CraveOnline: Would you rather call this your director's cut if you hadn't already called the 19992 version that?
Ridley Scott: I would say this is really the director's cut, yeah. At the time, as you all know, there was a lot of disappointment. I would call it too many cooks. As always working in movies, there are frequently too many cooks. Part of the job which they call a director, the director is the director. Now I produce a lot of stuff. One of the hardest things to do is get a director who has got that combination of being assertive, sure and has a vision. It's a very hard thing to do. I was pretty taxed by the time we did Blade Runner. I'd done two and a half thousand commercials, 9,000 bloody awards, Duellists and Alien. So I thought I was pretty well qualified but there's a lot of "help." So I think I did get cross doing it and making it, and probably garnered a bit of a reputation for being rather bad tempered, but I'm not at all. Out of it, I think, came an, as we can now see, remarkably, a film that still stands on its own after 25 years. Rather like good wine. It gets better as it gets older.
CraveOnline: Are you amazed how much of the material from 1982 still exists?
Ridley Scott: The studios, thank God, tend to actually keep things somewhat, even though I think they only got recently conscious about it. The screening that was of Blade Runner at the Santa Monica Film Festival, what happened was someone had asked for a copy of Blade Runner and somebody had gone into Warner’s and actually taken it out of a drawer, or wherever it was, on the shelf, and run it at the Nuart. And in there was actually a 65 millimeter that we must have been quite close at the time for. We decided to preview it, which 65 millimeter, you're taking the 35 and you're blowing it up. What you're going to gain by that is actually a striped edge which will give you a serious Dolby soundtrack. Today you don't have to do that. That's what we'd done. We wanted a final preview because we previewed this thing to death. That's what they dug out of the drawer, and in there, because as it began, there were no titles on it. It started off with Vangelis music and then went to a little bit of Jerry Goldsmith, a little bit of this, little bit of that, pretty damn good score. At the end of it, people kind of sat there flabbergasted thinking, "Wait a minute, that's not the film I remember." That's what really created this interest and also I think showed the studio that there was a lot of interest in the film.
CraveOnline: So what did you really want to have in your Final Cut?
Ridley Scott: Well, certainly get rid of the voiceover once and for all. If you get rid of the voiceover, then you do not want the ending. This is a film noir. It's an Elmore Leonard kind of influence or Philip Marlowe. This is a Marlowe-esque kind of story which of course is Mr.Dick and Mr.Fancher. Do Androids [Dream of Electric Sheep] has about 17 stories in the first 25 pages, so there was a big distillation right down to the bottom line of what this is about. That was the agony and the ecstasy of working with Hampton and Michael Deeley way back when. We were trying to get this down to a screenplay that we could make. I was completely for voiceover. There was all this bullsh*t saying I was against voiceover. Absolute horse twaddle. I was there and when Harrison and I would talk about this saying, "You like this?" I said, "Well, I think there's a possibility that if we're confusing the audience who are saying, 'What's cityspeak? What is this? What is that?' We may have to explain a few things. If we can get the right words, then it could work." Because three years earlier, there was a film called Apocalypse Now where you have an incredibly important voiceover which is the entire internalization of Martin Sheen's part, who is a man who seems to be a nihilist where you would not know what he's thinking if he didn't have that voiceover. The voiceover was brilliantly written and brilliantly delivered by Martin Sheen. So I hung my hat on that thinking that it may be a possibility, because also it's Philip Marlowe, because also it's Elmore Leonard and Mr. Dick, Philip Dick. But that's the style. He's a cop. He's a dark cop who's a bit of an alcoholic. He's a nihilist who hates himself and hates his job. Sounds like Elmore Leonard to me. And therefore out of it should come a great voiceover. We couldn't crack it. And Harrison really tried and I really tried and I think the voice was becoming over explanatory. When all you're going to do is sit there and actually see how it evolves, or you work it out, 10 minutes off. A film should always be ahead of the audience, not the audience parallel to the movie.
CraveOnline: There is a work print on the DVD which has a better voice over than the theatrical cut.
Ridley Scott: Yeah, it's okay. It felt like it could come in and it could be okay, and
CraveOnline: Are ever frustrated that people pay so much attention to a film that's 25 years old?
Ridley Scott: No, it's kind of interesting actually. It's actually flattering. It's very cool, particularly now as these thing can be really protected and kept. What they've just recently found is that digital doesn't hold as well as photochem [ical film]. So digital is already fading fast. It's going downhill after 10 years. We took a print which is photochem, celluloid, out of the lab, did a print, graded it. It [looks] like it was shot last week, which means that you can't rely on that [digital] one. What one should do or what the studios are now doing because they suddenly realized the huge value of their libraries, is that most films now are finished off with what you call an old fashioned Technicolor matrix system where there are three matrixes. Three primaries. It's not red, green, yellow. It's cyan... Once you've got that, you've got everything. You can rebuild it in two seconds. It's interesting that that old knotty method is the best.
CraveOnline: What should fans take from the other versions of the film on DVD?
Ridley Scott: Well, you've got Final Cut, you've got a version with voiceover and that ending on, you've got a disc of all interviews. You've got all the stuff that was cut out, there's a lot of information. I think they can make their own minds up.
CraveOnline: Would you like to see Final Cut distributed to theaters?
Ridley Scott: Yeah, of course. That'd be great. I have no idea. I think there's a real revenue there for them, serious revenue. Because today you've got 25 years, you've got two and a half generations of kids who didn't really see it at the time, so that generation now is 25 years old, 50 years old. If they missed it at the time, they get it now. And you've got a generation of kids who are, not to say educated by the way the world's gone and including MTV. I believe MTV was one of the main places of the film seeing the film actually is influenced from and the film is cool, to that generation of kids who use the word cool. I don't use the word cool but there is. So that generation is thinking, "You know what? This film's cool." Then they've only seen it on VHS or not terribly well done disc. The discs are like 15 years old, 10 years. But you haven't seen it on a big screen with a proper soundtrack. It's unbelievable.
CraveOnline: What was your involvement in restoring the visual effects?
Ridley Scott: Always but because it's so busy, I engage with Charlie [de Lauzirika] now for a while, a number of years. Charlie takes care of all of this stuff, keeps me up to speed, says you better come and see this mix, decisions, look at that, look at that. Today especially, the danger is to overdo something. You don't want to overdo something. Suddenly it doesn't become the film that it was. You'd be surprised how it just stands right there. It's pretty good.
CraveOnline: Where do you stand on the debate on whether Deckard is or is not a replicant?
Ridley Scott: He always was. I've learned to just agree now and just do it.
CraveOnline: Was there a lot of back and forth about that with the writers?
Ridley Scott: No. I was forcing the issue. No, I thought it made sense to me. I think at the time, perhaps they thought it was too neat. I said, "Well, if it's too neat, then if we don't do it, so you've got a human being going off with a replicant. That's okay." But I still thought the irony made sense. Then the irony of one of the really good scenes, but there's a very nice scene in the film with Deckard and Rachel in his small teeny living room, his Frank Lloyd Wright living room where he's saying, "That's not your memory. You understand that? That's the memory of Tyrell's niece." So he's in denial. That is played on a very, very, very human level, not a science fiction level, a human level so you kind of start to believe, can you inject, can you insert a memory into brain cells? You probably can now. We were talking about fantasy then. Right now, it's a possibility. Then you talk about replication, 15 years on, the senate was asking for permission to replication of sheep. So in farm animals, right? The idea of that, science that we were dreaming up and taking that which was always distilled by a funny element of logic. I think people, scientists, when they get stymied, they get stuck. Then look to the idea of the possibility of God or just sheer imagination. Then you've got to start getting imaginative as to how you're going to get past your barrier. Right, where two and two no longer make four. They have to make four, so I'm going to around the side and I've got to write a new scenario for how it makes four. That's the challenge.
CraveOnline: Was Blade Runner ever meant to be a franchise with sequels?
Ridley Scott: I don't remember that.
CraveOnline: What do you think of these novels based on your film?
Ridley Scott: It's cool.
CraveOnline: Would you ever want to do a sequel?
Ridley Scott: No, I don’t do sequels. I only do the one offs. I like to do the first one and then step to one side.
CraveOnline: Would a big budget movie with this script get produced today?
Ridley Scott: Good question. I don't know. There's not enough action in it. There's a lot of talking and there's a lot of good actors. The Wachowski Brothers I read on the web, the internet, were asked, obviously several times. The question was, "Were you influenced by Blade Runner?" The reply was, "Of course we f*cking were. We were the only ones that liked it." So I don't know. I really don't know.
 | Blade Runner: Ultimate Collectors Edition One of the greatest Sci-Fi films gets the DVD release it deserves. |
