Some films stick with you.
As Harrison Ford, star of “Blade Runner” and “Blade Runner 2049,” explains, “You always want the audience to go home with the refrigerator question, which doesn’t occur to them until they get home and open the refrigerator and suddenly the light comes.”
Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” has pretty much kept the refrigerator door open since its release in 1982. That’s pretty remarkable, because as Ford wryly notes “not enough” people saw it when it was first released.
It premiered two weeks after Steven Spielberg’s kid-friendly sci-fi movie “E.T.” and the googly-eyed alien was still dominating the box office. After a moderately successful opening, “Blade Runner” sort of slipped off everyone’s radar.
Unlike the optimistic “E.T.” “Blade Runner” was a dark, dystopian view of the future wrapped in an enigmatic neo-noir mystery. Black dominated Scott’s visual look, observes Denis Villeneuve, the director of “Blade Runner 2049,” the new sequel to the original. It stars Ryan Gosling and Ford, who reprises his role of Blade Runner Rick Deckard in a new mystery set 30 years after the first.
The original film was not a flop, but its tepid business didn’t scream sequel, either. Nevertheless, those who saw “Blade Runner” kept standing in front of the refrigerator thinking about it. The movie provoked a number of philosophic and existential questions about what it means to be human.
On a plot level, people argued whether Deckard, whose job it was to “retire” rogue androids called replicants, was human or not. Were his memories, like those of other replicants, implanted and not his own? Are memories what make you a human being?
With midnight screenings and the home video boom, “Blade Runner” began to gain more and more devotees in the years after its initial release, inspiring future directors like Villeneuve and Christopher Nolan, both teens when they saw it.
“Blade Runner” was based on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” The book was set in 1992, after a nuclear war has destroyed much of civilization as we know it, and it follows Deckard, a bounty hunter tasked with eliminating rogue “andys,” the novel’s term for androids.
Hollywood wanted it right away, but it would be a long winding tale in getting “Sheep” to the screen that’s worth its own book – and it got one, Paul Sammon’s “Future Noir: The Making of ‘Blade Runner'” which provides much of the background lore known about the film.
Along the way to production, “Blade Runner” ran into casting and money problems but finally got underway on the Warner Bros. backlot in 1981. There, Scott created something of a cyber-steam-punk L.A. landscape that has continued to influence generations of filmmakers and the culture at large.
By the time filming was finished, “Blade Runner” had morphed far beyond Dick’s vision. It was something fabulously new, but what exactly? Even Scott reportedly said after seeing all the footage, “It’s marvelous, but what the … does it mean?”
The plot confused test audiences. So under pressure, Scott hastily called in Ford and actress Sean Young, who played the replicant Rachel that Deckard falls for, to shoot a happy-ish ending. He also had the actor add a noir-detective voiceover to explain some of the plot points, something Ford reportedly hated.
In 1992, a “director’s cut” was released, although Scott had nothing to do with it. It dropped the narration and reinstated some critical scenes. A “Final Cut” was released in 2007. That’s the one Scott had complete editorial control over.
“I was raised with the theatrical version, and thus that’s the one I own and watched over and over,” says Villeneuve.
Ford says he was happiest with Scott’s “Final Cut” over “the one with the voiceover and sailing into the sunset.”
The actor and Scott still continue to disagree about Deckard’s humanity. While filming the original, Ford thought they had agreed that Deckard was human, but he found out later the director was sticking in little clues into the film that indicated Deckard was a replicant, including his daydream of a unicorn galloping through a forest.
“I pursued my instincts passionately, and he pursued his freedoms. He did not want audiences to be necessarily constrained by my imagination,” Ford tells me. “The result is that people have continued to have an interest in it.”
