Why Blade Runner Was The 'Hardest Thing' Ridley Scott Has Ever Done
Writer, director, and producer Ridley Scott has been making movies for decades, but one of his earliest features was also apparently one of his most difficult. The man behind "Napoleon" (read our review!) is no stranger to directing historical epics ("Kingdom of Heaven," "Gladiator"), real-world dramas ("American Gangster," "Thelma & Louise"), and even existential science-fiction ("Alien," "Prometheus"), but in an interview with Wired in 2007, he revealed that the most difficult film to create was his 1982 science fiction classic, "Blade Runner." Loosely based on the 1968 Phillip K. Dick novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?," "Blade Runner" is a noirish sci-fi starring Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard, who hunts down renegade android "replicants" in his job as a blade runner. In the course of hunting down a handful of such replicants that escaped from an off-world labor camp, he starts to question the very nature of humanity. It's heady, moody stuff, but it's also a deeply beloved film that inspired both a sequel and an animated series.
While many might imagine that "Blade Runner" was difficult because of the technical aspects or putting together the budget for such a complex film, it actually had a whole lot more to do with Deckard's world and drawing from imagination.
Bringing an alternate Los Angeles to life
In the interview, Wired notes that Scott has previously called "Blade Runner" "his most complete and personal film," and asks him to explain. He does so, saying:
"I just finished 'American Gangster.' It's about two real guys who are still alive, so you want to make it absolutely accurate. It's not a documentary, but it feels awfully real. For 'Black Hawk Down,' I went to the location and shot it. 'Legend' was more imaginative, but it borrowed from Jean Cocteau's 'Beauty and the Beast' and the best of Disney. 'Blade Runner' involved full-bore imagination. Deckard's universe had to be expanded into credibility. That's probably the hardest thing I've done, because there was nothing to borrow from."
The script for "Blade Runner" was written by screenwriter Hampton Fancher and producer David Peoples, though Scott had a heavy hand in bringing it all together, and he explained throughout the interview that bringing the future of the film to life was easily its most challenging aspect. Once they had the story "on paper," the rest of it was relatively easy. There was another reason that "Blade Runner" was both difficult and personal for Scott, however, and it had to do with personal grief.
Tears in the rain
Scott started work on "Blade Runner" shortly after his older brother Frank's death, and he used the film to deal with his grief. He only got to really know his brother after he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and the parallels between the replicants' desire for a longer life and his own brother's death were painfully close.
Creating the details of Deckard's world might have been a challenge for Scott, but he managed to imbue that world with a great depth of feeling. "Blade Runner" is a movie about grief, about lives cut too short and lost potential. It's a grand tragedy in every sense of the word, depicted through the stylish lens of cyberpunk noir. It may be the most difficult movie that Ridley Scott's ever made, but it's also one of the best.