A previously un-leaked “Blade Runner” script by Hampton Fancher has turned up over at Game Of The Art. The script is an apparent revision of earlier work by Fancher before he turned the script over to David Peoples. The legend goes that the director, Ridley Scott, wanted some changes in direction in the script that Hampton Fancher just didn’t agree to. Since Hampton Fancher wasn’t really a hired writer, but an owner in the project, he declined to revise.
In came Peoples and the rest is history. In the balance of things, Ridley Scott was the driving creative force in the film and after reading some of the early drafts of the script, the final structure and focus seems to have come in the filming process, under Ridley’s iron wing. Rutger Hauer and Harrision Ford are also credited with some of the iconic dialogue in the film. Rutger of course ad libbed the last two lines of the famous “I’ve seen things” speech, spoken on the roof across from the Bradbury building.
Again this version of the narrative reopens the whole “Is he or is he not a Replicant?”, question.
I don’t believe Deckart was a Replicant and I don’t think it matters that Ridley says he was. The final film is a creative end unto itself. It doesn’t matter that Ridley intended for us to infer that Deckard was a Replicant, or that earlier drafts of the script made the point more directly. All the fans of the film own the completed work equally with Ridley. Once Blade Runner was born on screen, the story was all of ours. In the finished product, judged without earlier intent, the unicorn element is not enough to show Deckart was a Replicant.
Below is an interesting quote, taken from Rutger’s official website, of the story behind the “I’ve seen things” speech. For fans of the film, seeing the newly uncovered draft is a must.Get it at Game Of the Art. Thanks also to io9.
Originally it was a bit longer, like a half-page of dialogue. So I said to Ridley the night before we shot it, ‘This is way too long. If the batteries go, the guy goes. He has not time to say good-bye, except maybe to briefly talk about things he’s seen’ Life is short – boom! I truly felt that the ending of this picture should be done very quickly, I mean, we’d already seen this opera of dying replicants; I didn’t think the audience would stand another protracted death scene. So I said to Ridley, ‘Let’s do it very fast, and do it as simply and profoundly as possible. But also, let Batty be a wiseguy for a second’. Ridley said, ‘Yes, I like it’. So when we filmed that speech, I cut a little bit out of the opening and then improvised these closing lines, ‘All those moments will be lost in time. Like tears in rain. Time to die’.
But you know, everyone always writes about me and that speech, and ignores the screenwriter. I thought David Peoples, the man who wrote that version of Batty’s soliloquy, really did a beautiful job. I mean, I loved those images he came up with -’c-beams glittering near the Tannhauser gate, attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion‘. I thought they were really interesting, even if you didn’t understand them. The whole idea there, is that once he stops talking, the dove flies. You never really see the moment of Batty’s death, the dove says it for him.
