Dune Nearly Stopped Ridley Scott From Directing Blade Runner
David Lynch has made a lot of wonderful movies over his filmmaking career, but "Dune" (1984) was not one of them. It was a film that was both severely limited by the quality of special effects available in the early '80s, and it had a script that tried to cram a dense 700+ page book into a single two and a half hour movie. It was never going to work.
This is why fans of Ridley Scott can look back with relief at the fact that Scott didn't direct "Dune" as originally planned. As Scott explained in a 1994 interview, he was originally reluctant to take on "Blade Runner" because he was "committed to producer Dino DeLaurentiis to do an adaptation of Frank Herbert's novel 'Dune.'" Although the 1984 "Dune" seems, in hindsight, like it was always a guaranteed flop, at the time producers had high hopes for it. After all, after the success of "Star Wars," it was clear there was a lot of potential with this sort of sci-fi movie.
But after half a year of working on "Dune," Scott left the project, partly due to the sheer amount of work he knew would have to go into the movie, and also due to a personal tragedy:
"I also realized 'Dune' was going to take more work. A lot more work. And I just didn't have the heart to attack that work. Because ... well, I'll tell you what really happened. My older brother died. Frankly, that freaked me out ... I couldn't sit around for another two and a half years on 'Dune,' which is how long I thought it was going to take, preparing and waiting on this thing. I needed immediate activity, needed to get my mind off my brother's death."
One of his most thoughtful works
After leaving "Dune," Ridley Scott asked to see the script for "Blade Runner" again, which at that point was titled "Dangerous Days." (When Scott first received an even earlier draft of the script back in 1979, it was titled "Android.") In addition to simply appreciating the quality of the script, there were two other reasons Scott took on this project. "One was the fact that I knew [producer] Michael Deeley well, and knew I could work with him," he explained. "The second tied in with the grief I was feeling over my brother's death."
Scott took on "Blade Runner" because he figured it would be a project that kept him immediately busy from thinking too much about his brother. "Which is ironic, of course," he said. "Because it wasn't immediate at all. It took another bloody year before I began shooting 'Blade Runner.'"
In the end, of course, "Blade Runner" turned out to be the better choice for Scott. Like "Dune," it wasn't a big box office success or anything, but it developed a strong cult following and is now considered one of the best movies of Scott's whole career. There's a lot of reasons why "Blade Runner" still has its fans 40 years later, but the persistent melancholic tone of the film might be a big part of it. Every character in this movie has a deep sadness within them that seems to drive their every action, and the antagonist's final monologue is one of the most poignant scenes in Scott's career. Even if the movie had been a total flop, it still would've been worth it.
"It all was kind of an exorcism, in a way," Scott explained. "Accepting 'Dangerous Days' helped get me through my brother's passing."