Ridley Scott sat down with GQ magazine for a retrospective video interview and revealed that “Blade Runner” financiers initially questioned his decision to cast Harrison Ford in the lead role. Ford was already Han Solo in “Star Wars” at that point in his career, in addition to having been chosen by Steven Spielberg to headline “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Apparently, the financiers weren’t 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 were like, ‘Who the fuck is Harrison Ford?’ And I said, ‘You’re going to find out. ‘ Harry became my main man.
Spielberg was in post-production on “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and gave Ford a thumbs up when Scott asked if he should cast the actor in “Blade Runner.” Ford was interested in working with Scott on the film because he scored a more dramatic character than Han Solo and Indiana Jones. The dramatic depth of “Blade Runner” is also what appealed to Scott.
“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 had actually written a play based on 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 which takes place in an apartment. I loved the dialogue, but I wanted to see what would happen when he walked through the door.
“Blade Runner” didn’t start out as a critical or box office darling. It took time. Scott still remembers the skillet he received from Pauline Kael in The New Yorker. She wrote that the film “has nothing to offer the public” and that “if someone comes up with a test to detect humanoids, perhaps Ridley Scott and his associates should go into hiding.”
“Man, four pages of destruction,” Scott said of the review. “She destroyed me. I’ve never even met her! …It’s insolent. At my level, it’s insolent.
Watch Scott’s full video interview in GQ below.
