Blade Runner
1982 · 117 min
Directed by Ridley Scott. Written by David Peoples, Hampton Fancher. Starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos.
In the smog-choked dystopian Los Angeles of 2019, blade runner Rick Deckard is called out of retirement to terminate a quartet of replicants who have escaped to Earth seeking their creator for a way to extend their short life spans.
Critics 89% · audiences 91% · $28 million in the US and Canada on its first run · about 9.4 million tickets sold, 4.0% of the country · 2 Oscar nominations
What they said about Blade Runner
- 1982
Misunderstood by audiences and critics alike, it is by far the best science fiction film of the year.
— Pauline Kael
How it got made
Interest in adapting Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? developed shortly after its 1968 publication. Director Martin Scorsese was interested in filming the novel, but never optioned it. Producer Herb Jaffe optioned it in the early 1970s, but Dick was unimpressed with the screenplay written by Herb's son Robert, saying, "Jaffe's screenplay was so terribly done ... Robert flew down to Santa Ana to speak with me about the project. And the first thing I said to him when he got off the plane was, 'Shall I beat you up here at the airport, or shall I beat you up back at my apartment?
The screenplay by Hampton Fancher was optioned in 1977. Producer Michael Deeley became interested in Fancher's draft and convinced director Ridley Scott to film it. Scott had previously declined the project but, after leaving the slow production of Dune, wanted a faster-paced project to take his mind off his older brother's recent death. He joined the project on February 21, 1980, and managed to push up the promised Filmways financing from US$13 million to $15 million. Fancher's script focused more on environmental issues and less on issues of humanity and religion, which are prominent in the novel, and Scott wanted changes. Fancher found a cinema treatment by William S. Burroughs for Alan E. Nourse's novel The Bladerunner (1974), titled Blade Runner (a movie). Scott liked the name, so Deeley obtained the rights to the titles.
Dick publicly expressed distaste with Fancher's early screenplay in the LA press, calling the result a "terrible script. Corny, extremely maladroit throughout". He complained that it "overrelied on the old cliché-ridden Chandleresque figure" and that Fancher had "concentrated on a lurid collision between human and android. The whole skein of the book had been simplified into a 'you or me' type of thing; only one of us, this human or an android, will survive". Eventually, Scott hired David Peoples to rewrite the script and Fancher left the job over the issue on December 21, 1980, although he later returned to contribute additional rewrites. Dick was especially enthusiastic about the 1981 rewrite of Fancher's draft by Peoples:
Afterwards
While not initially a success with North American audiences, Blade Runner was popular internationally and garnered a cult following. The film's dark style and futuristic designs have served as a benchmark and its influence can be seen in many subsequent science fiction films, video games, anime, and television programs.
Its influence has also extended beyond the science fiction genre, especially in the creation of cinematic worlds. For example, Denis Villeneuve, Lana Wachowski, Christopher Nolan, Guillermo del Toro, Gareth Edwards, Rian Johnson, Ronald D. Moore and David Eick have all cited it as an influence. Nolan notes that he has seen Blade Runner "literally hundreds of times", while del Toro describes it as "one of those cinematic drugs, that when I first saw it, I never saw the world the same way again". Scott Derrickson has called it "maybe the best American film ever made". Oren Soffer, who worked with Edwards as co-cinematographer on The Creator, cited the film as "the most visually stunning of all time" and as an influence on his work.
The film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry in 1993 and is frequently taught in university courses. In 2007, it was named the second-most visually influential film of all time by the Visual Effects Society. The film has also been the subject of parody, such as the comics Blade Bummer by Crazy comics, Bad Rubber by Steve Gallacci, and the Red Dwarf 2009 three-part miniseries "Back to Earth". The anime series Psycho-Pass by Production I.G was also highly influenced by the film.