Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner Page #2

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...because I was a friend,

he'd let me have a crack at it.

And I read it,

and I thought it was darn good.

Twenty-four hours later,

it was like. "Can we meet?"

And they wanted to do it.

It was a comic-book... Kind of a big...

Like a coffee-table comic book

I found in London...

...called Mechanismo.

These, like, replicants.

You know, gyro...

You know, metallic thing...

I love that book.

And I showed it to Michael Deeley.

I said. "This is incredible. This is like...

Visually, this is like

where we should go."

And... This is before Ridley.

And I said,

"I wanna call it Mechanismo.."

I kind of talked him into it,

so it was Mechanismo...

There's one script

where the cover says Mechanismo..

The title we finally settled on

was Dangerous Days, which I loved...

...because it was very much in tune...

...with the much more romantic script

that Hampton had written.

I was dead set against it,

but I figured I could get a vote in later.

But go ahead and we'll... They'll finance.

We'll call it Dangerous Days...

...for the time being.

And then Michael Deeley

came up with Blade Runner.

I'd used it already.

You know, it's a term

that I got from reading Burroughs.

He had a little book.

It was called Blade Runner.

It was a matter now

of getting into it.

We tried to get Ridley

from the outset...

...but he was, at that point,

planning to do Dune.

As I was mixing Alien...

...Michael Deeley had come to see me

at EMI.

And I'd known Deeley

from his days with EMI.

And he said. "I've got this script

called Blade Runner."

I said. "I don't wanna do another

science fiction, I've just finished one.

But I'll read it." And I read the script,

which was Hampton Fancher.

It was called Dangerous Days.

And I turned it down.

Ridley Scott was going to be

the original director on Dune...

...and Dino De Laurentiis hired him,

and their sets were being built.

They were gonna shoot it, and

it was going to be based on the novel...

...and it was going to be

this large-scale science-fiction film.

I was attracted to Dune because it was

beyond what I'd done on Alien...

...which was kind of hardcore

kind of horror film.

And Dune would be a step,

very strongly...

...very, very strongly.

In the direction of Star Wars.

At this point,

something rather sad happened...

...which was that

Ridley's older brother died.

Died rather young, obviously.

And Ridley was in some depression.

He really had to get to work.

He wanted to do something, because

when he's working, he's working.

To be faced with, you know...

...a brother dying of cancer...

...and then to die, it can often...

I think what happened is maybe

the lack of control over that...

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