All Those Moments by Hauer Rutger & Quinlan Patrick

Author:Hauer, Rutger & Quinlan, Patrick [Hauer, Rutger]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-10-12T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

AFTER BLADE RUNNER

On a warm night in June of 1982, I went to the premiere of Blade Runner in Los Angeles. I don’t remember doing any press appearances or promotion beforehand. I think the studio execs were nervous. It had gone through a few different edits by then—and audience reactions at sneak previews had been mixed. I felt uncertain about it myself.

Then I saw it, and I was just blown away by the Vangelis score, the incredible camera and artwork, the special effects and story. I thought it was just brilliant. The sound track added an extra dimension.

I felt that we had gotten a film with more layers than we were even thinking of. I knew right away that this was a very different and special movie. I thought it was great. Life is how you look at it, and Blade Runner decided to look at it in a poetic but dark way and, at the same time, with a lot of wit. It was not consumer-ready crap and it was not a fast-paced, science-fiction thriller. Instead, it was thoughtful and slow moving, and it challenged audiences to enter its world.

Half the audience loved it and the other half hated it. Nobody felt lukewarm about it and that was clear. It felt as if there was a strike of lightning going through the audience. People cheered because they thought it was wonderful. People moaned because they thought it was terrible. But everybody came out stunned. I remember walking down these stairs—it was on Hollywood Boulevard—and I heard this woman’s voice behind me. She said, “That’s not the L.A. we know. It’s so depressing.” Well, what are you going to do? You can’t please everybody. All I knew was that I was quite pleased.

The scene that sums up the magic of moviemaking is the one where Deckard is analyzing a photograph with a machine called an Esper. He found some photos in Leon’s hotel room, and he’s using the Esper to enhance the images and search through them for clues. Everything about this scene winks to the audience and says, “Watch me create a lie.”

For one, there is an image of Roy Batty sitting at the table in the pose of Rodin’s Thinker. This was funny to me because it’s silly for a robot to have a sense of humor about a famous sculpture from the past—it’s silly for him to even know about it. What’s even funnier is that the Roy Batty in The Thinker pose isn’t always Roy—sometimes it’s a stuntman dressed like Roy. I wasn’t on the set when they shot all of that.

Then Deckard uses the Esper to go deep into one of the photos. First he enlarges the reflection on a glass. Then he enlarges the reflection on a vase. Then he enlarges the reflection on an old French period mirror which itself distorts the image. This mirror is sort of like Ridley’s “trompe l’œil,” which means “deceive the eye,” because it distorts the image it reflects.

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