Ridley Scott Reveals Lost ‘Blade Runner’ Script Idea That Proved Too Complicated, and Why Harrison Ford ‘Didn’t Get’ the Movie

Ridley Scott has staged the Battle of Waterloo with over a dozen cameras and thousands of extras in “Napoleon,” designed intricate future worlds in his “Alien” films and “Blade Runner,” and recreated 19th-century France on a shoestring budget in “The Duellists.” Yet for the veteran director, whose new film “The Dog Stars” opens in theaters on Friday, there’s one aspect of filmmaking he finds more challenging than the visual world-building he’s known for. “Writing is the hardest possible thing to do,” Scott told IndieWire on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. Scott prides himself on having worked with some of the best writers in the business, from newcomers (like Callie Khouri when she wrote “Thelma and Louise”) to Hollywood pros like “The Dog Stars” scribe Mark L. Smith (“The Revenant”). Looking back, however, one particular screenwriter stands out. “‘Blade Runner’ was the best writer relationship I ever had,” Scott said of his collaboration with Hampton Fancher, who Scott credited with extracting a workable storyline from Philip K. Dick’s sprawling novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” “In the first 19 pages of that book there are 200 stories, and he chose one, about the hunter who had fallen in love with his quarry.” Fancher spun that story — of a bounty hunter (Harrison Ford) who falls for the “replicant” (Sean Young) he’s been assigned to exterminate — into one of the great science-fiction films of all time, a profoundly philosophical meditation on mortality and identity that’s also a kinetic action flick and a haunting film noir. While much of the film’s reputation rests on Scott’s exquisite visual style, the director says credit must also be given to the rhythms Fancher created. “The cadence is beautiful,” Scott said, noting that Fancher was “great with dialogue. The grace of it was fantastic.” When working with writers, Scott typically goes through the story and asks hypothetical questions to develop and deepen the ideas. For “Blade Runner,” he and Fancher devised elaborate backstories for characters that often didn’t make it into the movie but added texture and resonance, and motivated many of Scott’s most striking designs. The pyramid that houses the Tyrell Corporation is just one example. Early in “Blade Runner,” Harrison Ford’s Deckard meets with Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel), a trillionaire CEO with practically limitless resources. “The reason the pyramid happened is that I thought in any age, any time, any century, there will always be a disease we can’t figure out.” Although Tyrell had one of those diseases, he also had the funds to challenge mortality by creating clones — one of which meets with Deckard at the beginning of the film. ‘Blade Runner’©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection “Tyrell died from one of those diseases, but as he was dying for months and years, he built a pyramid in honor of himself,” Scott said. “In the middle of the pyramid is a highly electronic sarcophagus, where he put himself to go to sleep until they found a cure for the disease. One year, there was a massive shutdown of power, and he melted in his sarcophagus and died.” Since the corporation couldn’t afford to let Tyrell die, they covered it up and let the most convincing clone take his place at the head of the company. Although Scott and Fancher ultimately decided the mythology behind Tyrell was too complicated to integrate into the story, it seeped into the film’s DNA and iconic sci-fi imagery, and the director and screenwriter worked over every scene of the script to find similar layers. “We just sat and shot the shit saying, ‘What if?'” Scott said. Unfortunately, the camaraderie between Scott and Fancher ended when “Blade Runner” was released and didn’t perform as expected at the box office. “Hampton was furious,” Scott said. “He said, ‘You ruined my script. I was really deeply hurt by that.” Scott noted, however, that Fancher and the general public weren’t the only ones who didn’t appreciate “Blade Runner” during its initial release. “Harrison didn’t get it at the time,” Scott said, recalling fights he had with the actor over whether Deckard himself was a replicant — a question Scott felt was definitively answered by a clue related to the origami motif that runs through the movie. “Dude, you’re a replicant!” Ultimately, of course, “Blade Runner” was embraced by cinephiles and is rightly considered a masterpiece, and Scott harbors no ill will toward Fancher. “I forgive him because it was so far ahead of the game,” Scott said, noting that the film has become increasingly prescient in recent years thanks to the rise of a certain trillionaire with ties to the White House. “We’re headed there now,” Scott said. “[Tyrell] has got one of the two corporations that’s running the world. Who’s to stop you from having an army of 10,000 people and 200 Black Hawks if you’ve got that kind of money? So ‘Blade Runner’ is coming to fruition as we speak.” “The Dog Stars” opens in theaters on August 28. The Ridley Scott episode of Filmmaker Toolkit will air later this summer. To hear the entire conversation and make sure you don’t miss a single episode of Filmmaker Toolkit, subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.