Trivia / Blade Runner

The Trivia page for Blade Runner 2049 can be found here.

The Trivia page for the Westwood video game can be found here.

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• Accidentally-Correct Writing: When Batty and Tyrell are arguing about how to prolong a Replicant's lifespan, Batty mentions something called "EMS". Tyrell says they already tried "ethyl methanesulfonate" unsuccessfully. Ethyl methanesulfonate is an actual organic compound with mutagenic qualities, used in genetics. The scriptwriter later admitted he did no research for the conversation and the mention of a real compound in the Techno Babble was coincidental.
• Actor-Inspired Element:
  • Rutger Hauer came up with many inventive ideas for his characterization, like the moment where he grabs and fondles a dove. He also tweaked Batty's dying words to make them warmer and less verbose and added the famous "tears in rain" metaphor.
  • Cityspeak was Edward James Olmos's idea. He has since been amazed at how prescient it was vis-a-vis the increasing multicultural influence Los Angeles has experienced in the intervening years.
  • Gaff can be seen wearing blue contact lenses in a few shots. These were a suggestion by Hauer. Olmos paid for them himself.
• Approval of God: Although the film was produced without his involvement and was very loosely based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick was impressed with the production design after viewing a special effects test reel, telling Ridley Scott that it was exactly how he had imagined the setting in his original novel. Dick did not live to see the completed film, so we don't know whether he would have approved of the finished product.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: The most famous line of Roy's monologue is "All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain," with the final part being often remembered as "tears in the rain."
• Better Export for You: The American Ultra HD set includes the Final Cut in both 4K and 1080p, along with commentaries and two DVDs' worth of bonus features. The UK and French sets swap the two DVDs for Discs 2 and 3 of the 30th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray; this means that in addition to the US set's contents, they also include four older versions of Blade Runner in 1080p, an HD art gallery, and a 2007 featurette about the updates made to the Final Cut.
• Box Office Bomb: It lost around US$12 million on its first-run theatrical release.
• Cast the Runner-Up:
  • Stacey Nelkin auditioned for the role of Pris, but after her audition, she was offered the role of a replicant named Mary instead; the Mary role was eventually cut. Nelkin's screen test for the role of Pris appears on Disc 4 of the collector's edition DVD set.
  • Morgan Paull played the stand-in for Deckard during screen tests for the actresses who auditioned for the role of Rachael, and ultimately went on to play Holden in the film.
• The Cast Showoff: Daryl Hannah was a skilled gymnast and put some of her skills to use.
• Celebrity Voice Actor: In the 1997 video game, several characters are voiced by the actors who played them in the film, and several original characters are voiced by prominent actors, such as Jeff Garlin and Stephen Root.
• Completely Different Title:
  • Croatia: Exterminator
  • Bulgaria: Calls Himself RNR
  • Venezuela: The Relentless Hunter
  • Portugal: Imminent Danger
  • Poland: The Android Hunter
  • Romania: Bounty Hunter
  • Hungary: The Winged Bounty Hunter
  • China: Silver Winged Bounty Hunter
  • Turkey: Death Tracking
  • Vietnam: Clone Crime
• Creator Backlash:
  • For a long time, Harrison Ford refused to talk about the film for years due to the miserable experience he had to make it, and generally expressed dislike about the film and working with Scott, as well as the whole "replicant" debate. He became more positive about in The Oughties and The New '10s and agreed to star in the sequel. He states that part of the reason he's mellowed is how Blade Runner has gone on to inspire many young directors and he's happy to be part of a classic. Ford also likes the 2007 Final Cut version best of all versions of the film, as does Ridley Scott.
  • Ridley Scott does not think the love scene between Deckard and Racheal is very "successful" in his own words. On the commentary for the Final Cut he says he wishes the scene had more and different dialoge and that he had directed it differently. He acknowledges that both Ford and Young did not like the direction of the scene and his perceived failure of it is his own fault.
• Creator's Favorite:
  • Rutger Hauer considered this the best film he was ever involved with.
  • When Daryl Hannah was asked in a 2010 interview with The Guardian what her "career high point" was, she had this to say:
    "Blade Runner. It was like The Wizard of Oz: we all went into another reality."
• Creator-Preferred Adaptation: Philip K. Dick died less than four months before the film premiered. During production, he was critical of the screenplays and the multiple changes from the source material and the renaming of characters and concepts, but during a set visit, he saw an earlier version with the effects, mainly the opening scene showing the skyline of Future-LA, and was blown away by it. He was also impressed by Scott despite the fact that he admitted to not having read the source material. He felt that visually and aesthetically, the film, despite his initial misgivings about its departure from his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, was in synch with the spirit of his ideas.
• Dawson Casting: J.F. Sebastian says he has Methuselah syndrome, which causes him to look old/age prematurely as he says he's 25. In real life, William Sanderson was 40.
• Defictionalization:
  • Deckard's whiskey glasses and bottle, trenchcoat, and even the tiles in his apartment have been made into real (albeit insanely expensive) products. Even the neon light umbrellas are available from Thinkgeek (albeit the Thinkgeek versions are more practical LED/fiber-optic rather than neon tubes).
  • The police offices constructed in Union Station, Los Angeles for the filming still stand today, in use as station offices. The crew was able to get a little bit of a discount if Union Station officials agreed to keep the set for practical use after filming was over.
• Deleted Role: Stacey Nelkin had a role as Mary, a replicant that escapes from "off-world" and comes to Earth, but budget constraints resulted in her part being cut from the film early in the period of principal photography. This cut character explains a conflicting exchange between Bryant and Deckard in which Bryant initially tells Deckard there are four "skin jobs" on the loose, but a few minutes later, he says six escaped, and one was killed by the "electronic gate", which should leave five.
• Enforced Method Acting:
  • The scene with Chew was shot in a freezer and was ice cold, so the cast really was shivering.
  • When Deckard stops Rachael from leaving his apartment, he pushes her away from him. The expression of pain and shock on Sean Young's face was real, as Harrison Ford had difficulties playing the scene with her and had pushed her too hard.
• Executive Meddling: One of the most infamous cases in film history. The ending in the original movie was changed by higher-ups due to its ambiguity, and narration was added to help dispel the ambiguity evident in most of the movie itself. The original ending has been restored and the narration deleted in the Director's Cut, along with the Final Cut.
• Flip-Flop of God: Is Deckard a replicant? Director Ridley Scott and lead actor Harrison Ford, as well as Rutger Hauer, screenwriters Hampton Fancher and David Peoples have all had contrasting views on the subject. Scott says yes; Ford, Hauer, and the screenwriters say no. The novel on which the films based, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? states that the Deckard character is human. It's generally agreed upon that the evidence suggests Deckard is human in the Theatrical Cut and possibly a replicant in the Director's/Final Cuts. Albeit the hints were stronger in the 1992 version (via an extra line by Gaff that Scott removed for the Final Cut). According to Mark Kermode the idea of Deckard being a replicant at all first arose from a misunderstanding between the two screenwriters (who had little contact with each other beyond shipping script revisions back and forth): One had written into the script a line about Deckard wondering about his own creator, which was intended as him comparing himself to replicants and the creator being God. The other writer thought this line meant Deckard was a replicant and led to both thinking the other one put forth the idea first, and eventually, Scott embraced it during production much to the confusion of his crew who all thought it was clear that Deckard was a human.
• Focus Group Ending: The original theatrical release featured Deckard and Rachael driving a car to happiness and freedom through lush green hills. This ending is a jarring non sequitur: implausible and theme-negating in a dystopian future-noir film. It's the direct product of a test audience screening. Oddly, the sequence is unused footage from the start of The Shining.
• The Foreign Subtitle:
  • Brazil: Blade Runner: The Android Hunter
  • Portugal: Blade Runner: Imminent Danger
  • Slovenia: Blade Runner: Exterminator
• Hostility on the Set:
  • The crew had already had it up to here with Ridley Scott's demands (like showing up on the very first morning of filming and deciding that he wanted the columns in the temple-like Tyrrell Corporation set flipped upside down, which took the swing gang four hours) when an interview he did with a British newspaper trickled back to L.A. Asked about the difference between British and American crews, Scott said semi-jocularly that the American crews were not as compliant as the British crews he had worked with, whose attitude he characterized as "Yes, guv'nor". Within a day a whole run of T-shirts that had "Yes, guv'nor ... my ass!" on the front and either "Will Rogers never met Ridley Scott" or "You soar with eagles when you fly with turkeys" on the back had been printed and worn on the set by a few dozen crewmembers. Scott's sympathizers printed up and wore shirts of their own written "Xenophobia sucks" (Scott later said it was meant as a joke, and to defuse the situation because it would make people confused by the word "xenophobia" and would force them to ask what it meant) and Scott wore one with a hat reading "Guv'nor" for extra mockery. This so-called T-shirt war actually helped defuse tensions on what remained a very challenging shoot.
  • Among the actors, Sean Young's inexperience made Harrison Ford comfort her after she started crying following a difficult take, but otherwise he did not like how the actress kept on breaking character and ruining takes (in one documentary, as soon as Scott yells "cut" on their love scenes, Ford gives Young a strong disapproving look). Looks like Ford has made up with her over the years, though.
• In Memoriam: The film was dedicated in memory of Philip K. Dick, who passed away before the film's premiere.
• Inspiration for the Work: According to Word of God the aesthetic sources for the film's futuristic setting of brilliant night lights and factories belching fire and burning off waste gas, was the Port Talbot steelworks, Ridley Scott having spent part of his childhood in Wales.
• Life Imitates Art:
  • Some cities, particularly Shanghai, look more and more like Blade Runner every year. As Thom Andersen noted in his documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself this is because the film's production design was unintentionally reflective of avant-garde city-planning which they thought was supposed to indicate dystopia but are actually quite positive and effective. Also, Shanghai and Beijing have become far, far more polluted than Los Angeles ever was, making them atmospheric dead ringers for Blade Runner.
  • In an incredibly eerie coincidence, Rutger Hauer passed away in 2019 — the same year as his character.
  • In 2020, a camera showcasing the Los Angeles skyline recorded hundreds of fireworks going off in the city on Independence Day. It looks remarkably like the opening shot of the film.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: Blade Runner has been re-released many times. There's a Director's Cut, a Special Edition, a "Five-Disc Ultimate Collector's Edition" (that comes in the same kind of metal briefcase as the Voight-Kampff machines), and a 3-Disc 30th Anniversary Edition.^note The 30th Anniversary Edition compresses three discs of the Five-Disc Ultimate Collector's Edition into one 50 GB Blu-ray Disc and adds an HD Stills Gallery. The 5 versions included in the two newest releases include: The 1982 Workprint, The US Theatrical Cut, The International theatrical cut, The 1992 Director's cut, and the 2007 Final Cut, but nowadays WB prefers to only sell the Final Cut. According to The Other Wiki there are two other versions that exist but aren't included in any set (A TV broadcast version and a sneak preview version that uses deleted scenes).
• On-Set Injury: Daryl Hannah chipped her elbow in eight places during the scene where she accidentally slipped on the pavement and smashed the window of a parked car.
• One-Take Wonder: Hy Pyke managed to have a very memorable turn in his only scene as sleazy bar owner Taffey Lewis all while doing it in a single take, which is remarkable since Ridley Scott is known to be a very notorious perfectionist when it comes to shooting and reshooting scenes.
• Orphaned Reference: The tortoise story is the last remnant of an environmental theme present in both the source novel and Hampton Fancher's early drafts of the screenplay. The novel features an epigram of a (real) wire service story about the death of a 200-year-old sea turtle revered as an honorary chief by the people of Tonga, and the extinction of animals is a recurring theme. In an early draft by Fancher a distraught Deckard walks through the desert and finds a dying turtle on its back and saves it by turning it over, with the twist of the turtle being mechanical, tying into the film's overall theme of the blurred line between humans and Replicants.
• The Production Curse: The film provides something of a variation on the theme, as it suffered a similar curse, but instead of cast and crew members, it was the sponsors that got hit:
  • Atari would fall victim to The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 and never truly recover after market oversaturation and little in the way of quality control, not helped by an ill-advised video game adaptation of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial;
  • Bell would be broken up as a monopoly;
  • Cuisinart would go bankrupt in 1989 and be acquired by Conair Corporation;
  • Pan American Airlines was already undergoing problems since the Oil Embargo of '73. Then the Tragedy of Flight 103 happened, and everything went to hell in three years, the final straw being the price hikes caused by the Persian Gulf War;
  • Coca-Cola would go on to create the infamous New Coke, which, though it wasn't enough to bring down the company (which is still going strong today), helped its chief rival Pepsi take the lead in the Cola Wars.
• Production Nickname: Exasperated crews often referred to the film as Blood Runner.
• Prop Recycling:
  • The spinners' dashboard displays are taken from Alien. Ridley Scott directed both films, so this may actually be a Shout-Out.
  • The very top of the roof of the police headquarters building was originally the ceiling of the Mothership interior from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The building itself is rather similar to the Tower of Babel as depicted in Metropolis.
  • One of the buildings next door to the police station is a model of the Millennium Falcon tilted vertically and covered with Christmas lights.
  • The Dark Star miniature can be seen in the background near the police station as well.
  • Additionally, later sci-fi films would sometimes recycle props and set pieces from this one. Be on the lookout for a spinner in the junkyard in Soldier, and check out Craig Bierko's apartment in The Thirteenth Floor.
  • Some of the Lord of Darkness' palace interiors from Legend (1985) (most notably, the huge, spiraling columns) were featured in this film.
• Saved from Development Hell: Interest in adapting Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? began shortly after its publication in 1968.
  • Producer Herb Jaffe optioned it in the early seventies, with his son Rob writing the script, but Philip K. Dick was unimpressed with this draft. Dick recalled:
    Jaffe's screenplay was so terribly done ... Robert flew down to Santa Ana to speak with me about the project. And the first thing I said to him when he got off the plane was, "Shall I beat you up here at the airport, or shall I beat you up back at my apartment?"
  • In the early seventies, a then-unknown Martin Scorsese was in line to direct.
  • Hampton Fancher's script was optioned in 1977. Producer Michael Deeley became interested in the script and convinced Ridley Scott to direct. Scott was originally attached to direct Dune (1984) until his brother, Frank Scott, died in 1980. Stricken with grief and eager to work while Dune stagnated, Ridley Scott left the project to direct Blade Runner, which was all set to begin production. Scott officially came aboard in February 1980.
• Science Marches On: Tyrell's explanation to Roy for why the DNA of a mature replicant can't be altered effectively doesn't stand up to the modern understanding of genetics. Then again, this might be intentional, as the script hints that Tyrell may be lying about there being no possibility of lifting the lifespan limitation.
• Spared by the Cut: A downplayed example. The original version ended with Deckard knowing that Rachel, as a replicant, presumably only has four years to live. As a replicant himself (maybe?), this may apply to him as well. The theatrical release added a narration to the end, offhandedly mentioning that Deckard was told that she was special and didn't have the standard replicant expiration date.
• Stunt Double:
  • Vic Armstrong doubled Harrison Ford in the scene where Deckard is searching Leon's bathroom and finds the snake scale in the tub.
  • A female gymnast was hired as a stunt double for Daryl Hannah in the scene where Pris attacks Deckard, but Ridley Scott rehearsed the scene so many times that when they were ready to shoot the scene she was too exhausted to do anything. The scene was filmed with a male gymnast that they had been able to track down during the lunch break.
• Throw It In!:
  • There are a few ad-libbed lines, most notably in the Final Words of both Leon and Roy Batty. Roy originally had a slightly lengthier, wordy final monologue which Rutger Hauer disliked for being "operatic" and not suited to the film, so he cut a bunch of words and replaced them with the "tears in rain" line, which he came up with himself.
  • Daryl Hannah really slipped and smashed her elbow through a car window, chipping it in eight places. In Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner, the "making of" documentary of the film, she shows us the scars.
  • The pidgin Gaff speaks was largely put together by Edward James Olmos from languages he had some familiarity with. His iconic line "It's too bad she won't live, but then again, who does?" was also written by Olmos.
• Troubled Production: Ridley Scott is prone to facing these, and the movie was not easy to shoot, with the crew constantly exhausted due to working during late hours under fake rain and a perfectionist director (even leading to the "T-shirt war" listed on Hostility on the Set), Harrison Ford often veering between impatient and bored during production, and the final scene being shot literally hours before the studio was going to step in and remove Scott from the project.
• Vindicated by Cable: The film was a box office disappointment, but became a science fiction classic on home video, especially after the release of the director's cut.
• Wag the Director: Harrison Ford frequently argued with Ridley Scott over whether or not Deckard is a replicant. He was backed by the film's screenwriters and others in the crew since it was Scott and Scott alone who came up with that interpretation.
• What Could Have Been:
  • This was offered to Ralph Bakshi. He passed on it but recommended Ridley Scott for the director's chair. And the rest is history...
  • Hampton Fancher envisioned Robert Mitchum as Rick Deckard and wrote his dialogue with Mitchum in mind. Dustin Hoffman was originally cast, as Scott intended to subvert the typical image of the burly Hardboiled Detective, and Hoffman would fit that well. This period of the film's pre-production got so far that even some of the early storyboards featured Hoffman's likeness on images of Deckard. Sean Connery, Robert Duvall, Clint Eastwood, Peter Falk, Scott Glenn, Gene Hackman, Judd Hirsch, Raúl Juliá, Tommy Lee Jones, Paul Newman, Nick Nolte, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Burt Reynolds, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Christopher Walken were also considered. Martin Sheen was offered the role, but he turned it down, as he was exhausted, having come off Apocalypse Now.
  • Pete Townshend was at one point asked to compose the music for the film. He declined due to his experiences on Tommy.
  • An earlier draft of the script, called Dangerous Days would have been a far more action-packed affair, including a famous unused introduction of Deckard, where he shot a seemingly innocuous man, then took his skull apart to reveal mechanical components.
  • Ridley Scott himself wanted Debbie Harry to play Pris, but she passed up on it, and later expressed regret over it.
  • Joe Pantoliano was considered for J.F. Sebastian.
  • Mœbius was offered the opportunity to assist in the pre-production, but he declined so that he could work on Time Masters - a decision that he later regretted.
  • Grace Jones was considered for Rachel.
  • Sylvia Kristel was offered a part.
  • In this initial script, the story focused less on human issues than it did on environmental issues and larger questions of God and mortality. It refers to replicants as "androids" and makes it clear that Deckard is human. The Voight-Kampff test can spot androids after five or six questions (not the thirty questions required in later drafts); Rachael is detected after thirteen questions, not a hundred. The sixth android, Mary, is present in this draft. Instead of finding Tyrell at the Tyrell building, Batty goes to Tyrell's mansion, and he kills Tyrell, along with his bodyguard, a maid, and his entire family; he later kills Sebastian. The androids in this script have no obvious reason to be on earth; there is nothing about them wanting to live longer, they are simply on earth killing people for no apparent reason. At the end of the script, Rachael kills herself, as she knows if she doesn't do it, Deckard will have to. The script ends with Deckard wandering into the desert with the intention of dying, but upon seeing a tortoise struggling to turn itself over, he decides to live on.
  • The second draft has a number of scenes in this script that made it into the final film - the opening scene is almost identical, as is the briefing scene with Bryant, Deckard searching Leon's hotel room, and Deckard using the Voight-Kampff machine on Rachael under the supervision of Tyrell. Differences included a smaller role for Gaff, and a larger role for the Esper, which is a talking computer. The script ends with Deckard bringing Rachael out to the countryside so she can see snow for the first time, and shooting her. The last scene sees him driving back to the city musing about how the ability to choose is what makes us human. This version of the script also included Mary as the sixth replicant (still called androids at this stage).
  • The third draft opens in an 'Off-world Termination Dump', a dumping ground for dead androids (by now called replicants). Two workmen are shoveling bodies into a pit when one of the bodies comes to life (Roy Batty). He pulls Mary and Leon from the pile and they kill the workmen. This version introduced the snake scale storyline but does not have the chess game featured in the final film. Other differences include: a new replicant called Roger, who attacks Deckard in Leon's hotel room; a scene where Chew's frozen body is discovered and knocked over; in this draft, Tyrell turns out to be another replicant, after Roy kills him, Roy demands that Sebastian take him to the real Tyrell, and Sebastian reveals that Tyrell had an unnamed disease and was placed into a hibernation unit to await a cure. Roy demands that Sebastian wake Tyrell up, but Sebastian reveals that Tyrell died a year ago during a power outage at which point Roy kills Sebastian. After Tyrell's death, the entire replicant line is put on hold. There is also a scene where Deckard forces Gaff to take the Voight-Kampff test and subsequently kills him. This draft also ended with Deckard killing Rachael, but the scene now takes place on a beach. The final scene sees Deckard waiting in his apartment for the police raid due to his murder of Gaff.
  • Scott initially wanted a more action-packed opening scene that would have set up Deckard's ruthless character. It would have taken place in a house in the countryside where Deckard is silently sitting and waiting, while a pot of soup is boiling on a fire. Suddenly a man comes in wearing a protective suit and gas mask. He notices Deckard but ignores him, instead going to take some soup. He then addresses Deckard, but Deckard simply shoots him without saying a word and then proceeds by removing the man's artificial lower jaw, proving that the victim is a Replicant. The idea was abandoned in later drafts. A slightly modified version of this scene would be used as the opening for the sequel.
  • Zorah's snake dance was originally supposed to be in the film. The scene was storyboarded as an elaborate show that would even contain clay animation, but it was ultimately scrapped due to time and budget constraints.
  • In the scene where Deckard and Gaff find the snake scale, they were originally supposed to pull down a Murphy bed, uncovering a replicant hiding inside who would have a spectacular fight with them. This was axed due to budgetary reasons.
• Word of Dante: The continuation novel Blade Runner 2: Edge of Human by K. W. Jeter claims Pris was an insane human woman who thought she was a replicant. This and other elements of that book and its two sequels are considered Canon Discontinuity.
• Word of Saint Paul: Harrison Ford has stated that he believed Deckard to not be a replicant, as being one would undercut the theme of his character rediscovering his own humanity, and turns the man vs. machine climactic battle into a robot vs. robot fight. His word is backed by the film's screenwriters and by co-star Rutger Hauer. Ridley Scott on the other hand, claims that Deckard was always meant to be a replicant. Production documents support Ford and Co. on this. None of the screenwriters agreed with it, and this was a concept Scott devised mid-production, and as such in no ways was it planned from the start. As of 2023, it seems Ford has come around to the idea that Deckard is a replicant.
• Working Title: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Android, Mechanismo and Dangerous Days.
• Written by Cast Member: The famous "tears in rain" monologue was partly written by Rutger Hauer himself, especially the final line, "All these moments will be lost... in time... like tears in rain". Hauer added it the night before filming the scene (he noted that the original line was too jargon-heavy).

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