About : stanley furniture night stands
Title : stanley furniture night stands
stanley furniture night stands
enhance 224 on 76... beeping frames clicking enhance. stop. you haveall the tools, colours, toys - everything at your disposal - to transport youto an imaginary world. people's patience and theirwillingness to persevere tended to erode as we went onshooting nights in smoke.
it was a bitch, working every night,all night long, often in the rain. so it wasn't the mostpleasant shoot. the tension and the atmospherecreated was absolutely palpable. it was enormous - overwhelming,beautiful, enormous, great. and, er, i was living there. i don't think some of these peopleon the crew really understood how far ridleywas pushing the medium. the chaos of that production -everybody hating it, people don't want to be in moviesafter they've worked on that movie -
it's like all those things informedthis in a magical way, i guess. when it first came out, it wastoo intense to let in the darkness and the poverty and the projectionof what life would be like in 2019. what ridley created was thismultilayered, very intense investigation into howthat world might be. how do you prepare the audiencefor seeing something very different? now, time has prepared them. it was so dark, and so intenseand so beautifully constructed... i was absolutelyabout co-ordinating beauty,
shot by shot had to be great.my weapon was that camera. i'll get what i wanted. and if you're there with me, great.if you're not with me, too bad. in 1975,i thought i would produce a movie. and this guy, jim maxwell, who'sa close friend and knows me well, he says, "you know philip k dick?"i said no. "there's a book called do androids dream of electricsheep?" i read it. i didn't like it that much. but i thought, "ok, that'scommercial. here's a throughline." you know, bureaucraticdetective chasing androids.
my friend, brian kelly, had$5,000 or something and said, "you could get an option, that might bea good commercial project to get behind "and make some money."that's all we were talking about. so i wrote five pages, whati 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. the very first draft that he didwas much smaller in scale.
it was probably a low budget,one-room kind of motion picture. this was a small movie, that's howi wanted to do it. this rooms... a strange movie,but it's, you know, a face-to-face movie.people are talking. and i had this dreamof actors, you know, the right kind of actors,and actors' director. hampton saw the novel as reflectinga lot of real world current concerns. and one of the largest motivating factors was theecological concern that is in the original novel. the intellectual aspectsof the screenplay
were taken from my response to thedeath of animal life on this planet and what that meant- that's probably the thing that saw me through it, the first draft. and then, finally, when i wasreally looking for something, brian popped back in againwith another script. the way he put it was he'd gotseveral studios interested, but because i was a friend, he'd let me havea crack at it. i read it and it was darn good. 24 hours later, it was like,"can we meet?" and they wanted to do it! the title we finally settled onwas dangerous days, which i loved,
because it was very much in tune with the muchmore romantic script that hampton had written. i was dead set against it, but ifigured i could get a vote in later. but go ahead and they'll finance, we'llcall it dangerous days for the time being. and then michael deeley came up withblade runner. i'd used it already. you know, it's a term that i gotfrom reading burroughs. he had a little book.it was called blade runner. it was a matter nowof getting into it. we tried to get ridley from the outset, buthe was at that point planning to do dune. i was attracted to dune, because itwas beyond what i'd done on alien,
which was kind of hardcorekind of horror film, and dune would be a step, very strongly -very, very strongly - in the direction of star wars. somichael deeley had come to see me. "i've got this script blade runner," i said, "idon't really want to do another science fiction, "but i'll read it." and i readthe script, and i turned it down. at this point, something rather sad happened,which was that ridley's older brother died. i know it had a tremendous effect on sort of his emotional stateat that time. the blade runner ideahad 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.i think it's interesting "and will make the basis of a verygood futuristic, urban film noir." he said, "let's have a lookat the material," and he did. and we were off. it was a veryexciting moment, of course, for suddenly you had a talentattached to the thing. first thing i did was, i talked to alan ladd jr,who's an old friend, who had a deal at warner bros. and we thought it wasa terrific script.
and we put it into productionalmost right away. and then we neededour seven million. and that came from a company which consistedof jerry perenchio and bud yorkin. people were always submittingscripts to us. and by the time they got to us, cos we weren't, atthat point, in the picture business, they had been shoppedall over town and most of them were pretty uninteresting and thingswe didn't want to get involved with. and, somehow, this script forblade runner ended up on my desk. and i read it, and i loved it.
we saw the storyboards, we saw,we loved all the toys and the look that ridleyhad in mind for it. it really was futuristic, and, erm, ithought it could be a big smash hit. it was such a brand-new wayof trying to do all the things they were going to do on this -special effects and so forth - everyone was worried about how many monthswill it take, or how many years, to make it. they put up $7 million,and they chose to take a fee - admittedly a deferred fee, but a fee of $1.5 million- as guarantors of completion. so if the picture went over21 million, 22 million, whatever,
they'd have to provide that amount,which gave them a lot of rights. it gave more rights than we'd have given if we'd hadtime to negotiate, which we didn't, we had two weeks. as we were tryingto put together the budget, i was talking continuouslywith hampton fancher, so evolution of the worldwas growing. and we'd work all day, every day, i think, idon't know how long, but it felt like weeks. ridley started asking questions, youknow, of the script, with hampton, and started to say, "well, you know,what is the world that we're in?" "what's outside the window?"you know. i said,
"er...what do you mean?""but there's a world." they never move outside theapartment, it's very interior. i want to take them outside thedoor. once we go outside the door, this world has to support the thesisthat she's android, humanoid, robot. ridley's a gold mine to work with. he's just got beautiful notions. you have to be discreet as a writeror he'll go write an encyclopaedia. and he said, "hampton, i have to be frank, you'retaking a lot..." they used to call me happen faster. i was constantly saying, "that won't work, it'snot commercial, it's too vague, it's not cinematic."
so i was really being the hard manto hampton's romantic. i think hampton got a bit preciousabout doing things, and it was always a bit of a dramawhen or if things changed? i remember having an argument with ridley, andridley went into the bedroom and sat down on a bed. i'm following him, i said, "ridley, we can'tdo that." and he wouldn't argue with me! we got it up to a point wherehampton was just getting exhausted. i was angry and i walked outby the pool, and ivor, lovely, wonderful ivor came out,and he tried to tell me. he didn't come right outand say it, but he says,
"if you don't do it..." i rememberhe reverted to street talk, kind of. he says, "i know me man,"you know, "he'll do something." this was difficult in a way, becausehampton had been in it from the very start. and he was credited as an executive producer,which he'd remain, of course, but, um... his days, for the time being,were over. i get this call that ridleywould like to talk to me about blade runner.so they flew me down to la and put me in the chateau marmontin this terrific suite. and i read the script - two hours orsomething like that, sitting there -
and i was knocked out,i thought it was a great script. so ridley and michael came over, andsaid, "well, what did you think?" and i said, "i thought it was terrific, i can'tmake this any better than it is or anything," which...and they bothsort of chuckled. michael said,"oh, ridley has a few ideas," in that michael way.and, er... i got hired. "one more kiss, dear"by don percival there was a christmas dinneri was invited to at ivor's house. and we sat down,
he put the script in frontof me on the plate. he says, "this is the new script."and i said, "what new script?" and he told me.he said, "this is david peoples'." i said, "who's that?"i couldn't hear anything. i stood up, because i was goingto cry. my whole world fell apart. what's anybody going to be?incredibly hurt, because, um, you know,what he'd written was fantastic. and suddenly to have somebody elsecome in and take over your baby... michael deeley's so diplomatic.
i remember, he said,"yes, your things are very elegant. "but this is what we need to do to make themovie. now we're making a movie, hampton." i was writing for them and they werethrilled that i was so fast. and they'd had hampton,but of course, hampton had only done like god knowshow many drafts for them, and he... that stuff is wearingand everything, so we're talking about hampton after,you know, 10 drafts, i don't know. "hampton, why don't you try thisor that?" that stuff makes you crazy. it made me crazy in the short timei was there.
initially, he did what ridley asked,which, at that time, we needed. we needed to put the damn script to bed,because everybody, every time something changes, there are kind ofdomino repercussions. ridley found that much later,with the final hampton script, after hampton had done everythingthat he thought ridley wanted, it still didn't have what ridley finallyfelt he could only get from david peoples, which was a much harder edge, and really thecharacter, the nature of the film that you see today. i was completely wrong, ridley totally right,and peoples was definitely totally right. deckard's character is notdescribed in the script.
any actor could play it, really. it was up to the castingto tell about the character. we looked at various people. one whoseemed very attractive was harrison ford, because he hadn't playedthis sort of person, really, and he'd had some very good trainingunder some good directors. i liked harrison ford always.the conversations the first time i saw him about...and, of course, we saw star wars. i was impressed with star wars, becausethat's not easy to do, what he did. errol flynn didn't do it as goodas he did it, and that's hard.
i knew he was in london, doing this new thingraiders of the lost ark. barbara hershey was who initiallysuggested to hampton fancher that harrison fordwas someone to consider. barbara calls spielberg, "what'sthat like editing that film?" spielberg says, "huge star now." the boys - michael, ridley -fly to london to look at dailies. he just looked fantastic andwe just thought he was wonderful. erm, we were convinced.
i remember that i read a script,which i thought was, er, er, interesting, er, at the first versionthat i read of it, of the film, had some issues,i had some issues with. that there was a voiceover narrationattached to the original script. and i said to ridley that i playeda detective who does no detecting. how about we take some of this informationthat's in the voiceovers and put it into scenes? and so that the audience coulddiscover the information, discover the character, through seeinghim in the context of what he does.
and some of that survivedand some of it didn't. we spent a couple of weeks sitting around mykitchen table trying to find ways to accomplish that. with our meetings that followedin los angeles, he got carried along with the enthusiasmof a, doing another science fiction, because he's on a really good rollnow - star wars, indiana jones - so whatever it is,it's really exotic, ok? harrison has that loose, wonderful,devil-may-care smile and attitude. and he has a wonderful presence,he's a good athlete. harrison's naturally laconic -dry wit,
and, um, smart.so you'd better be ready. when we were casting, and ridleywas looking at different actors, i made him sit down in the screeningroom and look at katie tippel, soldier of orangeand turkish delight. and i said, "this is batty. "you've got to realise that."and he said, "absolutely." and he actually cast rutgerwithout ever having met him. he came in, because he was alwaysa weird dresser, this guy. he was a big man,and he was wearing
a puce nylon jump suit,with one piece, zip-up. a kenzo sweater that had a big foxacross the shoulder with two red eyes. he had already cut his hair the way he thoughtbatty should look, the short pointed blond hair. and he was wearing green, floralkind of elton john sunglasses. and i said, "ridley, i can assureyou that the guy is batty." and, of course, obviously, it was rutgerplaying a joke on ridley, or maybe he wasn't. the talk about character was, i thinkit was almost in the second talk we had, before i got signed on,where i explained to him, you know, what i thought would be interestingfor the character,
basically saying, "can i put in allthe things that don't belong there?" the things that are so amazingabout people, you know - sense of poetry, sense of humour,sense of sexuality, sense of soul. and ridley said, you know,"i like all of them. keep them in. "we'll work with them. we'll find a way to get,you know, get them out in different scenes." in those days, different from today, weactually did real studio screen tests. and they were quite elaborateand quite expensive. and you had a short crew into shoot them and, obviously, ridley was not convinced that any one ofour young women was the girl to go with.
my agent called mewith this strange request. he said, "there's this director, "ridley scott, he's doingthis sci-fi picture, blade runner, "and he wants youto be harrison ford." i said, "what do you mean?what are you talking about?" he said, "they need to test a bunch of girls to behis love interest and another girl in this picture, "and he thinks you bearsome resemblance or something." so i agreed to do itand it turned out to be 'a lot of fun. met ridley.we went to the warner bros stage,
'and he had blocked every girl 'for the same thing, so i was basically feedingthem, so it'd be an equal treatment kind of deal. 'the only girl who departed from the blocking andeverything right away was sean young, who says, '"we're not doing it this way."i said, "oh, this is great." ' she reminded me of vivien leighfor some bizarre reason. and i always thought that acerbictoughness that vivien leigh had, apart from being extremely beautiful andquirky, was an intelligence, was what she needed. i think he recognisedthat he could make a classic beauty type of picture,you know, with me in it.
i like what she did a lot, um,they were less enamoured. she looked beautiful, but i wasn't absolutely convincedabout her as an actress. harrison was probablylooking for somebody... i think he was nervousabout a first-timer. i think he probably did it being,"what about her? what about her?" we went through a bit of that.he wasn't thrilled, no. once it's on, it's on. harrison's a consummateprofessional. once it's it, that's it. you go. when i got the part,i realised i'd have to live up
to the responsibility of playingthe part, and i was pretty young, and it was very unknown to mewhat would be expected of me. so i was probably a little scared. she just came across so perfectly, soperiod and so right and utterly beautiful. she could be an android, she maystill be an android, for all i know! i remember the first auditionwas in a small trailer on the 20th century lot.originally, in the screenplay, pris was supposed to be sort ofdangling on these rings, you know, the gymnastic rings.
and there wasn't any kind ofgymnastic stuff incorporated into the fight, it was justtaking place in a gymnasium. and i had been a gymnastas a kid in school, so i suggested to ridley i could do gymnasticsand maybe i could put that into the fight sequence. and so, i remember he asked me to showhim what gymnastics meant... she laughs .. and what that was! and so i did like a back walkover or something in the trailer, and that was it. i met daryl, and daryl was pretty well it.i liked daryl immediately on meeting her. she's kind of perfect physically.she's bright, she's got this quirky side to her.everybody who was screen testing
got to create their own character,you know, had days to meet with the make-up teamand the wardrobe team. and i had seen werner hertzog's nosferatu, andi remembered the kind of puttied-out eyebrows and the black circle, you know,black, hollow eyes of klaus kinski. and so i was inspired by it that,kind of, and so i puttied out my eyebrows and did that sort ofblack thing on my eyes. the screen test process wasan entire day and night. it was very, very welland thoroughly produced, and there were four other womenwho were testing for the part,
all completelydifferent from me. and i just looked around and thought, "oh,my god, i've made myself into a monster." and everybody elselooked so beautiful! i was asked at the end of the days,you know, who i thought was the best, and i said, "well, it'shands-down daryl hannah." at the end of all these tests, ridley said,"i think we've got a role in this for you." and i said, "what would that be?" "he's a guy whokind of interviews these replicas at the beginning. "i'll call your agent and explain."i said, "fine." so i got home, got a call, was offered this role ofholden, which i thought was terrific.
definitely the femme fatale. i mean, i sort of reallyfit right into that. so of course i was going to be castas someone that was slightly dangerous. i thought she was a very impressive combinationof physical power, feminism to great sexuality. she was really powerful. physically, asa whole physical female type, she's great. if you're going to cast an amazon, there she is.very athletic of all of them, the most athletic and the most able to performwhatever feats had to be performed. she was superwoman. she was builtto be as strong as a man. and i mean, like, almost machine-like,and yet there was a femininity there.
and ridley and i talked about thisa lot. she was just a survivor. eddie i'd known for a long time, and i broughthim in to meet with ridley and it was eddie's idea to play a multinational,multi-ethnic, multilingual character, who had a vocabulary of his own. that was tricky, because eddiewas saying, "what's this cityspeak?" so eddie, god bless him, drove me crazy, comingup with ideas of esperanto and rhythms of speech that actually vaguely dovetailedand made sense in to what he had to sayin terms of the drama. he was absolutely obsessedwith getting that right.
as long as he went along with my understanding of whatwas going to be happening, which was the culturalisationof los angeles, in a way that peoplewouldn't be expecting, and he wentwith it right from the start. he would be very, very hispanic, could almostbe dressed as if he was a well-to-do drug dealer, and in fact was the man who did allthe dirty work for the department. the word gaff is a good name,actually. today, as we look back on it,it was an extraordinary cast.
then, it was a cast who i knew,and who ridley was meeting, and who ridley would guidethrough the film. he brought out the best qualitiesin his performers. it may not have always beenthe most pleasant process, but on the other hand, he coaxed, andvery gently manipulated performances from these people that, in someinstances, i think they've rarely topped. i saw a very large canvas, i saw a very eclectic canvas, where, basically, we were goingto make our own rules.
artistic direction, set design, i think generally,was one massive challenge. that evolution told us it had to be this amountof money, to make it on a backlot. michael had a saying that, "when ridley takesout the pencil, it's hundreds of dollars, "and when he takes out a pen,it's thousands of dollars. ridley was over here punting around for peopleto work on this film that he's agreed to do. i went over and had a meeting with michaeldeeley, ridley scott, ivor powell and john rogers, and got the script, handed it to me,called dangerous days. isn't it fortunate it wasn't used? and, er, took it home, and started to dosketches and started to submit work to ridley,
and then, lawrence paull was hired.i was the first hire on the staff. a futurist, syd mead, was one of thegreat illustrators of industrial objects. cars, electric irons,apartments, skyscrapers, cityscapes. and i brought him infor a meeting and said, "look, "we've got to go it this way, on thebacklot, the best we can on a limited budget. "i can't make things. i would neverhave the budget to do that." that's why the idea ofretro-fitting things came about. it would have to be retroedto the surface of the backlot, which had traditional buildings, upon which wewould put pipes and ducts and air conditioning.
so it was by necessitywe had to design it that way. this is a rather differentart department situation. ridley's in charge of the artdepartment on this picture. not to diminish the art departmentor the art director or whatever, but one is inevitably, in a way, because ridley's so on top of it andhe's micro-managing the art department. those guys had to work hard to do what ridleywanted and they had to be very efficient. but it was ridleywho decided what it would be. i knew that he had been an art directorand i knew that was probably a good thing,
that he understood,and it would mean that, unlike some pictures where a lot of money andfocus is placed on the script and the performances, which is a good thing, that a fair amount ofemphasis would be placed on the look of the film. i was hired to work one-to-onewith the director, ridley. after all, he's god.the director is god on a film. so i worked, essentially, for his approvalthrough this staff structure overlay who would then, you know, make thething look like ridley had approved. one of the troubles we got into with sydmead was he became so important to the film, he'd only originally been hiredfor a few days at 1,500 bucks a day.
suddenly he was on the thing for weeks. andthat was one factor in going over budget. sid designed this whole world, but he designednot just what would be the matte paintings, but conceived what the streetsand the neon would look like what the lighting would look like, and what it would look like drenchedin grizzly, oil-soaked rain, then designed the vehicles as well,so the whole thing knit together. sid wasn't really the productiondesigner, but was the stylist. i think it was a really smartdecision to get someone who didn't have justan idea about the future,
but he was someone who was anindustrial designer and illustrator who was designing products for the futurefor people who were going to manufacture them. we were evolving what the futurewould be with larry paull, my production designer,i hadn't worked with him before. i think he thoughti was absolutely crazy. but because i could draw,it'd help a lot. the big advantage we had was the famousactors' strike that lasted for months and the fact that, because i don'tthink we would have ever been able to finesse the designs that we weredeveloping in the art department,
finesse the technical aspect of it, had therenot been an actors' strike. we needed the time. so, consequently, we were in pre-productionfor nine months or nine and a half months, which is as long as i've ever beenon pre-production on a film. everybody in the art department was tickledto work on ridley scott's film following alien. we all thought, "ok, we're doingthis picture about replicants "and the future and flying cars.whoa, we're doing alien ii. "we get to walk down that same road." everybody got turned around and said,"no, wait, we're not doing alien ii, "we're doing something completely different, and itis the future, but it's not that far in the future."
michael deeley said, "at 3.00pm, i want all thedrawings on the wall, ridley will look at all of them." so michael deeley and ridley were walking around, iwas standing with larry paull, you know, terrified, and walking around looking at thedrawings, and as if we had left the room, he looked at michael and he said, "well, youknow, it's never really all what you want, is it?" he said, "you neverget what you want." because there was so much to doand, i think, at the peak, we had 400 plus or minus carpenters,painters, plasterers. i mean, there were so many people working on theshow that it was just a job managing all that, which was under the jurisdictionof the construction department,
but someone needed to be the liaison betweenwhat was being built and what was being designed. some of those streets have been used in westerns,i mean, for decades. they're very visually familiar. when i walked on that backlot,it's what it looks like now. when you walk on there,that's what it looks like. it can only be limited, so it's limited to,i think, two, maybe three storeys, mostly two. so it's not tall enough. so, in those days,because i hadn't got digital cgi or anything, the decision to do it at nightmakes a lot of sense. because i was a designer,i'm up there often. i'm all over larry, god bless him.
i've never seen anything like it. i quite honestly never had seensets built like that. it was just an amazing,an amazing amount of, er... of construction that had to be done. jerry perenchio and bud yorkincame to the burbank hangar. we were manufacturingthe cars and the furniture. they walked in and saw thisentire hangar filled with people and i could see the blood drainout of bud yorkin's face. he had no idea what was going on.he couldn't believe it.
"you're making chairs!what are you making? "buy a chair, buy a table.what are you making?" but it was all beautifully designedmuseum pieces that you can't buy. the caveat when i was going to do theshow was it was not going to be a big movie and i was told that the only setthat i would be designing, because the rest would be alllocation, would be the street. everything else was goingto be done live location. and, you know, given what's going onin the film business and so forth and so on, you say, "uh-huh, yes."by the time i got on the film,
there was a location manager on the filmalready, that the production manager had hired, and there were two locationsthat ridley liked in la. one was the bradbury buildingand the other was union station. the bradbury building turned out to be thehotel where one of our key characters lived and union station turned outto be the police station. i think, funny enough, it took somebodynot to come from la to actually do it in la, because i'm new, i haven't seenthis before, and i'm going, "wow, that's good and that's good.and the bradbury's great and we put a cheap canopy on. i evenbrought the columns from the studio,
cos they're only styrofoam.the bradbury building, "oh, everyone in tv uses that,"and i said, basically, "back off. i'll use it and shoot itin a way you haven't seen before." i went out a couple of nights,and we certainly went out when they weren't shootingand saw the sets and everything and right on down the line, from the scenery, thecostumes, the entire thing, i think it speaks for itself. the people at the studio would walk by orwalk through the set as it was being built. they'd walk through the set and walk away shakingtheir heads, saying, "what are these people doing?" i never chuck away the setor the proscenium or the landscape.
the set is the landscapeand to me, in all my work, the landscape and prosceniumis a character. sometimes to the irritationof some actors, always to the irritation of critics,who'd tear me apart for many movies before i realised, you know what,i have a real advantage. i can actually conceive a world, auniverse and carry it out so it's real. i always rememberthe first day was not good, because i got in thereand the columns were upside down. all the columns, and i'd seen it,i'd even drawn it for them.
saying, "like this,"and i'd put the weight at the top. he basically said, "well, the only thing i'dlike to do is turn the columns upside down." and i looked at him incredulously, like, "what do you meanturn them upside down?" and he said, "just that.put that down here." i said, "ok." i went to the first ad, told them,this is at 7 in the morning, "come back at two o'clockand we'll be ready to shoot. "the director wants a change."at two in the afternoon,
when everybody came back from lunch,ridley was a happy camper. the columns were upside down, everythingelse was in place, and they shot. it was worth turning them over, otherwise thatstuff would've been at the top, out of the shot. ridley was very demanding. i mean, from the point of viewof the lighting and the design. i remember himsaying, "put more stuff on her lips. "put more stuff on her lips, keep puttingthat stuff on her. no, no, no. more." 'i'd heard later that ridley wanted me tostay in my little cubicle dressing room, 'because he didn't want me to havetoo much interaction with everyone.
'so, i mean, that could've beenpart of the manipulation. ' ridley was constantly tryingto add a kind of, er, scintillatingvisual stimulation to scenes. a good example would bein tyrell's office. we're in this big set struggling with ourpart, the front projection out the windows. the live action guys are strugglingwith the weird lighting stuff and ridley's saying, "well, i want thislight to be like up against the wall." we said, "what's motivating that?is it raining? is the floor wet?" he said, "no, it's just got to...you know, it's just got to happen."
so i go, "if that's what ridley wants, that'swhat he should have." but ridley has this... has always had this incredible sensitivity toall kinds of ways to create visual stimulation. after the first day of shooting, doc ericksoncame to me and said, "we're now five days behind," which is not what i wanted to hear,but ridley was dealing with the smoke and the mirrors and the columns andso on and so forth. in the meantime, harrison's sitting there waitingto act and getting pissed off, because he's not being calledto the set to act in the scene. the reason i was thrilledabout having ridley is he's got the very best eye in the business.that comes with a price,
which is the time and the effortthat he has to put into it. so he'd often be sitting up in the sky on thecrane doing the last book on the table position, when harrison was sort of seethingand not being told what to do. ridley felt harrison wasperfectly capable of doing everything he had to do,knew how to do it, and ridley meanwhile wascomposing the picture. there's a part of you that wants to betotally in sync with the director's ambition. then there's a perverse partof you that says, "you know what? "it doesn't really matter.what matters is being there.
"and participating truthfullyin whatever the, er, "the relationshipsin the scenes are and, er... " bleep it, it's just a movie.let him worry about it." maybe ridley gave me more attentionthan he was giving harrison, because he was making the assumptionthat he didn't need that. harry was never happy on that show. he never was. not really. the only time he was happy was if it was goingto be close to wrap, you know? then he was happy. we had our man in havana,so to speak, there
on the set every day and watching itand we saw some of the rushes. ridley's a perfectionistand ridley came from the... the world of doing commercials, fromengland, and he was very successful. and he's very meticulous,that's what his genius is. and i don't take anything away fromhim, but it starts to slow down when you start to take many, manytakes of certain scenes. and we did. we started out, we were a few weeksbehind within a few weeks, so it was, i, er, thought thingscould start to take off. i presume, behind closed doors, he got twitchylike, after the first week, we were 2-3 days behind.
then, after the first weeksshooting tyrell's room, we went back to reshoot them.i'd have thought he went apoplectic, because they put x amount of money and theywere guaranteeing completion, you know? jesus. i mean, i would imagine himgetting pretty irate. i thought he printed waytoo many takes in those days and shot too many takes.i didn't think he needed it. now, obviously, he was lookingfor something in every one and he and i sat a couple of timesand i explained to him, "i don't quite understand. tell me why the 16thtake was the best one out of this whole group?"
yeah, there'd be irritation. i'd do seven takes."why's he doing that?" i know people who do 40 takes. but seven takes in those dayswere not inordinate at all. i was definitely very different, which is whyi've been very successful as a commercial maker, looking at things in different lights and adifferent way, so they hadn't seen that before. it's why you're hiring me. andi think that went on, definitely. ridley's a very strong-minded,knows what he wants, knows the look. and when you're trying to doa project that's this different and you've got the studio laddieon the one side, then ridley, and nothing ever gets madewithout having its difficulties.
a lot of people don't bother tounderstand what he's trying to do and i think that's what happened.there was a lot of nervousness, and a lot of competitionwithin themselves and i think people madea lot of it in the beginning. everyone anticipated before shooting, "he won'tlike us, he thinks american crews are not good." i don't think he sat there and said, "american crewsare not good." he wanted everyone to be at their best. being new on the block here,i had to learn the process of, i couldn't use this, couldn't usethat. i'm used to being my own operator. jordan came with his team, which wasfine, cos he's a great cameraman.
and he came with two really good operatorsand so i thought, "well, i can't operate." i would line up as much as possible.i like to line up, so, like that. that's what i do. that's what i know i'm doing.and that is more efficient and it's faster. on any film, people get frustrated and you have an artistic directorthat sees it his own way and... he's definitely the onedriving the show, um... jordan wasn't in the best of health,so it was frustrating for him, because he couldn't be with ridley.he just wasn't physically able. for a number of years, my father had suffered from adisease that we eventually found out was parkinson's
that, progressively through thecourse of the movie, took its toll and, for the last month or so ofthe movie, he was in a wheelchair. ridley, to his credit, saw past the illness andmade a very bold choice in going with jordan. intense. that's the best wayto describe it. we had our scenes together. "you lived so very long, roy.""i want more life" and all. very intense. looked him right in the eye, he looked mein the eye, we went at it and it was great. i want more life.
the facts of life. 'tyrell was a replicant as well. ' when he got his eyes squeezed outand his head squeezed out nuts, bolts, springs. and that was the idea, he wasanother front and another form of nexus 6, i guess. and that wouldtrigger me to go to the next floor. in the next floor, in the pyramidof glass would be, you know, mr maker himself,dead for four years. and so i had to designthe sarcophagus, and batty
was supposed to be therelooking at his maker. and i had him standingoff to the right of the little painting i didwith the sort of mayan capsule he'd come out of,the entrance to the crypt. that was never filmed either. harrison was supposed to be havingthis on screen love affair with rachael. and sean young was very youngand extremely inexperienced and ridley, i think, was more or less talking sean throughher performance to a certain extent
and sean and harrisonjust did not click on any level. any time you're doinga love scene is tricky. first of all, i feel for the actors havingto do it, saying it's real. or uncomfortable. you can't really let it fly, let go, because that'snot what you're doing. it's not very professional. so it's a waltz, it's actually a delicatewaltz to find out what should it be, how far should it goand where's enough enough? i think ridley told him to push me. and i was... i remember beingreally surprised about that. i think i wascrying afterwards, too.
and i remember harrygoing to the side. i was sitting on that ledge where theblinds were behind me and we did the scene and he went over to the corner and he turnedaway from me and took his pants and he mooned me, cos he was trying to make me laugh, cos i wasgoing, and i looked up and he was mooning me. i think i started laughing, and i think he wastrying to say, "hey, it's not that bad, kid." sean had a very interesting partto play. maybe one of the mostinteresting parts in the movie. she understood what was going on. she did, i think, a good job.
harrison was always, um,the great technician. "no, kid, you have to sit here. your face hasto be here. move that way. back up. come here." he always knew exactly what to doand i remember we had a metronome that wassupposed to create a rhythm and we had this metronome going andhe went over and he went like that. and he stopped it.i said, "why'd you do that?" he says, "i don't feel like looping it,kid." you know? i was like, "what's looping?" you know, i had no idea of anything. sohe was very much kind of teaching me the... well, making fun of me more, butyou know, pointing out my errors.
harrison ford is probably one of the smartestactors i've ever worked with. top of the line. a, for what they can do.but b, they're able to do it, because they're smart. it's notjust intuition. they work it out. sometimes they don't comprehend whati do for a living on a big movie. my performance is important as any otherperformance of any person, particularly the star. my film, the film that i makeat the end of the day, is my movie. it may be a team thing as well,but i'm taking the knocks. i'm taking the bashes and probablyi've developed it, etc, etc. so yes, it's my movie and i'm invitingpeople to do it and that's what a director is.
downtown la in front of the bradburybuilding in the middle of the night. usually, our call pretty muchalways was at sunset. we're vampire hours, you know? also there was,of course, lots of rain. and so one time, when i wasrunning away from jf sebastian, i ran and hit the van and my arm went throughthe window and it wasn't breakaway glass. i had eight chips or nine chips takenout and there's still some more floating around, i think, whichdidn't help doing the back walkovers and things on the chipped elbow.she laughs
i'd filmed in the bradbury buildingbefore, which is very pristine, very clean. an amazing place. great ironwork and so forth that,visually, just is fabulous and lit it for a set.you know, a lot of backlight. again, had the xenons passingthrough, and smoke. it was eerie. but the amazing part about it isi don't really think that the bradbury people understoodhow ridley wanted to do it, because it was,it was a total mess. in the interior, we hada 65ft truck filled with debris
and we had, of course, rain insidethe building. we had rain everywhere. and what we would have to do, because thebuilding was occupied at the time, we could get it at 6pm and, at 6am,we had to be out of there and it had to be clean.so because it looks like it's decrepit and filthy, we couldn'tfigure out a way at first, but then we came up with the idea ofwe took cork and crumbled up cork, because it has the same textureand colour as mud and dirt. so we'd throw cork all over thefloors and the rain would absorb it. so the next morning, when youswept everything up it was clean,
and didn't have to be scrubbedwith soap and water, because we probably had no more than anhour to get out of the building every day. when i first came onto the set, iwalked down the lot through this maze and saw these signsand buildings and what not. i said to myself,"wow, this is astronomical. "it'll take forever to do this filmif it hasn't already." i thought i was going to go to the studio andsee a so-called refrigerated lab. they shot it in a real fridge,basically. a monster fridge. let's say inside was, er, frosty.he laughs
in a way, it was kind of strangewhy they did that, because the conditionswere almost uncontrollable. they could not set the temperature of thatfreezer to where they could just get the cold and see the breath coming outand everything looks frozen. we started off witha couple of arcs in the freezer. well, they're carbon arcs.they're actually burning coal and, after about an hour,people were starting to get ill, because we were, number one,taking the oxygen out of the air and the carbon, the smoke from thecarbon, people were getting sick.
we had to shut down the arcsand literally open up the freezer, get all the air out, had fans going. the producer was on to ridley, "that's goodenough! that's good enough!" or whatever. like i said, i wouldn't wantto work in that atmosphere again. it's just too much. too much wasat stake at too short a time. the night scenes were all shot onwhat's called the new york street set, where the maltese falcon had beenfilmed by warner bros in the 1940s and it was just their standingurban new york type of look. to shoot a studio street on blade runner,you know, on the warners lot, would look crap.
if you look at all the tv series shot on thestudio street, it looks like a studio street. so wetting it down and having things in heavyrain certainly started to bring it to life. the reason why i could not have done thosesets in daylight, it wouldn't have looked good. they would've looked bad andwe'd have to spend more money. so, by shooting at night, you save money and it looksbetter. when it's always raining, it looks better. that's what it's about. why's there always smoke?i haven't got enough money. it looks better. so those three elements are alwaysin my armoury - night, wet, smoke. i thought the art directionwas brilliant and the world that was createdwas very dense and interesting.
but it was a bitch, workingevery night and all night long, often in the rain. so it wasn't the most pleasant shoot. there was always dialoguethat we were behind schedule. i think it all culminated when we were shootingon the back lot at night with the street exteriors. never less than 13, 14 hours. we would shoot all night.
kind of the joke was,"keep your eyes in the east, "cos soon as you see that glow, "you know we've gotonly about another hour". some days we never shot. and then some dayswe made two shots a day. one was on meal penalty and one was at sunrise. and that happened more than once. you were working inside of a full,
ongoing environment of soundand special effects. the spinners were coming up and down and they had thecranes working, and all the smoke and all the water. and that back lot came alive. what he was trying to dowas just incredible. and i remember, we would sit foreight hours trying to do one set-up. and you would do it, like, right? and what you're seeing in your eyes, what you'regoing to see, it's really pretty much that. but then i remember going to dailiesand it's the one film, to this day, where i went to dailies, and i went,"we shot that?" i was shocked.
blade runner, particularly to fans, is known as a movie that hassome fairly egregious blunders, and one of the most visual of thosewould be zhora's death scene, where joanna cassidy as zhora is crashing throughall these display case windows. it's like another one of thesegigantic oversights, to put hair on someone thatlooked nothing like my hair. i mean, it was basically a wigpulled out of somebody's bag, and it just never...it never cut it.
she's the double, because i won'trisk joanna running through. cos even though you'rerunning through sugar, that's not plate-glass, it's got to have been large sheetsof sugar glass. so when you go through that stuff,you could still cut yourself. that was a very famous stunt woman,by the way, named lee pulford. but the problem with her particularscene and moment in the movie was that, at that time, that was shot towards the endof principal photography.
and once again, the money issueswere bearing down hard on everyone and now we were facing time issues. everything was rushed.and you only get one shot at that. there's not two shots there.that's it. now that would probablybe digitally done or i'd shoot thatfor two nights, minimum, where, once you makethat mess and you tidy up, you've got to move offand do something else. that time i was invited down,i was on the set, man, and it's like,
i saw yorkin and those guys on ridley and on deeley,and it was not pretty. in particular, i remember one nightwhen we were shooting, which was a difficult sequence,zhora getting shot, and i remember bud yorkin wasdown there just wanting to know, expletives apart,why we were going so slowly and what the hell, you know, was going on, and pointing hisfinger pretty aggressively at ridley. as a director, i really had empathy for what he wasgoing through and i knew it was a huge task and so forth.
i never liked the idea of producing. i only produced, in my life, two pictures that i producedand didn't direct. and that's very frustrating for anybody as a directorbecause the directors don't want to just produce. i think bud secretly wantedto direct it himself. and if he had, it would be obviously,a very different movie. there was conversations like thatthat lead nowhere cos we stood by ridley and said,"you've got to finish the movie". "that's what we bought andthat's what we're paying for".
i was warned a couple of timesto speed up and that's about it. i said, "i can, i will speed up if i canbut, unfortunately, these are big set-ups". and he wanted to do what he had to do. you know,reminded me of george c scott and the hustler. "i'm talking about money", you know,or whatever. "you owe me money!" i think we went through that 20 million, we wentthrough the $20 million, and all of a sudden, somebody's tapping onyour shoulder and saying... so then you start payinga little closer attention when you have to start writingthe cheques yourself, so to speak. he was completion guarantor andthey put a lot of money into a movie.
and if you try to see it fromhis point of view, you know, what the hell was going on?you know, why? why were we so far behind schedule? you know, we were supposedly, youknow, professional film -makers, etc. i would never, ever deliberately ignore a budgetand just say, you know, "let's just spend the money". i just don't function that way. itdrives me crazy to go over budget. i hate that. for me to goover schedule, i hate that. and i think one of the important things is, whenyou're shooting, particularly from my point of view, i'm one of those directorswho always must be told
where i am financially, what i've got to do, butbe told early enough so i can do something about it. my job is to getwhat i promised i'm going to get. and that's why it was good for any investor,as they probably will have discovered by now. there was a sequence wherethey wanted to do hand to feet, hand to feet, flip flop gymnasticthings across there and wind up straddledon harrison ford. so i had this girl that, herand i'd be rehearsing at nights for, i don't know, in the gymnasium,and she goes down pretty good. well, in about, i'll say 20 minutes,ridley had her totally worn out.
she was over in the corner, gasping for air.she'd done it i don't know how many times. and they came to me and they said,"we've got a problem here". and i said, "yeah, well, go shootsomething else or go to lunch or what not" "and i'll have a guyhere after lunch". and so i brought him inin the afternoon. one of them was a guy, actually, and kind of quite a stockykind of wider guy than me, not shaped the same at all. a rehearsal for ridleywas really doing it.
not, "i'll do this and thisand this". you really did it. flip flop, flip flop, hit the wall. you know, and then slide down the wall,15 times or whatever it was, you know. harrison insisted that, you know, when i'm supposed to be shovingmy fingers up his nose and lifting his head upand throwing him back down, that i actually do it. you know, like, i was, like,trying to sort of gently, you know, pretend, and he was like,"no, you've got to just do it".
and his nose wasbleeding and it was gnarly. but, you know, it was sort of, theonly way to do it is just to go for it. and at one point, actually,we had to do sort of a reshoot of some of my close-ups.and i was really stunned because i had been...i mean, it was a gnarly fight. i was really fighting and i wassure really hurting harrison as well. and he really wanted me to begrimacing and mugging and, you know... and so we re-did the close-up of it so that i couldbe looking a little bit more horrific, i guess. any long picture is exhaustingfor everybody on it.
so once that patience goes,then people get very snappy. the gulf betweenridley's way of working and a lot of members of the crew,who'd been, in some cases, lolling around studios for years,began to become apparent. the crew that we hadwas a fast crew. they were a thorough crewand a professional crew. all departments, props,wardrobe, make-up, hair, everybody was fabulous. and i've worked withthese people subsequently,
on a variety of other shows. but everybody workedexceedingly hard and was right there on the dime. one afternoon, we saw somebodyhanding out these free t-shirts, which had a rather defiant or revolutionarystatement addressed towards ridley. and this had come about because,most unfortunately, somebody had filched from his trailera british newspaper article in which they'd asked whether he'drather work in england or in america. now, working for an englishpaper, you say "england".
you know, in england,i'm so, you know, known here, crews are more liable to say,"ready when you are, guv". that's it. that is it. really upset the crew.really upset the crew. and so i did what was called"the t -shirt wars". katie haber said, "they made t-shirtsand they're wearing them tomorrow". and i said, "what is it about?" she said,"that article you did". i said, "what article?" somebody had actually gotthe article from england, printed a pile of them andput them on the tea trolley.
michael and i sat down with ridley, andsaid, "what can we do to smooth this over? "because, obviously, we can't makea film with everybody hating you". i think deeley came upwith the phrase, "xenophobia sucks". he said, "well, xenophobiameans fear of strangers, "and basically what's going on is,these people don't understand you "and they don't understand the wayyou work". so if we put something on a t-shirt that makes peoplecome up to us and say, "what does it mean?", it'll sortof smooth over a lot of rough edges. i put on the greent- shirt the next morning,
with "xenophobia sucks" on it,with "guv" on my hat, and walked onto the set. i bought and paid for the t-shirt. as i put mine on and went to walk out of thetrailer door, who's the first one to see me? ridley. i said, "right, morning, harrison,we're going to do this." there was this, and there was all these people standingthere in their shirts, which i completely ignored, and didn't say a word about it. and, they ignored me and we got on with the firstscene, with all of us wearing this ridiculous gear, and by mid-morning the t- shirts started todisappear and by lunchtime they were all gone.
these were guys, you know,who were one's friends. i couldn't think of a crew member thatwasn't doing his absolute best, but, suddenly, you get all sorts of talkingbehind the scenes and here's this foreign director,"who the hell does he think he is?" "these limeys are over here...",and this, that and the other. they were tired and you could seethat they didn't feel appreciated. you know, i would say to ridley, "gotalk to these people, for god sakes! "tell them how great they're doing,because, you know, "everyone is devoted to you butthey're devoted through fear."
the only way you knewif you were working was if you got a call sheet at the endof the day and your name was still on it. cos people justall the time disappeared. on the property room door, there was a list ofpeople who said they'd had enough and they quit. and we kept a rosterof everybody who quit the film. it can be tough on a setand it can be long hours. and i remembersome pretty long hours on that show. so what? i'm sorry, but sometimeswork is gruelling
and i don't think pris there to whine about, "ah, you know, it destroyed my lifeand it was so gruelling." it was a tough shoot. we were doing something very special. to most of the crew,this was just a job. to a few of us, this was... special. this was really...it was magic time. there was tension from time to time
and there were timeswhen there wasn't. i think every big, ambitious moviehas tension involved. eventually we shot that sequenceon the back lot of warner brothers, with the jumpfrom one building to the other, in the building that we couldposition the way we wanted. i'd laid outthe distance of the building and i'd jumped it on the groundmany, many times and it was fine. and i'd put a rope on the other sidethat was blended into the building, where you couldn't see, where i couldget a hold of the rope and hang onto it.
then we go all ready to do it, againit was at night and it was smoking and it was rainingand there was a mess. so it came time to do the jump andi made a long run and made the jump. i was about half way and icould see i wasn't going to make it. i best thing i could do, i threwout my arm and i hooked one of these rafters under my arm andthat kept me on the building. they liked it so well they wanted me to doit two or three more times, i can't remember. so every time i had to hook my arm. i had abig bruise under my arm, but we made the jump. i had a great rapport with stunt guyscos i ride horses, i fence,
i do some martial artsand that sort of stuff. and i always watch them, see howthey prepare, watch what they do. it might have been 30 feet from the floor tothe top, so we had an air bag at the bottom. so if you didn't make it... if i remember correctly, the guy that doubledrutger, the first jump he made, he didn't make it. he hit and bounced offand went to the airbag. another stunt guy comes in.he does the same thing. now we're at five o'clock in the morning and we'vegot an hour and i'm saying to ridley, "ridley, "if you put the building, and the building wereit's own wheels, "if you give me a foot closer,
"i swear it's not impossiblefor me, i can do this." and he's desperate by now. so, he goes, "ok, let's do it." and then we didone take and i jumped. rutger did this one,big, bargey hop, with a dove in his hand. cos he came to me andsaid, "i thought, 'symbol of peace', is this ok?" i'm going, "yeah, yeah, yeah, go on,the light's getting blue." what if i take a dove with me and then when idie, i just hold onto the dove for the last bit? and then, when i die, justlet it go and that's it.
poof, end of storyand then the dove can act for me. that was the visual part of death. up to this moment in the film, it's been in a metropolisthat's constantly overcast, and raining, dark and gloomyand, all of a sudden, you do a shot where you see the doveflying up into a clear, blue sky which is a daylight shot and there's just someclouds of steam around and stuff like that. this was a matter of something thathad happened during the filming. the dove that they had got wetbecause of all this constant rain
and when he was releasing it to let itgo, the dove was so wet, it couldn't fly. so instead of flying off rutger's lapinto the sky and then following it up, the dove just literallyhopped out of rutger's lap and waddled across the roof,you know, out of the frame. there was a real page of opera talk, that is bad in any script,i don't care how you look at it. this was hi-tech speakthat had very little bearing on anything that the moviehad shown you before, so i just put a knife in itand i did this at night
and i didn't knowif ridley was ok with it. like most actors aware thatthis is his death scene coming up, this is his kind of moment and theysuddenly start getting pretty tenacious about what they want to shootand what they want covered. i think he was quite demandingat that time of ridley. i came out with two lines that had some sort of off-worldlyfeel to it and some poetry in it. and then i came up with the line,at four o'clock in the morning, "all those moments will be lostin time like tears of rain."
'i brought it to the setand ridley liked it. ' rutger is big and boldand interesting, as an actor. i had a great time working with him. some of the scenes we had togetherare some of the most satisfying... .. professional moments i've ever had. 'i think the two characters dependon each other in a dramatic sense. 'so, i was very grateful to havehis capacity and his strength 'and his focus to work with. ' the last two days were actually anightmare because we had only two days.
they were definitely cutting off the moneyand we wouldn't be able to shoot beyond that. we still had rathera lot of work to do. the last day of shootingwas 27 or 28 hours. we must have gone to work at five inthe afternoon or something like that and we shot all nightand, of course, everybody thought we'd finishwhen the light comes up cos you can't shoot any more. we were really, really dying. wewere absolutely in the water here, swimming with the sharks around us.
i knew, by then, it would be april,may, june - i'd got dawn coming in, 5, 4.45, so it's going to go blue.it's going blue, in fact, there's a beautiful lightcos it is blue. that's dawn. when the sun came up, the suitswere all standing off to the side, there was, like, four guys in suits. so the sun came up and theywere all smiling and all that, "oh, it's great,we can pull the plug now." ridley said, "i'm not finished yet,"cos the death scene was incomplete. michael deeley came over to me
and said, "listen,we got to keep going." and so what we decided to do wasliterally take chain-saws and saws and cut the setout of the street and put itin vehicles and fork-lifts and move that set piece, withthe roof top, down to the stage. everybody was just beat and we stillhad all the wet, all the dirt, all the smoke, everything going on. and when we finally cuton the last shot, it was, from top to bottom,it was, "let's get out of here".
and everybody walked away. for the first time in weeks, my excellentscottie dog and i drove home in daylight, thinking the wholenightmare was over. but we were not aware of what waslurking in our mailboxes the next day which was a communication from the lawyersrepresenting perenchio and yorkin, invoking their right, since we were 10% overbudget, to discharge us from the picture. i know they had the right to andi think it was done out of pique. i think that perenchiowas so cross with us
because he'd had to pay up on his guaranteeof completion that he wanted to punish us. we ran over budget, needless to say,and it was one of those things. it happens, i guess,in motion pictures and particularly in one that wasas difficult as this was to make. when they wanted to removeridley from the film, i said, "wait a minute, there's no way. "he's got to finish this film,because we bought a ridley scott film." that became very difficult for usi remember jerry perenchio coming in and saying, "now we can put this filmexactly how we want it."
i said, "that won't betoo easy, because "everything has been broken down, "because i'm working with the soundcrews" at the time, which it hadn't. i was trying to tap dance around this situationbecause i knew that ridley would come back. you don't fire a director unlesshe's done some horrible thing. it didn't have the slightest effect.i mean, the job continued to be done. so ridley was on the picture all theway through, nobody went anywhere. there's a lot offorgiveness in it all. and over a period of time, you justrealise that you are doing something
that is so different,so special, so unique. you've done a man's job, sir. but are you sure you are a man? i think everyonewho worked on that film, when they realisedwhat had been accomplished, was extremely proudthat they were involved. and all of those skirmishesthat take place, to the point of making it better, notjust getting on people for ego's sake. cos i don't really thinkridley does that.
he doesn't deal directly with ego. he deals with, "what's going to be thebest damn thing we can put on the screen?" the fact of it is that,in our going over budget, at least it can be said thatthe money was, is on the screen. no doubt, um... it's not the usual thingof just misplanning. it's just that it's up there. i look at blade runner as the lastanalogue science-fiction movie made, because we didn't have all theadvantages that people have now.
and i'm glad we didn't, becausethere's nothing artificial about it. there's no computer-generatedimages in the film. the things that pervaded us duringthe whole production was, "how do we pull rabbits out of hatshere? how do we do more for less?" i always remember themcoming off, going, "wow!" they nearly got me involvedin special effects in a big way. it was, er, plain,old-fashioned filmmaking with c-stands and gaffer's tapeand running the big 65mm cameras. in retrospect, this is probably
one of the last great in-cameraspecial effects movies ever done! in the late seventies,there was kind of a resurgence. as far as visual effects went,it was like a rebirth, because there was a large voidthe decade and a half before that. there were effects in some films, but there wasn't enoughinfrastructure to do a large film likestar wars or close encounters. the ground was changing, you know. suddenly, we had motion-control cameras and,suddenly, computers had reared their head.
but, as we were doing blade runner, i did have personal connectionwith dougie trumbull and, er, richard yuricich and i know i had a part inpersuading richard, you know, to do the movie. it was a very small film at the time. it was about $2 million,and it was about 50-56 shots. they had based it on doing a like number of shotsto alien, which really wasn't enough for this film. and the more ridley got into it, thegrander his vision, i think, expanded. it's not like, "spend all the money you guyshave and make it look as good as you can." it was like, "do more with verylittle money and very little time."
and that was kind of fun. well, part of what really workedfor blade runner was the fact that we were all stupid and didn'tknow too much about miniatures, and some of the choices we madei would never have dared make now, although they'reactually good choices. we worked to the concept. and you never design a visual effectsshot to have the audience go, "oh, wow, what a neat visual effectsshot. "what a great design." it always has to tell the story.
and fortunately, in the case of blade runner, one ofthe protagonists was the city, was the environment. people had to live in thisvery oppressive environment and that is one of thekey characters in the story. the good thing is that there waspollution as part of the story. pollution's not good, but there was goingto be lots of aerial perspective and haze and that was allpart of the, the scene. i like to get in there, cos ilike to see what the lighting was. and i pushed hard for smoke. when you're shooting thingsthat are only ten feet away from you,
and it has to looklike it's two or three miles, the only way to build up the senseof aerial perspective at that time was to fill the miniature roomfull of smoke and create things blurring offand greying off into the distance. it was a very different timefor visual effects. it was all optical composites,and quality was a major concern. and many times, instead of doing it as an opticalcomposite, we would do multiple exposures, which was risky, because you'd shoot one pass, roll the filmback, shoot another pass, roll the film back, and i remember a couple times,they'd open up the camera
and there'd be nothingbut shredded film inside. that opening shot,i think, had 17 passes. so they ran it, stopped, wound itback, ran it again, wound it back. very tricky work. if you make onemistake, you have to start over. and that's where guys like davecome in and make that magic happen. we learned early on that, even though we plannedto work at a certain scale on the miniatures, that that really wasn't going to work. what wehad to do was work the same way that ridley worked. you'd go into a large stage, takethe brightest light you've got, shine it backat where the camera sits
and then start putting stuffin front of it and add lots of smoke into the room. and so, i started composingminiature shots that way and that's whenit really started to happen. what most people are amazed at- a lot of those sets were no bigger than 12 feet by 12 feet. you know, we weren't shootingon very large stages. and this one shot, spiralling down onto the roof ofthe precinct tower, we wanted to get the camera up and the camera simply wouldn'tboom up that high either. so we brought the wholeminiature down to the camera,
basically by tilting itonto an oblique angle on its side, so that the camera could reach highenough to get that aerial shot and be far enough back from the topsof the building at the same time. in those days, in the caseof some of the visual effects work on that movie, we useda process called matte painting. and matte painting is a technique that is used to alterthe look of a location or a set in a motion picture. it's a combinationof painted artwork
and live action photography. that is even beyond digital. i mean, it's better than anything, because it's photography that isshot and exposed at the same time. the matte painting's exposedwith the live action photography, so it just is on one piece of film. there are, like, really notpaintings in this film. there's portions of paintings and someshots might have had five or six paintings where a section was burnt inthat could've been fluorescence.
well, in the tyrell office, there was a painting for theexterior where the pyramid had to be finished going up. those shots all came together real well. ireally like seeing sean walk through the sun ball, because that was all rotoscopedand it was a very scary shot. it's a beautiful shot.it's my favourite in the film. and you watch the film, and you know it's aneffect, but you just don't perceive it as an effect. you're in the tyrell corporationoffice and you just fall into it. everything was really done. cos you can feel that when you watcha film. i think when you see a film, and it's an in-camera effect,it feels real.
for me, there was an interestingthing that happened, because i knew, and we knew, how few visual effectsshots we had in the movie. compared to star wars or close encounters oranybody else's, you know, big effects movies. there was like a thirdof the number of shots. but the fact that the effects shotsdidn't stick out like a sore thumb, they were just integratedinto this big, amazing event, that it seemed like there were moreeffects shots than there were. katy haber gave me a call and said, "ridley wants you to meet philipdick and can he come down and see it?"
so we went into the screening room. and katy had said, "just tie together tenminutes of your better shots and run them." so the vangelis music started to play, the seatsstarted to rumble and we ran through the thing. the lights came back up, philip dick turned aroundand looked right through the back of my head. and he said, "how is this possible?how did this happen? "it's like you guyshardwired my brain. "that's what i saw wheni was writing that story. "i don't understand this.how can this happen?" he was completely blown away,could not believe it,
that something so seriouswas happening with his book. ridley and i decided to see this filmbefore we showed it to tandem on our own. so we sit there, the lights go down and wenever said a word through the entire film. and when the lights came up,ridley said... "i think it's marvellous,but what the bleep does it mean?" and we knew then that we hadsome restructuring to do and a lot of workto make this thing work. it didn't mean changing everything around, it meantgetting into each of the scenes and developing them more. i think it was four hours long. andthere was a three-page scene i'd written
that was now 14 minutes long, right?i mean, it was quite startling, but it was also magicaland awesome and stunning. bud and i and robin french, whowas one of our partners, we spent, i think, six weeksin england with ridley, you know, cutting the film. and doing all the special effectsand whatever else and it was... you know, it wasa lot of tug of wars, what should stay in,what shouldn't stay in. they would come overto see things and...
the trouble is, no matter whatwe did, they didn't like it. took out a ton of things that i felt werenecessary and we had to cut the film down. we also had a legal rightat that time that warner bros had the right to... anything from over two hours, theycould take out if they wanted to. what you reading? old favourite - treasure island. 'i think the first scene to bedropped was the holden hospital scene. 'basically, there waslots of trimming going on.
'you know, taking things out.when he comes back,' having been beaten by leonand he takes her back to his place, he's washing at the sink and it was much, much longerand sort of hypnotic. she just wanted to look at him. you had far moredetail of him washing and the blood coming from his mouthand she slowly got closer and closer. and that was wonderful. and the scene where he kisses her againstthe wall, that was more sort of, er...
it was more sensuous at one time. it becomes sort of violent now,because it's been cut down. towards the end, i know on blade runner we were sortof thinking about the next movie and there was this projectthat we were working on, which was called legend,affectionately known as leg end. i wanted it to work likethe thoughts of his. so he would pick up a photograph,he would then start looking at it and remembering and you'd see this unicornrunning through the forest coming towards you.
it'd come right up the cameraand it would shake its head. and as it shook its head, i cut to him shakinghis head like shaking that thought away. and it just made it sucha lyrical piece and... magic. to this moment, when he comes flying through the, ihad no idea what was it, nor did anybody in the film. now, when they run his cut,you look at that and you say, "well, what does that unicorn mean?" i remember them saying, "if it doesn'tmean anything, we're going to cut it out." so they were throwing away thingsthat were there for reasons. i mean, it's all tied together in the finalframes of the film, when he lifts up the unicorn,
the fact that they know that his thought patternworks with unicorns, it's one of his memories. could he be a replicant? could he be? that was trimmed down. i mean, all the subtleties were taken out.that's the thing about filmmaking anyway. most of the things that go first when theythink a thing's too long are the subtleties. do you know, the terriblething about blade runner was it was being made for people whodidn't understand what it was about. when we finally screened the picturein denver, and we got the cards, a lot of the people said theycouldn't understand it.
it was unintelligible.they couldn't follow this... they didn't know what the people weresaying. it was kind of a different language. he uses cityspeak too much confusion at this point, saying, "what's this?what's that? what's cityspeak? "i don't understand this. what's hesaying?" and i'm going, "oh, god!" bud and i insisted that we do...we put some voiceover, with, um, with harrison to clarify some of,you know, to move the thing forward. and i know this, ridley neveragreed to that and never liked it.
it wasn't their idea, it wasour idea. it was, "i am not stupid." i looked at the results andsaid, "this ain't working. i agree with you, but what canwe do? how about voiceover?" "ok, yeah, let's do it." now, is "farfetched" in or out? this is reel three, section one. take one. it didn't help me any. neither did the flakefrom the bathtub.
nothing helped, not even booze. i was restless and hungry. i needed the streetsand i needed food. 'ok. ' pretty weird. pretty weird. beepingthe flake. maybe it was a scale. a fish scale. real or artificial? - this is bizarre.goddamn, this is bizarre.
'um, why?' i don't know. 'i never believedit was going to be used. ' and, er, when i startedtalking to ridley about it, it turned out that they were,they were things that he was not out of sympathy with. and he's right. he said, "this doesn'tsound right." and i said, "no, you're right." so we tried every which way to rewrite,except it was difficult to write. we couldn't actually land on whathe should actually talk about. it's a romanticised view of being,internalizing what's in his mind.
what would he be thinking? turned out ridley and warner bros hadsome issues with the voiceover narration and the final versions of thenarration were done without ridley. and i missed him. we all went to london to do thecutting, to do the postproduction, and when we were away, that's when they sneaked inand did the voiceover. i was obliged by, um, by my contractto supply that voiceover narration. and on the last one,i went in and i thought,
"simply do it.do it the best you can and go home," because i had arduously arguedthrough other versions to try and get the best versionthat we could of the narration, even though i didn't thinkit was necessary. all right, go ahead.testing one, two, three. gaff had been there.he'd let rachael live. he had nothingto fear from bryant, but a lot to fear from meif he'd killed her. - i don't like that,let's start again.
excuse me. yeah. didn't you say that bothered you? no, but i... i thought you saidthat was getting in your way. no, sir, not... i'm sorry, i heard you wrong.go ahead, then. only after that had beendissected from the film that i got any pleasureout of seeing that movie. rolling now? yeah. once i knew that people were not getting withit, the fact is, if you are ahead of your time,
then that's...that's as bad asbeing behind the times, nearly. you've still got the same problem. and so, i'm all about trying to fix the problem, soi'm always there to try and say, "right, what can we do? "shit's not really working."i think it was jerry's team said, "you know, it's that dark ending,we need a happy ending." they decided to try to get some widescreen shotsof really nice-looking nature. i was sent to shoot it with acameraman. so it was just him and i. and we were flying aroundin a helicopter for six days.
but when we got back, you couldn't see anything,because there was a lot of cloud and a lot of snow. so everything we shotwas completely useless. ridley, being a fan of stanley kubrick's,remembered the footage that opens the shining. if i know stanley,stanley doesn't fly. he has never gone to montana, so he must have done a blanket shoot ofevery peak in montana for the shining, using the best helicopter crew. i'll bet you he's got weeksof helicopter footage. he was very receptive, he loved alien, heliked, he really sort of admired ridley,
and said, "yeah, yeah, but, you know,as long as there's no footage used "that's actually in the shining, there's a lotof outtakes, etc, and if it's any good, fine." within about 17 hours, i hadsix weeks of helicopter footage. it's a getting away shot, where i hadto shoot them on the road, and i did it, because i figured it might actually affect what ithought the outcome of the movie would be negative. i'd better deal with it. i didn't know howlong we'd have together. who does? one of the great things theexperiences that would follow for me
would be scoring atmarble arch with vangelis. and most of that, every night,i'd go to vangelis' studio and it would be him and maybe one assistant, that'sit, in a big, barn-like place behind marble arch. when i would arrive, he'd go,"come, listen to this." and he would actually say, "watch." and he would actually play,physically, what his recording was. and as he's doing it, he'slooking at me, and he's doing that. and it was watching this evolutionof this great music. i was in london when the movie wasgetting scored by vangelis,
so i'd seen a lot of the footageand i just... i mean, it just made me weep.the beauty of it was... it was just extraordinary. ridley talking about his images and how he wantedthis to be and what he wanted it to look like. and it all happened and it was... itwas very sweet to see that come together. i knew somewhere in there was not,shouldn't be a disappointment. i knew somewhere that i haddone something pretty good. it was then about,"well, i've done it. i don't know what else to do."
so we released itand the rest is history. it was a very tough subject matter. you're talking about replicants,robots, if you will. i mean, when you think what'shappened between then and now. it became so convoluted,what people thought of the picture. there were people who thought it was the greatest picturethey've ever seen and there were others that said,"what the hell was it about?" this was a study of the futureand i don't think, at the time,
people wanted to see the future, especially like predictedin the film. we finally did the cut, and we screened it outat mgm in one of the screening rooms out there, just with five or six people. and i guess it was because we wereinvolved with it, you know. it was, part of it was our baby. but i remember when thelights went up, i said, "it's going to be a smash!" it was a premiere out in hollywood,at sunset boulevard or something.
and i could literally feel the crackthat went through the audience. it was either "whoa!" or "ugh!" there was no middle, no in between. it opened on a friday night.it was huge, the numbers were huge. and then the word of mouth just that weekendpetered out, so saturday business fell off, sunday business fell off and, of course, the guysat the studios live and die by the opening weekend. i guess they called bud, and thenbud called me. and he said, "in the tank. it's a disappointment." i went into the theatre,
and there were probably three otherpeople in the theatre with me. i had already,you know, read reviews, which, for the most part, was notentirely positive, to say the least. i felt really, really disappointed that people didn't seem to get it. that point in my life, when i sawblade runner for the first time, i was really profoundly affectedby the bleakness of it all and i... i didn't really like it verymuch as a moviegoing experience. as a visual, filmic experience,
i thought the whole thingwas completely extraordinary. for me, it still emotionallyfalls short of total satisfaction, because i just think there is,there is there's an emotional logic and a sort of a narrative logic that doesn't run as true as i feelthat it should do. and, in a sense, i felt that what we made was anincredibly beautiful looking, as one would expect with rid,but it's almost like an art movie. it was the first science fiction art film.and i think that's a good way to describe it. it is a futuristic film, it's a sciencefiction film. but it's beautifully put together.
and you really saw a future that looked verydifferent from the futures you had seen before. about a future that lookedvery believable. not only was it different, it didn't look like it wasdifferent just to be different. it looked like someonehad actually figured it out. we were absolutelydisappointed in the opening. but it was bob dingilianwho said to me afterwards, "can you only imagine how badit would have been "if we didn't do what we did?"
everybody was expecting a heroic followup to raiders of the lost ark or star wars and the way it wasadvertised on television, with only the visual effects shots of aflying car going over a futuristic city, doesn't prepare youfor the traumatic, emotional side that there is in the film, that kind of leaves yousort of broken. there were people in thetrade papers at the time, starting around the winter of 1981, predicting that the summerof '82 would have such casualties,
simply by the fact that there was somuch product coming in all at once that they wouldn't be ableto find their audience. people were over the seventies, and there was a lot of depressingstuff coming out, and what they wanted tosee was a slice of, er... of utopia. people wanted to see happy movies. and ridley came out with an amazing, brilliantlyexecuted future of an absolute dystopia. there's absolutely no questionwhy that movie failed. in those days, peoplewere making logan's run,
with michael york dressed ina white suit and a silly hat being chased aroundthe place, you know. chased around white corridors,because that's the future. this wasn't whatwe were doing at all. there really wasn'tthat much of a lag time between its theatrical failure andits rediscovery on cable and cassette. the early eighties were also the dawn of homevideo and this was a profoundly altering technology. audiences suddenly started to realise that,you know, when they saw it on their home tv set, and when they could pause itor stop it or go back,
when they could actually manipulate the film justas deckard manipulates roy batty's photograph, then they suddenly realisedwhat an accomplishment it was. the fact that the film hasbeen underground for so long... has given it a very special status. on thursday nights, on the lower eastside - this is about '83 now - they're having midnight showings on thursday nights of blade runner. and then, i knew it wasgoing to become something and history bears it out.
we're sitting here, what,25 years after the release and you go up,there are all kinds of websites, there are people all over the world that areinterested in, "was harrison ford a replicant or not?" and that self-generating kind of thing that'sgenerated by fan appeal that you can't buy. when i started studying blade runner around 15-16,and watching it on television on my worn-out vhs tape, i mean, i think i pretty much threaded thatthing down trying to figure out ridley's lighting, his lens choices, his focal lengths,the way he composed things, where he decided to do darkness and light andcontrast and silhouettes and things like that. blade runner is almost a playbook, ifeel, for filmmaking of the last 30 years.
there's a lot of times whenwe're talking in writers' rooms or in production meetingsor with studio execs or whatever and you'll talk abouta blade runner look, you know, a blade runnerfeel of the future. and that, boom, it just sortof defines a certain iconography. i noticed that, more and more andmore, there were dark nights with rainy, steamy drains and actuallylots of stuff. i'm going,"that's from blade runner," and then i suddenly realisedit was taking a huge impact.
it wasn't till 1990, when the work printleaked out, at that fairfax 70mm film festival, that people realised,"oh, there's yet another version "and what's up with all theseversions of blade runner?" and that's when the troubled historyof the film started to get out and people realised that ridley's visionfor the film had been diluted somewhat, with the process of test screenings and gettingthe film more palatable for a mainstream audience. it had been diminished. all of this is kind of a process of people comingto realise what an exceptional film this is. and a lot of different things haveto happen before it really catches on.
the initial screenings, everything,it's like a snowball effect. and people, either they saw it in there-release in theatres or they rented it, but more and more people decided toreacquaint themselves with blade runner. and when you reacquaint yourselfwith it, you fall in love with it. this movie, to me, embodies theelegance, the power and the uniqueness of a film experience. and then, the film -making itself is,the images and the sound and the music, it's eight of those ten layers ofstorytelling. that's the difference. it's pure cinema.
blade runner is essentiallya cautionary piece. it's telling us to beware. it's telling us,"look where we're headed. "look what we can do to each other.don't be a replicant. "don't be someone who just followsorders and shoots women in the back. "be someone who has a monitor onyour own empathic pulse. be human." we're in a movie business where most movies aredisposable commodities. they're the summer blockbuster. i'm not going to name what they are, butthey come and go in weeks and, "bye-bye", nobody wants to resurrect them,nobody wants to see them again.
so the ones that are really, truly well-made,the kind of casablancas of science fiction, survive and get seen over and over. the intensity of his perfectionismon this movie made the movie. this is a master at his best. i was absolutely aboutco-ordinating beauty. it was shot by shot had to be great. what i'm expecting from youwill be very high. you're not going to be wasted. i've chosen you, cos i knowyou're really good at what you do
and i'm going to actuallypush you like crazy. i'm going to get the best!