Blade Runner: The Final Cut should be the ultimate, definitive edition of the classic movie first released in 1982. Ridley Scott’s film version of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? established the dark look of the future that was copied by many of its successors.
On 18 December, Warner Brothers will release the five-disc, five-version set in a briefcase, which should be enough Blade Runner to satisfy every fan. (Additionally, the final cut of the film will be shown in very limited theatrical release in early October in New York, Los Angeles, and the Venice Film Festival.)
Variety has an interesting, in-depth article discussing where this final version came from. They interviewed Charles de Lauzirika, who produced the final cut. He said that “when they were test screening the film, the response was pretty confused and negative. The people who saw the film back then didn’t really get it.” The movie was too dark and too downbeat.
The trouble started when, during the film’s post-production, the studio kept Scott out of the editing room and wound up releasing its own version of the film, with narration from Harrison Ford and a happy ending that showed Ford and co-star Sean Young riding off into the sunset.
In 1991, Warner Brothers accidentally sent a copy of Scott’s darker “workprint” version to a screening, and word of mouth turned it into a hit. The studio invited Scott to re-edit the film, but he was busy with other projects. Warner and Scott therefore agreed to hire Warner’s film preservation director, Michael Arick, to work with Scott on a version that would have “no narration, no happy ending, but add the unicorn dream” (a controversial sequence that suggests Deckard is a replicant).
“It wasn’t really Ridley’s true stamp on it,” said de Lauzirika. “They had to cobble something together that approximated his wishes.”
de Lauzirika has been working with Scott since he graduated from the University of Southern California’s film school in 1994. He calls Blade Runner his favorite movie. “It’s the whole reason I wanted to work with Ridley,” he said.
In 2000, he met with Warner to discuss releasing a definitive version of Blade Runner, which he then imagined would be a two-DVD set “with seamless branching of additional scenes and separate audio tracks for Ford’s narration.” Since then, the project has grown. de Lauzirika has had to sort through 977 boxes of negatives, and supervised a day of reshoots (with Joanna Cassidy and Harrison Ford’s son Ben) in order to synch up a scene at Abdul Al-Assan’s snake shop that has long irritated fans.
The final set will include the original workprint that started the odyssey of revision, as well as a three-hour documentary, giving fans license to choose their favorite take.
The full article is on this page.