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Ridley Scott reflects on his finest work
[Tue 09/09/2008 09:45:16]
By David Michael
When I met up with Ridley Scott to discuss Blade Runner: Final Cut marking the 25th Anniversary of the Blade Runner legacy, I expected Ridley Scott to be celebrating with one of his trademark cigars, but when I joined him in a London hotel to discuss the new definitive cut of the film, KitKat bars were the order of the day.
As he offered me one, Scott admitted, while tobacco often got him through the “demands and boredom” of long film shoots, he’s quit now.
“I did five packs of cigarettes a day on Gladiator,” he confesses. “I’m lucky I decided I was killing myself and I stopped everything. Now a carefully considered diet and a lunch time snooze, helps the 69-year-old director maintain his prolific back-to-back shooting schedule of recent years. “I go in the trailer, I eat my food in eight minutes, strip off, lie on the bed and sleep for 40 minutes, and I’m ready to go. If you learn to catnap, it’s like a recharge.”
The new lease of life given to Scott’s futuristic noir classic Blade Runner in its final cut version is equally as straightforward. While George Lucas took the opportunity of a digital make-o ver for his original Star Wars trilogy to add bigger explosions and seemingly random CGI creatures into scenes, Blade Runner is more a pristine polish. In essence, it’s the restoration to the vision Ridley Scott had originally intended.
“I thought I got it right first time,” says Scott, who in 1982, with the film over budget and in the hands of completion bond guarantors, was forced to bend his vision to incorporate both a voice over and happy ending. “I stuck that stuff on the end [outtakes from The Shining], which Stanley Kubrick gave me, because I called him up after doing all these bloody previews where there were these comments: What is ‘Cityspeak”?” Why is the bad guy sympathetic? Why is it always raining?”
Having removed both irritations in his Director’s Cut in 1992, Scott reflects back on that version as a “cheap job”. The forthcoming remastered cut, he insists though, will be “like watching the film as it should have been 25-years-ago in the theatres, but with a better sound mix [including Vangelis’s soundtrack].” Also, wires that aided the special effects have been digitally removed, which to the attentive eye remained visible in the first two cuts. “That’s why it was raining all the time in the film, to help hide the bloody cables!” Laughs Scott.
Cables or not, the glimpse of the future Scott showed in Blade Runner were rooted in the 1970’s. His monthly trips to New York, and a couple of trips to Hong Kong, during his career in advertising at the time, ultimately fed his imagination and fuelled the futuristic urban landscape.
“New York in those years was pretty decrepit, dirty and dangerous,” recalls Scott. “Also, my trips to Hong Kong, were prior to its skyscraper blocks. So I’d be looking at the junks in the harbour and the filth – it was incredible, like it was medieval. So the starting point was the juxtaposition of those two things, and the feeling that everything was on overload.”
By his own definition, the look of Blade Runner has provided a template for the science fiction genre since, not to mention, inspire architects and interior designers. “I was doing such a new world that people hadn’t seen before,” reflects Scott. “And after, it was tapped into continuously. I often recognise films that have copied it, and think, ‘Oh…no’ But that’s fine, because that means it’s been an influence.”
The final cut is a fitting epitaph to what is widely regarded as Scott’s signature film. “I think it’s my most authorish film for sure,” agrees Scott, to the notion. “Because I sat for a year with writer Hampton [Fancher] and we were literally stroking through it page-by-page, I’ve never spent so much time with a writer – that was the real evolution of the story.” An evolution that took the film away from the source material of Phillip Dick’s book ‘I Dream of Electric Sheep’, and famously caused friction with the author.
“It almost bares no relation to ‘I Dream of Electric Sheep’, at all,” states Scott. “I met with Phillip and he was angry, because I told him I couldn’t get through the book. I thought I better repair this [relationship], so I invited him to see rushes and he was absolutely stunned by them and couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
“He said: ‘My God, have you read my book, ‘The Man in a High Tower?’ I said, no. And he said, ‘You must have, because this is Tyrell!’. I said, ‘No, these things happen, that was only in your head mate, this was in mine’. He was a big smoker and neurotic.
While Scott has never revisited the genre he helped define, he admits he’s now keen to do another science fiction film, and if it happens, he favours shooting it in 3D. Without prompting, he ponders, “I’m curious about doing a sequel for Blade Runner…there’s something in the android that lived.”
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