Ridley Scott’s first return to science fiction, Prometheus, is debuting locally in just a few days, but he has another big “return” on the horizon in the form of his untitled Blade Runner sequel. We’ve already heard that it will be set sometime after the original, will have a female protagonist and that Scott would like Harrison Ford to reprise his role as original disheveled hero, Rick Deckard, in some way or form.
Now sitting down with Collider, Scott went even further by describing one scene in full detail. So why I am I not dirtying my fanboy underpants right now? Details after the jump.
The scene description came about when Collider’s Steve asked Scott about whether he’d begun thinking about the sequel’s visuals yet, prompting the director to go into a very animated description about one particular scene:
For those of you who don’t want to view the video, here’s the text version:
“There’ll be a vast farmland where there are no hedges or anything in sight, and it’s flat like the plains of—where’s the Great Plains in America? Kansas, where you can see for miles. And it’s dirt, but it’s being raked. On the horizon is a combine harvester which is futuristic with klieg lights, ‘cause it’s dawn. The harvester is as big as six houses. In the foreground is a small white clapboard hut with a porch as if it was from Grapes of Wrath. From the right comes a car, coming in about six feet off the ground being chased by a dog. And that’s the end of it, I’m not gonna tell you anything else.”
The problem I have is that most of that scene is not something that Scott came up with, despite how he’s selling it. If you’ve ever seen the Dangerous Days documentary on the making of Blade Runner, you would know that before Scott came on board the project and began throwing his prodigious Hollywood weight around, changing details to what he thought would be best, the original screenplay was a vastly different animal to what we saw in the final film.
One of the scenes that original writers Hampton Francher and David Peoples were very proud of, and which then got promptly trashed by Scott, was an almost duplicate of this very scene he’s describing now. It could just be that Francher, who is now developing the story for the sequel, is revisiting old material, but in the way Ridley spoke in that interview, you would swear that he came up with that.
I’ve always had a bit of a love/hate relationship with Scott. As much as I love a huge percentage of his movies, everything I’ve read about him tells me that he is a power-hungry bully, who uses his Hollywood fame to hold studios, casts and writers to ransom to get what he wants, irrespective of whether or not their ideas are better than his.
This is certainly not going to help change that opinion.
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Last Updated: June 5, 2012
James Francis
June 5, 2012 at 11:33
I still think this is an unnecessary sequel. And what is the point of Scott describing vague scenes that tells us nothing about the film, other than that a part of it will probably be shot in Kansas or somewhere similar?
Here’s the problem: there is a difference between a good sci-fi movie and a good sci-fi world. Blade Runner was the former – there is little in the movie or short story that establishes a larger world. This means the writers have carte blanche, allowing them to follow their fan boy whims. Dangerous territory, especially once the script is then distorted by the director and producers.