Director Ridley Scott Describes a Scene from the Blade Runner Sequel
4 June 2012



Fans have been waiting patiently for a mere 30 years now for director Ridley Scott to return to the sci-fi genre, and the wait will finally be over with the release of Prometheus this week. As if one Alien-connected return to the genre wasn’t enough, Scott is also developing a sequel to his 1982 classic Blade Runner. We know that the follow-up takes place “some years after the first film” and it was recently announced that the original pic’s writer, Hampton Fancher, has been brought on develop and write the sequel for Scott to direct.

Steve recently sat down with Scott to talk about Prometheus, but the director also shared a ridiculously exciting gift regarding the Blade Runner sequel: he described a full scene. In order to give us an idea of the visual style he’s planning for the follow-up, Scott took the opportunity to map out a scene from the project that could easily serve as the opening to the film.

Steve began by asking Scott if he has already begun thinking about the visuals for the Blade Runner sequel, to which the director replied in the affirmative. Scott then proceeded to describe a scene from the in development project:

"There’ll be a vast farmland where there are no hedges or anything in sight, and it’s flat like the plains of—where’s the Great Plains in America? Kansas, where you can see for miles. And it’s dirt, but it’s being raked. On the horizon is a combine harvester which is futuristic with klieg lights, ‘cause it’s dawn. The harvester is as big as six houses. In the foreground is a small white clapboard hut with a porch as if it was from Grapes of Wrath. From the right comes a car, coming in about six feet off the ground being chased by a dog. And that’s the end of it, I’m not gonna tell you anything else."

So, yeah, that happened. Scott is known for crafting some truly gorgeous visuals, and this scene from the Blade Runner sequel appears to be no exception. It’s important to note that the project is still in the early stages of development, so this scene could be vastly different or entirely scrapped when the actual film comes together.

http://collider.com/ridley-scott-blade- ... ew/170633/

Blade Runner at 30: Celebrating Ridley Scott's Dystopian Vision
25 June 2012

Three decades after its release, Ridley Scott's movie of the Philip K. Dick novel remains an icon of knotty science-fiction film mastery




On the closing day of the Cannes Film Festival in May 1982 I sat in a terrace restaurant with Steven Spielberg and Melissa Matheson, the director and writer of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, which was to have its world premiere that night. I had just written a cover-length story for TIME on E.T., and in gratitude Spielberg had invited me to lunch. Sitting with Matheson was her beau, Harrison Ford, and we spent much of the afternoon discussing his new film, Blade Runner, which I had seen before leaving for Cannes and which would open June 25. Ford said he had enjoyed making the movie but was annoyed that he had to record a voiceover narration at the insistence of the producer, Bud Yorkin, who had also insisted the ending be changed. Even then, a month before its release, Blade Runner was awash in internecine controversy.

When the movie premiered, 30 years ago today, it received mixed reviews. Its star and director, Ridley Scott, were unhappy; and Philip K. Dick, the author of its source novel, had wildly conflicting feelings about the adaptation. The picture’s backers would consider it a flop — costing $30 million to produce, it earned just $27.6 million in its North American release.

But Blade Runner, the disputed child in a standard Hollywood custody case, would mature into one of the seminal artifacts and art works of science-fiction filmmaking. This film about the future found its salvation there. The movie has gone through more gestations than the monster in Scott’s Alien: a comic book, two video games, three sequels to the source novel and, of course, four increasingly refined versions of the film. Last year, Scott announced that he might make a sequel or prequel to Blade Runner.

Three decades after it opened, and seven years before the period in which it is set, we celebrate this important birthday by offering a few glimpses at what Blade Runner was and what it would become.

The Book

By 1980, Dick had been writing in the genre its adherents called SF (never, please, never sci-fi) for three decades. Many of his short stories and novels would be made into movies: “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” into Total Recall, “Second Variety” into Screamers, “Adjustment Team” into The Adjustment Bureau, plus Spielberg’s Minority Report, John Woo’s Paycheck and Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly. But Blade Runner was the first, based on the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

A biographical sketch at the time proclaimed that Dick “considers his best work to be Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?… because it deals with the misfortunes of animals and imagines a society where a person’s dog or cat is worth more as a status symbol (and costs more) than a house or car.” Yet when Dick managed to get a Blade Runner script, he found that the animal motif was gone.

And what does that title mean? It came from a novel by Alan Nourse that William S. Burroughs had adapted as a screenplay in 1979. Scott and writers Hampton Fancher and David Peoples just appropriated the title for their Androids project.

Reading the Blade Runner script, Dick thought “it bore no relation to the book…. What my story will become is one titanic lurid collision of androids being blown up, androids killing humans, general confusion and murder, all very exciting to watch…. They’re not called movies for nothing. I have no complaints.” Dick had known the movie wouldn’t be “faithful” to the book when he discussed androids with Scott. To the author, they were inhuman, unhuman simulations of us; to the director they were supermen who couldn’t fly.

Then he saw part of the movie in post-production and was wowed by the density of the world Ridley Scott’s team had created. “You would literally have to go five times to see it before you could assimilate the information that is fired at you,” in said in an interview in late 1981. “The human brain craves stimulation. And this movie will stimulate the brain, the brain will not be lulled…. The book and the movie do not fight each other. They reinforce each other.”

We’ll never know what Dick would have thought of the first release version of Blade Runner. He died March 2, 1982, five days after suffering a stroke. He was 53.

The Movie as It Was in 1982

Here’s part of what I wrote in TIME when the film was released:

Says David Dryer, who helped supervise the special photographic effects of Blade Runner: “The environment in the film is almost a protagonist.” He and other talented craftsmen are lavishing their imaginations on graphic design—on high-tech spaceships and déjà vu futurism—and allowing the characters to wander through a labyrinthine narrative like lost dwarfs. Moviegoers seeking the smooth propulsion of story line look at these films and ask, “What’s going on here?” Directors and effects specialists, plumbing the resources of a technology that can show what has never been seen before, answer: “The here is what’s going on. The setting, the surroundings, the texture.”

In Blade Runner, the here is quite enough: a vision of dark, cramped, urban squalor. This is Los Angeles in the year 2019, when most of the earth’s inhabitants have colonized other planets, and only a polyglot refuse heap of humanity remains. Los Angeles is a Japanized nighttown of sleaze and silicon, fetid steam and perpetual rain. This baroque Tomorrowland juggles images from a dozen yesterdays: walk out of the rain and into a 1940s world of overhead fan blades and women in shoulder-pad jackets moving to the cadence of a keening alto sax. The filthy streets are clogged with Third World losers and carnivores, while 10 ft. above them the police cars hover, monitoring the future as it molders into chaos.

Some people don’t belong in this decaying cityscape. One is Deckard (Harrison Ford), a burnt-out, Bogie-style detective; the others are “replicants,” robots of advanced design who have infiltrated the city to find their creator and prolong their short, violent lives beyond the allotted four-year span. Deckard, brought back into service to kill the quartet of replicants, finds it no easy job—for they are powerful and cunning, and he is tired beyond caring. Moreover, Deckard’s emotions have been short-circuited from a lifetime of dirty police work, whereas the emotions of the replicant leader Batty (Rutger Hauer) are flowering just as his “termination date” nears. And so the twin pursuits begin. Deckard, a man from the past, races against time to track down his quarry; Batty, the man of the future, races for as much time as genetic engineering and his appetite for life will grant him.

Blade Runner, like its setting, is a beautiful, deadly organism that devours life; and Ford, the cockily engaging Star Warrior of Raiders of the Lost Ark, allows his heroic stature to shrivel inside it. In comparison, Hauer’s silver-haired superman is more human than human, and finally more complex than Ford’s victimized flatfoot. Because of this imbalance of star roles, and because this drastically recut movie has a plot that proceeds by fits and stops, Blade Runner is likely to disappoint moviegoers hoping for sleek thrills and derring-do. But as a display terminal for the wizardry of Designers Lawrence G. Paull, Douglas Trumbull and Syd Mead, the movie delivers. The pleasures of texture have rarely been so savory.

The Making of Blade Runner

In Charles de Lauzirika’s feature-length making-of doc in the 2007 four-disc Blade Runner DVD pack, Fancher explains that his script was a kind of closet drama, with most of the scenes taking place within 1940s-style interiors. Scott kept asking, “What’s outside the window? There’s a world.” Fancher’s response: “F— the world.” Since Scott’s main interest was in creating that world, he looked to designer Paull and the art department for backup. And when Fancher was slow in producing rewrites (“They used to call me Happen Faster,” he says), Deeley hired Peoples, who hadn’t read the original novel.

Fancher had written the Deckard character for Robert Mitchum, a noir star then in his 60s. The producers considered nearly every leading man of the day: Sean Connery, Jack Nicholson, Paul Newman, Clint Eastwood, Peter Falk, Al Pacino, Nick Nolte, Burt Reynolds. They wasted months detoured on Dustin Hoffman. Somebody floated Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name, and this was before he’d made his first hit, Conan the Barbarian. Then Scott and Deeley saw rushes from Raiders of the Lost Ark, and they had their star.

Scott cast Hauer as the android Roy Batty after he was shown the actor’s early Dutch films. He tested several ingenues for the replicant Rachael and gave the role to Sean Young — “So perfectly right,” says Deeley. “She could be an android. She may be an android, for all I know.” Daryl Hannah, another cute kid without much screen experience, stuck on a blond punk wig, “puttied out my eyes” after seeing Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu and became the replicant Pris. Joanna Cassidy, one of the great underused beauties in movies of the time, was perfect as the snake lady. She was 62 when interviewed in 2007, and still looked gorgeous.

The visual team of Blade Runner — one of the last big fantasy movies to be made without much computer graphics finery — worked directly for Scott, who sketched each of his prolific ideas on paper (they were called “Ridley-grams”). He plundered the imagination of “futurist” Syd Mead and stole from the work of the French artist Mobius (Jean Giraud) in Heavy Metal magazine. Production illustrator Tom Southwell saw a Japanese ideogram he liked and placed it in the window of the noodle shop. He found out it meant “origin” — the theme, the big question of the film. Effects wizard Douglas Trumbull borrowed the explosions in the first shots of Blade Runner from effects he had created for (but were not used in) Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point more than a decade earlier. The top of the police building was a redesign of the mothership in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Moral: Never throw anything away.

When Scott looked at the first four-hour rough cut, he told his editor, “I think it’s marvelous. But what the f— does it mean?” Fancher’s take was less querulous: “You’ve ruined it,” he said to Scott. The film’s financial backers, Yorkin and Jerry Perenchio, weren’t crazy about it either. It was they who ordered up the voice-over narration (which Fancher had used in an early draft). Paul Sammon, one of several Blade Runner-ologists to speak in the 2007 doc, blamed the flop on E.T., which he called “happy comfort food” and which, by its extraordinary success, pushed out all darker science-fiction visions. A young director, Joseph Kahn (Torque), blamed it on Reagan. Yeah, well. In fact, Blade Runner was one of several dystopian science-fiction films to tank in the early and middle ’80s. Tron, The Dark Crystal, The Keep, Labyrinth: none found a large audience.

All the Other Blade Runners

The 2007 four-disc box set has four versions of the film: the original U.S. release; a slightly different version shown abroad; Scott’s 1997 recut of the movie (with the narration removed); and his latest, absolutely-final-for-now superduper director’s cut of the director’s cut. Scott did the commentary on one track; the writers and producers on a second; the designers and effects technicians on a third. The package also has enough exegesis — six hours of making-of docs! — to fill a Blade Runner doctoral dissertation, of which I’ll warrant there’ve already been several. A recluse could spend the years from now to 2019 immersed in this verbiage and visuage.

On the writers’ track, you’ll find Fancher and Peoples disagreeing about almost everything, as writers will, including the pronunciation of Chateau Marmont, the hotel where Fancher lived at the time. They also tangle over the best lines in the film: Each attributes them to the other writer. But it seems beyond dispute that Fancher came up with the noir angle; he also gave the movie a good title, Mechanismo, which producer Michael Deeley junked for Dangerous Days. (Not Dangerous Nights? Practically the whole movie takes place after dark.) And it was Peoples who, in a conversation with his daughter, came up with a classier word for the movie’s androids: replicants. People later wrote the 1998 film Soldier, which he described as a “sidequel” to Blade Runner: inspired by but independent of it.

Blade Runner, whose original version had a happy ending imposed on it, had a happy ending as a project. It became one of the most revered and influential fantasy films of its time (tied with Alien). New technology — video players, with their pause and slo-mo buttons — brought new fans. Sammon: “When they could actually manipulate the film, just as Deckard manipulates Roy Batty’s photograph, then they suddenly realized what an accomplishment it was.” Viewers were finally ready to savor the pleasures of texture.

Three decades after that Cannes conversation with Harrison Ford, I can finally imagine a smile on his stern face. And now, Mr. Scott, could we please see the Blade Runner sequel-prequel? And, for an extra 30th-anniversary treat, the four-hour rough cut of the original film? It’s got to be somewhere.

http://entertainment.time.com/2012/06/2 ... de-runner/

Ridley Scott on Blade Runner Sequel
12 October 2012



British commuters' freesheet The Metro spoke with Ridley Scott this week to tie-in with Prometheus's Blu-ray and DVD release, as you might have guessed, the conversation turned to the possibilities for Prometheus 2 and Blade Runner 2.

The Metro approached the question as if the idea of a Blade Runner sequel was just a rumour. Scott was quick to dismiss that idea:

"It’s not a rumour – it’s happening. With Harrison Ford? I don’t know yet. Is he too old? Well, he was a Nexus-6 so we don’t know how long he can live [laughs]. And that’s all I’m going to say at this stage."

Make of that what you will, especially with Scott's tongue obviously firmly embedded within his cheek (following on from something similarly jokey earlier in the year), but it's an emphatic confirmation that the Blade Runner follow-up is go.

Then there's the indication from Scott that the Blade Runner sequel's protagonist should be female, as well as the news that the original's writer, Hampton Francher, is also on board the project – but nothing is fully confirmed as yet.

http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=35490

Ridley Scott Finds New Writer for Blade Runner Sequel
31 May 2013



Michael Green is in negotiations to work on Alcon’s Blade Runner sequel, which is to be directed by Ridley Scott.

Hampton Fancher, who wrote the original movie, did the initial draft of the sequel.

Loglines are being kept locked but it is known to be set several years after the events of the classic 1982 sci-fi movie starring Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer.

Green recently completed rewrites on Robopocalypse, Steven Spielberg's recently delayed sci-fi tentpole, as well as Warners' Moses project Gods and Kings.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/green-talks-rewrite-561246

Harrison Ford Talks Blade Runner Sequel
9 October 2013

'We've been chatting about it...'



With all the recent Star Wars shenanigans, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner follow-up has rather been swept aside in the news-snippet stakes. Kudos to IGN then, for asking Harrison Ford about Rick Deckard rather than Han Solo, when they caught him on the Ender's Game publicity trail. Is he actually interested in reteaming with Ridley? "We've been chatting about it," he reveals.

Ford's involvement (or non-involvement) has been the subject of much speculation since the project was revealed back in August 2011. Andrew Kosove, of production company Alcon Entertainment, was initially quoted as saying there was practically no chance of Ford showing up ("I think it is quite unlikely").

A few months later, however, a mischievous Scott suggested that, while Deckard isn't intended as the centre of the film (it sounds more like a Prometheus-ish expansion of the mythology), "It would be amusing to have him it somewhere". A few months after that, Scott was musing about how Deckard's having aged might be explained away in the film. "He was a Nexus 6, so we don't know how long he can live," he chuckled. Since Ford was never an adherent of the Deckard's-a-replicant school of thought, you might think that would be a sticking point.

The assumption about Ford's reluctance to attend, however, has always been based on his much-reported ambivalence towards the original, and his fractious on-set relationship with his director. His appearance on the lengthy Final Cut DVD documentary suggested that those wounds have healed though, and he now tells IGN: "I remember it with complication, but I'm not there to generate nostalgic moments, I'm there to do a job of work. I quite understand that everybody has an ambition when they come and do a film, and everyone's ambition may not be focused on the same thing. I truly admire Ridley as a man and as a director, and I would be very happy to engage with him again in the further telling of this story."

As for the infamous voiceover, excised from all versions subsequent to the Theatrical Cut, Ford, of course, says, "That was a big part of the issue. I don't think it was necessary... and Ridley didn't think it was necessary. That was something that came up from the studio." So if the new film required narration? "I'm now capable of losing my voice: cutting out my tonsils and my vocal chords!"

Blade Runner 2 - or whatever it ends up being called - is a long way off yet. Last we heard, Michael Green was at work on the screenplay, following an initial draft by original Blade Runner writer Hampton Fancher.

http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=38990

Harrison Ford On the Blade Runner Sequel
14 April 2014

'I'm quite curious and excited'



This weekend Harrison Ford submitted himself to a Reddit grilling in which, between revelations about snakes (likes them) and David Blaine ("spooky"), he shared his thoughts on the long-mooted Blade Runner sequel. Positive thoughts, too. "I’m quite curious and excited about seeing a new script for Blade Runner", Ford wrote. "If in fact the opportunity would exist to do another, if it’s a good script I would be very anxious to work with Ridley Scott again. He’s a very talented and passionate filmmaker."

Despite painful memories of a Blade Runner shoot he still remembers as the most difficult he's experienced, with 50 night shoots in a row and almost constant rain, he said that he's keen to get back under the skin of Deckard: "I think it would be very interesting to revisit the character."

Ridley Scott, of course, is already on record saying that the sequel to his Philip K. Dick-inspired sci-fi "will happen sooner or later", and Ford's enthusiasm means that a big part of the jigsaw should fall more easily into place.

"I quite understand that everybody has an ambition when they come and do a film, and everyone's ambition may not be focused on the same thing," the actor explained, with some vagueness, back in October. "I truly admire Ridley as a man and as a director, and I would be very happy to engage with him again in the further telling of this story."

http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=40749

Harrison Ford Offered to Reprise Rick Deckard Role in 'Blade Runner' Sequel
15 May 2014



It's official: Harrison Ford has been offered to reprise his iconic role as Rick Deckard in the sequel to "Blade Runner."

The film is a followup to the 1982 classic by the now-very busy Ridley Scott – who was just announced to direct Matt Damon in "The Martian," as well as having "Prometheus 2" in the pipeline – and will be written by Hampton Fancher (who co-penned the original, adapted from Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?") and Michael Green. Scott has been attached to the project since its original announcement in 2011.

While it's unusual for producers to go public with their news of an offer to an actor, they're probably hoping that an emphatic reaction, online or otherwise, from fans would sway Ford, who's also starring in the latest "Star Wars" installment, into taking the bait.

There hasn't been any word from Ford's camp yet. Stay tuned.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononho ... ner-sequel

So, this means that Deckard is not android? Then for me its bullshit!

It doesn't mean that. It could mean for instance that Deckard is an android that was designed to ape the process of human aging. Or that Deckard has paid for someone to make him look older in order for him to blend in. And so on and so on. There are many possible explanations to Deckard's apparent "aging" in the sequel. But whatever the case it needs to be pointed out that Ridley Scott has stated for years and years now that Deckard is an android which means that Deckard is an android and will remain so. Unless of course there's another Deckard, an original human Deckard that Deckard the android was closely based on but a scenario like that seems very unlikely.

I understand all this and I hope you are right. The point is that after first movie we don't know and STILL debate is he android or human. Nobady knows that for shure even Ford and Scott don't know it (yet). And I personaly want that same debate after sequel. That's what I want to say.

Well, Ridley Scott disagrees with you and, less importantly, so do I. I do not mind if that debate is still going on but after Ridley made it clear he's an android/replicant it has seemed futile to me.

Blade Runner Riddle Solved
9 July 2000



Director Ridley Scott has finally revealed the answer to a plot twist in his film Blade Runner which has been the topic of fierce debate for nearly two decades. Movie fans have been divided over whether Harrison Ford's hard-boiled cop character Deckard was not human but a genetically-engineered "replicant" - the very creatures he is tasked with destroying.

Little suspicion was raised by the 1982 original version of the film, based on Philip K Dick's novel: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? But a decade later the Director's Cut edition - although deliberately ambiguous - convinced many that the hero was indeed a replicant and in a Channel 4 documentary Scott at last reveals they are correct.

'He's a Replicant'

The acclaimed British director, who also directed Alien, Thelma and Louise and current box-office hit Gladiator, settles the issue when questioned on key aspects of the film's imagery.

In the Director's Cut version, the biggest clue for analysts was the appearance of a unicorn on screen while Deckard is lost in thought. The image of the mythical creature appears again towards the end of the film when he picks up an origami model discarded by another character, Gaff. As the replicants had no memories of their own, they had to be implanted, and fans interpreted the appearance of the model as a sign that Gaff knew what Deckard was thinking because it was an image shared by other non-humans.

In Channel 4's documentary On The Edge Of Blade Runner, Scott discusses the scenes and asked what they mean, he confirms with a grin: "He's a replicant".

Another hint in the film comes from the number of replicants which Deckard is hunting. We find out that six had made their way to earth, one of whom was killed. Deckard is looking for four, begging the question: "Who is the fifth replicant?".

Blade Runner's futuristic urban imagery was hugely influential on later movies but at the time of its release it was a relative box office flop. However the film noir-style movie proved to be a success when released on video with repeated viewings revealing hidden depths. When it was first made, poor reception at preview screenings prompted the film's backers to call for a happy ending being added, as well as a voice-over from Ford. Scott removed these for his revised version. "What we'd done was kind of a dark novel, it was rather novelistic," he said.

"I didn't really realise that that eventually became the true longevity of the whole film - you revisit it constantly like re-reading one of your favourite books. You always find you get sucked in again.

"I still think it's one of the best films I ever made," he added.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/825641.stm

He said that, but it's notting official. Things still can be changed in sequel. But, as I said, I personally want this question to still be open after second one. Because this debate is one of the main reasons why first movie was so good.

Well, the different cuts of the film will forever exist which I suppose leaves some room for debate, at least until the sequel arrives.

'Blade Runner 2': Harrison Ford Confirmed, Ridley Scott Producing
24 March 2015

'Prisoners' filmmaker Denis Villeneuve is in talks to direct an untitled 'Blade Runner' sequel.



Harrison Ford will reprise his celebrated role as Rick Deckard in the sequel to Alcon Entertainment's Blade Runner, with Academy Award nominee Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners, Incendies) in negotiations to direct, it was announced by Alcon co-founders and co-CEO's Andrew A. Kosove and Broderick Johnson. The film is scheduled to start principal photography in summer of 2016. Hampton Fancher (co-writer of the original) and Michael Green have written the original screenplay based on an idea by Fancher and Ridley Scott. Ridley Scott, who directed the iconic 1982 sci-fi pic for Warner Bros., is aboard to executive produce.The story takes place several decades after the conclusion of the 1982 original. Here's what Andrew A. Kosove and Broderick Johnson had to say in a statement.

"We are honored that Harrison is joining us on this journey with Denis Villeneuve, who is a singular talent, as we experienced personally on 'Prisoners'. Hampton and Michael, with Ridley Scott, have crafted a uniquely potent and faithful sequel to one of the most universally celebrated films of all time, and we couldn't be more thrilled with this amazing, creative team."

Among its many distinctions, Blade Runner has been singled out as one of the greatest movies of all time by innumerable polls and media outlets, and overwhelmingly as the greatest science-fiction film of all time by a majority of genre publications.

Blade Runner was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." The film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry in 1993 and is frequently taught in university courses.

'Blade Runner 2' comes to theaters in 2017.

http://www.movieweb.com/blade-runner-2- ... dley-scott