Why did Ridley Scott borrow footage from ‘The Shining’ for ‘Blade Runner’?
The battles Ridley Scott faced in bringing Blade Runner to the screen are almost as legendary as the film itself, with the director forced to call up one of the most respected auteurs in the game for an assist that ultimately amounted to nothing in the long run.
Even though he was hot off the back of Alien, the classic sci-fi horror that strapped the proverbial rocket to the back of his career, Scott was still nowhere near being in the position he is now, where he’s given almost complete freedom to make his movies in any way that he sees fit.
The director of Alien and the star of Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark should have realistically made the dystopian epic an easy sell, but the production was fraught with bad blood and negativity. Scott wasn’t particularly happy with the version that made it into cinemas, but it’s entirely down to personal preference which cut of Blade Runner deserves to be called the definitive version.
In the ending widely accepted as the best, Ford’s Rick Deckard spies an origami unicorn to end the film on a note that’s been generating discussion and debate for over 40 years, but there was originally insistences on the studio’s part that a more ironclad resolution be tacked onto the end so that audiences would be sent home happy.
Scott wasn’t thrilled at the suggestion and openly poked holes in the logic, but he nonetheless decided to reach out to one of his heroes for a helping hand. Kubrick being Kubrick, though, he opted that he was going to be as exhaustive as possible in lending that assist.
“I was having a very bad time on Blade Runner,” Scott admitted to Reel Blend. “The previews were a disaster. Things like, ‘Why is always raining?’. ‘Why is it so dark?’. And so, I was being pushed into, ‘We’ve got to have a happy ending. Don’t Americans like happy endings?'”
Blade Runner signing off by tying itself in a neat little bow didn’t make sense to the guy who’d directed it, but because he wasn’t established enough to tell them to shove it, he was left with no choice but to acquiesce. Warner Bros wanted Deckard and Sean Young’s Rachael to be seen escaping the city for a new life together in the mountains, even though it didn’t make a lick of sense.
“So I say, ‘What does that mean?’. You know, go to the mountains somewhere, run away forever,” Scott pointed out completely accurately. “Why would you do that? If there are mountains everywhere, why would you live in this goddamn awful city?” A very fair point, and because there was no time to shoot the inserts himself, The Shining immediately popped into his head.
“I called up Stanley and I said, ‘Listen, The Shining. I know you were in a helicopter for about six weeks, right?,” he asked the legendary filmmaker, who suddenly became a pedant. “He said, ‘No, I would never go in a helicopter’. But yeah, about six weeks.” Scott inquired if there was any footage he could borrow to give the studio what it wanted, and the next day he ended up with 17 hours of the stuff.
He then had to come through more than half a day’s worth of second unit film from The Shining, pick out the shots he wanted to use, splice them into the conclusion of Blade Runner, and then screen it for preview audiences. Much to Scott’s chagrin, “It made the preview much better,” which meant he had to go back to Kubrick and strike a deal to buy the footage.
As a result, “The Shining footage is in the first release of Blade Runner,” which Scott then subsequently excised from his director’s cut when he was no longer under the thumb of Warner Bros demanding an uplifting ending that flew in the face of what he was trying to accomplish in the first place. As far as calling in favours goes, ringing up Kubrick isn’t a bad way of going about it.
