to do something."
And "Dune" wouldn't even go into production for another year. But "Blade Runner" was still
available, so Scott took it on ... and turned it into an immortal work of art.
Scott's grief shaped "Blade Runner" in other ways too. At The Directors Series, Cameron Beyl writes,
"In this light, Scott's approach to 'Blade Runner' serves as something of a grieving process for his
late brother — an intensely personal work [...] a heartfelt meditation on creation,
death, and loss— the beauty of life as defined by its ephemerality."
Considered in that light, the film gains even more power and meaning.
How does "Blade Runner" imagine an utterly convincing future? It draws on the
past — especially Hollywood's past, pulling from film noir to create its own mean L.A. streets.
The British Film Institute's "anatomy of a classic" feature on the film traces some of
its inspirations. They range far and wide — even including Edward Hopper's iconic
painting "Nighthawks," with its quietly lonely diner patrons — but classic Hollywood comes up
again and again. One of the best pulls is Rachael's hairstyles and costuming.
As fashion site GlamAmor explains, her styling draws heavily not only on the
1930s and '40s but on specific films: "Mildred Pierce'' and "The Thin Man."
Most of all, the film noir inspiration shows up in Harrison Ford's Deckard. With his trench coat,
jaded decency, and semi-outsider status, he's an old school hardboiled detective,
plain and simple. Even Deckard's voiceover — often mocked by fans and ultimately removed
from the Final Cut edition — belongs to this noir sensibility. In fact,
even though this exact voiceover track suffered from studio-mandated dollops of exposition,
Ridley Scott liked the basic idea and even intermittently planned on using one himself.
Screenwriter Hampton Fancher confirmed this in the making-of book "Future Noir,"
"Scott was after the feel of a '40s detective thriller,
so he liked the idea of using this film noir device."
All these familiar movie tropes help sell us on this darkly strange new world.
Edward James Olmos' enigmatic character Gaff often speaks in a kind of linguistic hodgepodge
of several real-world languages. In the original cut of the film,
Deckard's voiceover explains that this lingo is called "Cityspeak."
(Speaking in foreign language)
And before Olmos got his hands on the script, that's about all anyone knew
about it. Cityspeak was a blank slate, just a "funny language" placeholder. It
caught Olmos' imagination like a hook, and it seemed like a key part of Gaff's character. So,
as he explained in "Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner,"
"My first idea was to put a mixture of genuine Spanish, French, Chinese, German, Hungarian,
and Japanese into Cityspeak. Then I went to the Berlitz School of Languages in Los Angeles,
translated all these different bits and pieces of Gaff's original dialogue into
fragments of foreign tongues, and learned to properly pronounce them."
This futuristic L.A. language is exactly the kind of worldbuilding
that makes "Blade Runner" one of the best science fiction movies ever made.
"Blade Runner" has some of the greatest sets of all time. If we close our eyes,
we can see it's dark and rainy futuristic Los Angeles, jam-packed with people and buildings,
and all the details fit together perfectly. And, of course, there's a reason for that. A lot of
thought went into the film's production design — especially its architecture.
As Ridley Scott explained to American Cinematographer,
old buildings are difficult to maintain, and when they're in
the middle of urban environments, they can be even more difficult to raze and rebuild.
"Eventually, you'll just have to 'retrofit' things on the face of the building rather
than having to pull half the side off. [...] It's going to be simpler just to smack things
on the outside. So maybe buildings will start to be designed from the inside out.
You wear your guts on the outside. That gives us a picture of a textured city."
And just as the buildings have gotten more and more piled-on,
so have the streets, which intentionally evoke a kind of desperate overcrowding.
It takes money — and a flying car — to go higher. And it takes even more money to build
something new: Tyrell's 700-story pyramid full of polished black marble. It's like an Aztec temple
reimagined as an office building — the production designer called it "Establishment Gothic" — and it
quickly signals Tyrell's incredible power. Now that's some efficient storytelling.
When it comes to "Blade Runner" quotes, two have always stood out
head and shoulders above the rest: Gaff's last question to Deckard —
"It's too bad she won't live. But, then again, who does?"
and the "tears in rain" speech Roy Batty makes as he dies. Even reading them can give you chills.
But what makes them particularly remarkable is that they were invented by the actors themselves.
The British Film Institute's "anatomy of a classic" article details how Rutger Hauer
saw Roy as the hero of the piece and pushed and pushed for his interpretation — Roy as a kind
of embodiment of charisma, and in his words, "a romantic, flamboyant, sexualized dandy:
half-rock star and half-terrorist." His influence over his character and
his persistence in advocating for it led Scott to give him permission to write Roy's final speech.
Right from the start, Ridley Scott insisted that their flying cars had to be a little
different from everybody else's — no plane-like wings or standard propellers. Designer Syd Mead
told American Cinematographer that the real challenge wasn't a technical one,
it was psychological. Mead had to work with what he calls "audience in-head memory,"
where people only believe in something new if it resonates with what they already know.
He worked with that memory partly by making sure every vehicle we saw
matched up with the world as a whole, explaining,
"For instance, you'd start with the air pollution, and you'd say,
'If that's true, then they would probably have to have bigger air
conditioning units.' [...] More congested traffic, and you get bigger bumpers."
They're all familiar ideas applied in an unconventional way. The same is true for
how the vehicles match their characters — J.F. Sebastian the "tinkerer" has a
van that's consciously designed to look like he pieced it together himself. Maybe the audience
doesn't consciously take any of this in, but it all paints a vivid and convincing picture.
Making "Blade Runner" left Harrison Ford miserable.
"What the hell was happening to me?"
The production's continual night shoots were exhausting, and Ridley Scott,
who wasn't used to opinionated American film crews, had a talent for rubbing
everyone the wrong way. But Ford had an extra complaint. He believed very strongly
that Deckard shouldn't be a replicant, in an interview with Vanity Fair, he said,
"I felt that the audience needed to have someone on-screen that
they could emotionally relate to as though they were a human being."
Scott kept slipping in subtle clues to undermine this. It was a major artistic
standoff, and neither one of them could let it go.
The film was also a sore spot for a while because it initially flopped. In hindsight,
we can certainly see that it didn't hurt Ford's career, but it must've felt like it at the time.
All in all, we can see why it all left Ford pretty sour, but we're glad that the film's
lasting cultural legacy has brought him around on it. He and Scott mended fences,
and Ford returned for "Blade Runner 2049, which Scott executive produced.
"Blade Runner" was such a distinctive, ambiguous, and ambitious film that it was,
right from the start, in danger of being a flop. So — guided by
early test screenings — Ridley Scott decided to inject a little more optimism into the ending.
The 1982 release, accordingly, featured Deckard and Rachael making their getaway
into the mountains, transitioning from the noir cityscape to a kind of idyllic untamed nature
where it's possible they can find some kind of peace. But most of the footage they captured
at Big Bear Lake was marred by bad weather. When you're desperately trying to inject a
little more hope into your ending, you know what you don't want? Heavy, ominous clouds.
Luckily, Scott remembered the famous opening of Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining," where the camera
glides over the mountains to follow the Torrances' car. In context, it's unsettling. Out of context,
it's gorgeous. And while Kubrick didn't want to turn over any shots he'd actually used,
he was fine with supplying Scott with his outtakes. It's a clever solution...
provided the audience doesn't know about the substitution. No one wants to think that
Deckard and Rachael are inadvertently fleeing towards the Overlook Hotel.
Philip K. Dick and "Blade Runner" got off to a bad start. In an interview with The Twilight
Zone Magazine, Dick explained that his dealings with Hollywood left a bad taste in his mouth.
He didn't trust the studio, and he didn't like the "Blade Runner" script. He thought
Hampton Fancher's original screenplay "cleaned [the] book up of all of the subtleties and of
the meaning," and it upset him to feel like his work was being stripped of its real substance.
Seeing a promo of the movie's special effects turned things
around. The visuals boggled him. He said,
"I recognized it immediately. It was my own interior world. They caught it perfectly."
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe."
Ironically, this was exactly the change of heart he'd been worried he would have. Beforehand,
his agent had urged him to go see the remarkable sets, and Dick had refused, saying,
"If the sets are that good, maybe I'll go up there and fall into the mode that exists now
in science fiction, where the special effects and the sets are everything."
Well, he didn't go that far. But the sets were good, so they prompted him to ask for
a copy of the new screenplay. And the adjustments won him over completely.
Unfortunately, Dick died a few months before the movie's release. He was never
able to see it in full, but we're glad it still wound up giving him some joy.
We're all used to the story of the classic film that bombs at the box office and only
picks up its true audience later on. It's happened before, and it'll happen again. And to be fair,
the original cut of "Blade Runner" was burdened with tacked-on happy and lackluster voiceovers.
"They don't advertise for killers in a newspaper. That was my profession."
If you prefer the more ambiguous later editions,
you might understand why theatergoers in 1982 mostly gave this one a miss.
But they also gave it a miss because it opened in June of 1982, which was absolutely swamped
with competing sci-fi features, nearly all of which have proved memorable in their own
right. "Blade Runner" — already burdened with lackluster reviews — was coming into
theaters that were already packed for showings of "E.T." and "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan".
And even audiences who wanted darker fare could have flocked to "Poltergeist" or John Carpenter's
superbly chilly "The Thing," which opened directly opposite "Blade Runner." It was a
month jam-packed with destined classics, and plenty of audiences understandably
opted for the more familiar and comforting entertainment of Spielberg and "Star Trek."
When you want to watch "Blade Runner," you have to make a choice – which "Blade Runner," exactly?
As it turns out, there are seven different versions of "Blade Runner." And these aren't
as buried as the original versions of "Star Wars" either. You can still get your hands on several
older versions of "Blade Runner," especially if you shell out for the Collector's Edition DVDs.
But for most fans, it comes down to a battle between the original U.S. theatrical cut and
Ridley Scott's Final Cut from 2007. Both have their merits. For example,
the original is the version that cemented the movie's place in history. No one would've ever
cared about the Final Cut if they hadn't already been hooked by the original. It's
also not like the Final Cut represents some kind of pristine artistic purity. After all,
it's not just a cut free of studio interference, it contains out-and-out reshoots. The Final Cut
is a masterpiece of ambiguity, with all the original virtues of the film sharpened and
polished. You lose the clunky narration, and you get a much more convincing, haunting ending.
There's no wrong answer here, and both versions, like humans and replicants, are equally real.