Why harrison ford hates blade runner

Largely considered a cult classic today—to the point where it inspired a year later legacy sequel with a massive budget—the film opened to mixed reviews and poor box office. Many would argue this was in large part due to how the film was tinkered with in post, beginning with Scott being fired from the picture after principal photography.

But after Warner Bros. Ford reportedly laughed at the script he was handed for what became the final narration in the theatrical cut alternate deleted scenes includes different, slightly better read narration. Guess which film. Ford has denied these rumors, however, and criticized the writing itself for his restrained delivery.

Being a Blade Runner means to slaughter replicants, which are physically indistinguishable from humans. From that perspective, no, Deckard is not a replicant. He might as well be. Trapped between these two formidable egos, Villeneuve has wisely decided to leave the question unanswered.

Deckard, in the movie, is unsure, as we are, of what his identity is. Because I love that. I love mystery. They love answers. They really, really love specific answers that resolve every possible ambiguity. And so you can imagine yourself being somebody else. You can imagine knowing things other than what you know. He breaks off here and gestures toward a dog playing just beyond the playground.

We walk some more, and Ford offers a low-key, laconic summary of his recent ankle problems. This one got dislocated backward when…uh…the plane crashed. These mishaps, one in and the other in , are both fairly well known. The first, when he was crushed by the door of the Millennium Falcon on a London soundstage, occurred during his second day on a Star Wars set in more than 30 years. The second incident occurred in March , when his World War II—era open-cockpit plane lost all power shortly after he took off from Santa Monica Airport.

He still doesn't remember the minutes leading up to the crash landing on a golf course, though the available evidence—including the audio of his conversations with the control tower—suggests that he made every smart move to increase his chances and mitigate the collateral damage.

That includes finding the golf course—he knew there was one nearby. Ford also fractured his pelvis, shattered a vertebra, and lacerated his head.

The investigation into this crash absolved him of any blame—it was a faulty carburetor, nearly impossible to detect in routine maintenance. This time, he did mess up. And it was a good landing. In the wrong place. When he was told over the radio what he'd done, Ford knew immediately what would follow. I knew what process I would have to go through. I even knew it would be in the newspapers. I didn't know it would be for weeks. And that I would be Mike Flynn's new best friend.

Because he was in the shitbox, and it took him out of the news cycle. Ford is not remotely deterred from flying—he flew himself here from Los Angeles. Aviation is something he deeply cares about. Nonetheless, he ultimately requests that I don't attend his aviation event. He says that trying to come up with a speech has already caused him several sleepless nights. My watching won't make it any easier. We meet again a month later in the hangar at Santa Monica Airport where he keeps his aircraft.

He shows me around. He makes me coffee and asks what we should do today, and I say that the main thing we need to do is to talk. When I interviewed Ryan Gosling for GQ last November , he was in Budapest to film Blade Runner , and he explained how Ford had inadvertently punched him in the face during a fight scene.

I wanted to give Ford the opportunity to present his own account of the same incident. My job was also to make sure that I pulled the punch. But we were moving, and the camera was moving, so I had to be aware of the angle to the camera to make the punch look good. You know, I threw about a hundred punches in the shooting of it, and I only hit him once. What—did he fucking expect the whole bottle?

You know, I figured one drink would fix it. That was enough. No, he was fun to work with. I like him a lot. He's a smart guy. I mean, he's a fucking Mouseketeer—he's been doing this since he was 6 years old or something.

He knows what he's doing. The reverence enjoyed now by the original Blade Runner movie has had the unintended side effect of disguising its messy birth. In a manner of speaking. And when the movie first came out, it wasn't a success. If you read old articles about Harrison Ford, it's jarring to realize that for a while Blade Runner was included on lists of films that were considered misbegotten attempts by Ford to extend his reach beyond his Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises.

Soon enough, Ford's career blossomed in all kinds of other ways, but Blade Runner also began its own separate, slow-burn rise.

Ford and Scott have had a long-running disagreement about Deckard, specifically over whether he is human or a replicant himself. Over the years, Scott at first hinted and then stated with increasing force that Deckard is a replicant. Ford has always taken the opposite position. The story worked better, in his view, if the audience had a character they could trust to be who, or what, he said he was.

That's the character he believed he was playing, and that's how he played it. When I first bring up the subject, Ford tries to deflect any sense of a still-simmering disagreement. Except this isn't true. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly , Denis Villeneuve recounted a dinner with Ford and Scott one night in Budapest, and how Ford and Scott started going at it all over again.

It was war stories. They are no men of small words—they are deeply passionate, both of them. I had always assumed that Scott believed this as well, but apparently not. At one point during a commentary track on a collector's edition, Scott alludes to the origami unicorn that Deckard finds late in the movie, which connects to a dream Deckard has earlier on.

Why is this voiceover track so terrible? Fans of the film know Ford hated the voiceover track, which the studio insisted be added to better help viewers understand what was going on. It was removed from later cuts of the film. Flashback dialogue confusing.