I recently worked on a story for the New York Times on the 40th anniversary of the Apple “1984” commercial. It was a blast to get to talk to so many of the people involved with the making of the commercial, but I neglected to mention Brent Thomas, the commercial’s art director, who everyone I spoke to acknowledged played a crucial part in the making of the ad. It was an oversight, and I wanted to make sure to mention Thomas in this brief follow-up to that story.
A few weeks back, I had the good fortune to speak to the legendary filmmaker Ridley Scott for my story on “1984.” As we talked early on a Sunday morning, I asked Scott about whether he saw the commercial as having been influenced by his work on Blade Runner, which had come out two years prior. Thus prompted, the director launched into an extended description of the making of the film. I knew it wouldn’t make its way into my story, but there was no way in the world that I was going to interrupt one of my favorite filmmakers as he described the making of one of my all-time favorite films. Below, some of Ridley Scott’s recollections of the writing of the Blade Runner script.
“I’d come across a writer, Hampton Fancher, who’d done a very nice adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I met Dick. I didn’t know him a lot. Showed him the visual effects for Blade Runner, which he was blown away [by]. Forgave me for saying I couldn’t get through Android because there [were] 19 stories in the first 4 fuckin’ pages. What Hampton had done cleverly, [he] had selected the overall overview of the book, in that a hunter falls in love with his quarry.
It was a film written for Hampton to direct. Hampton had this wonderful touch and cadence [and] beautiful dialogue. But the story took place entirely in an apartment. There was an affair, the man would leave in the morning and return in the evening. It was a low-budget movie. I’m not sure whether Hampton’s pleased I came in, because he’d written it for himself. But I came in and read it, [and] said, ‘I think the dialogue’s very special, the story’s very special. There’s one thing missing. I want to see what the world’s like, once he leaves the house, the world that creates such an AI nexus.’ A nexus, which we later found the word ‘replicant’ for, from biology replication. We didn’t realize we were 30 years ahead of the game. 40 years ahead of the game. Because you’ve created AI.
In those days, even in Alien, we were talking about off-world mining. Which everybody said, ‘yeah, sure, nah nah nah.’ Now, everybody is talking about off-world mining on Mars and the moon. The fiction was really a precursor to the fact.
I then sat with Hampton, the longest I’ve ever sat with a writer in my career. Five months, every day, 8:30 in the morning till 7:00 at night, finishing with a glass of wine. Hampton walking away, thinking, ‘Oh fuck, I’ve still got to write more.’ But he kept coming back with the goods. And the more the goods came in, it fed me, so I had bigger ideas. It drove him crazy for a while, but he really put together one of the great screenplays, I think.
It was a good partnership, and from that, I went off and got money to do it in Hollywood. I got fed up with explaining what I was doing. At that point, I was 42, 43. Very experienced commercial maker. And well-off. So I’m afraid I didn’t suffer fools easily, and I gave as good as I got. And that’s how the film got made.
It was hard going. Really tough. They didn’t know what I was doing. [Everyone thought] the film was a disaster when it opened. It took 20 years to discover the bloody movie. So at least I got the last word.”