Scott Reveals Cut Blade Runner Backstory Too Complex to Film — SkimNews
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- Ridley Scott told the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast that 'Blade Runner' was his best writer collaboration, with Hampton Fancher distilling Philip K. Dick's novel 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' into the hunter-falls-for-his-quarry story — Scott said the first 19 pages contained '200 stories.'
- Scott and Fancher devised a backstory for Tyrell — a trillionaire dying of an incurable disease who built a pyramid housing his electronic sarcophagus, then 'melted' during a power outage and was replaced by his most convincing clone — that proved too complicated to integrate but seeped into the film's iconic imagery.
- Harrison Ford 'didn't get' the film during production, Scott said, with the two fighting over whether Deckard was a replicant; Scott considered the origami motif a definitive clue and told Ford: 'Dude, you're a replicant!'
- Hampton Fancher was 'furious' after 'Blade Runner' underperformed at the box office and told Scott 'You ruined my script,' though Scott has forgiven him because the film was 'far ahead of the game.'
- Scott explicitly linked the film to current events, saying Tyrell's corporation is 'one of the two corporations that's running the world' and that 'Blade Runner is coming to fruition as we speak' given the rise of 'a trillionaire with ties to the White House.'
- The Dog Stars, Scott's new film written by 'The Revenant' scribe Mark L. Smith, opens in theaters August 28, with the full Filmmaker Toolkit episode airing later this summer.
Why it matters: Scott's explicit comparison between Tyrell's pyramid-dwelling trillionaire and today's 'trillionaire with ties to the White House' turns a 43-year-old box-office disappointment into a director-endorsed allegory about concentrated corporate power — while the cut Tyrell mythology gives fans a rare window into the world-building that shaped the film's now-iconic visual DNA.
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