Then I wanted the test to be the opposite of before – not something they do before going into action, but afterwards. They do the test once they’ve been in through a traumatic event. Originally, the test was supposed to be someone nearby, and [K] on a bed with a machine scanning. I thought, no. That’s a scene that came through the storyboarding process; Roger Deakins and I thought it would be much more interesting if it was a very claustrophobic little booth, with a strange scanner in front of him, and we will never see the cop who’s asking the questions. It’ll be much more brutal, much more impersonal, much more inhuman – almost like he’s an animal in a laboratory. I thought that would be much more violent, and that it would say more about K’s place in society. How he’s just an object to them. And that replicants are so strong, the door out of the booth has to be very well locked, you know? [Laughs] In case something goes wrong, they’re safe. He’s an animal in a cage. How vulnerable he is in that environment.

The scanner was designed by our storyboard artist, Sam Hudecki. So it’s really a scene that came from strong ideas that were from Michael Green, that I transformed with Deakins and Sam as we worked.

Then I was talking about the scene with Ryan Gosling, and at the beginning, Michael had this beautiful idea, which was that the replicants who are working for the police have to go through a baseline test where they have to say a poem. The way the words are creating an emotion inside them, it would be like a way to gauge whether they’re still on track or not. If they’re still aligned from an emotional point of view, if they’re still reliable.

In the original [script] it was just a mantra he was repeating. But I felt that wasn’t intrusive, wasn’t aggressive enough, and Ryan came up with this idea when we were brainstorming. He came up with this process that actors use to learn Shakespeare, where you say a word, then they repeat the word, and then someone would ask a question about that word. It’s to induce specific memories linked with a word, so they remember the word forever. I transformed that process to make it intrusive, where instead of having someone repeating a long, long sentence, they will be more aggressive – they’re asking questions about specific words.

We did both versions, and the new version was so strong – everybody loved it – so that new baseline test became the one you see in the movie. It was about three days into shooting, and I said to Ryan Gosling, “That’s exactly the kind of movie I want to make. That’s the exact kind of tension, brutality, aggression I want.”