Is there something you’ve always wanted to know about Blade Runner? In honor of BLADE RUNNER: THE FINAL CUT, the team behind the movie will now be taking your questions. Send us your question in a personal message, or post a question in our comments section. New answers will be displayed here every Friday, so check back and learn more about
The Film that Started it All!
The Unicorn. The most beautiful scene. Is it a memory?
It was originally conceived as a reverie, or a waking dream. However, the film itself never explains exactly what kind of vision it is, which is probably for the best. To paraphrase screenwriter and executive producer Hampton Fancher, it’s the question the Unicorn raises that’s interesting. The answer is not. However, if you look at the clues and come away believing that Deckard is, in fact, a replicant, then yes, it can probably only be a fanciful implanted memory. If you come away still believing he’s human, then perhaps Rick’s simply had one too many bottles of Tsing Tao.
What influence, if any, did Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" have on the cinemaphotography, or other aspects of "Blade Runner"?
BLADE RUNNER’s Special Photographic Effects Supervisor, David Dryer, once showed me an eye-opening video comparison between the two films that he cleverly edited together and it was fascinating to see how many similarities there are, whether intentional or not. Not just in terms of cinematography, but also in the production design, costume design and even storyline. Any BLADE RUNNER fan who hasn’t seen Fritz Lang’s groundbreaking METROPOLIS should watch it immediately and make their own comparisons.
So I remember seeing the movie in a theater when it was first relased and the ending was slightly different than the one I saw on cable or the one on the dvd I own. If I remember the original movie I saw had Decker and his almost human android flying off to somewhere North. It was like I had not watched the same movie when later versions were modified. Why take a good thing and mess with it?
Whether the film’s original 1982 “happy ending” (in which Deckard and Rachael escape the polluted, over-populated Los Angeles for an improbably beautiful and lush wilderness) is a “good thing” or not is clearly open for debate. The happy ending begs the question, “If there’s a such a clean, hospitable environment within driving distance of the congested megalopolis of L.A. 2019, why wouldn’t everyone go live there instead? Why is everyone trying to get Off World?” It doesn’t really make much sense and feels like a different movie has been grafted onto the one we’d just been watching. And as many BLADE RUNNER fans will tell you, it was from a different movie! Ridley Scott used outtakes from Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING to flesh out that happy ending which was only cobbled together after test screening results suggested that audiences didn’t like Ridley’s far more ambiguous original ending of Deckard and Rachael entering the elevator, as seen in the Workprint, the Director’s Cut and now the Final Cut.
Is it true that Rutger Hauer wrote the final words of roy batty "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."?
Rutger did indeed come up with the latter part of that unforgettable speech, first during an early table read of the script, then again on the last day of shooting. As you will see in the DANGEROUS DAYS documentary, there was a very different speech planned for that scene, and was even filmed. It was originally written as dialogue for Leon but ended up being repurposed for Batty and mostly had to do with reproduction and the Nexus 6’s genetically-engineered inability to procreate. “Lots of little oversights,” Batty tells Deckard. (A fragment of this train of thought remains with Leon in this finished film, when he informs Deckard, “Nothing’s worse than having an itch you can never scratch.”) But after you see the outtakes of that alternate version in the documentary, I think you’ll be glad that Ridley decided to go with Rutger’s heartbreaking “tears in rain” speech instead.
Why is everyone so opposed to Harrison Ford's narration?
Well, I wouldn’t say that “everyone” is opposed to it. Some people, particularly those who grew up with the original version of the film, still miss that hard-boiled narration – and those fans will be very happy to have the option of enjoying that original voice-over in the 4-disc and 5-disc versions of the upcoming BLADE RUNNER set. Every time I watch the narration-free Final Cut and see Deckard for the first time, reading his newspaper across from the White Dragon noodle bar, a little voice in my head still says, “They don’t advertise for killers in a newspaper…”
On the other hand, some fans feel that the narration is over-explanatory, awkwardly written (by Roland Kibbee) and flatly performed by Harrison Ford. It was, as Ridley might describe it, a little too much of “Irving the Explainer.” There was actually a completely different narration recorded by Harrison for the film, based on earlier drafts of the script by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples. And you will get to hear this very different voice-over in its entirety in the Deleted and Alternate Scenes section of the new set. And we have an entire section of the DANGEROUS DAYS documentary devoted to how the narration was developed, recorded, re-recorded and eventually abandoned. Harrison, in particular, has some amusingly vivid memories of those recording sessions.
Questions are answered by Charles de Lauzirika (Restoration Producer, BLADE RUNNER: THE FINAL CUT & Director/Producer, DANGEROUS DAYS: MAKING BLADE RUNNER).
