* Photo: Robert Maxwell * It's a classic tale of failure and redemption, the kind of story Hollywood loves to tell. Fresh off his second successful movie, an up-and-coming director takes a chance on a dark tale of a 21st-century cop who hunts humanlike androids. But he runs over budget, and the financiers take control, forcing him to add a ham-fisted voice-over and an absurdly cheery ending. The public doesn't buy it. The director's masterpiece plays to near-empty theaters, ultimately retreating to the art-house circuit as a cult oddity. That's where we left Ridley Scott's future-noir epic in 1982. But a funny thing happened over the next 25 years. Blade Runner's audience quietly multiplied. An accidental public showing of a rough-cut work print created surprise demand for a re-release, so in 1992 Scott issued his director's cut. He silenced the narration, axed the ending, and added a twist — a dream sequence suggesting that Rick Deckard, the film's protagonist, is an android, just like those he was hired to dispatch. But the director didn't stop there. As the millennium turned, he continued polishing: erasing stray f/x wires, trimming shots originally extended to accommodate the voice-over, even rebuilding a scene in which the stunt double was obvious. Now he's ready to release Blade Runner: The Final Cut, which will hit theaters in Los Angeles and New York in October, with a DVD to follow in December. At age 69, Ridley Scott is finally satisfied with his most challenging film. He's still turning out movies at a furious pace — American Gangster, with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, is due in November — building on an extraordinary oeuvre that includes Alien, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator, and Black Hawk Down. But he seems ready to accept Blade Runner as his crowning achievement. In his northern English accent, he describes its genesis and lasting influence. And, inevitably, he returns to the darkness that pervades his view of the future — the shadows that shield Deckard from a reality that may be too disturbing to face.



__ Neil Gaiman__

Novelist "Kurt Vonnegut believed that what science fiction and pornography have in common is that they're both visions of impossibly hospitable worlds. But what Blade Runner did was create a dystopic, inhospitable world. It's dark and it's grungy and you wouldn't want to live there — but you'd love to go there. " Wired: You started working on this movie more than 25 years ago. How does it feel to be talking about it again?

Scott: It never went away, so I'm used to it. It kept reemerging, and that's when I realized that it had really unusual staying power. It's all very well to say, "Well, I knew it had." But I didn't, really, at the time. I knew I'd done a pretty interesting movie, but it was so unusual that the majority of people were taken aback. They simply didn't get it. Or, I think, better to say that they were enormously distracted by the environment.

Wired: What do you mean by that?

__Scott:__I was touching on possibilities like replication. It's now quite commonplace, but 25 years ago they were barely discussing it in the corridors of power. Now, the film is not really about that at all, it's simply leveraging that possibility into one of those detective film-noir kinds of stories. People were familiar with that kind of character, but not with the world I was cooking up. I wanted to call it San Angeles, and somebody said, "I don't get it." I said, "You know, San Francisco and Los Angeles." It's bizarre: People only think about what's under their noses until it comes and kicks them in the ass.

Wired: How did you decide to tell a 21st-century story in a 1940s style?

__Scott:__Well, people want a comfortable preconception about what they're seeing. It's a bit like 20 years of Westerns and, now, 45 years of cop movies. People are comfortable with the roles. Even though every nook and cranny has been explored, they'll still sit through endless variations on cops and bad guys, right? In this instance, I was doing a cop and a different bad guy. And to justify the creation of the bad guy, i.e., replication, it had to be in the future.

__Zack Snyder __

Director "I first saw Blade Runner when I was 16. It rocked my world. All those incredible images were burned into my psyche. It's one of those movies you can't help but quote, an involuntary reference source that will be recycled throughout cinema forever. It's like a lesson from the master saying, 'Go out into the world and do good.'

__Scott:__It's the same as trying to do a monster movie. You know, Alien is a C film elevated to an A film, honestly, by a great monster. In this instance, my special effect was the world. That's why I put together people like [industrial designer] Syd Mead who were actually serious futurists. The big test is saying, Draw me a car in 30 years' time, without it looking like bad science fiction. Or, Draw me an electric iron that will be pressing shirts in 20 years without it looking silly. I wanted the world to be futuristic and yet feel — not familiar, because it won't be — but feel authentic. One of the hardest sets to design was the kitchen. It's easy to fantasize about Tyrell's giant neo-Egyptianesque boardroom, but imagining a bathroom and kitchen in those times, that's tricky. Nevertheless, fascinating. I love the problem.

Wired: Dream kitchens aside, it's a rather bleak vision of the future.

__Scott:__I was always aware that this whole Earth is on overload. I've been that way for 30 years. People used to think I was — you know, not exactly depressive, but dark. And I'd say, "It's not dark, mate, it's a fact. It's going to come and hit you on the head."

Wired: You made a director's cut in 1992. Why wasn't that the final word?

Scott: The director's cut removed the voice-over and that silly ending and put in the unicorn daydream, but the disc didn't look that great. And it should look great, because Blade Runner at the time was pretty formidable — it's pretty formidable even now, actually. A lot of people don't notice whether they're watching something beautifully technical or not, but it's important to me. So that always got in the way of the director's cut being the final version. I think it's final now because I've done all the nips and tucks and tidied up one or two of the visual areas that we couldn't do properly at the time because we didn't have the technology.

Raymond Kelly

New York City Police Commissioner "Though it was set in LA in 2019, Blade Runner resonated with many people who, in 1982, foresaw an irreversible downward spiral for American cities. Police and other government agencies were behind the curve. Large corporations had the technological edge. In that respect, the film was prescient." Wired: Did you reinstate any material you had previously cut?

__Scott:__I tried, because 25 years later you think, "Let me look at those scenes that were removed." But there was a good reason those scenes weren't in the film. What's great about the upcoming five-disc set is that it covers every piece of ground, from the original version to this final cut to a whole disc of discussions between all the people who helped make the movie.

Wired: Would you describe some of those deleted scenes?

__Scott:__In the opening scene, there's a guy who's interviewing one of the replicants, and he gets shot. Deckard goes to see him in the hospital, where the character explains who these replicants are and where they're coming from. But, in a way, it repeated the meeting between Deckard and his boss at the police station. It was a bit of overexplaining, although it was fascinating to see the hospital room and the breathing machine they'd put him in because he'd taken it through one of his lungs. Also, there was a bit more sexuality between Rachael and Deckard. It got a bit rough, and I needed Deckard to be sympathetic. Harrison Ford was playing a character opposite to what people expected from him. Also, the hero, or antihero, finally gets his butt kicked by the so-called bad guy — who turns out not to be a bad guy. That's what's interesting about the movie, right? Otherwise it's all down to bad guys and good guys, which is really boring.

Wired: Some of that ambiguity got squeezed out of the original version. It seems like you've been making up for it ever since.

__Scott:__I read an article recently saying that one of the reasons the film has found an ongoing audience is that it was incomplete. That's absolute horseshit. The film was very specifically designed and is totally complete. In those days, there was more discussion than was welcome, as far as I'm concerned. [Screenwriter] Hampton Fancher, [producer] Michael Deeley, and I talked and talked and talked — every day for eight months. But at the end of the day, there's a lot of me in this script. That's what happens, because that's the kind of director I am. The single hardest thing is getting the bloody thing on paper. Once you've got it on paper, the doing is relatively straightforward.

J. Craig Venter

__Geneticist __ "The movie has an underlying assumption that I just don't relate to: that people want a slave class. As I imagine the potential of engineering the human genome, I think, wouldn't it be nice if we could have 10 times the cognitive capabilities we do have? But people ask me whether I could engineer a stupid person to work as a servant. I've gotten letters from guys in prison asking me to engineer women they could keep in their cell. I don't see us, as a society, doing that." Wired: It was never on paper that Deckard is a replicant.

__Scott:__It was, actually. That's the whole point of Gaff, the guy who makes origami and leaves little matchstick figures around. He doesn't like Deckard, and we don't really know why. If you take for granted for a moment that, let's say, Deckard is a Nexus 7, he probably has an unknown life span and therefore is starting to get awfully human. Gaff, at the very end, leaves an origami, which is a piece of silver paper you might find in a cigarette packet, and it's a unicorn. Now, the unicorn in Deckard's daydream tells me that Deckard wouldn't normally talk about such a thing to anyone. If Gaff knew about that, it's Gaff's message to say, "I've read your file, mate." That relates to Deckard's first speech to Rachael when he says, "That's not your imagination, that's Tyrell's niece's daydream." And he describes a little spider on a bush outside the window. The spider is an implanted piece of imagination. And therefore Deckard, too, has imagination and even history implanted in his head.

Wired: You shot the unicorn dream sequence as part of the original production. Why didn't you include it in either the work print or the initial release?

__Scott:__As I said, there was too much discussion in the room. I wanted it. They didn't want it. I said, "Well, it's a fundamental part of the story." And they said, "Well, isn't it obvious that he's a replicant?" And I said, "No more obvious than that he's not a replicant at the end." So, it's a matter of choice, isn't it?



Wired: When Deckard picks up the origami unicorn at the end of the movie, the look on his face says to me, "Oh, so Gaff was here, and he let Rachael live." It doesn't say, "Oh my God! Am I a replicant, too?"

__Scott:__No? Why is he nodding when he looks at this silver unicorn? I'm not going to send up a balloon. Doing the job he does, reading the files he reads on other replicants, Deckard may have wondered at one point, "Am I human or am I a replicant?" That's in his innermost thoughts. I'm just giving you the fully fleshed-out possibility to justify that look at the end, where he kind of glints and looks angry. To me, it's an affirmation. He nods, he agrees. "Ah hah! Gaff was here. I've been told."

Wired: Harrison Ford is on record saying Deckard is not a replicant.

__Scott:__Yeah, but that was, like, 20 years ago. He's given up now. He said, "OK, mate. You win! Anything! Just put it to rest."

Wired: You've called Blade Runner your most complete and personal film. How so?

__Scott:__I just finished American Gangster. It's about two real guys who are still alive, so you want to make it absolutely accurate. It's not a documentary, but it feels awfully real. For Black Hawk Down, I went to the location and shot it. Legend was more imaginative, but it borrowed from Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast and the best of Disney. Blade Runner involved full-bore imagination. Deckard's universe had to be expanded into credibility. That's probably the hardest thing I've done, because there was nothing to borrow from.

Wired: Did you draw on specific personal experiences?

__Scott:__I went to art school in west Hartlepool in the north of England, alongside the Durham steel mills and the Imperial Chemical Industries plant. The air smelled like toast. Toast is quite nice, but when you realize it's steel, and it's probably particles, it's not very good. Crossing the footbridge at night, you'd be walking above the steel mill, crossing through the smoke, dirt, and crap, looking down into the fire. Later, I spent a little time in New York, which always seemed to be a city on overload, and Hong Kong at the time it was wonderfully medieval — pre-skyscraper, when the harbor was filled with junks. When it came to deciding whether to go Hispanic or Asian for what seems to be the majority culture on the streets in San Angeles, I opted for Asian. And I felt I knew what it would be like to ride in a spinner. In the years when I was doing a lot of TV commercials, once a month I'd fly into New York. I'd get off the plane at JFK and take a helicopter, which cost $20, to the top of the Pan American building. Winter or summer, high wind or balmy evening — it was hairy. I did that for almost two years. Then, one stormy winter evening, a chopper nearly missed the top of the building because of the wind gusts. It perched perilously on the edge, and they nearly lost it. And that was the end of that. There were no more helicopters; they just closed them down. But I always remembered that.

Thom Mayne

Architect "

Blade Runner anticipated the conception of the metropolis that we have now, as a global phenomenon. It's so thorough in this depiction that it's incredibly useful to anyone making environments. It reminded architects to think about the physical environment in cultural terms, as something ephemeral and chaotic. Twenty-five years later, it's still contemporary." Wired: Is it true that you didn't read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the book on which Blade Runner was based, before making the movie?

__Scott:__I honestly couldn't get into it. It's so dense, by page 32 there's about 17 story lines. So one of the problems is distilling it down into a three-act play that can be filmed. Fancher did that with a script he called Dangerous Days. Deeley came to see me when I was mixing Alien and said, "Do you want to do another science fiction?" I said, "I don't really want to go down that route if I can avoid it." But, to cut a long story short, eight months later, the script stayed with me. So I went back to Deeley saying, "You know, we can expand this into something more spectacular if we push it outside onto the street and create a futuristic urban universe." I could never shake loose the fact that I was a designer — which I'm constantly criticized for, and I really don't give a shit. At the end of the day, it has proved to be quite useful. In fact, I've been painting again seriously for a while now. My favorite painter is George Stubbs, an 18th-century artist, one of the great ones. The target is to paint like him. I'm getting there.

Wired: Part of your work in making the new version was eliminating visible wires. Given your legendary attention to detail, how did flaws like that get into the original print?

__Scott:__Because you can't make a spinner fly without a crank. That's why it was raining in the shot, to hide the cables. Today we assume it's all digital. It's not — it's a 2-ton spinner being hoisted around the corner by a large crank that literally brought it down, landed it, and took it off again. Bloody good crane driver, right? You have four points on the cable that keep it steady. When I watched the movie, I always used to sit there staring at the cables. Then eventually one or two of the geeks spotted them. So we took them out.

Ray Kurzweil

Futurist "The scenario of humans hunting cyborgs doesn't wash because those entities won't be separate. Today, we treat Parkinson's with a pea-sized brain implant. Increase that device's capability by a billion and decrease its size by a hundred thousand, and you get some idea of what will be feasible in 25 years. It won't be, 'OK, cyborgs on the left, humans on the right.' The two will be all mixed up."

Wired: Some might say that scrubbing out those wires was defacing a masterpiece.

__Scott:__I was tempted not to, because I thought it was quite charming that there were cables in the shot. And when Roy Batty came out of the phone booth, for some bizarre reason we never noticed that somebody's thumb was in the bottom left-hand corner. The phone booth had an automatic door and I couldn't de-automate it, and I was getting really beaten up 'cause we were up against the gun, so I just shot. And there was the bloody thumb in the frame. It's little mistakes like that that you're tempted to leave in. It's a signature that says, yes, it is fiction, it is moviemaking.

Mamoru Oshii

Anime Director "Twenty-five years ago, I was becoming dissatisfied with Japanese animation's focus on characters and stories at the expense of environments. Suddenly, the world I vaguely imagined appeared in front of me. I felt overwhelmed — but at the same time I realized that what I was attempting was not wrong at all." Wired: Today it would all be done with computers.

Scott: Oh yeah, you wouldn't even think about it.

Wired: And there would be no thumb on the door.

Scott: Oh, it's become too easy.

Wired: Do you prefer physical effects to digital effects?

__Scott:__Not necessarily. I mean, otherwise I'll sound like an old fart. When you see an explosion that no one could have survived and the person is still running, then it's bullshit. And that's frequently why digital effects are not as good. Whereas when you do it physically, you've got to be careful — like, really careful. With digital, the painting book is unlimited; the world in, say, Lord of the Rings would not have been nearly as impressive 30 years ago as it is today. Star Wars was the beginning of some interesting digital thinking. [Stanley] Kubrick really showed the way with 2001, where Douglas Trumbull did some very simple computer-driven shots. That was the first of the really great science fiction films, where I went, "Wow, that works." Everything up to that one was a bit too much fantasy and not enough reality. There are films where digital effects are massive overkill — and that's OK, because there are audiences that want that. But I still have to have the story. So the digital is not the end, it's the means to the end.

Moby

Musician "The contrast makes it: a relentlessly gritty film with this ethereal music on top of it. Without the music, the movie would have been good. But with the music, it was close to perfect." Wired: Blade Runner was prescient in many ways, anticipating globalization, genetic engineering, biometric security. How do you gauge the movie's influence?

Scott: Enormous. One of the top architects in the world told me he used to run it in his office once a month. Architecture would have been my game if I hadn't done movies. Frequently an architect will design a building and then walk, and not care about what's put inside it, which is a pity. If I were an architect I'd say, you know, "You can't have that chair." And I think of Charles Knode's wardrobe, which people don't talk about often enough. Usually you get bad futuristic suits, right? Deckard's was very well done. And Rachael's clothes were stunning. I think there was a lot of influence from the film in that direction. And interiors, definitely. A big clothing designer sent me pictures of the interior of his place, and the factories looked like Blade Runner. Hotels in New York started to look like the movie.

Wired: What have you learned about Blade Runner — the story, the characters, the ideas — that you didn't know when the production began?

__Scott:__I always knew everything! I knew all the characters. Of course, I got more experience as a filmmaker. But the more experience you get, the less you know — because the more you know, the more you know can go wrong. It can make you insecure. But I don't worry much about that.

Senior editor Ted Greenwald (ted_greenwald@wired.com) interviewed Neil Young in issue 12.03.

Feature Explore Cultural Influences Before and After the Film in the Blade Runner Nexus Full Transcript and Audio of Wired's Interview with Ridley Scott