First all of all – don’t worry, this article is completely Blade Runner 2049 spoiler-free.

Second of all – the movie is just unfathomably good, and an absolute visual treat. Go and watch it in a cinema at soon as humanly possible.

Alright, housekeeping sorted. Cinematographer Roger Deakins, who has 13 Oscar nominations to his name, revealed in an interview with Variety that one of the locations was inspired by Sydney‘s weird ass dust storm.

Blade Runner 2049 takes place thirty years after the 1982 original, which was set in 2019. (Are you keeping up?) Ryan Gosling plays a young cop, K, whose purpose is to find and ‘retire’ (a.k.a. kill) genetically engineered robots.

His mission to uncover the truth about a long-buried secret at one point leads him to the city of Las Vegas covered in a permanent, rich cloud of dust.

Don’t worry, this isn’t a spoiler; you’ve seen these images in the trailer.





Goddamn beautiful, no? And the entire film is like this.

Speaking to Variety, Deakins revealed that it was Sydney’s 2009 dust storm that provided the inspo for those scenes.

“With Las Vegas, Denis [Gassner, production designer] wanted it to have the red dust. We discussed it at length and we came up with these images of Sydney during the dust storm that they had a few years ago. There are these wonderful photos of the Sydney Opera House and it’s covered with red dust. That formed the basis for Las Vegas.”

Here’s a reminder of that truly weird day.



Photo: Stuart Hannagan / Getty.

Photo: Cameron Spencer / Getty.

Photo: Getty.

Honestly, if Deakin doesn’t pick up an Academy Award for this visual masterpiece of a film, then the organisers would have flubbed it harder than the La La Land / Moonlight debacle.