Posters / Blade Runner

BLADE RUNNER

1982

Wake Up, Time To Die: 5 Things You Might Not Know About ‘Blade Runner’

Oliver Lyttelton 

June 25, 2012 12:02 pm

One of the many reasons “Prometheus” was eagerly anticipated by so many was the director’s track record in the sci-fi genre. Ridley Scott had only made two science fiction pictures before this year’s blockbuster, and both are considered classics (and arguably his best two films). The first was 1979’s “Alien,” the direct inspiration for “Prometheus.” And the second? 1982’s “Blade Runner,” the noirish mystery adaptation of Philip K. Dick‘s novel “Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep,” which has been one of the most talked about and influential science fiction films of all time, particularly in terms of its grim look at Los Angeles in 2019.

The film, which follows Harrison Ford‘s “blade runner” Deckard as he’s tasked with tracking down four murderous “replicants” (life-like robots) who’ve escaped from an off-world colony and are hiding out on Earth, wasn’t a success when it first arrived, partly thanks to the tumultuous, compromised release, but the cult behind the picture has grown and grown over the years. And coincidentally, just as he gears up to work on the script with original scribe Hampton Fancher, we’ve hit the 30th anniversary of the film, which was released on June 25, 1982. To mark the occasion, we’ve pulled together five nuggets of information that you may not be aware of about Scott’s sci-fi classic — check them out below.

1. “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain”

We could have seen versions of the film directed by Martin Scorsese or “To Kill A Mockingbird” helmer Robert Mulligan

In another, parallel world, it’s possible that we might not know Martin Scorsese as a man who made his name with the gangster movie, but as a science fiction pioneer who reinvented the genre before “Alien” or “Star Wars” came along. According to Paul Sammon‘s seminal making-of book “Future Noir,” Scorsese and screenwriter friend Jay Cocks (who would go on to co-write “Gangs Of New York” and the “Blade Runner“-like “Strange Days“) met with Philip K. Dick in 1969, two years after Marty’s feature debut “Who’s That Knocking At My Door?” and a year after the publication of Dick’s “Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?,” to talk turning the novel into a film. Discussions proved fruitful, but the book went into development elsewhere: producer Herb Jaffe (“Fright Night“) optioned it in the 1970s, and got his son Robert (“Demon Seed“) to write a script, one that Dick hated so much that he joked about beating up the screenwriter. But it was writer Hampton Fancher and producer Michael Deeley who were the ones to get over most of the hurdles, although the first director attached wasn’t Ridley Scott, but was in fact Robert Mulligan (“To Kill A Mockingbird,” “Same Time Next Year“). The veteran helmer worked with Fancher on a script for three months, before becoming frustrated and quitting. Michael Apted, Bruce Beresford and Adrian Lyne were all considered to replace him before Scott, who’d been approached early on, became free, frustrated with slow progress on his version of “Dune,” and unable to get a green light on the historical epic “Tristan & Isolde.”

2. “More human than human is our motto”

A version of the film starring Dustin Hoffman, Barbara Hershey, Debbie Harry, Sterling Hayden and Joe Pantoliano? It might have happened.

When Fancher was writing his script, he envisioned it as a noirish tale with Robert Mitchum playing Deckard, and Sterling Hayden (who, as it turned out, made his last film with 1981’s “Venom“), but their age ultimately made this an unrealistic proposition. For Deckard, Scott spent months negotiating with Dustin Hoffman, but he the two couldn’t come to agreement on their approach for the character, so Hoffman left for new pastures (“Tootsie“). Beyond that, an extensive list of leading men were considered — “Future Noir” reveals that Tommy Lee Jones, Gene Hackman, Sean Connery, Jack Nicholson, Paul Newman, Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Al Pacino, Burt Reynolds, William Devane, Raul Julia, Scott Glenn, Frederic Forrest, Robert Duvall, Judd Hirsch, Cliff Gorman, Peter Falk and Nick Nolte were all possibilities, but it was early word on “Raiders Of The Lost Ark” that persuaded Scott that Harrison Ford was the best choice (actor Morgan Paull, who read the role of Deckard in screen tests, impressed Scott enough that he was cast as ill-fated blade runner Holden in the opening scenes).

Still, Scott might have come to regret the choice, as the two clashed on set. Scott was still nervous with actors, and left Ford out to dry a little, the actor later saying, in Tom Shone‘s “Blockbuster,” “There was nothing for me to do but stand around and give some vain attempt to give some focus to Ridley’s sets.” In producer Alan Ladd Jr’s words, “Harrison wouldn’t speak to Ridley and Ridley wouldn’t speak to Harrison and I was stuck in the middle, ‘Could you tell him to do this, or tell him to do that?’ It was difficult.” Scott acknowledged later, “Harrison and I are very similar. It can be perceived that we’re bad tempered and crotchety and actually we’re not. We’re actually relatively good fun, [but] if you have a discerning actor, who is smarter than most, he’s gonna ask questions, and you’d better have your answers. If you haven’t got your answers there’s likely to be a row. You have a row and your adrenaline flushes out all the other stuff you’ve got going through your mind and you suddenly come up with a very distilled answer…rage flushes it out. I get very articulate.” But the two have subsequently made up, with Ford contributing to interviews for the 2007 release of the Final Cut.

Meanwhile, Dick had suggested “Dallas” star Victoria Principal to play Rachael, and was thankfully ignored, and testing came down to three contenders — Nina Axelrod (who can be seen on the “Dangerous Days” documentary on the Final Cut release, and went on to become a casting director), Barbara Hershey, and Sean Young. The latter got the part, but Hershey made her mark: the story of a spider being devoured by its young that Rachael tells was her suggestion. Rutger Hauer was always Scott’s first choice, thanks to his work with Paul Verhoeven, and the director was clearly a particular fan of the Dutch helmer’s 1973 picture “Turkish Delight,” as he wanted to cast Hauer’s co-star in that film, Monique van de Ven, as fellow replicant Pris, but she had a scheduling conflict. Blondie frontwoman Debbie Harry was discussed at one point, while Stacey Nelkin also tested for the part, before getting another role in the film (see below); her screen test is also in “Dangerous Days.” Finally, former NFLer Frank McRae (“1941,” “48 Hrs“) was cast as Leon, until Brion James freaked out Scott’s secretary to the degree that he thought he had to cast him, while future “The Matrix” star Joe Pantoliano was in the running for Sylvester.

3. “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe”

The missing replicant that caused debate among fans for so long was actually a mistake, leftover from earlier drafts.

Given the substantial changes from the source material, and the many writers involved, it’s no surprise that things got a little confusing, and that’s particularly true when it comes to the fifth and sixth replicants — in all versions before the Final Cut, Bryant tells Deckard there were four on the loose, but seconds later, says that six escaped, with one killed by an “electronic gate.” The fifth was actually a character called Mary, who’d been present in many earlier drafts. Fancher’s original take was very different; the replicants are simply called “androids,” and the Voight-Kampff test can detect them after only six questions (although Rachael makes it to thirteen, rather than a hundred). At the end, Batty kills Tyrell’s entire family, as well as Sebastian, while Rachael kills herself, so Deckard doesn’t have to do it. Mary, the sixth replicant, a maternal, housewife-like character analogous to Irmgard Baty in the novel, is included in this take, and survived to Fancher’s next draft, completed on July 24th, 1980. It’s mostly closer to the finished version, although concludes with Deckard killing Rachael. The first draft by David Webb Peoples (dated December 15th, 1980), broke away a little; it opens with Batty pulling Mary and Leon from an Off-world Termination Dump, and includes at least two extra Replicants; a character called Roger, who attacks Deckard in Leon’s hotel room, and Tyrell himself — Roy kills his creator, only to discover that the real Tyrell was placed in hibernation after getting a terminal disease, but passed away during a power outage a year earlier. It was also darker in the conclusion; Deckard makes Gaff take the Voight-Kampff test, and kills him, and again shoots Rachael in the finale. Mary survived until very late on; Scott cast actress Stacey Nelkin, who’d also tested for Pris, in the part, but it was excised before filming. However, the script inconsistency involving six escaped replicants went unnoticed, and was only fixed in the 2006 Final Cut version. A note on the title; Fancher’s first draft used the novel’s, before it was changed to “Dangerous Days.” The name “Blade Runner” actually came from a William S. Burroughs screenplay, an adaptation of the Alan E. Nourse novel “The Bladerunner,” which Scott got producer Michael Deeley to buy the rights to, but at the last minute, tried to change it to “Gotham City.” Understandably, “Batman” creator Bob Kane and DC Comics were reluctant to sell the rights…  

Harrinson Ford and Sean Young

4. “Too bad she won’t live. But then again, who does?”

There have been three sequel novels, as well as David Webb People’s ‘sidequel’ “Soldier,” and a video game with a narrative that runs alongside the original, with a new protagonist.

Scott is finally getting moving on a sequel for “Blade Runner,” it would seem, but he’s far from the first to try. Soon after the release of the “Director’s Cut” helped to restore the reputation of the film, sci-fi author K.W. Jeter penned a novelistic sequel, “Blade Runner 2: The Edge Of Human,” published in 1995. Sticking mostly to the continuity of the film, it involves Sarah Tyrell, the human template for Rachael, hiring Deckard to hunt down the missing sixth replicant, even as the template for Roy Batty hires Holden (the blade runner in the opening scene, shot in the chest by Leon), to track down Deckard, who he thinks is the sixth replicant. Two further sequels follow: 1996’s “Blade Runner 3: Replicant Night,” which sees Deckard on Mars working as a consultant to a movie crew making a film based on his life (seriously…), and 2000’s “Blade Runner 4: Eye And Talon,” which follows Iris, another blade runner, on a quest to find Tyrell’s owl (again, we’re not making these plots up). The 1997 video game “Blade Runner” (there was an earlier 1985 game, based, confusingly, on Vangelis‘ score, rather than the film, which involves you hunting down “replidroids”) also builds out the universe, following blade runner Ray McCoy as he tries to hunt down more escaped replicants, taking place across the same timeline as the film. Deckard doesn’t appear, but Sean Young, Brion James, James Hong, Joe Turkel and William Sanderson all reprised their roles and lent their voices to the game (although Edward James Olmos refused to return as Gaff). Writer David Webb Peoples also penned a script called “Soldier,” which he considers to be a “sidequel” to “Blade Runner,” inspired by the deleted opening scene in an Off-world Termination Dump. The script included several references to “Blade Runner,” including a mention of the Tanhauser Gate and a glimpse of a spinner, but sadly, Paul W.S. Anderson was hired to direct, and turned it into a critically-reviled picture, and a box-office disaster. Other attempts were made at a sequel, however: Stuart Hazeldine (writer of Spielberg’s upcoming Moses movie and the aborted “Paradise Lost“) penned one on spec, entitled “Blade Runner Down,” in the late 1990s, and “Eagle Eye” writer Travis Wright and former partner John Glenn, worked on a potential sequel for producer Bud Yorkin in the 00s, which was said to explore questions like, in the writer’s own words “Is or isn’t Deckard a replicant? What happens to Rachel? What are the off world colonies like? What happens to replicants once Tyrell is killed by one of his creations?” More recently, Scott, his brother Tony and son Luke were said to be developing a web series called “Purefold,” inspired by the same themes as the film, but it never seemed to come to pass. Let’s hope the sequel is more successful.

5. “Death. Ah, well that’s a little out of my jurisdiction”

The director’s cut was discovered entirely by accident.

Budget overruns and poor test-screenings meant that Scott was overruled on several key decisions on the film as it came close to completion, most famously the ending (partially achieved with unused footage from “The Shining“) and the narration. For many years, it was thought that Scott’s original version hadn’t survived, but in 1989, Warner Bros sound preservationist Michael Arick stumbled across a rare 70mm print in the archives while looking for footage from “Gypsy.” Arick didn’t watch it, but it was sent to the Fairfax on Beverly Boulevard in L.A. the following year when they were holding a special festival of 70mm films. They were as surprised as anyone to find that they were screening a never-before-seen version of the film, and word of mouth soon led to sell-outs at additional screenings, which led Warners to plan a release. It was labelled as the “Director’s Cut,” but against the objections of Ridley Scott, who wanted to make further changes, but wasn’t given the time or budget to do so. It was only with the 2006 Final Cut that he was able to do those last alterations. It wasn’t just the film that took some time to see the light properly; Vangelis‘ score only got a proper release after the Director’s Cut in 1992, although bootlegs circulated throughout the 1980s. 

THE PLAYLIST

Rutger Hauer / Blade Runner

Rutger Hauer

BLADE RUNNER

Rutger Hauer
Poster by T.A.

Rutger Hauer: an icily elegant presence with a touch of self-aware drollery

Hauer became a hall-of-famer with his ‘tears in rain’ monologue in Blade Runner, but there was much more to this talented, stylish actor

Peter Bradshaw
Wed 24 July 2014

‘Q

uite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.” So begins the icily elegant final speech in Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic Blade Runner. It is famously delivered by the Dutch star Rutger Hauer, playing Roy, the charismatic replicant rebel with the mysterious moral sense who rescues Harrison Ford’s cop Deckard from falling at the very last. And as the rain streams down his face, Roy pronounces: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”

C-beams evidently means the “caesium beams” used in space combat and the Tannhäuser Gate apparently an interstellar portal. The speech was semi-improvised, the “tears in rain” line being Hauer’s own idea. Did he, at some unconscious level, access a memory of the Everly Brothers’ Crying in the Rain? Either way, he gave this devastatingly bleak and opaque aria a touch of what later generations might call relatability; he sold it to movie audiences around the world who might otherwise at that late stage be too punch-drunk with postmodern sci-fi action to pay attention to a tricky closing speech. It conferred on Hauer himself real hall-of-famer status. His enigmatic combination of despair, forgiveness, and passionate connoisseurship of what it is to be alive – which as a replicant, he can hardly know as much as real humans – supplies a satisfying ending to the film, an ending that wouldn’t otherwise be there.

Hauer had a fierce blond handsomeness as a young man which was to crag up in early middle age into something meaner and starker: perhaps a little like Max Von Sydow, but without the gravitas. In the 1980s, when he became famous internationally, it was Hauer’s destiny to be cast as the the bad guy when Reagan-era action movies in Hollywood needed a mannered stylish villain or Nordic nasty to play opposite the all-American hero: people such as Dolph Lundgren or indeed our own Alan Rickman as the German terrorist in Die Hard.

In Nighthawks (1981), Hauer played a fanatic terrorist, opposite the more wholesomely conceived cop, played by Sylvester Stallone. He was slightly more demandingly cast by Nicolas Roeg in Eureka (1983) as the ambitious and grasping social climber who is to become the highly unreliable son-in-law of Gene Hackman’s retired plutocrat. But again it was his foreignness, his Europeanness, which was brought into play as the symbol of something sinister and cynical – and Hauer brought to this, as so many other roles, a theatrical touch of self-aware drollery.

Then in 1986, he achieved the second pillar of his celebrity status with the gruesome horror thriller The Hitcher, playing the hitch-hiker who terrorises and butchers those rash enough to pick him up. This movie hardly had the challenge of dark poetry or subtlety that Roeg and Scott had given him, and The Hitcher was little loved critically or indeed by theatre audiences who mostly stayed away. But it had a long afterlife on VHS leading to cult status, and one of Rutger Hauer’s less glorious achievements was said to be that he single-handedly ended hitch-hiking as a commonplace travel option for young people in the United States.

Rutger Hauer (right) at a 2007 reunion of Blade Runner stars (left) Edward James Olmos and Daryl Hannah, and the film's director Sir Ridley Scott.

Hauer so often played the amoral monster: very memorably portraying the corrupt and homicidal Cardinal Roark in Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City (2005). But in fact he won his single substantial award, a best supporting actor Golden Globe, for his much-admired performance in the TV drama Escape From Sobibor (1987), the story of the 1943 uprising at the Nazis’ death camp. He played Sacha Perchersky, the tough Russian Jewish inmate who enthusiastically takes up the mutiny plan and in fact lives to rejoin his Red Army unit. Perhaps Hauer got typecast as the quasi-Nazi bad guy a lot of the time, but his dynamic, charismatic Perchersky showed the different career he might have had, were he not imprisoned by a certain type of frosty or black comic look and sound – which incidentally gave him a lot of lucrative voiceover work.

Hauer was a stylish, talented man who will have a place in the heart of all of us who saw Blade Runner and found ourselves watching it again and again, and found ourselves blindsided afresh by that speech of Hauer’s: a speech about tears in the rain delivered by someone who is tragically, mournfully dry-eyed.

THE GUARDIAN

Obituaries / Rutger Hauer

Rutger Hauer obituary

Dutch actor who found fame in the 1982 sci-fi film classic Blade Runner

Ryan Gilbey
Thursday 25 July 2019




Rutger Hauer, left, with Brion James in Blade Runner.

The source of much of the plangent poetry in Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi drama Blade Runner was the electrifying and ruminative performance by the Dutch actor Rutger Hauer, who has died aged 75 after a short illness. Hauer played Roy Batty, a replicant in a futuristic society who revolts against his foreshortened existence by going rogue and demanding a longer lifespan; when he discovers that this request is impossible to grant, he crushes his creator’s head in his hands.

Despite such extreme moments, Roy ended the film not as a villain but as a sympathetic creature tormented by his own mortality. Rather than killing his pursuer, played by Harrison Ford, Roy saves his life and then makes him an audience for a brief reminiscence – “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe” – before surrendering stoically to his own inevitable demise: “Time to die.”

Contrary to rumour, Hauer did not improvise that monologue, though he did cut most of the written version while adding a few lines of his own, including that final one.

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 Rutger Hauer in Ladyhawke, 1985. Photograph: CineText/Sportsphoto/Allstar

Though the film was not a box-office success, Hauer’s appearance chimed neatly with the new wave futurism in vogue at the time, adding to the picture’s cult appeal. With his platinum hair, black leather trenchcoat, eyebrows so faint as to be non-existent and, at one point, a white dove as an accessory, he could have stepped off the set of that week’s Top of the Pops.

If Blade Runner secured his reputation internationally, it was the popular series of “Pure Genius” commercials for Guinness, which ran from 1987 until 1994, that made him a multimillionaire. He was chosen by the ad agency, Ogilvy & Mather, because of his physical resemblance to the beer in question.

“The star’s blond hair was a symbol of the foamy head on a pint,” noted Campaign magazine. Though not a Guinness fan (“I’d rather drink milk”), he starred in more than 20 commercials that maintained an unvarying level of refrigerated quirkiness; in one, he mused on his former life on Mars, while in another he sat beside an aquarium window and assured viewers: “It’s not easy being a dolphin.”

Rutger Hauer
by Saskia Vugts 

Hauer was born in Breukelen to Arend Hauer and Teunke (nee Mellema), actors who also ran a drama school in nearby Amsterdam. He abandoned education at 16 for the sea, scrubbing decks on freighters for a year. Stints as an electrician and a carpenter followed, and he briefly enrolled at acting school before being expelled for missing classes. A stretch in the army ended when he was discharged for “psychological unfitness”. He took up acting again in earnest, completed a three-year course and joined a touring theatre company.

Playing a Robin Hood figure in the TV adventure series Floris (1969), set in the middle ages, made him a star in his homeland; he reprised the part in the West German remake Floris von Rosemund (1975). When Paul Verhoeven, the director of the original show, moved into cinema, he took Hauer with him, casting the actor in five films beginning with Turkish Delight (1973), in which he played a sculptor embroiled in a volatile relationship. “I’m naked for three-quarters of the film,” he later said. “In Hollywood, they called it pornography.”

Next came Verhoeven’s lavish period drama Katie Tippel (1975) and his barbed wartime yarn Soldier of Orange (1977). Reviewing the latter, Janet Maslin in the New York Times identified the actor’s enigmatic essence: “Though the screenplay provides him with every opportunity to turn matinee idol, Mr Hauer shows little interest in making himself adorable, and that in itself is intriguing.”

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 Rutger Hauer in The Hitcher, 1986. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex

After Verhoeven’s sexually explicit biker drama Spetters (1980), Hauer made his Hollywood debut in Nighthawks (1981), as a charming, callous terrorist hunted by two cops (Sylvester Stallone and Billy Dee Williams). “I had a lot of problems on that film, principally with Stallone,” he recalled. “I had to fight him on the level of what I thought was good enough for the part and what he thought was good enough. I was very angry, very aggressive, very alert, very awake. I don’t think I’ve been more motivated or done better work.”

In the wake of Blade Runner, he was in Nicolas Roeg’s underrated gold-rush saga Eureka and Sam Peckinpah’s disappointing swansong, The Osterman Weekend (both 1983). He was reunited with Verhoeven for the director’s first US venture, the gory medieval drama Flesh+Blood, and stayed in period dress for the more family-friendly Ladyhawke (both 1985) with Michelle Pfeiffer.

In the cat-and-mouse thriller The Hitcher (1986), he was a psychopath who hides a victim’s severed fingers in a portion of French fries and tears a woman in half by tying her to two trucks. “I think in my darker characters I go a little further than most American actors,” he said. “Maybe it’s because I’m not afraid of that side of myself.”

He mixed high and low culture projects with ease. He won a Golden Globe for his portrayal of an inmate at a Nazi death camp in the TV movie Escape from Sobibor (1987) and played a homeless alcoholic in The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1988), which won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival.

But he was a good fit, too, as a vampire in the original, unloved film of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), and returned to blood-sucking in 2013 for episodes of the HBO series True Blood. Though it was not true that the novelist Anne Rice had Hauer in mind when writing the main character of Lestat in her novel, Interview with the Vampire, she did concede that he “is surely how I see my beloved … hero”.

He worked solidly, often in straight-to-video material, but reached wider audiences through small parts in George Clooney’s directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002), and the hits Sin City and Batman Begins (both 2005).

Rutger Hauer

He played the title role in the exploitation thriller Hobo with a Shotgun (2011) and Van Helsing in Dario Argento’s Dracula 3D (2012), and was glimpsed more recently in Luc Besson’s intergalactic romp Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) and Jacques Audiard’s acclaimed western The Sisters Brothers (2018). He was also the subject of a 2006 documentary, Blond Blue Eyes, and wrote an autobiography, All Those Moments: Stories of Heroes, Villains, Replicants and Blade Runner, the following year.

He is survived by his wife, Ineke Ten Cate, an artist and actor, his daughter, Aysha, from his first marriage to Heidi Merz, which ended in divorce, and by his grandson, Leandro.

• Rutger Oelsen Hauer, actor, born 23 January 1944; died 19 July 2019

THE GUARDIAN

Blade Runner / Tears in rain

Rutger Hauer
Blade Runner

TEARS IN RAIN

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

BLADE RUNNER

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoAzpa1x7jU

Blade Runner - Final scene, 

"Tears in Rain" Monologue