WHAT WENT WRONG - Blade Runner (Part 1)

Episode Date: November 22, 2022

Carbon monoxide poisoning, an on set "T-shirt war" and a very, very grumpy Harrison Ford are but a few hurdles Ridley Scott and company ran into while making this 1982 sci-fi classic. This week Chris fills Lizzie in on Rutger Hauer's sex appeal, the downsides of writing a script set entirely at night, and that one time Harrison Ford told Darryl Hannah to fish hook his nose just so he could feel something.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Your favorite hits and the big old suck bombs with Lizzie Bassett. And Chris Winterbauer. Let me take it again. No. One more time. That's the one. Let's do it again. Okay.

Take it from the top. Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong. Your favorite, we always say that it's a little presumptuous, but that's all right. Your favorite movie podcast that talks about all the shit that goes wrong behind the scenes on big budget blockbusters and total box office suck bombs. Today we're talking about one that I believe didn't make a huge. huge impact at the box office, but did make a huge impact on the world because it's freaking awesome. I'm here with my co-host, as always, Chris Winterbauer. And Chris, if you're wondering why I'm a little jazzed tonight. I was going to say, Lizzie ripped a line of

Coke immediately before this podcast recording. Well, listen, I got to say this. This is not by any means a plug for this product because I think it's horrible. Cocaine. I tried one of those Celsius drink things before I went to work out at the gym. Aren't they like four cups of coffee? I don't know. I didn't read the instructions. And I was just like, well, I need, I'm tired. I need to get this workout in. And then we're going to do this podcast. So I like chugged one. And I like halfway through the workout, I was like, whoa. I mean, I feel a little sick. But here we are. And I'm excited. Chris? Well, I'm thrilled that you're excited. Today we're talking about 1982's Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott. As Lizzie mentioned,

didn't set the world on fire when it was first released, but has had a lasting cultural impact, much more so than the Revenant, I would argue. They're kind of inverses of one another. Before we go any further, guys, it's important to note that this is a two-part episode. There's a lot of great information out there about Blade Runner, and so we have divided it into two episodes.

The first episode is going to cover the writing process, pre-production and production. And then the second episode is going to cover post-production, special effects, music, and the release and eventual re-release of this movie. Okay. So Blade Runner is a science fiction noir film set in a dystopian Los Angeles circa 2019. Synthetic humans, known as replicants, have been created by the Tyrell Corporation to work as slave labor on distant space colonies.

The story follows Harrison Ford's Rick Deckerd, a burned, out human detective as he attempts to hunt down a group of rogue replicants led by Rutger Hauer's Roy Batty. The cast is rounded out by Sean Young, Edward James Olmos, M. Emmett Walsh, Daryl Hannah, William Sanderson, one of my favorite character actors. Is that J.W., whatever his name is? Yeah, he's great. And from Deadwood. And True Blood. Yeah, and True Blood. Cuck, Sucka, from Deadwood. He cracks me up. Joe Turkle as Tyrell and James Hong. If you guys saw everything everywhere all at once this year, he is still crushing it at 90 plus years old.

Okay, so I have seen this movie before, but I don't remember when, and I clearly did not remember it at all, because I wasn't super stoked to watch it again this time. I was like, oh, how long is it? Yeah, you did send me a very annoyed text, being like, so I guess I'm stuck with this three-hour movie. I was like, it's two hours.

Which was the first check in the correct column for this movie is it's a great length. It is awesome. It's just like really, really cool. And I can't wait to hear about how they've made it. The thing that I will call out right at the top is one of my favorite parts of it is how they use L.A. architecture and L.A. landmarks in a way that like you know where they are. It's so cool. My favorite thing was the L.A. IWorks sign as they're going into James Hounder.

Tongue's little like eyeball then. Directed by Ridley Scott, written by Hampton, Fancher, and David Peoples. Blade Runner was based on a Philip K. Dick novel from 1968 to Android's Dream of Electric Sheep. It was released in 1982 and was a commercial flop. It grossed around $28 million against its $30 million budget. That's crazy. And it was kind of critically mixed reviews. It was criticized for its slow pace and lack of action, but was given a lot of

of praise for its world building. And over the years, the film has kind of been re-evaluated, developed a cult following, and eventually has now been hailed as a masterpiece of the genre and a foundational work of kind of cyberpunk world design. Now, before we dive in to what went wrong and a lot went wrong on this seminal piece of sci-fi, we should mention that there are no fewer than technically seven versions of Blade Runner in existence. Yeah, let me tell you, this was a pain in the but to find the one that you told me to watch. I'm sorry. So there are two versions of the original theatrical cut.

There's a domestic release and an international release. The international one had a little more violence in it. That's the only difference. There was then a workprint version that was leaked, and we'll get into that, in the early 90s. And this was closer to a rough director's cut. And that was used to create the director's cut in 1992. And then in 2007, the final cut was released.

And this was the only version over which Ridley Scott had complete artistic and editorial control. That's the version I had. You watch Lizzie. That's the version that I like the most and wanted you to watch because I'm going to play you some parts from the other version that are going to crack you up having watched that version first. And I'm very excited. Okay. First thing that we should talk about is the book.

And the thing about this book is that it seems like nobody making this movie Doug the book. And that happens way more often than you think. That's one thing I've learned on this podcast is that somebody is like, here's a book. I like this kernel of an idea in it and I'm going to rip everything else out. Exactly. Our journey with this movie starts with Philip K. Dick. If you don't know Philip Dick, you know his work. I'm not going to tell you his life story, but he was a prolific novelist and short storywriter.

and his sci-fi tales have been adapted time and time again on both the big and small screens over the last 40 years. Blade Runner was the first. So some notable examples. Steven Spielberg's Minority Report. I still think it's the best sci-fi movie the last 20 years. Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall. Ben Affleck's Paycheck. I don't remember that one.

Him and Uma Thurman, early 2000s wasn't great. That's not real. It's real. Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly. Matt Damon and Emily Blunt's the Adjustment Bureau and Amazon's The Man in the High Castle series among many others. But as I mentioned, it all began with Blade Runner, the adaptation of do Android's dream of electric sheep, published in 1968. The rough story is more or less the same. It's set in San Francisco instead of L.A., 192 instead of 2018 or 2019.

Rick Deckerd is assigned to retire, six Androids that have returned to Earth, escaped from Mars. In this world, all animals are extinct for the most part. And the only people that own real animals are like the elite elite wealthy. And so the idea is like Deckerd owns an electric sheep. And he wants to be able to buy his wife a real sheep. And the title, Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep comes from, do they have the same dreams and feelings that we do in the way that Decker dreams of that. And it's a beautiful title.

Now, you may have noticed a few words. missing from the description I just provided, notably replicant, the derogatory term they use for Androids in the film. Yeah. And Blade Runner. Yeah. Which I still don't get. It's never really explained in the movie.

What blades are they running on? I didn't see him. It's just called Blade Runner. Well, it turns out one of those things is made up and the other one's stolen. Guess which is which, and we'll get to that answer in just a minute. According to a 1982 interview with Philip Dick from Starlog magazine, the first director that was interested in making this into a movie, any guesses Lizzie? Okay, well, this is in the early 80s?

This would have been in the early 70s, so 10 years prior. Geez, I don't know, Coppola? No, that's a great guess, though. Martin Scorsese! Ah, that's what I thought he would be too young. Interesting. Him and his collaborator, Jay Cox, who wrote Gangs of New York. They were interested in adapting the book.

They didn't. They then got optioned by this indie producer, Herb Jaffe. He produced Fright Night. He had his son do the screenplay. and Dick said it was so bad that he threatened to beat the shit out of his son and then offered to buy the movie rights back so they wouldn't bastardize it. And apparently, what was wrong with it is that they had written it as a comedy. Well, that does seem off.

I would have liked to see that version of the movie, but it just apparently it didn't. It didn't work. So around the same time, there's an actor turned screenwriter. His name is Hampton Fancher, and he was looking for a sci-fi story to turn into a screenplay. Didn't even like sci-fi. Just thought that it was commercially viable. So he asked his actor buddy friend, Brian Kelly, who was on Flipper at the time, for recommendations. And Brian Kelly, big sci-fi fan is like, do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep?

Read that book. Fanser read it. He said he didn't like it, but he likes the idea of a detective hunting androids. So he tried to find Killip K. Dick and his agent hadn't heard from him in two years. So he literally just gave up. And then one day, he's walking through L.A. and he literally bumps into Ray Bradbury on the street. This was how life worked 40 years ago.

There were 12 people on the planet, and one of them was Ray Bradbury. And so he bumps into Ray Bradbury on the street and says, do you know Philip Dick? You write sci-fi. And he goes, oh, yeah. And he writes on his phone number on a piece of paper. It gives it to Hampson Fancher.

Hampton Fancher calls him. And Dick's like, okay, yeah, sure, you can option the script. And he got to work on a screenplay. And I just want to emphasize Brian Kelly, actor from Flipper, one producing credit in his entire career, executive producer on Blade Runner. Good job. He's the only reason this movie happened.

So basically, the movie initially gets set up at Universal. This producer Michael Dealey comes on. He's fresh off the Wicker Man, the man who fell to Earth, and the Deer Hunter. So he's a legit producer. Okay. It gets set up at Universal.

And Robert Mulligan, who had directed to kill a mockingbird, is going to direct it. The budget was set at $9 million. It was a small movie that took place entirely indoors. And sorry, what year is this in relation to when it actually comes out? 75 to 77, basically. Okay.

It's also worth noting that Philip Dick still hated the script. He thought that Fancher's draft was trash. His quote was, the intention was base and the execution was clumsy. So you had two dynamically tragic faults. They aimed low and failed in what they aimed at, which is like a pretty sick burn from a writer. But they had a script. We have a script. So what do you do when you have a script, Lizzie?

What's the next thing that you need? Actors. Director. A director. There we go. We'll pick it up. Order of operations. Basically, it seems like producer Michael Dealey, who's British, was the person who thought of

Ridley Scott to direct this movie. Who had done, obviously, alien. So he's just done sci-fi horror, and it was a huge hit. And if you want to learn more about Ridley Scott's background, I'm not going to talk about it here. Check out our episode on Gladiator. It's a doozy, and we give all the background on Ridley Scott. So they offer the movie to Ridley Scott. He reads the script.

It's interesting. It also wasn't called Blade Runner at that point, but it also wasn't called Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep because that title was too long. It was called Mechanismo. Nope. And then it got changed to dangerous days, even though the movie takes place entirely at night.

Didn't see a single bit of daylight. Nope. So Ridley Scott turned it down. because he was already in pre-production on another science fiction epic that would also be remade 40 years later by the same director that would reboot Blade Runner 2049

40 years later. That's right. He was going to direct Dune. Whoa. Basically, what ended up happening was it was taking a really long time to put that movie together because it was so big in scope.

They had spent months and months and months just trying to get the script, even into like a semi-workable shape. And then Ridley Scott's older brother died unexpectedly of a heart attack. And he fell into a deep depression. And I think he just needed something to work on, like visually and actively. And he realized Dune was just going to be a slog and probably not good for his mental health. So he stepped away from the project, ultimately leading David Lynch to be the director of that film. and he joined the then titled Dangerous Days team in February of 1980.

So this is after the release of Alien and even more importantly, after the release of Star Wars. So all of a sudden, people want to make sci-fi films. So Ridley Scott joins the project. That means the budget goes up because they've got a real director now. So they're up to like a $15 million budget. Still nowhere near enough. Oh, no, no, no, it's not. We'll get there.

Yeah, 15 million. He wants changes to the script, and the first thing is he wants the title to be changed. And there was literally a novel called The Blade Runner by William S. Burroughs, and they liked the title. So they literally just bought the rights to the title, and they just named their movie Blade Runner. Yeah, knowing what I know about Ridley Scott, that tracks. So he did like 12 rewrites with Hampton Fancher. Hampton Fancher was like pulling his hair out. And then he hired this other screenwriter, David Peoples, to come on for rewrites.

And Hampton Fancher had a mental break. down over this. He then came back to the movie later. People's was like a film editor and a screenwriter. He would eventually write Unforgiven for Clint Eastwood and 12 Bunkies for Terry Gillen. At the same time, Philip Dick decides he's going to take an even bigger shit on the movie publicly. And so he writes an article for TV guide. According to him, Ridley Scott had tried to read the novel but found it too difficult to understand that the screenplay was trash and that Ridley Scott's Alien was just a monster on a spaceship with no new ideas that coasted on its special effects. Okay, wrong.

The production is pretty upset with Dick because they've spent two and a half million dollars up to this point in pre-production costs. What Dick didn't realize is that Ridley Scott specifically wanted to make this movie something much bigger and bolder than Hampton's original, like, little bit of Rooms sort of story. He basically saw a version of Blade Runner in his mind that embraced the polluted multinational clutter of Hong Kong where he had been filming commercials. He wanted to create this world that was like the city, pushed to the brink by war and climate change. He was inspired by this sci-fi anthology French graphic novel called Metal Erlant or screaming metal.

Also this futurist architect Antonio Sant'Elia. You can check out his works. And if you'll remember from our Liator episode, Ridley Scott is an incredible artist. So he just started drawing the movie he saw in his head. So then he hires Sid Mead, who's an amazing futurist artist. Like everything that's retrofuturist, like Sid Mead like pioneered basically all of that design. They brought him on to design the cars, the spinners, right? And then Sid Meade designed that.

And then basically they were like, great, go have fun design the entire world, basically. Yeah, it's so cool. There's a lot of weird like Aztec influence on a lot of the architecture. And again, they're using, I'm sure we'll get to this. But fun fact, you can see two of the. major landmarks in this in Los Angeles. One is the Bradbury building downtown, heavily featured and so, so cool. And the other is the Ennis House, which is in Los Feliz. Also the second street tunnel. There's a few others that we're going to do as well. A lot downtown. Yeah. And I have a

soft spot for a downtown. It's really cool. So then they brought on production designer Lawrence G. Paul, art director David Snyder to build the sets. And then Douglas Trumbull, who's going to be a big character, Doug Trumbull, he had done 2001 A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and famously turned down doing the special effects of Star Wars. And they brought him and Richard Eurisich to supervise the film's truly remarkable special effects. Yeah, they really are. So, of course, as more and more designs are made, more effects mapped out, they've realized

that the funding that they have is way too low. And you know who else realizes that? Filmways. They're financier. So they say, adios. Oh, no. Two months out from production, the money's gone. Oh, my God.

At this point, Philip Dix's taking dumps on the project publicly. They have no money. They're $2.5 million in the hole. They've already hired the whole crew. They're building sets. They're scouting locations. They've cast. We'll get to that.

So basically, they set up a, like, show and tell in the production office with all of the concept art, et cetera. And they just start bringing executives from the major studios. in and they're like, can we interest you in a blade runner, sir? As they like walk them by, MGM comes through United Artists. Nobody wants to put in the full amount for this movie. It's a lot of money. The script is dark and they don't know if it'll work.

So producer Michael Dealey makes a producing deal that is, I think, amazing. In 10 days, he puts together a deal where he gets the Lad Company. So if you guys remember, Alan Ladd Jr., listen to our episode on Star Wars. He produced Star Wars. They get the Ladd Company operating under Warner Brothers to purchase the domestic theatrical rights. He then sells the foreign rights to a producer in Hong Kong. And then he sells the ancillary rights like video TV to tandem productions, which is actually Norman Lear's production company at the time.

Oh, wow. Yeah, very eclectic. Norman Lear was not involved in the project, but that was his company. And basically, they're like $7.5 million from each of you gets our budget to $22.5.5. and we'll go make this movie. Lizzie's shaking her head. It's still not enough money. You're exactly right.

We'll get to that. And really important, and this is a great thing for the audience to learn about I didn't know entirely about. Tandum productions also served as the completion bond guarantor for Blade Runner.

And what that means is that they have to pony up when the movie goes over budget because they are guaranteeing its completion. But if the movie goes more than 10% over budget, they have the right to take the movie over from the other producers and the director. Is that a standard thing?

I don't know how standard it is on a studio-backed movie. That seems a little unusual, but that was the instance in this case. But they have their money. They send Philip Dick the script. He loves it. He comes in, watches a 20-minute VFX reel, special effects reel.

It was not VFX. And just turned around and said, can you play that again? And they played it again. And then he just was over the moon. And he just felt like they had peered into his head and they pulled the ideas out. He thought it was great. And so they're off to the races now.

They've got their money. They've got the author on good terms. And now let's talk about casting. Hampton Fancher wrote this movie with one man and one man alone in mind. And I know you know this actor, but he's going to seem way too old. But when you think film noir... Humphrey Bogart? No.

But that's a great guess. Shoot. Am I in the right era or am I totally off? Kind of. Night of the Hunter? Robert Mitchum? Robert Mitchum. Oh, whoa.

He would have been very old. Yeah, he would have been in his 60s at this time. It would have been a very different movie. It would have been good. It would have been good. It would have been good. Yeah. But it would have been different.

Now, Ridley Scott and the producers, though, had somebody else they liked for it. Not Harrison Ford. So who do you think Ridley Scott and the producers spent four months chasing slash having conversations with? Give me a hint. He was a big actor at this time and he's very short. Al Pacino. No.

What the heck? But that's a good guess. I think he's shorter than Al Pacino. Dustin Hoffman. Dustin Hoffman. No way. Get out of here, Dustin Hoffman. You do not belong in this movie.

They really liked this idea of like this kind of scrawny, smaller version of Rick Deckard. In fact, they even the storyboard artists assumed he was going to be cast. And so there are all these storyboards from Blade Runner that look like Dustin Hoffman as Rick Decker, which is really funny. And we can maybe put one on our Instagram. And guess what? Hoffman turned them down. So the part was his. The part was his to lose. And ultimately, he decided to go do something else. Man, I'm really glad. I'm going to run through a few other actors that were considered. Gene Hackman. Okay. Sean Connery. God. Jack Nicholson. Yeah. Paul Newman, one of the favorites of mine. That's interesting. I really like Paul Newman.

Clint Eastwood seems kind of obvious. Tommy Lee Jones, like it. Okay. Arnold Schwarzenegger would have been really, Really weird. Peter Falk and Nick Nolte. Wait, Columbo got in there. Yeah, I know. You can't just skip past Columbo. And then Al Pacino was apparently considered, as was Bert Reynolds. To be clear, I don't know how seriously some of these were considered.

I know for a fact, Dustin Hoffman was like they wanted him. I mean, I get it. Listen, I get it. He was probably off busy slapping Merrill Streep and Kramer versus Kramer against her and marathon man, where he'd proven that he was like physical. as well. He's an amazing actor. They probably had a better time on set with Harrison Ford.

Well, I'm not so sure about that. We'll get to it. Was he crashing planes into things? Harrison, stop. So ultimately, though, Harrison Ford hot off of Star Wars and wrapping up production on Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I mean, talk about a one-two punch. Was recommended to the production by both Steven Spielberg and actress Barbara Hershey, who was Hampton Fancher's girlfriend. at the time in like a weird Hollywood connection. Good for you, Hampton. Ford read the script and he liked it.

And he said he would do it if they did one thing. And it's really important that we remember this for part two of the podcast. Hampton Fancher, like a lot of noir films, had written in a whole lot of voiceover. You know that classic, like, I didn't know if I could trust the broad, but I had to go with my instincts. There was a lot of that. And Harrison Ford was like, that sucks. It's terrible. I don't like it.

And I'm not going to do the movie if there's all this. stupid fucking voiceover that basically he wouldn't get to act. All the scenes that are him processing things and thinking about things and looking at things would be just explaining the movie and voiceover over his performance. If anybody has recently watched The Luckyest Girl Alive on Netflix, let's just say it falls victim to that trap. Yikes. It does.

So they said totally, we get it. And basically he and Ridley Scott spent a couple of weeks at Harrison Ford's place, just cutting the voiceover and transferring it into show, not tell storytelling, which is great, because that's what Ridley Scott's great at. Harrison Ford wants to do it. Awesome. Harrison Ford's in. Rick Decker. The role that had changed the most across all the drafts was Roy Batty, the lead of the replicants, the villain role, the foil to Rick Decker. In one version, he died very early on in the movie. I don't know what that version was ultimately about. And another, he was actually introduced first before arriving on Earth participating in a replicant uprising.

And I think people didn't have a good sense of what this character was. Like, was he just like totally robotic? How do you do this villain? And production executive, Catherine Haber, read the role and she goes, I know exactly who's Roy Batty. And she pulls Ridley Scott into a screening room and she makes him watch three Dutch Paul Verhoeven films before he came to the U.S. Turkish Delight.

Turkish Delight. Yeah. Soldier of Orange and Katie Tipple's all starring amazing Dutch actor, Rutger Hauer, who is... Boy, is he. So good in this movie, it like makes the hair on my arm stand up. He's so good. Yeah, he's amazing.

And we got to give Catherine Haber all the credit. They offered the role to Rutger Hauer. He comes in to meet with Ridley Scott. Scott immediately has regrets because he comes in. He has already cut up. his hair, Roy Batty style, dyed it platinum blonde. He is wearing candy pink skin-tight pants, Elton John sunglasses, and a Kenzo sweater with a faux dead fox sewed across its chest that has red glass eyes. Oh my God, I love this. That was just apparently Rutgerhauer's sense of humor.

He wanted to, like, throw Ridley Scott off at the beginning of this movie, which he very much did. I love Rutgerhauer. He's so good. So Haber convinces Scott to stick with him. And to his credit, Scott let Howard bring all of his ideas to this character. So, Howard was the one that said, I want to give him everything human that Decker doesn't have. He needs to have a sense of humor. He needs to have a sense of poetry, of sexuality, of childishness, a sense of soul, all of this eccentricity that's going to make for a more memorable foil opposite Deckerd, who's the supposedly human character and yet has no emotion throughout the whole movie. Yeah, he's pretty bland. And it's perfect. Roy Batti is the one who ends up having the arc across the story.

So also of note, Sean Young and Daryl Hannah. They were cast as Rachel and Pris, and they were both the lead female replicant roles, and they were both relatively unknown actors at the time. It's important to note that Sean Young did not screen test with Harrison Ford. Harrison Ford, I don't know why. I think maybe he was still on Raiders, but basically he didn't screen test with any of the actresses for Rachel.

They instead used Morgan Paul, who plays Holden. He's the agent that gets shot in the first scene of the movie. Yeah. They had him read as, Deckard for the screen tests with the actresses playing Rachel. That must have sucked for that man because you know in the back of his head he was like, if I do this well enough, maybe. I think he knew he was losing to Harrison Ford at the time.

Not the worst thing. True. But Sean Young apparently one of the reasons she won the role is that they gave her the blocking and she just didn't care. She did her own thing. She's really good in this. She's great. She's great.

So the cast is set and the team heads in. to production. Boy, do things start off on the wrong foot on this movie? So some details. Most of the film was shot on the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank. So if you've ever been to the Burbank lot and gone on the old New York

Street. Yeah. That's where they shoot all the exteriors for this movie. They literally redressed everything and it is crazy how good it looks. That was Sid Meade basically just like laying industrial shit on everything for weeks and weeks and weeks. They also built sets on traditional

sound stages. And then as Lizzie mentioned, some LA landmarks they filmed at, the Radbury building in downtown L.A., the Ennis Brown House. Lizzie mentioned it's like the Aztec looking kind of house location. Which is weird because they don't show the exterior of it. They're using the interior. It's strange. They had footage of the exterior. It never made the cut. The second street tunnel, L.A. Union Station. That's right. That's the police station, right? It is. The Pan American building and bits of downtown L.A. between third and fourth street for some of like the empty street locations as well. Okay, Lizzie, this was a really hard shoot.

It was a really hard shoot. And just looking at the movie, do you have any simple guesses as to why it might have been hard? The flying cars? No, no, don't even worry about it. You're thinking too sophisticated. Simple things, simple things. What time of day does this entire movie take place? Oh, it's all real dark.

It all takes place at night. And is it ever not raining in this movie? No, it's real dark and wet the whole time. It is raining this in the night. entire movie. It takes place entirely at night and in the rain. It was a four-month shoot and 33 days of that were night shoots back to back to back to back. They had to have a dozen versions of every single piece of wardrobe because if they did a take where a character exited from the interior and then got wet and they had to go again, they had to then redress in the dry version of the

outfit while they then dried out the other version of the outfit. Do you just want to point out, L.A., not famous for having 30 days of rain. No, they were just sprinkling water from above for 33 straight days. They also were pumping smoke into the set 24-7. Great. And cast and crew actually had to wear gas masks because they started getting sick from all of the smoke that was getting pumped in to the set. So I want to play a clip. And I should also mention, I forgot to mention it earlier, that the two main sources that I am using for this episode are Scott Buchatman's book, Blade Runner. It's an incredible behind the scenes look at the movie. It also has some great cultural and critical commentary to it. Also, funny story, didn't realize this until I was halfway through.

He was my freshman year film studies professor at Stanford. Oh, wow. And then also the great documentary, Dangerous Days, The Making a Blade Runner, which you can watch on the Blu-ray final cut included in the five-disc version if you want to buy that. So here is a little behind-the-scenes snippet of how things went on literally the first day of filming Blade Runner. I always remember the first day was not good because I'd gone in there

and the columns are upside down. All the columns. And I'd seen it, I'd even drawn it for him, saying like this, I'd put the weight at the top. So to be clear, that is in the, Tyrell Corporation when he meets with Rachel and there's like the great view outside, right, with the sun and the other pyramid. They show up on the first day and the columns in the room are, according to Ridley, upside down. He basically said, well, the only thing I'd like to do is turn the columns upside down.

And I looked at him incredulously. Like, what do you mean? Turn them upside down. And he said, just that. Put that down here. I said, okay, I went to the first ID, told them this is at 7 o'clock, come back at 2 o'clock, and we'll be ready to shoot. The director wants to change. So the first day, they're supposed to get set up and start shooting at 7 a.m.

And they just shut the production down for over a half a day. And the first AD at the end of the first day, went to the producers and said, we are five days behind at the end of the first day because of the ripple. That sounds like me on a recent podcast I worked on. I started. I'm at my first meeting. I was like, so we're several months behind. Yeah, exactly. Now, the producers, to be fair, actually seemed to be pretty forgiving of Ridley's pace. That the person who wasn't, could you guess, Lizzie? Harrison Ford. Harrison Ford, star of the film was got to be. Very frustrated with the pace of the shoot. He would just wait in his trailer for hours and hours and hours, while Ridley, fussed with the water and the smoke and the lighting to get everything right and then just bring

him in at the last second to deliver his lines. Now, if you listen to our episode on Gladiator, Lizzie, what was the famous point of direction that he gave one of the actors in Gladiator? I don't know if you remember this. I can't remember. The guy goes, do you have any direction? And he goes, yeah, you're good enough to be in a fucking Ridley Scott movie. Do your job. Basically, you know, summed up his kind of approach to working with actors at the time. That's right. Not a lot of direction. To kind of show the disconnects between these two, Harrison Ford had literally just gotten done working with Stephen Spielberg, who is one of the most inclusive and efficient filmmakers to ever do it. And the other two directors that he'd worked with at that point are George Lucas.

And Ron Howard. Not Ron Howard. Francis Ford Coppola. That's right. The Conversation Apocalypse Now, dear friends of Spielberg, all of whom brought him into the creative process. Well, also worth calling out, though, that in both Star Wars and in, well, particularly Apocalypse now, he's not the biggest part. No, no, no, not at all.

But I think even though he wasn't the biggest part, he still got included a lot. And so then imagine the whiplash of being the biggest part and not getting included at all. Exactly. And so apparently Ridley's style was very much, I direct, you act, meaning I direct the frame. And then you come and act in the frame. And Harrison's job was to bring the character to life. I'm going to play a brief clip of Rachel Young talking about him on set. Uh-oh.

All right, here's the clip I've labeled Harry was never happy. Maybe Ridley was giving me more attention than he was giving Harrison because he was making the assumption that he didn't need that. Harry was never happy on that show. He never was. Not really. The only time he was happy was going to be close to rap, you know? Then he was happy.

To be fair, this would be really hard. And also, like, it's interesting. My initial reaction was, you know what? Maybe Dustin Hoffman would have been a better fit for this. But then I thought about it and I was like, there's no way. Dustin Hoffman and Ridley Scott would have killed each other. Like, if this is Harrison Ford's reaction and he seems relatively chill, no way. So Ridley Scott's perfectionism also didn't just drive them over schedule.

It also drove some of the crew insane. For example, the first property master on the movie, the property master or prop master is responsible for, as you could guess. all of the props on the shoot. And he was laying out options for pens and mugs for the first interview scene between Holden and Leon that opens the movie. So he got a couple pens and a couple mugs. I mean, it's not like a hero prop.

And he shows Scott the options. And he goes, where are the other options? And the guy's like, what do you mean? What do you like of these? And the art director grabbed him, yanked him aside and he says, go buy 100 pens and 100 mugs. He wants to see all of them. And apparently that property master just straight quit when that happened, left the projects and they brought in somebody new. Another example, Gene Winfield was the auto fabricator for the movie that made the spinners off of Sid Mead's drawings.

They made a total of 27 vehicles. And that took 50 people working in three shops for 18 hours a day, seven days a week for five and a half months. You see one. Those were full-sized. People had to get in them. And they were functioning. And then they had to be light enough that they could lift them with wires and cranes. But you see

maybe one. No, you see a few of those spinners from time to time. I mean, not up close. Yeah, I know, that's true. So also, like David Fincher, Ridley Scott also did double-digit takes to get what he wanted.

Within a few weeks, they were a few weeks behind. And then after the first two weeks, they actually went back and reshot basically everything from the first two weeks because everything was, according to Ridley Scott, exposed to dark, which I think is totally first. the movie's already pretty dark. You want to make sure it's visible.

Yeah, you don't need a house of the dragon that. Yeah. Now, apparently, the producers and the financiers were getting a little antsy. And it got back to Ridley that they were unhappy with the number of takes he was doing. So apparently, he started doing double-digit insert takes of stuff like food hitting a table just to get back at them. Oh, my God. He says that that's not true, but then they actually, in the documentary show, like, nine takes in a row of like a bowl of fishheads hitting the table. And I was like, well, you know, maybe. But to Scott's credit, his whole point was that they hired him to get a unique and specific

look and feel to the world. And that look and feel takes time and experimentation to achieve. And also, like, the reason he used rain and smoke was specifically because the set only extended 50 feet in one direction. And so they didn't have the effects to extend the background. So he had to make it so you couldn't see beyond a certain distance. And the rain made things look more interesting because you got reflections off of surfaces, etc. So it's like he didn't have the money to make the giant movie he wanted to. So he was trying to figure out a way to save money. And the way that he could do that was by using these effects that eventually did add more time to the shoot. Now, things kind of reached a boiling point, not between Ridley and Harrison, not between Ridley in the studio, but between Ridley and his crew. And it was a bit of a cultural miscommunication. So as we all know, Ridley Scott is from the UK. And up until this point, he's entirely shot in the UK. His

commercial work in his first two films, the duelists and Alien, our UK productions. So he's shooting in the US for the first time, and he had to use an American crew, which means he couldn't bring his own people. And the American crew was a bit defensive, anticipating that Scott would have a problem with

them, and Ridley Scott was really demanding, wanting everybody to be at their best. And to complicate things further, Ridley Scott, up until now, because union rules are different in the UK, prior to this, had been able to shoot all of his own projects. He's literally operated the camera. Oh, no. On everything else he'd done. That would be hard. Yeah,

so he's very much like, I know what I'm doing. I'm going to tell you what to do and you do it because that's my job. And the crew seemed to bristle at this a little bit. And to complicate matters further, the cinematographer for the movie who did an amazing job, Jordan Croninworth, had been suffering from Parkinson's for years. Oh, man. And it took a turn for the worst when he was on this movie. And so for the last month of the movie, he was actually confined to a wheelchair. So he also couldn't operate the camera. And so it was a really difficult situation where Ridley would like go and set up a shot and Cronin Weth's would not necessarily be able to be where they were. So they weren't able to communicate 100% in the way that they would want to. And to his credit, Ridley Scott hired Cronin Weth knowing that

he had Parkinson's and that it could be an issue. And he didn't let it get in the way. And it seems like everyone worked around it as much as they could. But just another challenge. on the shoot. Now, making matters worse, there wasn't just tension between Ridley and everybody. Rachel Young and Harrison Ford just didn't click on this movie. That tracks. It is weird to watch. Yeah.

Which kind of works in a weird way for the movie, but yeah, there is zero connection between them. Yeah, that chemistry test they didn't do. Yeah. May have revealed that they don't actually have chemistry. They didn't click on screen and they didn't click in real life. It really sounds like it was a very difficult experience for Sean Young. She's in this documentary from the mid-2000s Dangerous Days.

She plays it off in the interviews that she gives as if it was all fine and she's very forgiving, I guess, is what I would say, or she goes along with it. But there's one example that she mentions in the doc that this scene really stuck out at me when I first saw the movie and even more now that I saw it. And that is the love scene between the quote unquote love scene. Bizar. Very bizarre. Extra rapy.

Yeah. So apparently at this point, Ridley Scott was really micromanaging her performance, maybe because she was a new actor. And beyond that, Harrison Ford was kind of doing the same thing because he would tell her like, no, you stand here, you stand here, avoid the light. I guess his perspective was like, I'm the big kid. Like, I've done this before.

I'm going to help the new kid out. But she had these two guys kind of telling her every little thing to do. It was very technical. And so when they did the love scene, it started off. Apparently it was much more gentle scene. But there was just no chemistry between them. And they just kept shooting it and reshooting it, basically improvising a sex scene on set

until eventually Ridley told Harrison without telling Rachel Young to shove her or throw her against the window, to try to, which is what ends up in the movie. Yeah. And the take ended with Rachel Young in tears, because she was very surprised. Now, in the documentary, she laughs it off, saying that Harrison Ford apparently then stepped to the side,

pulled his pants down and mooned her and the crew trying to lighten the mood, which was just very weird to hear. But I guess he tried to help. Again, this is a great example of when an intimacy coordinator would now be used. On a happier note, as opposed to the rest of the cast and crew,

Rutker Hower is having a great time on this movie. he's doing his own stunts. It's the biggest production he's ever been on by like a factor of a hundred. And Ridley Scott's not giving him direction, which means he can do anything he wants. And boy does he do it. He's doing everything.

All the like the weird moves and the smiles and the like weird sexual energy, like him and his boxer briefs at the end. Like that's all. Yeah, where did that come from? That's Rutger Hower, baby. That is like, where did your pants go? Dutch, Dutch magic.

They filmed famously at the Bradbury building, which was occupied. at the time so they could only shoot between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. Now that meant they could not enter the premises before 6 p.m. And they had to leave with it entirely cleaned by 6 a.m. I'm sorry. Why are they shooting overnight when people live in this building and it's Rutgerhauer running around in his panties? I have no idea. I don't want that there at night. I have no idea. During the work day. They're also making it completely dirty when they shoot it and they have to clean it every time they leave. Oh my God. The fridge lab that's...

James Hong's character is in is a real freezer. They could only film in it for 20 minutes at a time because the camera would literally freeze after that amount of time. Oh, my God. Further, they powered it with carbon arc generators that created so much carbon monoxide that the crew started getting sick and throwing up. Oh my God. The lights wouldn't work in the conditions and James Hong could barely move his fingers in the space. There's a funny interview with him where he's very polite, but he's kind of like, I didn't understand why we had to do it that way. Yeah. The first sister cameraman said there were days where we never shot anything. Other days, we'd only get two shots, one on meal penalty, which means they would get one shot off pushing into lunch, and the other at sunrise, just as they ran out of light.

But what they did shoot looked amazing. The script supervisor commented that she would go to Daileys and be blown away, saying we shot that. Like, it really, I mean, it looked remarkable for the time. Yeah, it looks awesome. Now, they're deep in the shoot. Everyone hates everyone. and a crew member for some reason goes into Ridley Scott's trailer and finds a copy of an interview that Ridley Scott had given to a UK publication

that says he prefers working with English crews than American crews. And the quote says, when he'd asked for something in the UK, they would just say, yes, governor, and go and get it. Whereas in the United States, it had to be a conversation. So this crew member, who turns out to be the head of the makeup department, and he's so funny and salty in this. documentary. He prints out a pile of them, leaves it on the coffee cart for everyone to read, and then makes t-shirts that say, yes, governor, my ass, and hands them out to the whole crew.

So Ridley Scott shows up on set, and the whole crew is wearing shirts that say, yes, governor, my ass, which apparently very much hurt Scott's feelings. So then he turns to Catherine Hayward, the production executive, and he's like, what the fuck are we going to do? And she's like, I have an idea. So they printed a shirt that said, said xenophobia sucks and then buttons that said, I survived the T-shirt wore, and he started wearing a hat that said, Govna on the top of it as like a joke

and a way to like broker the piece. And there are photos behind the scenes of like the crew members in these shirts looking at him. And apparently Harrison Ford never had any idea of what was happening. He was busy flying a plane into a nearby field. Yeah, exactly. So the shoot goes on for four, it's four months of this, of smoke and fog and like carbon mononauts.

side poisoning and shooting in freezers and like unprompted sex scenes. And then they come to a real head as the shoot kind of nears its end. Basically, the producers keep coming in and firing Ridley Scott, like telling him like, you're done, it's over. And then he just says, no, we have to keep shooting. And they're like, fine, keep shooting because they won't have the movie done yet. So like, they keep getting shut down only not to be shut down. And there was at one point speculation that Bud Yorkin, who's the producer from tandem,

he's Norman Lear's partner. Okay. There's basically speculation that he wants. to direct the movie himself and that he's going to come in fire Ridley Scott and take over as the director. Because remember, they had the right to do that as the completion bond. You don't fire Ridley Scott. But Ridley always would win out. He'd come out of these meetings and be like, we keep going. Like, no one could take him down. No one could break him. You cannot get rid of you cannot get rid of Ridley Scott. They were past their $22 million budget at this point. They're

just blowing through it. I'm going to skip over a couple of fun facts. One, funny one though is the moment where Rick Harrison Ford jumps across the buildings at the end right and he hooks his arm on the rail so that was a mistake by the stunt man he did that by accident Ridley Scott liked it so much he made him do it 12 more times and he like bruised the shit out of his armpit doing it so that was a little happenstance wait sorry I saw on your note something about Daryl Hannah hooking Harrison Ford's nose I do want to do that oh I'm screen sharing I forgot okay so yeah I'll do this really quick. Pris, Darrell Hannah, she does the handsprings and lands on Harrison Ford's neck. That was originally going to be done by a stunt double, but the amount of takes and rehearsals that it took

wore out that female stunt double, so they had to bring in a male stunt double to perform it. So if you look, she looks super jacked all the sudden. Yeah, I did notice that. Also, she was supposed to fake fish hook Harrison Ford's nose. And Harrison Ford, I think, just wanted to feel something. And so he told her to do it for real. Oh my God. Mangled the shit out of his nose. He was bleeding everywhere. Oh my God.

Okay. So we're in the home stretch of the first episode here, guys. And I want to end with my absolute favorite story from the production of Blade Runner. This is Roy Badi's famous final speech, considered one of the greatest desolicoes ever given. It's on the roof before he dies.

And it's become known as the tears and rain monologue. And it has its own Wikipedia page. It's 42 words long, and I think Rutger Howard would agree that it would be the defining moment of his acting career. I've seen things who peep attack ships on fire off. I watched sea beans. Glitter in the darkly the ten hours a game. All those moments will be lost in time. All right.

It's a beautiful, beautiful speech. It's so well performed. And the most famous line in the speech is all those moments will be lost in time, like tears and rain. And this line was written by Rutker Hauer. Yep. Which is so badass.

So I found the original script, and the line was, I've known adventures, seen places you people will never see. I've been off world and back, Frontiers. I've stood on the back deck of a blinker bound for the,

plutician camps with sweat in my eyes, watching stars fight off the shoulder of Orion. I felt wind in my hair, riding test boats off the black galaxies, and seen an attack fleet burn like a match and disappear. I've seen it, felt it. Very long, very space opera. Rutger Hauer, basically, the night before they filmed that scene, decided to give it his own flavor, and I'll let him tell you guys about it. I came out with, you know, two lines that I had some sort of off-worldly feel to it and some poetry in it. And then I came up with the line at 4 o'clock in the morning. All those moments would be lost in time like tears of rain.

And I brought it to the set and really liked it. And here's Ridley Scott with his perspective on how it went down. Yes, he wrote it. One o'clock in the morning. I was going to be fired at three. And then somebody said, Rutger said, oh, f***. So I went, boom, boom, but through the rain to his trailer. He's sitting there saying, I have a written speech on it.

No. And he said, no, no, no, sit down and listen. And he said, okay, ready, go. And he read it and it was great. I said, you stole that. He said, no, no, I just wrote it. That's amazing. So that's what we're going to do.

So Rutger Hauer, he basically cut down the original monologue to two lines. And then he amended the ending and added the time to die at the end. And it's just beautiful. I mean, it's just, it's so well performed, it's so well shot. It's such a great moment, this person choosing life for Deckard. It's a great conclusion. But of course, even shooting that monologue, which they shot on the last day of the shoot, by the way, had some problems, which were that. It had rained so much that the dove that he releases from his hands was too wet to fly.

Oh, no. It's like arrested development. When he would release it, it would just hop out of his hands and waddle across the roof. And they were on their last day of production. And so, like, there's now going into the spring. They have less and less night, right, to shoot. So the sun is rising an hour earlier than before because it's June. And basically, the producers are sitting there and they get done with this take of Redker-Hauer,

and the light comes out. And they're like, all right, we're done. And Ridley Scott's like, no, we haven't finished the scene. And they're like, you're out of light. He's like, I got a soundstage right over there. So he brought the constructions crew out. They took out chainsaws. They sawed that part of the set off.

And they moved it down into the sound stages. And they finished shooting the scene across that day. So like the last day of that shoot was like 20 hours, basically, trying to finish that scene. And then the shot of the dove flying off that looks so weird into the blue sky is it looks really weird. Because you can tell when I didn't even, first of all, I was like, where'd that dove come from? Because it's like, he's kind of got it like under his arm. The dove was also Rickerhauer's idea, by the way. That one could have been out of there.

But it, it's like after he dies, you see this dove go kind of like, and it like, it goes through the bottom, like, right third of the shot. That's the dub being too wet and it falls through his arms. And then you cut to the dove flying and you're like, wait. And also that's just, that's just a random building on the Warner Brothers lot. Like they tilt up and it's just like flying past corrugated steel like aluminum. And it's like, that's just a random. building on that. That was a pickup shot at that. It just looks kind of wonky. So it's July 9th,

1981. The production wraps. They are $8 million over budget at this point. So they're closer to 30 million than 20 million. And haven't even got into post yet. Yep. And so Ridley Scott and the producers go home, you know, you've wrapped. Like, oh my God, you survived. You're going out of post. And the next day, Ridley Scott and all the producers get a letter from tandem and Bud Yorkins lawyers saying that they're exercising their right and they're firing Ridley Scott from the movie and they're going to finish it without him. So one day after finishing production of Blade Runner,

Ridley Scott got a letter saying that he was fired. And on that cliffhanger, we are going to wrap part one of our epic two-part episode on Blade Runner. So please, guys, come back two weeks from now. And in the meantime, give us a rating and review. And then we'll let you know about the first. post-production process, the box office bombing, and the cult classification of this seminal sci-fi film. All right, I'm ready. What went wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie

Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing in music by David Bowman with cover art from Uthano UOS.