Bringing ‘Blade Runner’ back to life after 35 years
LOS ANGELES — It was dawn on the set of “Blade Runner 2049” and Harrison Ford and director Denis Villeneuve were swimming back to the shore together after an all-night shoot in a million-gallon water tank. It was cold in the water. It was cold outside. And it was just one night out of a dozen that they’d be spending their sleeping hours soaking wet to try to execute a set piece that even Ridley Scott thought too ambitious.
“What we are doing now is insane,” Ford told Villeneuve. “It’s insane.”
He might as well have been talking about the whole project, which is, by one metric, a $150 million art house sequel to a 35-year-old sci-fi film that flopped on release. In 1982, Ridley Scott’s neo-noir dystopian mind-bender based on Philip K. Dick’s story “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” made a mere $27.6 million on a $28 million budget. For comparison, the year’s top film, “E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial” made $359.2 million.
During the troubled production, Ford and Scott famously disagreed on even the nature of Ford’s character Rick Deckard and whether or not he was a “Replicant” (aka an android), and neither liked the theatrical release which included a tacked on happy ending and a forced voiceover narration. Then came all those other versions. Seven are said to exist, five are still available. Both Ford and Villeneuve like “The Final Cut,” from 2007, best.