Why one of Harrison Ford’s most cherished movies was “a fucking nightmare”
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, starring Harrison Ford, is a true marvel to perceive. It has gone down in history as one of the most beloved sci-fi movies of all time.
A film adaptation of one of the most significant science fiction novels ever written, Philip K Dick’s 1962 effort Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? never disappoints with its beautiful visuals and glorious electronic score by Vangelis.
The film, also featuring Rutger Hauer and Sean Young, takes place in a futuristic dystopian Los Angeles where synthetic humans have been developed to work on off-world colonies. When a band of synthetics (known as replicants) escape a colony and set out for Earth to confront their creators, a specialist police officer (Ford) known as a “blade runner” is tasked with taking them out or “retiring” them.
While the film is arguably Scott’s masterpiece and is well worth the widespread consideration of being one of the greatest science fiction movies ever made, it’s fair to say that Blade Runner endured a rather torturous production, and it essentially came down to a clash between Ford and Scott.
In 1992, Ford said, “Blade Runner is not one of my favourite films. I tangled with Ridley.” This is nothing new. Scott is known to be one of the more cantankerous creators in the industry, routinely clashing with the media and his stars. It has become a part of his way of working, and it didn’t mesh well with Ford’s work ethic.
“It was a fucking nightmare”
Harrison Ford
Ford started out relatively late in acting and, with more than a few carpentry and handyman jobs under his belt, has been known to prefer a simple and structured way of working on set. Allowing a director to rule said set with a tyrannical touch is always likely to upset the actor. And it seems it certainly went that way on Blade Runner, but that wasn’t the end of the issues.
Ford had a particular issue with providing voiceovers for the film, which he initially thought would not be required. “When we started shooting, it had been tacitly agreed that the version of the film that we had agreed upon was the version without voiceover narration,” he said. Ford and Scott had worked together to figure out how to show “the actual detective work” in the scenes. But when the studio received clips, they rejected them out of hand, deeming them too complicated.
“It was a fucking nightmare,” the actor added. “I thought that the film had worked without the narration. But now I was stuck re-creating that narration. And I was obliged to do the voiceovers for people that did not represent the director’s interests.”
The issues between Ford and Scott were not one-sided, though, and the director also once offered his thoughts on his leading actor, admitting that he was a “pain in the arse” to work with. “He’ll forgive me because now I get on with him,” Scott told the BBC. “Now he’s become charming. But he knows a lot; that’s the problem.”
As Scott mentions, Ford knew “a lot”, particularly about science fiction and Dick’s novel in particular. The two argued over whether or not Deckard is indeed a replicant in the story, and the tension on set rose even higher with other clashes between members of the production crew.
“I admire his work,” Scott later added. “We had a bad patch there, and I’m over it.”
Still, Ford seemed to have not forgotten the awful production of the film, which included “50 nights of shooting in the rain”. While that was undoubtedly a big problem, it was having to perform one “bad voiceover after another” that really caused the biggest gripe.
