You cannot work with the master it would be unbearable… but he was very generous with me. I would not have been able to work with him behind me. So Ridley was there a lot, from an influence point of view. He was at the birth of the project: the main ideas, the main characters, the art of the film, is from him.
We will give everything and try to do our best, and after that we know that people will judge us and condemn us, and will compare us to a masterpiece – no matter how good the movie is.īeyond his input at script stage, what involvement did Ridley Scott have? We said, ‘We’re going to do a pure artistic gesture.’ Like a painter. Once we made peace with that, it gave us a lot of freedom. I remember a conversation I had with Ryan Gosling right at the start, where we both agreed that our chances of success were very small, that what we were trying to do was insane. I was afraid of looking like a vandal with paint in a church! I will say there was a huge freedom coming from the fact that I was the first one.
Unlike Alien, a franchise begun by Scott that has seen numerous sequels and spin-offs, this is the first film to follow Blade Runner. For me, Blade Runner is one of those rare gems in film history where a true artist decided to make a real sci-fi movie. But in movies, sci-fi was very much approached as a B-movie genre – with the exception of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. In literature, it’s a serious genre: there was Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Arthur C.
It was something I was deeply looking for: someone who would take sci-fi seriously. His appointment feels well-earned after a quartet of critically admired English-language films – Prisoners (2013), Enemy (2013), Sicario (2015) and Arrival (2016) – have positioned him as one of Hollywood’s most ‘visionary’ directors. ‘It’s definitely the movie I saw the most in my life.’ Now he’s been given the daunting mission of delivering the sequel, Blade Runner 2049. ‘I saw this movie maybe 50 times,’ he says. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), it was certainly a touchstone for the French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve. It would be almost impossible to list the ways in which Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) has impacted science fiction filmmaking.