Blade Runner

• 1. Introduction

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  Blade Runner arrived in theaters on the 25th of June, 1982, a date producer Alan Ladd Jr. chose deliberately because the 25th of the month had been his lucky day for previous releases. Ridley Scott's film dropped audiences into a Los Angeles of 2019 where rain never seems to stop, where artificial animals stand in for extinct ones, and where a corporation called Tyrell builds synthetic humans called replicants to labor in space colonies. When a group of those replicants escapes back to Earth, a former cop named Rick Deckard is pulled out of retirement to hunt them down.

  The film earned mixed reviews at first. Some critics called it slow. One dubbed it "Blade Crawler." Another described it as "science fiction pornography." It was released the same summer as The Thing, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and the competition hurt its box office. Yet a poet named Rutger Hauer rewrote his own death speech on set and delivered it as something that would outlast every film that beat Blade Runner at the box office that season.

  What turned a commercial disappointment into one of the most analyzed films ever made? How did a story about a man hunting artificial humans end up asking harder questions about the hunter than the hunted? And why does the film exist in seven different versions, only one of which Ridley Scott actually controls?

• 2. A Novel Nobody Wanted to Film Correctly

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  Philip K. Dick published Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in 1968, and interest in adapting it surfaced almost immediately. Director Martin Scorsese was interested but never optioned it. Producer Herb Jaffe did option it in the early 1970s, but Dick was so disgusted by the screenplay Herb's son Robert wrote that he greeted the younger Jaffe at the airport with a mock threat: "Shall I beat you up here at the airport, or shall I beat you up back at my apartment?"

  Hampton Fancher's screenplay was optioned in 1977, and producer Michael Deeley brought Ridley Scott on board. Scott had recently walked away from a slow Dune production after his older brother died, and he wanted something faster-paced. He joined the project on the 21st of February, 1980, and quickly pushed the Filmways financing commitment from thirteen million dollars up to fifteen million. But Scott wanted changes to Fancher's draft, which focused more on environmental concerns than on the philosophical questions of humanity that Dick had centered in the novel. Fancher publicly called out Dick's early criticisms as fair, and Dick himself called Fancher's original script "corny, extremely maladroit throughout," saying it had "overrelied on the old cliché-ridden Chandleresque figure."

  Scott brought in David Peoples to rewrite the script, and Fancher left the job on the 21st of December, 1980, over the dispute, though he later returned for additional work. The February 1981 draft by Peoples transformed the project in Dick's view. Dick wrote that Peoples had resolved every previous problem, smoothed the dialogue, and introduced the idea of replicants built with a premature aging condition called progeria. Dick called it "a beautiful, symmetrical reinforcement of my original work." Peoples himself was more modest, crediting Scott's vision as "the motive force of the film" and noting that actors Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer both contributed ideas about dialogue. Hauer went further: he rewrote his character's final "tears in rain" speech himself and brought the words to Scott on set before filming.

• 3. The Cast Nobody Expected

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  Screenwriter Hampton Fancher had written the role of Deckard with Robert Mitchum in mind. Production documents show that Gene Hackman, Sean Connery, Jack Nicholson, Paul Newman, Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Peter Falk, Nick Nolte, Al Pacino, and Burt Reynolds were all considered. Ridley Scott and the producers spent months talking with Dustin Hoffman, who ultimately departed over differences in vision. Harrison Ford got the role partly because Steven Spielberg, who was finishing Raiders of the Lost Ark at the time, strongly praised Ford's work to Scott.

  Rutger Hauer was cast as Roy Batty without Scott ever having met him, based solely on performances Scott had seen in three Paul Verhoeven films: Katie Tippel, Soldier of Orange, and Turkish Delight. Dick later called Hauer's portrayal of Batty "the perfect Batty, cold, Aryan, flawless." In a live chat in 2001, Hauer said of the film: "Blade Runner needs no explanation. It just. All of the best. There is nothing like it. To be part of a real which changed the world's thinking."

  Edward James Olmos built the fictional street language his character Gaff speaks by drawing on diverse ethnic sources. His first line to Deckard, spoken partly in Hungarian, translates roughly as "Horse dick. No way. You are the Blade Runner." Meanwhile, Hy Pyke completed his role as the bar owner Taffey Lewis in a single take, something almost unheard of on a Scott production known for its double-digit-take demands.

  Dick died shortly before the film's release, but he had seen a twenty-minute special effects test reel at the studio and was moved by it. He said he recognized it as "my own interior world. They caught it perfectly." The motion picture was dedicated to him.

• 4. Building 2019 Los Angeles

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  Ridley Scott credited Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks and the French science fiction comics magazine Métal Hurlant as stylistic mood sources for the film's look. He also drew on what he described as "Hong Kong on a very bad day" and the industrial landscape of his former home in northeast England. The visual style was further influenced by the work of Italian futurist architect Antonio Sant'Elia.

  Concept artist Syd Mead, who like Scott had been influenced by Métal Hurlant, was hired to design the world. The artist Jean "Moebius" Giraud was offered a role in pre-production but declined so he could work on René Laloux's animated film Les Maîtres du temps, a decision Moebius later regretted. Production designer Lawrence G. Paull and art director David Snyder translated Scott's and Mead's sketches into physical sets, while Douglas Trumbull and Richard Yuricich supervised special effects and Mark Stetson served as chief model maker.

  Principal photography began on the 9th of March, 1981, and ran for four months. The Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles served as a location, along with a Warner Bros. backlot housing the 2019 street sets, the Ennis-Brown House, and the 2nd Street Tunnel. The film's visual parallel to Fritz Lang's Metropolis was deliberate enough that special effects supervisor David Dryer used stills from Metropolis when lining up Blade Runner's miniature building shots. Both films place wealthy inhabitants literally above the workers, with a single dominant structure dominating the skyline.

  The flying cars called "Spinners" were conceived by Mead, who described them as aerodynes that direct air downward to create lift. Gene Winfield, an automobile customizer, built twenty-five vehicles from Mead's drawings; at least two were fully operational ground vehicles, while others were lightweight mockups for crane and street shots. One Spinner is now on permanent exhibit at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in Seattle, Washington.

• 5. The T-Shirt War and the Voice-Over

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  The relationship between the filmmakers and the investors deteriorated during production to the point where Deeley and Scott were formally fired, though both continued working on the film. On set, British crew members made T-shirts reading "Yes Guv'nor, My Ass," mocking Scott's unfavorable comparisons between American and British crews. Scott responded with his own shirt reading "Xenophobia Sucks," and the standoff became known as the T-shirt war.

  Harrison Ford's frustration with the production ran deep. In 1992, he said plainly: "Blade Runner is not one of my favorite films. I tangled with Ridley." His specific grievance was the voice-over narration: Ford believed the film had been agreed upon without it, and was furious when studio executives imposed it after test screenings. He described going "kicking and screaming to the studio" to record lines he felt undermined the film. The narration monologues were ultimately written by Roland Kibbee, who went uncredited. Earlier rejected versions had been written by Fancher, Peoples, and Darryl Ponicsan.

  In 2006, when Scott was asked to name the biggest pain he had ever worked with, he answered "It's got to be Harrison." He added that Ford "knows a lot, that's the problem" and that the friction came partly because it was Scott's first American film. Ford, asked about Scott in 2000, said: "I admire his work. We had a bad patch there, and I'm over it." By 2007, Scott confirmed that Ford had recorded interviews for the Blade Runner Special Edition DVD and was "fully on board."

  Financing nearly collapsed before a camera ever rolled. Having invested more than two and a half million dollars in pre-production, Filmways withdrew its backing as principal photography approached. In ten days, producer Deeley secured twenty-one and a half million dollars through a three-way deal involving the Ladd Company through Warner Bros., Hong Kong-based producer Sir Run Run Shaw, and Tandem Productions.

• 6. Seven Versions, One Vision

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  Test screenings in Denver and Dallas in March 1982 produced negative audience responses, which led the studio to modify the film. The changes included adding Ford's voice-over narration, inserting a studio-imposed happy ending, and removing a scene showing a wounded blade runner named Holden in a hospital. The resulting U.S. theatrical version ran 117 minutes.

  A workprint version of the film was shown without Scott's approval at the Los Angeles Fairfax Theater in May 1990, and at further screenings in 1991 at the Los Angeles Nuart Theatre and the San Francisco Castro Theatre. Positive audience responses pushed the studio to approve an official director's cut. Scott provided extensive notes through film preservationist Michael Arick. Ridley Scott's Director's Cut, released in 1992 at 116 minutes, removed the voice-over, reinserted a sequence in which Deckard dreams of a unicorn, and stripped out the happy ending. The unicorn footage was often falsely reported as an outtake from Scott's subsequent film Legend; it was in fact shot for Blade Runner itself as additional photography by second unit cinematographer Brian Tufano.

  The Director's Cut arrived alongside Blade Runner's growing popularity as a video rental, and the combination made it one of the earliest films released on DVD. In 2007, Warner Bros. released The Final Cut, a digitally remastered version marking the film's 25th anniversary. Scott's definitive cut ran 117 minutes and was released theatrically on the 5th of October, 2007, with DVD, HD DVD, and Blu-ray releases following in December 2007. It reached Ultra HD Blu-ray on the 5th of September, 2017. The Final Cut is the only version over which Scott retained complete artistic and editorial control, and a "Blade Runner Trilogy" set released the same year added a second disc of previously unreleased music and a third disc of newly composed Vangelis pieces inspired by the film.

• 7. The Music Nobody Could Buy

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  Vangelis came to Blade Runner fresh from winning an Academy Award for his score for Chariots of Fire. The Blade Runner soundtrack he composed is a combination of classic orchestral form and synthesizer textures that mirrors the film's own retrofitted aesthetic, pairing advanced technology with decaying surroundings. Vangelis performed all the music on his synthesizers and incorporated chimes and the vocals of his longtime collaborator Demis Roussos. The "Love Theme" features a tenor saxophone solo performed by British saxophonist Dick Morrissey, who had played on several Vangelis albums. Ridley Scott also used a track called "Memories of Green" from the Vangelis album See You Later, an orchestral version of which he later used in the film Someone to Watch Over Me.

  The score was nominated in 1982 for both a BAFTA and a Golden Globe as best original score. Yet the promise of a commercial soundtrack album, listed in the film's end credits with Polydor Records, went unfulfilled for over a decade. In the vacuum, the New American Orchestra recorded an orchestral adaptation in 1982 that fans noted bore little resemblance to the original. A bootleg tape surfaced at science fiction conventions in 1982 and circulated widely. By 1993, a bootleg CD produced by "Off World Music, Ltd" proved more comprehensive than the official album Vangelis finally released in 1994.

  The film's soundscape also drew on sources beyond Vangelis. It included a track by the Japanese ensemble Nipponia, specifically "Ogi no Mato" or "The Folding Fan as a Target," from a Nonesuch Records release of traditional Japanese vocal and instrumental music, and a harp piece by Gail Laughton from an album titled "Harps of the Ancient Temples" on Laurel Records.

• 8. The Question the Film Refuses to Answer

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  Blade Runner employs the conventions of film noir: a protagonist of questionable moral character, a femme fatale, chiaroscuro cinematography, and first-person narration in the original release. Beneath that, the film draws on Greek tragedy and its preoccupation with hubris, as well as Biblical imagery and literary references to Frankenstein and the poet William Blake. Roy Batty's demand of his maker Eldon Tyrell for "more life" and his subsequent murder of Tyrell reads as a retelling of the creature turning on its creator.

  The film's central anxiety is about memory and identity. Replicants are given implanted memories to give them what Tyrell calls an "emotional cushion." Rachael does not know she is a replicant. The memories she believes are her own belong to Tyrell's niece. Eyes appear throughout the film as a recurring motif, alongside manipulated images, all of them destabilizing the viewer's trust in what can be known or remembered.

  The deepest question the film plants is whether Deckard himself is a replicant. Producer Michael Deeley and Harrison Ford wanted Deckard to be human. Screenwriter Hampton Fancher preferred deliberate ambiguity. Ridley Scott has said he envisaged Deckard as a replicant. The unicorn-dream sequence that Scott inserted into the 1992 Director's Cut, paired with Gaff's parting gift of an origami unicorn, is read by many as evidence that Gaff has access to Deckard's implanted memories. Others argue the shared imagery between Gaff and Deckard simply reflects that humans and replicants share the same inner life, which only deepens the film's theme. In an interview with The Observer in 2002, Scott described the film as "extremely dark, both literally and metaphorically, with an oddly masochistic feel," and said that exploring pain on screen was connected to his own experience of visiting his brother during his final illness.

  In a 2004 poll of sixty eminent world scientists, Blade Runner was voted the best science fiction film ever made. Denis Villeneuve, who directed the 2017 sequel Blade Runner 2049, cites the original as a huge influence, while Christopher Nolan has said he has seen Blade Runner "literally hundreds of times." The sequel Blade Runner 2099 is scheduled to premiere on Amazon Prime Video in 2026, meaning the world Ridley Scott imagined for a dystopian future continues to expand into a real one.