ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

________________________________

IMDB has 290 trivia items for this production! I picked the ones below from the first 40. I'll add more in a week or so. Hopefully you guys will have plenty to say about the movie, inspired by all the info below.
________________________________

~ Director Ridley Scott and director of photography Jordan Cronenweth achieved the famous "shining eyes" effect by using a technique invented by Fritz Lang known as the "Schüfftan Process": light is bounced into the actors' and actresses' eyes off of a piece of half mirrored glass mounted at a forty-five-degree angle to the camera.

Note from me: I'm not sure what "shining eyes" the item above is referring to. Can anybody help me out?

~ According to Rutger Hauer's biography, the final confrontation between Rick Deckard and Roy Batty was to have been a fight in an old gym, using martial arts like kung-fu or something similar. Hauer disliked the idea, saying it was "too Bruce Lee" (he didn't know kung-fu anyway) and claims to have come up with the idea of Batty chasing Deckard.

Note from me: Rutger might not know kung-fu, but he was sure quick on his feet when he came up with a way to get out of the fight in the gym!

~ Rutger Hauer came up with many inventive ideas for his characterization, like the moment where he grabs and fondles a dove. He also improvised the now-iconic line "All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain". He later chose "All those moments" as the title of his autobiography.

Note from me: Mr. Hauer wasn't just a pretty face! He apparently had the soul of poet as well.

~ The novel hints at the "Is Deckard a Replicant?" problem by having Deckard casually mention that one indicator of an android is a lack of sympathy for other androids. His interlocutor then points out that, given his job, this means that Deckard could be one too.

Note from me: Check the first post in this thread for my comment on why it makes the story much more interesting if Deckard is a replicant. The theory I like is that Dr. Elden Tyrell wanted to prove his creations were so close being human he could make one that fooled everybody — even the replicant!

~ Although Philip K. Dick saw only the opening 20 minutes of footage prior to his death on March 2, 1982, he was extremely impressed, and has been quoted by Paul Sammon as saying, "It was my own interior world. They caught it perfectly."

However, neither director Ridley Scott nor screenwriter David Webb Peoples had actually read Dick's novel; only original screenwriter Hampton Fancher had.

Upon re-writing the script, Peoples had actually asked Scott if he should read the book, but Scott told him "don't bother", since the spirit of the book was already in Fancher's original draft. As of 2020, Peoples still hadn't read it.

Note from me: First of all, why did Philip K. Dick only see the first twenty minutes? Second, I'm amazed that the visual look of the movie was so accurate to Phillip's vision, since the only person involved in the production who actually read the book was the writer of the original script — not anyone connected with the production design!

Screenplays include very few descriptions of a production's visual. What little they do include tends to be very general.

~ The term "replicants" is used nowhere in Philip K. Dick's writing. The creatures in the source novel are called "androids" or "andies".

The movie abandoned these terms, fearing they would sound comical spoken on-screen. "Replicants" came from screenwriter David Webb Peoples' daughter, Risa, who was studying microbiology and biochemistry. She introduced her father to the theory of replication — the process whereby cells are duplicated for cloning purposes.

Note from me: "Replicants" was a wise choice.

"Androids" is certainly a well-worn term, and "andies" doesn't work for several reasons; it's sounds like the mountain range as well as the plural form of two guys named Andy!

~ At some point of this movie, each replicant has a red brightness in his or her eyes.

It is most prominently seen in the replicant owl at Dr. Elden Tyrell's office. Leon Kowalski has the red glow during his Voight-Kampff test, like Rachael during her test. Rachael also has the glow in Rick Deckard's home, and Pris in J.F. Sebastian's home.

Zhora has the glow while in the club, and Roy Batty has the glow several times, most prominently while killing Tyrell.
Deckard also has the shining in his eyes while talking to Rachael in his house.

In July 2000, Director Ridley Scott confirmed that Deckard is, in fact, a replicant. Harrison Ford takes issue with this, however. "We had agreed that he definitely was not a replicant", Ford said.

In his autobiography, Rutger Hauer expressed some disappointment with Scott's revelation, because he felt that it reduced the final clash between Deckard and Batty from a symbolic "man vs. machine" battle to two replicants fighting.

Note from me: So THAT was the "shining eyes" I was puzzled about earlier! And it's yet another bit of evidence that Deckard is a replicant.

I can understand Rutger Haur's objection to making Deckard a replicant. But one element of the climactic scene was to show that Roy envied Deckard for not having a short lifespan like Roy did. And that's still true if Deckard is a completely human-like replicant who may in fact live longer than normal humans!

This next item is well-worth reading, and it certainly reflects my own revulsion towards the Nazis.

~ Philip K. Dick first came up with the idea for his novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" in 1962, when researching "The Man in the High Castle", which deals with the Nazis conquering the planet in the 1940s.

Dick had been granted access to archived World War II Gestapo documents in the University of California at Berkley, and had come across diaries written by S.S. men stationed in Poland, which he found almost unreadable in their casual cruelty and lack of human empathy.

One sentence in particular troubled him: "We are kept awake at night by the cries of starving children."

Dick was so horrified by this sentence that he reasoned there was obviously something wrong with the man who wrote it. This led him to hypothesize that Nazism in general was a defective group mind, a mind so emotionally flawed that the word human could not be applied to them.

Their lack of empathy was so pronounced that Dick reasoned they couldn't be referred to as human beings, even though their outward appearance seemed to indicate that they were human. The novel sprang from this. And, interestingly enough, it is now thought that some people are "Occupational Psychopaths" due to low-functioning amygdala, the fear centers of the brain's limbic system.

Note from me: It's bad enough that individuals have this defect, but the fact that large groups of them have banded together through history and inflicted their cruelty on the human race is absolutely tragic.

~ The studio wasn't happy with the original final ending where Rick Deckard is looking at the piece of origami, and leaves his building with Rachael. The ending of the U.S. theatrical cut, with Deckard's voice-over about Rachael, used left-over helicopter footage from the opening scene of The Shining (1980).

Note from me: I actually prefer the ending with the voice over. Deckard speculates about Rachael's lifespan, and we wonder if two replicants who were designed to be completely human might be able have offspring.

Here's a nice video that examines this debate.

_________ The Ending Of Blade Runner Explained


__________
_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)