Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner

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Enhance 224 to 176.

Enhance.

Stop.

You have all the tools...

...colors, toys,

everything at your disposal...

...to transport you to

an imaginary world.

People's patience and their willingness

to persevere tended to erode...

...as we went on

shooting nights in smoke.

It was a bitch working every night.

All night long, often in the rain.

So it wasn't the most pleasant shoot.

The tension...

...and the atmosphere created

was absolutely palpable.

It was enormous. Overwhelming,

beautiful, enormous, great.

And I was living there.

I don't think some of these people

on the crew really understood how far...

...Ridley was pushing the medium.

The chaos of that production.

Everybody hating it.

People don't wanna be in movies

after they worked on that movie.

It's like all those things informed this

in a magical way, I guess.

When it first came out,

it was too intense to let in...

...the darkness and the poverty...

...and the projection of what life

would be like in 2019.

What Ridley created was this

multilayered, very intense...

"investigation into

how that world might be.

How do you prepare the audience...

...for seeing something very different?

Now time has prepared them.

It was so dark.

And so intense

and so beautifully constructed.

I was absolutely about coordinating

beauty. Shot by shot had to be great.

My weapon was that camera.

I'll get what I wanted.

If you're there with me, great.

If you're not there with me, too bad.

In 1975,

someone gave me some money.

They pitied me.

They said. "You gotta...

...do what you wanna do.

Here's some money.

You can go away and write."

And so I did.

And it didn't work out, you know.

I thought I would produce a movie.

And this guy Jim Maxwell, who's

a close friend and knows me well...

...and he said, "You might..."

I said. "I think science fiction's

gonna happen."

And he said. "Okay, I know a..."

He says. "You know

who Philip K. Dick is?" I said, "No."

He said, "There's a book called

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"

I said. "Okay, I'll read that."

I read it, I didn't like it that much.

But I thought, "Okay, that's commercial.

Here's a throughline:

You know, bureaucratic detective

chasing androids."

In '78 or so, my friend Brian Kelly,

he had $5000 or something.

He said. "You could get an option. That

might be a good commercial project...

...that you could get behind and make...

You know, make some money."

That's all we were talking about,

making some money.

I'd been pursued for about two years

by Brian Kelly...

...a close friend of mine,

who had this idea in mind...

...to make a movie based upon Dick's

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

And I'd first read it

and thought I wasn't very interested.

He read the book, and he said.

"It ain't a movie."

And then Brian came back to me

and said. "That's what-l'

I said. "He's full of shit.

There's a movie there."

He said. "Could you

write something down to prove it?"

So I wrote five pages,

what I thought could be a structure.

And he took that to Michael Deeley...

I didn't know Michael Deeley.

And Brian came back and said.

"Michael Deeley says it sucks."

Then he came back with a script,

which wasn't terrific...

...but it was interesting.

Unfortunately, the scripts

Hampton generated initially...

...did not meet with Phil's approval,

to put it mildly.

He thought, again,

that it had been dumbed down...

...that it turned into, you know,

a detective just chasing androids around.

Well, he was really protective...

...of Do Androids Dream

of Electric Sheep? Understandably so.

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