By
Cindy Davis | Posted Under
Toward the beginning of his
Blade Runner commentary, Ridley
Scott says, “It is a director’s job to dictate what you want,” and by
gum, does Scott ever know how to wield authority. He also states that a
director “needs to be as user-friendly as possible, knowing how to lead
people down a path to understand the world you’re going into.” This is
clearly where he fails his own edict, evidenced by the documentary
Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner.
Does the end justify the means? Most fans would answer a resounding,
“Yes,” but it is clear that even 25 years after the film was made, many
of the cast and crew harbor deep resentment. Still, the film is
stunningly beautiful — a tremendous feat when one sees the bare bones of
what Scott had to work with — and in moments that teeter near the brink
of reality, its moral implications remain relevant.
(For the record, I watched
The Final Cut, the director’s
preferred version. Most of this information came from the documentary,
as Scott’s commentary was nearly entirely self-masturbatory egoism and
pointless.)
1.
Blade Runner is based on Philip K. Dick’s novel
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The title came from the William S. Burroughs novella,
Blade Runner (a movie), which was a proposed film adaptation of another novel, Alan E. Nourse’s
The Bladerunner.
The first script was written by Hampton Fancher, primarily a
television actor (“Gunsmoke, The Fugitive, Bonanza”). A friend of his
told Fancher, “I think science fiction is going to happen,” and
suggested Dick’s novel. Fancher said he didn’t like it much, but he came
up with the idea of a detective who chases androids; they just wanted
to make money.
2. Producer Michael Deeley (
The Deer Hunter, The Italian Job [1969]),
read both the book and Fancher’s script ideas and didn’t like either
very much. Deeley said he thought the script “dumbed down” the book.
Fancher found a comic book he liked called “Mechanismo,” in fact, he
wanted to give the film that same name. He wrote another script that
Deeley thought was much better, but Deeley didn’t think the name worked.
To try to get financing, they decided to call the film,
Dangerous Days.
Ridley Scott was beginning work on
Dune when he got the
Dangerous Days script, he turned it down. Then, Scott’s brother Frank died and the director pulled out of
Dune, saying it was partially because of a poor script and the time that was going to be necessary to put into the film.
3. Some time later, Associate Producer, Ivor Powell (
Alien) was working on a commercial with Ridley; Powell read the
DD
script, thought it was powerful and convinced Scott to re-read it. This
director finally decided to take on the project and called Michael
Deeley. They were originally financed by Filmways Pictures, but the
company was small and having financial difficulties, so though they were
already building sets and doing pre-production, the group sought out
new financing. The film was eventually financed partially by Warner
Brothers and other investment groups.
4. Unsatisfied with the script as it was and unable to get quick and
accurate revisions done by Hampton Fancher (who also resisted the
changes), Scott brought in a second script writer, David Peoples (
12 Monkeys, Unforgiven).
Overworked and emotional, Fancher said he cried after reading the new
script. Peoples said he understood Fancher’s exhaustion after having
revised the script at least ten times already.
5. Scott began doing drawings; his creativity was inspired by the look of a French Comic, Métal Hurlant (Screaming Metal).
6. The character of Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) was changed a lot. One
script opened with Batty crawling out from under a pile of “dead”
replicants. Another had Batty killed at the beginning of the film.
Production Executive, Katherine Haber showed Ridley Scott several of
Rutger Hauer’s films and Scott hired the actor without having met him.
When Hauer first came in, he wore a zippered nylon jumpsuit, a sweater
with a fox on the front; he had cut his hair the way he thought Batty
should look and wore green “Elton John sunglasses.” Haber said she loved
the look on Scott’s face. Over their first lunch meeting, Scott bonded
with Hauer over Métal Hurlant, with which Hauer was already familiar.
The actor gave his own ideas about the character and felt Scott was
receptive to them. It was Hauer’s idea to hold the dove when he was
dying, at the moment of his death the dove would be release and fly
away. Because there was so much rain, the bird was too wet to fly and
just hopped around the roof. Hauer also came up with his character’s
often quoted ending words: “All those moments will be lost in time,
like tears in rain.”
7. Hampton Fancher wrote his script with Robert Mitchum in mind for
Rick Deckard. Other actors listed on his script as possibilities were:
Dustin Hoffman, Peter Falk, Al Pacino, Nick Nolte and Burt Reynolds.
Hoffman was interviewed by Scott for “hours and hours” and “months” were
spent trying to make it work, but Hoffman had his own ideas which kept
getting further and further from the story they wanted to do. Actress,
Barbara Hershey suggested Harrison Ford to Deeley (and possibly Scott).
Ford was doing
Raiders of the Lost Ark at the time, so Deeley and
Scott flew to London to watch dailies; they loved him. Ford was
unhappy that he was not (as he had been used to with previous directors)
a part of the whole filmmaking process and that Scott did not tell him
what to do. He was said to have only come out of his trailer when he
was shooting scenes.
8. Elaborate screen tests were done for the Rachel (Sean Young)
character. Scott preferred an unknown actress and said that Young
reminded him of Vivien Leigh.
9. Young and Ford never clicked; Ridley Scott is said to have talked
Young through her performance. During the sex scene, Scott told Ford to
push Young against the window ledge and because she wasn’t expecting it,
Young cried. She said that Ford turned around and dropped his pants,
mooning her, to make her laugh.
10. Daryl Hannah (Pris) auditioned—the fight scene—in a gymnasium.
Having been a gymnast her whole life, she asked Scott if she could
incorporate some gymnastics; Scott didn’t know what she meant so she
demonstrated her flips. However, when it came time to film a male stunt
double was used to do the flips, after a female stunt woman was run
through so many rehearsals that she became exhausted. For her screen
test, Hannah found the blonde wig and inspired by Klaus Kinski in
Nosferatu the Vampyre,
gave herself the black eye make-up. Daryl said Harrison Ford insisted
that when she stuck her fingers up his nose and grabbed his head, she
“really do it.” She felt badly because his nose was bleeding and she was
really hurting the actor.
11. Edward James Olmos (Gaff) was known and brought in by the casting
director. Olmos came up with the idea of Esperanto/Cityspeak and went
to the Berlitz Language School to learn different languages to put
together.
12. Joanna Cassidy (Zhora) worked with her own pet snake, “Darling.”
Scott originally envisioned Zhora doing an elaborate “mud dance,” where
she and the snake transformed into each other and then into one being,
but it would have been too expensive to do.
13. Visual Futurist/Illustrator Syd Mead was brought in; Scott said
that Mead “nailed the future of cities like Tokyo; he knew where cities
were going.” The artist was brought in for a few days, but ended up
staying months (which added a large over-budget cost). He designed
Sebastion’s car and the “killer” parking meter, everything in the future
world.
14. The ongoing actor’s strike gave the art department a big
advantage, they had nine months in pre-production. According to Michael
Deeley, Ridley Scott “micromanaged” the art department, looking at
every single drawing done by Mead and illustrators, Sherman Labby,
Mentor Huebner and Tom Southwell. Auto fabricator, Gene Winfield said
27 vehicles were made from Syd Mead’s drawings; he had 50 people working
in 3 shops (18 people working on fiberglass), 18 hours a day, 7 days a
week. It took them 5 1/2 months to complete the cars. The taxis were
built on VW van chassis and the sedans on VW chassis lengthened by 12
inches. The spinners had working gears (with all the inside gadgets
functioning, as well) and were on rolling tables; the one flying spinner
was on a lift and had no engine, but everything else worked.
15. The Hades landscape was all miniatures set up on a plywood table.
Thousands of etched brass cutouts gave the illusion of a dimensional
scene. They filled the darkened miniature room with smoke, then using
fans and smoke detectors (the detectors would sense when the smoke level
dropped and cause more smoke to puff) to maintain the same level of
smoke at all times during filming. This was done because if the smoke
level changed, it would cause flickering on film. Around 20,000 light
tubes were used to light up the miniatures. The explosions were
previously shot on 35 mm film. White cards were placed behind the
towers, the explosions projected with the 35 mm camera and then the
whole thing reshot with 65 mm camera.
16. The two locations Ridley Scott liked and wanted to use were LA’s
Bradley Building and Union Station. Because the Bradley Building was
occupied, shooting could only be completed from 6 pm to 6 am and it had
to be clean every day. Cork substituted for dirt and it effectively
soaked up the rain water, so every morning after filming, the cork could
easily be swept up.
17. Shooting conditions on set were considered horrendous and
miserable by most; to try to get the look on film that he wanted (while
attempting to keep under budget), Scott filmed at night on the New York
street set, in rain and smoke. There were about 33 days of night
shooting. Cast and crew often had to wear masks because of the
never-ending smoke being pumped in. Edward James Olmos marveled at how
realistic it looked, adding that Scott brought in giant theater speakers
and set them up on the building roofs. The score (by Academy
Award-winning [
Chariots of Fire] Greek composer, Vangelis) was then blasted during filming, causing the set to come alive.
18. In an interview, Ridley Scott said he’d rather work with English
crews than American, because when he’d ask for something, they would
just say “Yes, gov’nor, and go get it.” This so upset the crew that
they got t-shirts made-up and wore them on set; the shirts read: “Yes,
gov’nor, my ass.” In response, Scott wore a shirt that read “Xenophobia
sucks.” Almost all the on-set accounts of the production were of
constant tension between the director and just about every person
involved with the film.
19. Toward the end of production, when the budget had been exceeded
and the schedule overrun, studio executives came on set several times,
threatening to shut down filming. Though the crew would always expect
production to end, it was said that Scott always prevailed after
contentious meetings and he would just keep going. At one point,
notices that everyone was fired were sent out, but again, Scott refused
to quit until the film was done.
20. Though he only saw a segment of the film’s special effects on the
news, Philip Dick said, “It was my own interior world. They caught it
perfectly.”
While speculating on possible projects in the 
