DENIS VILLENEUVE It’s linked with the birth of my love for cinema. I think we hadn’t seen before, the combination of film noir and science fiction, and it’s the first time that someone was taking the time to really create the future. They tried to project the ’80s into the future and to think about it from a sociological point of view, from a demographic point of view, technological. Visions of the future in the cinema at that time were more fantasy-like, you know? Not that serious.

Why was now the time to do a sequel?

SCOTT I always thought it was time to do it, any time in the last 30 years. I got a call from Alcon [the producing studio] saying, “We’re gonna buy this. Do you think there’s a story?” I said, “There’s a big story,” which is about artificial intelligence. I called up Hampton and we sat there and worked it out. The fundamental basis of the story [is about] that idea of A. I.s being turned into A. I.s with emotion, which becomes very dangerous. Because he’ll get out of control in a heartbeat as soon as he realizes he’s superior to his master.

That idea is even more relevant now than it was in 1982.

VILLENEUVE In some ways it’s a very classic story of a human wanting to play God, like the Frankenstein story. It’s timeless. So the same questions are still there, but we are more and more kind of hybrids ourselves. Our relationship with memory, faith and communications has evolved a lot since then.

GOSLING What adds to the surrealness of it is that the original film is baked into your memory. So as you start to unravel the idea of memory, in general, Denis and I just kept finding ourselves back to the original, which was so much a part of our early memories.