Directors And Other Artists On Blade Runner

PJ Manney, author of the upcoming book (R)evolution, out this summer.

I was a sucker for Blade Runner from the start. As both a film noir and science fiction fan, the movie was a beautiful, elegiac mash-up of two genres known for ambiguity and dark social commentary. It's about my town, Los Angeles, and our deepest fears and desires sold back to us in the neon nightmare of ubiquitous marketing, with some sexy anti-heroes thrown in. And Harrison Ford? As someone who believes all the eligible men of the world are either "Luke Skywalkers" or "Han Solos," I married my own Harrison Ford.

Hell yeah. It seemed Ridley Scott made Blade Runner just for me. I just wish L.A. got that much precipitation. Even if it was acid rain...

Q: APART FROM 2001 ... what is your favourite sci-fi movie? Do you enjoy the genre apart from being one of its greatest exponents?

Keir Dullea (actor, best known for the character of astronaut David Bowman, whom he portrayed in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey): Yes, I enjoy sci-fi and Blade Runner is my other favorite of the genre.




http://interviewly.com/i/keir-dullea-nov-2014-reddit





Alex

Jeff Cronenweth (cinematographer for Fight Club, The Social Network, ...) talks about Blade Runner:

Visit the link:

http://www.empireonline.com/features/cinematographers/19.asp


Nathan Sage (director, cinematographer, writer): "I study Blade Runner more than almost any other film."


https://twitter.com/NathanOSage/status/534385028126752768


Denis Villeneuve (director for Prisoners, Enemy, Sicario, Blade Runner 2): “I’m ready to do it (Blade Runner sequel) because the original Blade Runner is by far one of my favourite movies of all time. Blade Runner is almost a religion for me.”


http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/movies/denis-villeneuve-on-the-big-joy-of-sicarios-cannes-premiere-and-his-upcoming-blade-runner-sequel


Alex

The longest thread I've come across yet.

"Everyone is ignorant, only on different subjects". Will Rogers (1879-1935)

Q: What I’ve appreciated in all of the work that I’ve seen of yours, THE SIGNAL and THE RECONSTRUCTION OF WILLIAM ZERO, is that you take these sci-fi like elements and inject them into very human and emotionally powerful stories, where the story takes the spotlight more than the sci-fi elements. Is that intentional, the interest in that approach?

Dan Bush (writer/director/producer): Yeah, I mean I think Sci-Fi, at best, is the question of what it is that makes us human beings and what are we capable of? I like to think about movies like BLADE RUNNER, where you have that tears in the rain monologue, where you have a replicant ask the question of “why am I not human?”. So you ask yourself how do you define being a human? So the SciFi genre at its best, does ask those questions, and makes you really think about the answers. It’s really a showcase for that debate.

Michael Kaplan - costume designer for Star Wars - The Force Awakens:

“I learned a lot on Blade Runner, just my love of grit and texture and things being overly aged… I learned from Ridley [Scott – Blade Runner’s director] how great it is to re-use things and make new things out of things that already exist in a way, where you’re kind of not even recognizing the object that you started with. We re-used many things [in Star Wars – The Force Awakens], like taking old military gas masks and tubes and hoses and kind of applying them, which we did on Blade Runner, which I’ve always liked to do when I can.”

Daniel Jackson (artist): They’re becoming more important for me. In my last show, the videos were short loops, like gifs from social media. My favorite video from the show is a reference to a scene in Blade Runner: Roy, the main cyborg, knows that he is going to die, but he doesn't know how much time he's got left. His arm and hand are cramping up, and suddenly relaxing again, while he says "Time enough…". I copied the scene, and added these goofy digital hearts coming out of the hand.

http://www.artfridge.de/2015/07/interview-daniel-jackson.html

From a recent Forbes interview, another comment from Christopher Nolan:

On Batman Begins as a Blade Runner homage:

It’s hard to say what was conscious homage, and what was my analysis of why Blade Runner was so convincing in its production design and in the way it uses its sets. From a pragmatic point of view, Blade Runner is actually one of the most successful films of all time in terms of constructing that reality using sets. On Batman Begins, unlike The Dark Knight, we found ourselves having to build the streets of Gotham in large part. So I immediately gravitated toward the visual treatment that Ridley Scott had come up with, in terms of how you shoot these massive sets to make them feel real and not like impressive sets. And immediately we started looking at the rain, the handheld cameras, the longer lenses…

So myself, my designer Nathan Crowley, and my cinematographer Wally Pfister, we started to throw all of that into the mix of how you can help the look of something, how you can create texture, as Ridley Scott has always been the absolute master of. Creating a texture to a shooting style that maximizes the impact of the set, and minimizes the artifice — the feeling that this world has edges to it that you would see at the edge of the frame. Blade Runner is one of the examples of how you can take a camera and get down and dirty… and really envelop your audience in the atmosphere of the world you’re trying to create. We definitely tried to emulate that style, and I think in doing so we actually created homage, particularly where we used the rain very much.