So with Blade Runner - and you probably get asked this a lot - but how has it been over the last 35 years to see so many things in that film that feel more familiar now than they did back then.
Well, when I did Blade Runner, I'd already been successful since I was about 27. I started my company at 27, and it's 50 years old this year. We've been successful in both London and the US - in fact, the US is the bigger operation. The company still has about 60 directors. So by the time I was... let's see, I was 40 when I did The Duellists, I was 42 when I did Alien, nearly 44 on Blade Runner. I'm really a good businessman. I'm not having any wool pulled over my eyes. I knew exactly what I was walking into.
Because I was a new person on the block - I'd never made a film in Hollywood before. And so what I walked into was not pleasant and was very controlling, and very unionised. And because of that, I was not allowed to work how I'd normally work, because I was a [camera] operator, on 2,500 commercials, on The Duellists, on Alien, I operate. And I couldn't operate on Blade Runner, so that to me was tricky. I spent a lot of time finding the very best person that would pretty well... I'm blessed with a great eye. I've always had a great eye.
And so finding a cameraman who's terrific, who at the time was very ill, from which he would pass away. But he was the best around, Jordan Cronenweth. He had a disease they'd misdiagnosed, so by the time I got to him he was walking with a walking stick and very, very shaky. He had a crew around him who loved him. But my investors said, "Why the fuck did you hire this cameraman?" I said, "Because he's the best in the business."
So between he and I, we put together the way it should look. But then Syd Mead and Lawrence Paull [production designer] and I can draw. Because I was at art school, I can really draw and really paint and really envision. I knew the world I wanted to create, which was a combination of Hong Kong prior to any skyscrapers. I'd shot in Hong Kong before the first bank of Hong Kong went up. Hong Kong was an eastern medieval town - it was incredible. I always fitted that into New York, because in New York I spent a lot of time going in and out for advertising jaunts. New York at that point was smelly and dirty - I didn't like it. It wasn't until [Mayor, Michael] Bloomberg came in and really made it what it is. New York right now is fantastic - bore no relationship to New York in the 60s. But I thought New York meets Hong Kong was it. I had to make a decision as to whether the prevalent nationality would be Mexican, Hispanic, or Chinese. I went Chinese. I think it's gonna be Mexican.
Where did the Noir element come in, because that's what really adds the spice to the sci-fi.
You've got to remember, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep was an endless book. An endless amount of story. My show is Man In The High Castle. That's my show. So Dick's novel... we fell out, because I carelessly said, "I couldn't get through it." And he was really pissed off. Now I know the family and the daughters and everything, so I think it's all mended. But nevertheless, what I got from the book - I read about 20 pages.
What had happened was, Hampton had buried himself alive in that kind of book, and discovered it was incredibly complex. 19 stories in the first 50 pages. He'd gone for the backbone of the story, which is fundamentally, the quarry falls in love with the hunter. It was all taking place in an apartment - internalised storytelling, as [Philip K] Dick would have. And I was doing Alien, I was mixing Alien, and Michael Deeley came over to me and said, "Read this play that Hampton's written. What do you think?" I said, "I love the writing. I love the writer." I thought about it for almost eight months, because I didn't want to go back and do another science fiction.
Eight months later, I found myself doing Dune, and then I thought, "What am I doing Dune for?" I think Blade Runner,that was a great thing. I went to Hollywood, to cut a long story short, and spent the next five months every day, with probably the best time I've had ever working with a writer. My opening premise with Hampton was, "Right, you've got a story that purports a humanoid, or a robot, that looks so human that you can't tell the difference. And this person falls in love with him. I want to see what it looks like outside. I want to see what the world [looks like], and who's doing this."
From that moment, once we opened the door onto that whole thing, it evolved into this pretty epic universe. And through it, aware or not, I don't think whether I'm doing film noir or any of that shit. I just make movies, and if at the end someone calls it film noir, then so be it. God bless you. Because you never breathe a word of that in Hollywood. They go, "Film noir? I'm out of here, thank you very much. It's too intellectual."
But film noir it was, on a very grand level - Philip Marlowe, really. That's why I'd always diddled around with the idea of voice-over, because Francis had just done a brilliant film called Apocalypse Now, where I think the voice-over was really the third dimension of the film. Because Martin [Sheen] was fundamentally a silent, savage witness through the whole process - and protagonist - but didn't really speak other than to say, "I told you we shouldn't have stopped", having killed the children and the dog. I thought his voice-over was terrific.
So I had that on the side, as a style but not as a necessity. As a style, should we play around with that? Because the film, when it was finished, was so obscure to most people, they were more distracted by the environment - watching the pictures. The story's pretty straightforward. But it's when you're trying to take everything in that you're going, "What? Why is it dark? Why is it always raining?" Etc. And so that was where we employed the idea of voice-over, which to me became even more confusing - it wasn't a good thing to do. Then later, the history was, it was discovered by accident as a print without the voice-over at a film festival.
One thing I'd learned by the time I was that age was, and I had it fully endorsed by a very bad article by Pauline Kael - and you can print this: I was so angry. I'm still angry that she destroyed the film in three and a half full pages of the New Yorker, without mercy. Even becoming personal. And I never met her. Because I'm 44, I'm mature - pretty mature at that point. And I thought, "You know what? I'll never read another piece of criticism about me". I've never read press since. Because if you read press and it's great, the danger is you'll think you rule the world for about half an hour, and you don't, you never do. And if you read bad press, they can be wrong. And she was so fucking wrong. She was wrong to do that. Also, what's wrong about critique is, I can't reply. But I replied to the editor, saying, "If she didn't like the film that much, why did she devote so much time to its destruction?" Why didn't you just ignore me? Ignoring me's fine.
But in any other industry, if I'd been one of the investors, I'd have sued her, because she can kill a movie before it's even off the starting block. To me, that's as bad as industrial espionage.
Full interview: Here
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