Steven Spielberg: "I thought Ridley [Scott, director of Blade Runner] painted a very bleak but brilliant vision of life on earth in a few years. It's kind of acid rain and sushi. In fact, it's coming true faster than most science fiction films come true. Blade Runner is almost upon us. It was ultranoir."
http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/10.06/spielberg_pr.html
Alex
Charles de Lauzirika: I think Blade Runner endures on three fronts. One is that there's just so much detail in the film plugged into every single shot. That every time you see it you see something new. I mean, today I did a picture and sound check for the screening tomorrow and I saw something new that I hadn't spotted before and I had seen the film hundreds of times. So that's--it's like this kind of puzzle that you keep coming back to. There's always a different way to solve it, there's always a different angle you can take when you see it. Additionally the film is so influential with other film makers. Immediately after Blade Runner you started seeing not only other science fiction films and commercials and music videos, comp books, was just--you know, ripple effect, that you started seeing neon steam and rain. It was always kind of like we're going to have some visual cliches. But back then they were really striking. And there's this interesting shorthand to the future that really had figured out that he kind of started with the Alien but definitely kind of blew out of the water with Blade Runner. So even though Blade Runner kind of faded away on its first release, it was still alive through these other film makers that were kind of copying it or paying homage to it along the way. And on top of that you look at the real work and it's like becoming slowly like Blade Runner. I mean look at Times Square. I mean that's Blade Runner. You look at—[to Hackett-Dick] I mean this goes back to your father's work but I mean the—paranoia about government and the corporate mindset. And that was in the film. Then you look at it today and it's--it is so much like a Blade Runner world minus the flying cars which I really want…I think that we're seeing it unfold before our eyes, and that kind of keeps it alive too.
Alex
I always enjoy Charles de Lauzirika's comments about Blade Runner. It's so clear that he's such an unapologetic fan of the film - like so many of us.
For fans of di Lauzirika - he's been working on his first feature film. He's directing, writing and producing Crave:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1535432/
We all wish him good fortune on this endeavor.
Reaction time is a factor in this, so please pay attention.
We all wish him good fortune on this endeavor.
Ditto....
I'm going to give you a few seconds before I come.
What are some of the science-fiction films that present the view of the future with which you would tend to agree?
Sir Arthur C. Clarke: Well, 2001 missed the date by a few decades. Blade Runner is a classic, of course.
Alex
'Brighton Music Scene' magazine talks to John Fowler of Gentleman's Vase.
What has been the inspiration for the music on your EP?
John Fowler (Gentleman's Vase): I love artists like Daft Punk, Kraftwerk, Peter Gabriel, Vangelis, David Bowie, Dead Can Dance, Fun Lovin’ Criminals, Depeche Mode, Electric Six and many many others. The EP title ‘More Human Than Human’ was inspired by Ridley Scott’s movie ‘Blade Runner’. It’s the motto of the Tyrell Corporation, which manufactures ‘Replicant’ humans.
The vocals are very unusual – how did you get that sound?
John Fowler: There are real voices on it but I have also used two different virtual vocalists in homage to the replicants in that film as well as the HAL 9000 computer in ‘2001 A Space Odyssey’. Its not completely unique as Japan have virtual pop stars called Kyoko Date and Hatsune Miku - I think they have been high in the charts over there. I read that Hatsune Miku is a new speech synthesiser developed by Yamaha.
What is it you like about those films?
John Fowler: ‘Blade Runner’ is an amazing film. I love the sci-fi concepts in the story, the astonishing visuals, the brilliant soundtrack by Vangelis and great performances by Rutger Hauer and Harrison Ford. I was moved by the replicants struggling to come to terms with emerging raw human emotions and their acute awareness of their 3-year lifespan. In ‘2001…’ the character HAL also appears childlike as he struggles to use logic to resolve conflicting human instructions. I think the characters make us ask questions about the nature of being ‘human’ as well as drawing attention to the relatively short length of human life.
http://gentlemanvase.fourfour.com/
Alex
Alex Epstein is a screenwriter for television and movies, and author of the book Crafty Screenwriting.
Alex Epstein: "Voice overs are generally looked down on, as a non-cinematic "cheat" for getting thoughts into the screenplay that you were too lazy to communicate through action and dialog.
That's an extreme view, fostered in film schools. Voice overs are often used as a last gasp, when the movie is too confusing for audiences and needs explaining.
Ah, you think, "explaining" is bad. Exposition is dull. But exposition, properly done, is as essential to crafty screenwriting as handles are in a cabinet.
Blade Runner is a prime example. Test screening audiences couldn't understand who Deckard was or what replicants were or what was going on. Then the studio (not Ridley Scott) put in Harrison Ford's voice over (Ford reportedly hated doing it) and the movie made more sense.
(Between you and me, Blade Runner is a rare example of where studio meddling makes a picture better. The various director's cuts floating around are, in my humble opinion, self-indulgent. The studio cut tells the same story with less subtext and more emotional affect. It's just a more effective picture.)"
Alex
Question: You are the son of an acclaimed director and a gifted script writer. Maybe the reason for cinema to surprise you in such a way to jump into your life is this. We know that you have a movie project as well as your poster designs and your commercial works. Can you tell us about this issue?
Emrah Yücel (Graphic Designer): I have such a project. But I would like to talk about it after I finish it. I do not like disappointments.
Question: What kind of a portrait do you see when you compare Hollywood and European film genres? Which of the two are you most influenced by regarding intimacy of expression and visual value?
Emrah Yücel: Of course I am influenced by European cinema. I find Hollywood too commercial although I work for it. On the other hand, the most important things that I admire in Hollywood are the size of the projects and the power of the people who create them. For instance, Ridley Scott. He can do any project with whomever he wishes. And he can enter any studio that he pleases. I admire this strength that developed in time.
My favourites are European and recently Latin American cinema. Especially French and British cinema from Europe, and Brazilian and Argentinean cinema from Latin America.
Question: Our theme for the 4th issue of Bak Magazine is 2050. How do you see the future of humanity and visual arts? What, in your opinion, will constitute the agenda of the world in 2050?
Emrah Yücel: I thought whether I will be alive then when you asked the question. 2050 is not that important to me but 2019 is of the upmost importance.
When I was a young design student in Ankara, Blade Runner was one of the milestone movies that influenced me. Blade Runner opens in 2019, Los Angeles. I live in LA right now and I am excited that I will be here in 2019. Yo ... The idea of being in LA in 2019 was very far when I watched the movie in Ankara.
Returning to the question, I don’t know about the future of humanity but I have an idea about visual arts. I am sure that it will keep its past and present significance. The medium will change for sure, but the designed visual will always be on the front.
http://www.emrahyucel.com/movieposters.html
Alex
MovieRetriever: Who are those filmmakers and what films?
Neill Blomkamp (Director District 9): I've been thinking about this lately. The ones that had the biggest effect on me are the ones that I was young enough to be highly impressionable but old enough to sort of grasp what was going on. For me, at my youngest, around ten is when I saw Alien. It scared me but it made me want to get into films. Obviously, when you're like ten, you have no idea how films are even made. All I knew is that I drew about 600,000 illustrations of H.R. Giger's Alien. It's from ten until about fifteen is what solidified ... and, within that range, was Alien and Aliens were the two biggest one by far. James Cameron's Aliens had a life-altering effect on me. So, it was the two first Alien films and then I saw Blade Runner was I was like fifteen and I was obsessed with that. Those three. I saw 2001 when I was younger but then I saw it again when I was sixteen and that had a massive effect. I didn't realize it until I was a bit older but the first two Star Wars, especially Empire Strikes Back, I had been watching pretty much every afternoon for most of my childhood. That has to be in there and I think had more effect on me than I knew at the time. And Robocop.
Alex
Gerard Way - frontman for the band My Chemical Romance talks about how their album, due out in spring 2010 was influnced by muscle cars, the film Blade Runner and Judas Priest.
Way on Blade Runner: "I watched a lot of Blade Runner and I watched a lot of the Making Of Blade Runner, [director] Ridley Scott was really inspiring too, just kind of his unwillingness to put the camera down and really capture something special," he said. "People were upset by that, but he was very strong in his vision and I think the band was very strong in its vision this time. That's why the record took - instead of a month and a half to do - four months to track because our barometer for great was very high."
http://www.nme.com/news/my-chemical-romance/49017
And the juke box plays. Apocalyptic be-bop.
Then in the next episode (of Heroes), you killed off two major characters. Was that your decision?
Bryan Fuller (Producer and writer for Heroes, Pushing Daisies, Dead Like Me): Well, we killed one. Just Daphne. Tracy shatters and then you see her blink and the tear goes down the drain. We will see Tracy again. I'm such a sci-fi geek so the tear coming out was totally a shout-out to Zhora from Blade Runner.
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/tv/s1/heroes/tubetalk/a153559/bryan-fuller -talks-heroes-return-finale.html
Alex
Speaking about foreign films... where there any foreign films that influenced you in your work?
Shozin Fukui (Japanese horror movie director): Blade Runner was a very important film for me. It was not very successful in its first run in Japan, my local movie theater showed it just for a week. I sat through all the shows during that one week, all afternoon and evening. Mostly, I was the only one sitting in the theater.
Alex
George Hull (Concept illustrator artist for The Matrix, V For Vendetta, The Island, Speed Racer, Avatar, and many others): Yes. Traditionally, I learned through Industrial Design School how to use markers, pastels, color pencil, and gouache, and I’ve developed through the years looking at my heroes. What really got me into this thing was, essentially, when my Mom took me to see Blade Runner back when I was a kid, and when I saw the conceptual paintings that were done for that film they just knocked my socks off. I thought, I’d love to that when I grow up. And they’re still, to this day, some of the most beautiful, spot on conceptual paintings. It would really make me happy if, one day, I could perform to that kind of level of artistry, and also, Ralph McQuarrie’s initial paintings for Star Wars. So I’m keeping a library of artistic challenges and stuff I’ve tried to work to. What we all use are markers and lots of materials, but just since January [2000] I’ve started to paint into Photoshop to sort of enhance that photographic feel.
Alex
Chuck Beaver (Senior Producer for the game Dead Space): As for movies, we are huge horror and sci-fi fans. We’re influenced by many, but we didn’t want to be exactly like any of them. Our goal was to create something new and fresh that could live in the sci-fi universe without being identified and compared. We aspired to have a frame of Dead Space be as uniquely identifiable as a frame of Blade Runner, where when you looked at it, you knew immediately where it came from. We were inspired by all these, and maybe subconsciously some of their stuff made it into our game, but we wanted to be unique.
Don’t you regret not having been more adapted like Philip K. Dick was ?
Norman Spinrad (SF author): It’s just about luck. This is always the wrong question. It’s not "Why hasn’t your stuff been adapted ?" It’s rather : "How come anything gets done at all ?" You’re in Hollywood, you’re going into somebody’s office and say : "Give me 15 million dollars !" When something gets made, that’s what’s unusual. In the case of Phil Dick, he was broke you know, his car wasn’t working and that just came all over. Dick didn’t hate Hollywood. It’s just that the movie can never be the book. You have to do more than cut, you have to extract the essential story and then make a film. That’s why Blade Runner was good, whereas Dune was a horror. It was terrible because David Lynch tried to make a literal adaptation of the book. With Blade Runner, David Peoples - who wrote the second script, the one Ridley Scott shot - extracted the real essential story and wrote a movie. Phil understood that when he saw the rough cut of Blade Runner. He said to me that the movie captured the spirit and the essence of the book. There was a scene at the end of the movie where the replicant saves Dekerd instead of killing him, which is not in the book at all. And Phil said "that" captured the spirit of the book, even though it was never in the book. As a good example, take Minority Report. That wasn’t adapted from a novel, that was adapted from a short story, a novelette. That is a much more manageable length of a story to make a movie from, that’s the natural length to adapt into a movie, not a great big novel. Sure I’d like to have some more of these adaptations working out, if nothing else for the money ! And for getting the books more known. But the book also is going to be separate from the film, I think.
http://www.digital-athanor.com/PRISM_ESCAPE/article_usf9e5.html?id_art icle=29
Alex
TrekMovie: What are some of your favorite movies?
Zoe Saldana (Uhura in Star Trek): Blade Runner. I grew up in a sci-fi environment and am a huge sci-fi fanatic so Ripley [Alien] and Sarah Connor [Terminator] are some of my favorite characters of all time. I am driven toward women who are very strong and commanding and kick alien ass and all that stuff, and also kiss aliens. I would say Blade Runner, and The Hunger, which is one of Tony Scott’s first films. I saw it when I was very young, I think I saw it when I was nine or ten, I fell completely in love with the movie. It felt completely dark and hopeless because these people were eternally condemned and unable to love. And Blade Runner, I knew watching Blade Runner, and Dune, that I wasn’t old enough to understand the concept. But the fact that I was to grow older and be able to one day look at it and go ‘I get this now’ was so exciting to me at the age of five.
Alex
Jonathan Carroll (novelist): "Also...did you ever see Blade Runner? One of my favorite lines in the movie is when Rutger Hauer is about to die, and he says to Harrison Ford, "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die." It's such a wonderful, tragic line, it's true. All of the stuff that you have accumulated, all this experience, all these loves, all this coffee, all these dogs...as soon as you die, it's just tossed? I can't imagine that it works like that. I think there's probably some repository of this stuff. And that made a kind of sense for me. You just take this thing that you arrange, and once you're finished arranging it and you die, someone puts it into the mosaic, and the mosaic is made up of 10 zillion pieces. That made sense to me."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Carroll
Alex
Salman Rushdie (novelist and essayist): I do think film at its best is fully the equal of a great novel. Blade Runner, for example, is a film that would stand up against most contemporary novels.
Alex
Five Favorite Films with Fame director Kevin Tancharoen:
- All That Jazz
- Taxi Driver
- Schindler's List
- Close Encounters Of The Third Kind
- Blade Runner : I appreciate Blade Runner on a visual aesthetic level -- it's just visually stunning.
Rotten Tomatoes: And this has inspired Arcana, your next film?
Yeah, true. We're actually writing the first draft right now. [Screenwriter] John Ridley just finished [World War II fighter pilot film] Red Tails for George Lucas, which was taking up a lot of his time. So he's writing the first draft right now... we a have a little ways to go
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/10011235-fame/news/1845930/five_favori te_films_with_fames_kevin_tancharoen
Kevin Tancharoen (Fame): "Arcana is a unique blend of the graphic-novel backdrop - like Blade Runner - and shot like 300, and has a little bit of Warriors mixed in there, with a little bit of martial arts, so it’s got a lot of crazy elements in there."
http://www.slashfilm.com/2009/08/26/kevin-tancharoen-directing-sci-fi- actioner-arcana/
Alex
Miguel Sapochnik, director of Repo Men on his early influences:
Miguel: Well, thank you. I was… listen, "Robocop" was a huge influence in my life when I was growing up watching movies, and it was a guilty pleasure in some respects. Interestingly, my upbringing was kind of Schwarzenegger and Tarkovsky. And my dad was the one who used to push Tarkovsky on me, so secretly I would watch Schwarzenegger. "Robocop" was a rare movie that he loved because it walked that line. And Monty Python was like that as well. You know... there was also Terry Gilliam and "Brazil" and "Clockwork Orange" and obviously "Blade Runner". All those are the kind of movies that influenced this film. But definitely the intent was to kind of entertain and at the same time have an underlying social comment that didn’t really hit people over the head with giving its point but was there if you choose to take a closer look.From an interview for HitFix http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/2008-12-6-motion-captured/posts/the-m-c-in terview-repo-men-director-miguel-sapochnik-talks-verhoeven-music-and-m ore
And yes, his movie set in a dingy futuristic Los Angeles where people hunt down artificial beings has a little bit of Blade Runner in it too, and he doesn't mind the comparison. "Better Blade Runner than Demolition Man," he told me in our later conversation. In fact he imagines Repo Men as taking place about 25 years before Ridley Scott's seminal sci-fi film, in which people are "building the foundations of that world." The Asian influence in the Los Angeles of Blade Runner becomes an economy completely dominated by China, and the flying cars Deckard uses are still in the prototype phase-- Sapochnik told me his film initially included news reports on more flying car test deaths.From: http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Exclusive-Interview-Repo-Men-Director-M iguel-Sapochnik-17650.html