I've seen things you people wouldn't believe: Skyscrapers engulfed in a sickly yellow haze; Elvis Presley performing on the stage of a decadent art-deco nightclub; water rippling across the windows of a flying car, only to vanish—like tears in rain.
And I've seen the original blade runner himself set off running again … and again … and again.
It's a fall morning in 2016, and on a cavernous soundstage in Budapest, Harrison Ford—wearing a gray button-down shirt, dark jeans, and a Ford-tough grimace—is shooting a crucial encounter in Blade Runner 2049. For the first time in more than three decades, Ford is reprising his role as Rick Deckard, the piano-plinking, hard-drinking cop from Ridley Scott's 1982 Blade Runner. The 75-year-old actor has endured several on-the-job injuries over the years—this is a guy who had a chunk of the Millennium Falcon fall on his leg—but he shows little sign of wear as he sprints through Deckard's almost tomblike condo, shoulders pumping vigorously and a wolfish dog galloping by his side. In today's scene, Deckard is being pursued by a special agent named K (Ryan Gosling), who bursts methodically—perhaps even robotically?—through Deckard's marble wall like a slimmer, grimmer Kool-Aid Man. But every time Gosling smashes into the room, it terrifies the pooch, who scrambles out of frame before Denis Villeneuve, the film's 49-year-old French-Canadian director, can call, "Cut!"
Why K doesn't just use the front door isn't exactly clear, as the plot of Blade Runner 2049 is guarded with the kind of intensity usually reserved for Star Wars reshoots. (Even negotiating to get onto the set required more back-and-forth than a Voight-Kampff test. I'm told I'm the only US journalist who passed.) Still, there are a few confirmed details: Thirty years after audiences left Deckard bruised and battered in 2019 Los Angeles, he has disappeared, and Gosling's LAPD officer is on the hunt (possibly at the behest of his boss, played by Robin Wright, though no one involved with the movie will say for sure). Meanwhile, there's a new breed of replicants—the series' term for androids—being built by a mysterious inventor named Wallace (Jared Leto), who's aided by a devoted employee, Luv (Sylvia Hoeks). That's pretty much all the 2049 team will tell me, no matter how politely I ask. "I'm not even sure I'm allowed to say I had a good time making it," Gosling jokes.
As Ford dashes repeatedly across the set and Gosling continues smashing through the wall, Villeneuve stands outside of the faux condo, his short gray-black hair looking early-morning tousled. When Villeneuve is satisfied with a shot, he tends to repeat his words, patternlike, in a rich Quebecois accent. ("When you hear three deeeplys—'I deeeply, deeeply, deeeply love it'—you know you're in the sweet spot," Gosling says.) After the dog finally gets the timing right, Villeneuve puts his hands in his pockets and nods happily: "Greatgreatgreatgreatgreat."
Though the director's demeanor is calm—when he's not talking quietly to the actors, he's chewing gum and stoically stroking his beard—the wall-breaking moment is one he's been worried about for a while now. He doesn't want his 2049 action sequences to be too noisy or audacious or, as he puts it, "too Marvel." Instead, he says, "I want to bring them down as close as possible to the original Blade Runner: more simple, more brutal." Which would make sense if the first film had been a hit and moviegoers had flocked to its chilly (and, yes, brutal) vision of a not-too-far-off future ravaged by ecological disaster and corporate corruption. But they didn't, and even after the subsequent decades of mainstream discovery, critical reassessment, and massive cultural influence, Blade Runner 2049 remains the rarest of Hollywood propositions: an R-rated, $150 million sequel to a movie that not a lot of people liked (or even fully understood) when it first came out.
What makes this all the more difficult to compute is that 2049—35 years in the making and arriving in theaters this month—promises an even darker vision of the future than the original, amping up the dystopic futurism-funk that bombed with moviegoers and critics back in 1982. If it took audiences years to connect with the future depicted in the original Blade Runner, how will they respond to Villeneuve's version of how things are going to get even worse?
"I don't spend too much time trying to look like I'm having fun," Harrison Ford says.
Ridley Scott swears he doesn't think too much about the past. Ask him if he feels validated that the world seems to have finally caught up with Blade Runner and he'll give you a cockeyed stare and a shrug: "I don't give a shit."
Wait, really?
"No, I don't give a shit," he says. "I've got a movie shooting in Rome in two weeks. The important thing to do is move forward and never look back."
Scott, 79, has been responsible for some of the most meticulously crafted, forward-moving sci-fi smashes of the past four decades. On a spring afternoon in Los Angeles, perched at the end of a couch in an all-black shirt-and-pants ensemble, his manner is cordial and kinetic, albeit in a let's-get-on-with-this way. And while he says he hates to look back, he's spent decades trying to keep interest in Blade Runner alive, even though (or maybe because) his difficulties making the film—angry financiers, a bitter crew, endless energy-sapping delays—were so extensive they wound up filling an entire making-of book, as well as a three-and-a-half-hour documentary.
The offscreen saga began in 1977, when a struggling actor named Hampton Fancher set his sights on making a movie out of Philip K. Dick's book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, an idea-congested, paranoia-stoked novel about an android-hunter, Deckard, who falls for a synthetic creation named Rachael. In the novel, as in the eventual film, the androids are built by a secretive, deep-pocketed corporation and are often sent to take up tasks that humans no longer want to do. Taking the name Blade Runner from an old William S. Burroughs book, Fancher joined forces with Scott—who was coming off the haunted-house-in-space hit Alien—and the two spent long, sometimes combative months working on early versions of the script, trying to conceptualize life in 2019. "Science fiction is a very special form of auditorium," Scott says. "It's a theater, a box, within which anything goes—but you'd better draw up the guidelines and the rule book before you begin. Otherwise, you end up with nonsense."
After one too many creative falling-outs with Fancher, Scott brought on David Peoples (later of Unforgiven and 12 Monkeys) to help finish writing the screenplay. In 1981, filming finally began, with Ford playing Deckard and Sean Young playing Rachael, and the English-born Scott found himself at odds with his American crew—and, it was rumored, with Ford. (In the 2007 making-of documentary Dangerous Days, one producer remembers that Ford would get "pissed off" about the constant delays in shooting.) Scott denies that the tension between him and his star was ever as bad as reports would have you believe: "Oh, we got on fine! I used to get drunk regularly with Harrison during filming."
SCROLL DOWN
"The power of science fiction, and what's positive about it," says Ryan Gosling, who as a kid in Canada saw Harrison Ford in the original Blade Runner, "is that you're able to experience the worst-case scenario without actually having to live it."
When Blade Runner was released in June of 1982, even Ford's post–Star Wars star power and Scott's post-Alien cred couldn't make it a hit. Set in a drab, undesirable future devoid of sunlight or serenity—and bursting with moments of (literally) eye-popping violence—the film turned off most moviegoers, who instead chose to spend that summer moon-swooning with E.T. or getting wrapped up in the wrath of Khan. (Blade Runner made a so-so $6.15 million in its opening weekend, barely beating Rocky III, which had been playing for nearly a month.) Many of those who did buy tickets were taken aback by its depiction of the future. "It wasn't like Flash Gordon, where everyone had great spacesuits and shiny spaceships, and everyone looked really sexy," futurist and physicist Michio Kaku says. "In Blade Runner, the people were misfits, and the robots did the dirty work. It shocked people."
The shock was especially hard to shake because, unlike so much other sci-fi of that era, Blade Runner wasn't searching too far to find the future. As opposed to the Star Trek or Alien films—galaxy-questing adventures set centuries henceforth—Scott's Blade Runner was an Earth-bound best guess at what a troubled American city might be like within the audience's lifetime. You felt as though you could almost reach out and touch the technology in Blade Runner, which made its take on where the world was heading all the more palpable—and terrifying. "It's a film that haunts you," says Gosling, who caught the original version of Blade Runner at home when he was a teenager in Canada, "because that future feels possible."
The film disappeared from theaters almost as quickly as it arrived, though Scott says today that he is not entirely surprised by its unicorn-rare second life beyond the big screen. "I knew what we had," he says. "And I knew it was special." A couple of years after its release, Fancher walked into New York City's Shakespeare & Co. bookstore, where a clerk recognized the screenwriter's name. "He said, 'We have a Blade Runner club!'" Fancher recalls. "'We bought a 35-mm print, and every month we get together and find a place to play it.'" Thanks to midnight screenings, cable TV runs, and home-video releases, more and more viewers found themselves lost in the future world of Blade Runner, drawn in by the electro grandeur of the film's claustrophobic cityscapes and the poetry of Rutger Hauer's soul-battered, rain-spattered speech, in which his replicant villain, Roy Batty, mourns a life he'd only barely begun to understand. ("I've seen things you people wouldn't believe …") And because of the film's diffuse storytelling and blurry genre confines, Blade Runner can feel like a different movie every time you watch it: a detective story, an action flick, a romance—or maybe all of them at once. "I definitely saw it as a love story, about people searching for their identity," says 2049's Hoeks, who first saw it in her native Holland. "And it's about people trying to have control over their lives."
Ingredients of Sci-Fi Dystopia
By imagining the consequences of, say, rampant consumerism or unchecked technological growth, we can hopefully—hopefully—avoid dystopia IRL. Here's how Blade Runner stacks up against other genre classics. —Caitlin Harrington
Within a decade, Scott's enveloping techno-noir tale—with its teeming city streets, culture-cluttered skylines, and potentially toxic technologies—would prompt a new generation of filmmakers to pursue their own sleek, solemn visions of the future, many of which wound up looking a lot like Blade Runner. Its dank aesthetic coursed through movies and shows like The Matrix, Cowboy Bebop, Akira, The Fifth Element, and the original Ghost in the Shell. Videogames like BioShock and Perfect Dark, meanwhile, borrowed heavily from its visual vocabulary. "At first I was amused by the fact that Blade Runner was an influence," Scott says. "Then I got fed up with seeing pouring rain onscreen."
All great sci-fi inevitably gets replicated through other sci-fi—Star Wars begot a late '70s/early '80s load of junky, mumbo-jumbo space tales; The Terminator minted an entire video-store shelf's worth of killer-robot dramas; Alien unleashed a galaxy of ship-devouring monsters. But Blade Runner stood out not just for its influence but for its possible prescience. Think of the animated lights adorning Hong Kong's International Commerce Centre building, or the illuminated spine of Los Angeles' recently opened Wilshire Grand tower. Take a walk through the centers of Manhattan or Tokyo, with their LED-zeppelin screens and sky-plundering advertisements. They're the kind of sense-assaulting landscapes that have come to represent our collective concept of "the future," and though their designers no doubt had other things on their minds besides a decades-old sci-fi flick, it's hard to look at them and not wonder where Blade Runner's influence begins and where it ends.
"Blade Runner changed the way the world looks and how we look at the world," William Gibson says. The godfather of cyberpunk famously walked out of the movie in the theater, shaken that its visuals had "totally scooped the atmosphere of my first attempt at a novel"—a book, by the way, that became hacker tome Neuromancer—though he finally caught the full film a decade later and came to understand why it was so influential. "It's a true classic," he says today. "And it's become our cultural-visual template for the future."
The most enduring legacy of Blade Runner may be the film's never-resolved cliffhanger: Was the replicant-hunter Deckard actually a replicant himself? Fans have been debating the question for decades now, incited by new cuts of the movie that Scott has released over the years to sharpen and clarify his original vision. (The consensus seems to be: Yes, Deckard's a replicant … probably.) No matter where you land, it's the kind of existential quandary that only leads to more quandaries—about how we define "human"; about whether or not our most unique traits are, in fact, data points to be duplicated; about how much we can trust our own recollections.
"It's an ambiguous film: Is he or isn't he, and does it matter?" says sci-fi novelist Madeline Ashby, who's written extensively about robotics and AI. "It's about who you are, and what you're here to do, and which memories are important to you." Adds Ford: "Is one ever secure in the knowledge of how you got here—of how you were made?"
Existential id-scratchers like these are why Blade Runner went from outcast to oracle. And they're also why Scott had long hoped to add a new chapter to the saga. "There was always," he told me, "another Blade Runner story."
"Science fiction is a very special form of auditorium," Ridley Scott says. "It's a theater, a box, within which anything goes—but you'd better draw up the guidelines before you begin."
One night in early 2011, just as he was about to start filming Prometheus—his first return to the Alien series since he launched it back in 1979—Scott had a three-hour dinner in London with producers Broderick Johnson and Andrew Kosove. Their company, Alcon Entertainment, was just coming off hits like The Blind Side, The Book of Eli, and Dolphin Tale, and they had spent a year quietly acquiring the rights to produce a new Blade Runner movie. Would the director have any interest in joining them to discuss a sequel? "Ridley said, 'I've been waiting for this meeting for 35 years,'" Kosove remembers.
Not too long afterward, Fancher was sitting in his Brooklyn apartment when the phone rang: Please hold for Ridley Scott. The two hadn't spoken for years, but with the director once again piloting the Blade Runner franchise, he wanted to see if Fancher could fly to London to talk ideas. "I immediately said, 'Oh, you finally hit the bottom of the barrel,'" Fancher says of his old sparring partner. "And he laughed." As luck would have it, Fancher had been working on a short story whose protagonist would eventually become 2049's Agent K. Those few pages were eventually turned into a treatment and a short script, which was then turned over to a screenwriter named Michael Green, who at the time was known mostly for this TV work. The resulting script was so top secret that at one point it was given the code name Acid Zoo, based on a story Fancher likes to tell about the time he took LSD and stared at gorillas. Even early on Scott and Fancher had Gosling in mind to play Agent K, and Scott made a point of keeping Ford looped in on the script's progress. In a 2015 interview, Scott recalled that when he first brought the idea of 2049 to Ford, the actor said, "Meh."
"I don't remember saying that," Ford says, "but I don't know if he talked to me before I had a couple cups of coffee. The script is what convinced me."
"Everybody going into this was apprehensive," says Green, who would go on to work on four other big 2017 projects (American Gods, Logan, Alien: Covenant, and Murder on the Orient Express). "The prospect of diving back into many people's favorite film, including my own—we all wanted to make sure we were getting it right. You're not playing with fire, and you're not playing with matches; you're playing with M-80s in the backyard, and you've already lost your thumb."
gadget lab: 2049 edition
Prop master Doug Harlocker and production designer Dennis Gassner on the cars, guns, and manicure sets of the new film's future. —C.H.
Harpoon Gun Scavengers in the lawless outskirts of the Blade Runner universe use these grappling guns to snag loot. Inspired by whaling harpoons, the design is purposefully steampunk, Harlocker says, because they're "meant to reflect a culture in which scavengers forge their own weapons from the leftovers of history. With futuristic movies, a lot of the technology is digitally advanced and based on computers, but we tried to make this movie with an analog bent."
agent K's Blaster
Harlocker kept the double-barrel design of Deckard's gun from the original film but streamlined it and gave it a single trigger instead of two. He also added textures, vents, and a top slide.
Spinner 2.0
This three-wheeled flying vehicle is powered by a futuristic form of fusion. "It's a new technology," Gassner explains, "since in the world of 2049 they don't really have a lot of fossil fuels or sun to power a car."
LAPD Cuffs
Harlocker and his team tried several color treatments for these restraints before landing on yellow. "In a police department that's grubby and pale," he says, "yellow stands out and makes criminals easier to spot."
Deckard's Binoculars
Inspired by real-life military rangefinders used for spotting targets miles away. Harlocker miniaturized them, painted them red, and gave them infrared night vision and thermal-imaging capabilities.
manicure set
Ostensibly a (gnarly) manicure set, the team designed this toolkit with robot repairs in mind. Manicurists (or robot technicians) can work on a near-microscopic scale as fiber-optic lights guide their laser scalpels over hard surfaces.
Memory Spheres
These marbles store massive amounts of data (including Voight- Kampff test results). However, like human brains, their power declines with age. "As the spheres get older," Harlocker says, they cloud over and "become less readable."
Deckard's Blaster
For 2049, Harlocker and his team fashioned an exact replica of the iconic original. They tracked down the blaster's owner, a collector who'd snagged it at auction. He flew the sidearm to LA, where they meticulously photographed and measured every inch. They reverse-engineered three identical copies, using parts from the same revolver and rifle vintages as the original, then distressed them to look timeworn. "We went to incredible lengths to make sure what we put in Harrison Ford's hand was something he recognized."
Luv's Blaster
For Luv, Harlocker's team struck a balance: "It had to look feminine and graceful, but also lethal and futuristic." The effect came down to materials and color. The team settled on a ceramic outer shell with a bluish tint, for a clean sophisticated look, then 3-D printed it to get the right fit in actress Sylvia Hoeks' hand. "Guns are part of our history. So we kept the premise that they'd have a similar ergonomic form, but more advanced firing systems and composite materials."
photographs by joseph shin
Then, a hitch. In 2014, Scott's other directing commitment made it clear he wouldn't be able to helm 2049. Instead he became an executive producer, and Johnson and Kosove approached Villeneuve. At that point, the director was still not quite a household name: He'd spent the past decade making a series of unyielding dramas that were freeze-grab gorgeous but gut-wallopingly tough, like 2010's sweeping war drama Incendies (yikes), 2013's abducted-kid downer Prisoners (oof), and 2015's stark, almost suffocatingly tense drug-war thriller Sicario (hoo, boy). These were films in which violence acted as a pathogen, spreading through one person's body or an entire country's history with devastating, long-term effects—especially for the characters on the receiving end. And with last year's Best Picture–nominated hit Arrival—about a linguist (Amy Adams) who communicates with a pair of octopus-like aliens—Villeneuve proved himself to be one of the few filmmakers who can make sci-fi that feels at once fantastical and utterly real. Kosove, who also produced Prisoners, believed that duality was necessary for 2049. "Blade Runner is always put in the sci-fi genre, but we really think it's more of a noir movie," he says. "And if you look at Prisoners and Sicario, you know there isn't a filmmaker today doing better noir than Denis."
But Villeneuve had some (perfectly human) reasons not to take the job. He'd just finished Sicario and was about to start on Arrival, and he wasn't sure he'd be able to handle another movie so soon. Besides, Blade Runner was one of his favorite films, and he suspected that reentering the movie's complex world could be "a super-bad idea." He initially said no, but when the producers came back with another offer to accommodate his schedule, he changed his mind and decided to take the risk. "I said to myself, 'If there's a moment where I'm going to do a movie of this scale, it needs to be something that matters to me.'"
Later, I asked Scott what it was about Villeneuve that made him comfortable handing over the keys to his beloved Blade Runner.
"I wasn't," he says.
He wasn't?
"No. But waiting for me to direct it would have only gotten in the way, and Denis was our best option, by far." He smiles, before adding cryptically, "It takes one to see one."
Production began in Budapest in the summer of 2016, and for nearly 100 days, filming swallowed up a campuslike 10-stage facility. Unlike the famously calamitous making of the original Blade Runner, which Ford once described as "a bitch," Villeneuve's set hummed with brisk, amiable efficiency. (On the day I visited, at least.) Even shooting take after take of the scene where Gosling kept scaring the daylights out of the dog, Ford appeared to actually be … enjoying himself? "Well, if it looked like I was, I probably was," he says, his voice still reliably—and wonderfully—coarser than a quarry. "I don't spend too much time trying to look like I'm having fun."
Millions of dollars went into re-creating the look and feel of the original film—and all without relying on too much green-screen chicanery. "So many science fiction films all look the same, because the effects are done by rote," says 2049 cinematographer Roger Deakins. "We were desperate to create our own world." Step up to Deckard's windows, for instance, and you see that the hazy high-rises surrounding his home are towering illustrated backdrops that wrap around the stage. Nearby, there's an enormous Vegas-like nightclub in which a skinny-era Elvis, surrounded by feather-adorned showgirls and iced champagne bottles, crooned "Can't Help Falling in Love." Outside, there's a giant lot strewn with mini mountains of rusted beams and oil barrels, as well as a warehouse where crew members are hosing down one of several "spinners"—the insectlike police cars that served as Deckard's transport in the original and have been upgraded for the sequel. "We wanted the vehicles to have a more chiseled, angular, graphic strength," says production designer Dennis Gassner, who oversaw the design of the new spinner. "It's a harsher world than in the first film, both environmentally and stylistically."
"Weather helped me figure out this movie a lot," says director Denis Villeneuve. "I started from the premise that the ecosystem has collapsed, and I started to build a new Los Angeles."
That harshness has marked much of Villeneuve's previous work—though even the director is puzzled as to where it all comes from. If his movies follow a pattern, even an accidental one, "it's obviously saying something about me," he says. Maybe, he guesses, "I'm a nerd who is in contact with the shock of the world." Which is part of the reason he's drawn to the downcast future portrayed in Scott's Blade Runner, one devoid of star treks or new hopes that has only become more immediate of late. It's not too batty to attempt to draw a line from Deckard's primitive Blade Runner VidPhone to our own FaceTime; from man-made snakes and owls to the critters being modified in labs; from combat-model replicants to the military robots deployed around the world. Indeed, the first movie served not only as a pre-viz of our possible future but a warning of just how brutal it would be to live in it.
"The only violence I got in my life was winter," Villeneuve says one summer afternoon in a small, Kubrickian-white office on the Sony lot in Los Angeles, several months after 2049 wrapped. Though the late-afternoon sun is breaking through the window, the director can't help but think of the harsh weather he experienced as a kid—six or seven months of snow, stuck in his parents' house in a small town in rural Quebec, a nuclear power plant visible from the kitchen window. "And weather helped me figure out this movie a lot. I started from the premise that the ecosystem has collapsed, and I started to build a new Los Angeles."
In a nearby editing room, Villeneuve has just shown me a brief scene from 2049 in which a bloodied-up K pilots his spinner over a series of low, tightly packed houses, before heading toward a looming LAPD headquarters. Once inside, he's placed in a white room and subjected to a post-trauma stress test in which an unseen authority figure grills him. He then pays a visit to downtown LA, which is being pelted with snow. Even on a small screen, the sequence is absorbing, elegant, inscrutable. It's Blade Runner.
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