The egg hatched... and a hundred baby spiders came out

Ridley Scott will direct a Blade Runner sequel. For me this is like hearing Stanley Kubrick has only been playing dead. Intrigued as I am by the Prometheus / Alien rerun, Blade Runner is the world I'd really like him to take a second run at: the one I want to see again.

Before he died in 1982 Philip K. Dick saw the movie that would bring his writing to the mainstream:

"All I can say is that the world in BLADE RUNNER is where I really live. That is where I think I am anyway. This world will now be a world that every member of the audience will inhabit... Once the film begins, you are taken from this world into that world and you really are in that world. And I think the most exciting thing is that it is a lived-in world. A world where people actually live. It is not a hygienically pristine space colony which looks like a model seen at the Smithsonian Institute. No, this is a world where people live. And the cars use gas and are dirty and there is kind of a gritty rain falling and its smoggy. It's just terribly convincing when you see it.

"Seeing Rutger Hauer as Batty just scared me to death, because it was exactly as I had pictured Batty, but more so. I could have picked Sean Young out of a hundred different women as Rachael. She has that look.

"Of course Harrison Ford is more like Rick Deckard than I could have even imagined. I mean it is just incredible. It was simply eerie when I first saw the stills of Harrison Ford. I was looking at some stills from the movie and I thought, this character, Deckard, really exists. There was a time that he did not exist, now he actually exists. But he is not the result of any one individual's conception or effort. He is to a very large extent, Harrison Ford's efforts. And there is actually, in some eerie way, a genuine, real, authentic Deckard now."

When the third version of the film was released in 2007 Ridley Scott talked to Wired about creating the future:

The future that I had seen portrayed to that particular point — without being specific or mentioning names, because that means I'm getting really critical — all of the urban films until that moment had been pretty ordinary to not very good. So, it was a challenge to say — it's the same as trying to do a monster movie it's, like, Aliens is a monster movie. Alien is a C film elevated to an A film, honestly, by it being well done and a great monster. If it hadn't had that great monster, even with a wonderful cast, it wouldn't have been as good, I don't think. So, in this instance, my special effect, behind it all, would be the world. That's why I put together [industrial designer] Syd Mead and people like that who were actually serious futurists, great speculators, great imagination, looking to the future, where the big test is saying, draw me a car in 30 years' time without it looking like bad science fiction. Or draw me an electric iron that will still be pressing shirts in 20 years' time without it looking silly. That's the stretch, that was the target: that I wanted the world to be futuristic and yet felt — not familiar, because it won't be — but feel authentic. I could buy it. One of the hardest sets to design was his kitchen. It's not Tyrell's room, which is easy because we fantasize about a giant super-Egyptianesque, neo-Egyptianesque boardroom. But the idea of saying, what is his bathroom and kitchen like in those particular times — that's tricky.

I interviewed Syd Mead when he came to New Zealand, I think late '80s. Of course I don't have a copy of it now: it's on paper in a stack of publications somewhere.*

The script for Blade Runner was written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples. Fancher started it:

I guess I was approaching it on my own obscure level, thinking that I was making something commercial. 'This is science fiction--people will flock to see this.' Of course, I had themes I was working with that I loved and I was intrigued with. But still I thought of it as a commercial venture... They hustled my script, my fifth or sixth draft, out to all the studios in Hollywood. And so everybody read it. I mean, important people read it, in terms of studio honchos... I was flavor of the month for about two years.

David Peoples (who also wrote Unforgiven) was bought in without Fancher's consent:

I didn't know about it. That was a secret, because I wasn't cooperating with Ridley... I came back at the end, because they called me. They needed something for the rooftop scene. They just had a couple days to shoot and they wanted me to look at rushes. I came back and I wrote some stuff for them. I hated the dailies. They sold this film down the tubes. It's not gonna work. It's not anything like I wanted.

In 1992 Peoples told the LA Times:

Hampton Fancher was the key writer. He optioned the book and made it happen. Though I like the current director's cut a lot better than the original, I have no proprietary sense about the movie. In fact, I get lost trying to figure out where I am in it.

*UPDATE: Found it! The December 1987 version of my interview with Syd Mead is here.