Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner

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.

Certain things were dear to him in that story...

...mostly around, you know, what is human, and what makes us human.

It was the Hampton Fancher script...

...which Phil was skeptical of, because it did include a voice-over.

The very first draft that he did was much smaller in scale...

...than anything that's been on the Internet...

...or anything that has been talked about.

It was a... Probably maybe a low-budget...

...maybe a one-room kind of motion picture.

And it all took place mostly in apartments, a few street scenes...

...and at the very end. Rachael kills herself.

This was a small movie. That's how I wanna do it, It's rooms.

You know, a strange movie, but it's, you know, a face-to-face movie.

People are talking.

And I had this dream of actors... You know, like the right kind of actors.

The right kind of actors' director.

Hampton saw the novel as reflecting a lot of real-world current concerns.

And strangely, one of the largest motivating factors...

...was the ecological concern that is in the original novel.

The fact that the Earth is slowly falling apart because of these world wars...

...and because of these biological plagues and that type of thing.

And, of course, those are all analogues for pollution and for overpopulation.

The intellectual aspects of the screenplay...

...were taken from my response to the death of animal life on this planet...

...and what that meant. That's probably the thing that saw me through it...

...the first draft, was I had a passion about that...

...so my affection for the project was consistent.

Finally, when I was really looking for something...

...Brian popped back in again with another script.

The way he put it was he told me that he'd got several studios interested...

...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...

...kind of created a darkness.

I remember, you know, him talking about Frank...

...his older brother, from time to time, and I knew that they were very close.

And...

...I know it had a tremendous effect...

...on sort of his emotional state at that time.

It's a strange coincidence that he's doing a film that is, on the whole, very dark...

...about creation, about control.

And also losing the control and losing the battle over death.

I think we were shooting a commercial.

I remember sort of having persuaded him, saying. "Look, let me read it."

And I think I was reading it on the train while we were traveling to the location.

I said. "Listen, I think-l'"

Because everything else was kind of not working out right...

...I said. "Listen, I think you should give this, you know, a second thought."

You know. "I really think this is powerful, and, you know, emotional..."

...and really interesting."

The Blade Runner idea had stuck with me.

So I'd called up Deeley saying, basically. "Where are you with it?"

"We're nowhere." "All right, I've re-read it. We...

I think it's interesting. It'll make the basis of a very good...

"...futuristic, urban film noir."

He said. "Let's have a look at the material,” and he did."

And we were off.

It was a very exciting moment, of course...

...for suddenly, you had a talent attached to the thing.

We then went to Filmways, which had just been taken over...

...by a former Universal person. Raphael Etkes.

Very nice guy. An old friend of mine.

We were with Filmways, which Michael had found a person for that.

But, of course, his conception of what the budget of this film would be...

...at that particular point was way off-course.

We were way down in terms of our target of where we would be.

We'd spent about 2 and a half million...

...by the time it became perfectly clear that the world we were building...

...was much bigger than 12 and a half million dollars. Much, much bigger.

And this put Raphi in a jam...

...because he couldn't allocate more than that to this picture.

It was an old company, a small one, and they didn't have that much money.

I know we were beginning to feel that something wasn't right...

...and then suddenly one read in the trades...

...that Filmways was in financial trouble.

And suddenly we sort of said, well, you know. "Shit. We're in trouble..."

...and we need to find another backer." So we sort of set up this room...