Alien director Sir Ridley Scott has never shied away from sharing his often blunt opinions, but he got surprisingly candid while reflecting on making Blade Runner in an interview with Total Film (via SFFGazette.com).
Released in 1982, the movie was flopped at the time but has since become one of the most important and groundbreaking sci-fi stories ever told. Every bit as influential as Star Wars, Scott's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? remains beloved four decades - and a couple of very different cuts - later.
Harrison Ford has talked about the challenges he faced while making Blade Runner, and while Scott acknowledged those, he dismissed the notion that the movie is one he isn't incredibly proud of.
"[The shoot] was a very bad experience for me. I had horrendous partners," the filmmaker recalls. "Financial guys, who were killing me every day. I'd been very successful in the running of a company, and I knew I was making something very, very special. So I would never take no for an answer."
"But they didn't understand what they had. You shoot it, and you edit it, and you mix it. And by the time you're halfway through, everyone's saying it's too slow. You've got to learn, as a director, you can't listen to anybody. I knew I was making something very, very special. And now it's one of the most important science-fiction films ever made which everybody feeds off. Every bloody film."
Scott may not sound particularly humble here but he's not wrong. In fact, the filmmaker went on to make it clear he has no time for the critics who once tore apart what may go down as his magnum opus.
"I hadn't seen 'Blade Runner' for 20 years. Really. But I just watched it. And it's not slow," Scott said, responding to reviewers who dismissed the movie as being too slow. "The information coming at you is so original and interesting, talking about biological creations, and mining off-world, which, in those days, they said was silly. I say, 'Go f**k yourself.'"
Blade Runner is set in a dystopian future Los Angeles of 2019, in which synthetic humans known as replicants are bio-engineered by the powerful Tyrell Corporation to work on space colonies. When a fugitive group of advanced replicants led by Roy Batty escapes back to Earth, burnt-out cop Rick Deckard reluctantly agrees to hunt them down.
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