Bloomsday

I’m rewatching the Final Cut (2007) of Blade Runner today. No matter how many times I’ve seen this film, it never fails to impress me. I love the art direction and set design most of all, from the incredible Bradbury Building in downtown LA to the future world of the Tyrell Corporation. Hard to believe the imagined world is only years away at this point.

Blade Runner (1982).

We had been searching for locations for a building. We wanted to go on location to an old, decrepit building and take a suite of rooms and use that as Sebastian’s apartment. One day we were in downtown Los Angeles looking at a possible location, and I took a stroll across the street with Ridley and a few other people and Ridley took a look inside the beautiful Bradbury building. What we did to that building you wouldn’t believe. On a superficial level we trashed it with high-tech, then filled it with smoke on the inside and shot at night. We also added a canopy with big columns to make it look like it was an old apartment building. All of a sudden we had a very gothic, eerie environment.

Lawrence G. Paull, Blade Runner production designer in Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner by Paul M. Sammon.

This website gives a great overview of the art and production design for the film. And, by the way, if you haven’t seen the Final Cut, it is really worth watching, especially if you have only seen the original US theatrical release. One day I hope to see a film print of this 2007 version on a big screen. I was lucky enough to see a pristine film print of the Director’s Cut when it screened in 1991 in Westwood (Los Angeles), but this version is even better. Rutger Hauer and Sean Young never looked better.

Oh, and on the big question of whether or not Deckard is a replicant, I’ve always thought that he is. The enhanced unicorn daydream sequence in this version coupled with the unicorn origami left for him by Gaff at the end of film leaves no doubt for me. I guess this is one of those things (like the ending to Inception — I say the top falls) that people will just have to agree to disagree on.