The Future Was Now by Chris Nashawaty

Author:Chris Nashawaty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

9

With a new trio of financiers securely in place to pick up the escalating tab on Blade Runner, the production was inching closer and closer to the official starting line. But Ridley Scott still wasn’t completely sold on Hampton Fancher’s most recent draft of the script. Looking for another voice and an infusion of new blood, Scott heeded the advice of his brother—director Tony Scott—and met with a screenwriter he was high on named David Peoples. Peoples hadn’t had one of his scripts produced yet (a western he’d written in 1976 called Unforgiven was purchased by Clint Eastwood but was still more than a decade from getting made), but he also took Tony’s opinion seriously enough to meet with him. Ridley invited Tony and Peoples to a private screening of Mad Max that he had set up. He was constantly looking for inspiration in the works of others.

After the screening, Peoples, who had been expressly told not to read Dick’s novel, was given a copy of Fancher’s latest script, which he took back to his hotel, the Chateau Marmont, to read and come up with ways to punch it up and improve it. But Peoples’s response wasn’t quite what Scott was looking for. He told the director that not only did he love Fancher’s screenplay, he couldn’t think of anything he could do to make it better. Scott, never a man to take no for an answer, rattled off a list of suggestions that had been simmering to a slow boil in the back of his mind over the past few weeks. Peoples went off and began trying to turn Scott’s vague, abstract ideas into concrete words and scenes over Thanksgiving and the early part of December, turning in his revised draft on December 15, 1980. One of Peoples’s changes was a new beginning to the film, which involved the androids’ escape to Earth (and which Scott ended up scrapping). Another beefed up the actual detective work that Harrison Ford’s Deckard would do in the film—a breadcrumb trail of tiny clues and tips that would culminate in a glass-shattering chase sequence with one of the fugitive androids, Zhora (this one made it in). But perhaps Peoples’s most important contribution was one of semantics. The writer felt that the word android felt all wrong in the context of Blade Runner. Instead, he coined the term replicants. It turned out that Peoples’s daughter Risa was doing work in microbiology and biochemistry at the time. Peoples asked her for another way to describe the synthetic humans in the story. She proceeded to tell her father about the concepts of cloning and replication. The idea was all hers. Scott loved it. As for Fancher, he was never told that another writer had been brought on to the project.

As Christmas approached, casting ramped up in Burbank. With Ford happily (for now at least) on board, Scott’s crosshairs moved to Rachael, the replicant femme fatale whom Deckard falls in love with despite her not being human.

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