The one movie Harrison Ford admits he was “desperately unhappy with” might also be his best
There’s a humanity to Harrison Ford that shines through everything he does.
Sure, he has spent the majority of his career as untouchably cool action heroes — a career that includes both Indiana Jones and Han Solo, might well be the envy of almost every leading man born after the 1970s — but he has done so with a down-home sense of humility.
For the most part, Ford has felt like an attainable icon. His attitude has always been plain; his unwillingness to do jobs he hates, unless the money is right, is just the kind of attitude that could have, in another life, turned him into a president. But not every part of his career has been smooth sailing.
Now lauded as one of the best movies of the 1980s, one of the greatest sci-fi films ever made, and an all-time cinematic great, Blade Runner hardly arrived out of the gate with its reputation secured.
It took a long time for Ridley Scott’s ambitious adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to get there. The neon-soaked cyberpunk spectacular initially underperformed at the box office and polarised critics, with studio interference at least partly to blame for the initial apathy.
In the years since, Blade Runner has become subject to multiple revisions and alternate editions, with the theatrical cut eventually being followed by Scott’s director’s cut before ‘The Final Cut’ was released to commemorate its 25th anniversary, with the latter being the director’s preferred version and the only one on which he exerted full creative and artistic control.
One of the most hotly-contested aspects of Blade Runner was the voiceover of Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard, which was only added at the studio’s request when test screenings left certain audiences confused. Scott was wholly against adding in narration to spell things out in explicit detail, as was the leading man, who revealed that it left him utterly dismayed.
“I was desperately unhappy with it”, Ford said of the studio-mandated recording sessions to Empire, “I was compelled by contract to record five or six different versions of the narration, each of which was found wanting on a storytelling basis”. Lamenting that “it could have been more than a cult picture”, the star further underlined the original cut as “something that I was completely unhappy with”.
Alongside Scott, Ford “contested it mightily” when the voiceover was first floated, with his famously curmudgeonly side shining through when he arrived to record the dialogue. The Star Wars and Indiana Jones icon knew he didn’t have a choice and “had no chance to participate” in further discussions about the decision, so he went in and read from the script without having any emotional or performative connection to the material, which was readily apparent in the film.
Scott did eventually get around to putting his own finishing touches on Blade Runner, even if it did take a quarter of a century to get there, but with the final cut being out of his control, he was at the mercy of the studio to release the movie in the way they saw fit as executives, and not what his original intentions were as its director.
Ford was in much the same boat, with their respective status as world-renowned Hollywood creatives meaning nothing when the call to slap a voiceover on Blade Runner was made well above their station, despite each of them voicing their opposition.
However, Ford’s performance is arguably the best of his career, bringing plenty of depth to his role as he is forced to confront existential questions and reflect on his morals. Despite his initial depiction as cold and aimless, he soon becomes more human after interacting with Replicants – synthetic humans. Thus, through Ford’s incredible performance, audiences are left to question the difference between artificiality and reality.
