‘Blade Runner’: the Ridley Scott movie that Christopher Nolan refused to call a flop
As one of the biggest and most celebrated directors of recent times, Christopher Nolan has naturally been compared to some of the all-time greats. His preference for high-concept, highly technical stories has earned him numerous comparisons to Stanley Kubrick, especially when you consider the similarities between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Interstellar. There’s also the case of a fellow British director who was also knighted for his services to film – the incomparable Sir Ridley Scott.
Nolan has made it very clear that he is a big fan of Scott’s work, and his influence on the younger man is obvious across his filmography. In particular, the 1982 sci-fi stalwart Blade Runner is a film that Nolan regularly references, both overtly and subtly, in his own movies. In conversation with Forbes, the Academy Award winner got the chance to wax lyrical about Deckard Shaw’s replicant-hunting adventure and to talk about the oft-quoted fact that the movie originally made little impact at the box office.
“From a pragmatic point of view, Blade Runner is actually one of the most successful films of all time in terms of constructing that reality using sets,” he explained. “On Batman Begins, unlike The Dark Knight, we found ourselves having to build the streets of Gotham in large part. So I immediately gravitated toward the visual treatment that Ridley Scott had come up with, in terms of how you shoot these massive sets to make them feel real and not like impressive sets. And immediately we started looking at the rain, the handheld cameras, the longer lenses…”
Blade Runner is set in Los Angeles in the futuristic year of… 2019. That felt a lot further away in 1982, promise. To create the bustling, grimy, soulless cityscape that serves as the backdrop to this story, Scott hired concept artist Syd Mead, a leading light in the ‘neo-futurist’ movement. With his help, the director designed a city that, unlike the pristine vision of many previous future-set movies, felt like it was collapsing under its own weight. Nolan borrowed heavily from this philosophy when it came to creating his version of Gotham City, a once-mighty metropolis that, despite the promise of progress, has slid into the mire.
“Myself, my designer Nathan Crowley, and my cinematographer Wally Pfister,” Nolan continued. “We started to throw all of that into the mix of how you can help the look of something, how you can create texture, as Ridley Scott has always been the absolute master of. Creating a texture to a shooting style that maximises the impact of the set and minimises the artifice – the feeling that this world has edges to it that you would see at the edge of the frame.”
He praised Scott’s ability to immerse his audience in the world of Blade Runner, creating an atmosphere of dread and hopelessness that almost becomes a character itself. “We definitely tried to emulate that style,” Nolan said of his ‘Batman’ films. “I think in doing so, we actually created homage, particularly where we used the rain very much.”
Despite the fact that it only made $42million on a $30m budget, the impact of Blade Runner goes far beyond the money it made at the time. It almost single-handedly reinvented how sci-fi was presented on-screen, and its impact can be felt on the genre to this very day.
