Ridley Scott sat down with GQ magazine for a retrospective video interview and revealed that the financiers on “Blade Runner” originally questioned his decision to cast Harrison Ford in the lead role. Ford was already Han Solo in “Star Wars” at the point in his career, in addition to being picked by Steven Spielberg to headline “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Apparently the financiers were not paying attention.
“Harrison Ford was not a star. He had just finished flying the Millennium Falcon in ‘Star Wars,’” Scott said. “I remember my financiers saying, ‘Who the fuck is Harrison Ford?’ And I said, ‘You’re going to find out.’ Harry became my leading man.”
Spielberg was in post-production on “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and gave Ford a thumbs up when Scott asked about if he should cast the actor in “Blade Runner.” Ford was interested in working with Scott on the film as it marked a more dramatic character compared to Han Solo and Indiana Jones. “Blade Runner’s” dramatic depths is also what appealed to Scott.
Popular on Variety
“On ‘Blade Runner’ I was inventing a whole new world,” the director said. “I spent five months with a very good writer Hampton Fancher, who’d really written a play adapted from the novel ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ I read the book and felt there were 90 stories in the first 20 pages and it was too complex. Hampton wrote this beautiful story set in an apartment. Loved the dialogue, but I wanted to see what happens when he walks out the door.”
“Blade Runner” famously did not start out as a critical or box office darling. That took time. Scott still remembers the pan he received from Pauline Kael in The New Yorker. She wrote the film “has nothing to give the audience” and “if anybody comes around with a test to detect humanoids, maybe Ridley Scott and his associates should hide.”
“Dude, four pages of destruction,” Scott said about the review. “She destroyed me. I never even met her! … It’s insolent. At my level, it’s insolent.”
Watch Scott’s full GQ video interview below.