“Fuck you guys,” Fancher said, and returned home to Carmel.

The character of Rick Deckard had evolved, over the succession of drafts, from the befuddled bureaucrat of Dick’s novel to a hard-boiled gumshoe. For the part, Fancher was initially thinking Robert Mitchum. Scott and Deeley, meanwhile, were thinking Dustin Hoffman—the antithesis of an alpha-male hero.

The director and producer flew to New York to meet with Hoffman, who talked their ears off about everything from the character to cryogenics. After a few weeks, Deeley began to think Hoffman’s enthusiasms were dragging down the process. “I felt it was getting out of hand—the film seemed as though it was drifting on an endless ocean,” he wrote in his 2009 memoir. Hoffman and Blade Runner parted ways.

According to Fancher, his then girlfriend, Barbara Hershey, was the first to suggest Harrison Ford. Though Star Wars had made the former carpenter world-famous, he still hadn’t carried his own mega-hit. Steven Spielberg invited Scott and Deeley to London, where he was shooting Raiders of the Lost Ark. “After watching only a few minutes of the Raiders rushes, Ridley and I knew we wanted Harrison,” Deeley wrote. There was just one catch: when they met Ford in his hotel, he was wearing his Indiana Jones fedora.

“Shit, I wanted that hat for Deckard,” Scott told Deeley.

“Tough,” Deeley responded. “We lost a hat, but we gained a star.”

Katy Haber, Deeley’s right hand, suggested the Dutch star Rutger Hauer for the role of Roy Batty, the leader of the replicants. His look was perfect: the kind of blond Übermensch some future Dr. Frankenstein might dream up in a lab. Scott cast him sight unseen, but he wasn’t prepared for Hauer’s impish sense of humor, introduced by way of a gag that relied on the era’s less-than-progressive sensibilities. At their first meeting in L.A., Hauer walked in wearing a Kenzo sweater with a fox across the chest, candy-pink pants, and Elton John sunglasses.

Scott turned ashen. “He took me in the other room,” Haber recalls, “and he said, ‘He’s a fucking woofter!’ ”—British slang for gay. “I said, ‘Ridley, can’t you see he’s pulling a fast one on you?’ ”

Fancher had written the role of Rachael for Hershey, but Scott was entranced by the screen test of Sean Young, a 21-year-old newcomer who had done the Bill Murray comedy Stripes. Sure, she was green, but Scott cared less about experience than about optics, and he saw Young as a classic beauty in the mold of Vivien Leigh; he asked Haber to coach her so that her acting could live up to her look.

For the role of Pris, the lethal punk sexbot, casting director Jane Feinberg thought back to a spunky teenager she’d met in Chicago, who had auditioned for a bit role in Breaking Away wearing a sequined bow-tie choker. Daryl Hannah, not yet 20, was now living in Los Angeles. At her screen test, she pulled a blond fright wig from a basket, and her character’s iconic look was born. The cast was rounded out with Edward James Olmos, as the detective Gaff (for whom Olmos invented his own dialect of “City Speak”), and Joanna Cassidy, cast as the snake dancer Zhora in part because she had her own Burmese python.

As the cast came together, the financing fell apart. The indie company Filmways, which had signed on to finance the production when the budget was around $12 million, abruptly pulled out most of their money once the budget was increased to $20 million, leaving Deeley with two weeks to drum up that amount. The Englishman tap-danced around Hollywood, getting $7.5 million from Alan Ladd, Jr., at Warner Bros. and another $7.5 from the Hong Kong mogul Run Run Shaw. For the rest, he turned to Jerry Perenchio, a former boxing promoter who would later become the billionaire chairman of Univision.