Blade Runner/Trivia

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• Accidentally Accurate: When Batty and Tyrell are arguing about how to prolong a Replicant's lifespan, Batty mentions something called "EMS". Tyrell says they already tried "Ethyl methanesulfonate" unsuccessfully. Ethyl methanesulfonate is an actual organic compound with mutagenic qualities, used in genetics. The scriptwriter later admitted he did no research for the conversation and the mention of a real compound in the Techno Babble was coincidental.
• Celebrity Voice Actor: In the 1997 video game, several characters are voiced by the actors who played them in the film.
• Completely Different Title:
  • Exterminator (Croatia)
  • Calls Himself RNR (Bulgaria)
  • The Relentless Hunter (Venezuela)
  • Imminent Danger (Portugal)
  • Bounty Hunter (Romania)
  • The Winged Bounty Hunter (Hungary)
  • Silver Winged Bounty Hunter (China)
• Creator-Preferred Adaptation: Philip K. Dick felt that the film (at least, the director's cut, not the butchered theatrical version) was superior to its source material, his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and was amazed at how the book was "escalated into such stunning dimensions."
• Creator Backlash: Harrison Ford refused to talk about the film for years due to the miserable experience he had making it.
• Defictionalization: Deckard's whiskey glasses and bottle, trenchcoat and even the tiles in his apartment have been made into real (albeit insanely expensive) products. Even the neon light umbrellas are available from Thinkgeek (albeit the Thinkgeek versions are. more practical LED/fiber-optic rather then neon tubes).
  • The police offices constructed in Union Station, Los Angeles for the filming still stand till today, in use as station offices. The crew was able to get a little bit of a discount if Union Station officials agreed to keep the set for practical use after filming was over.
• Enforced Method Acting: The scene with Chew was shot in a freezer and was ice cold, so the cast really were shivering.
• Executive Meddling: The ending in the original movie was changed by higher-ups due to its ambiguity, and narration was added to help dispel the ambiguity evident in most of the movie itself. The ending has -- thank God -- been restored and the narration deleted in the Directors Cut.
• Flip-Flop of God: Is Deckard a replicant? Director Ridley Scott and lead actor Harrison Ford, as well as screenwriters Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, initially said no. Ever since the Directors Cut in 1993, they now say yes.
  • More solidified now in that it's generally agreed upon that he is human in the theatrical cut and a replicant in the directors
• Hey, It's That Guy!:
  • Naturally, Dr. Jones is the protagonist.
  • Sheriff Dearborn is Sebastian.
  • Carinal Roark is Roy Batty.
  • Edward James Olmos in the role that made him famous (well, sort of) as Gaff. He only appears about three times, but he's got the best outfit in the movie and gets one of its last, and best, lines. If Deckard is a replicant himself, Gaff is presumably his human handler and the model for some of his fake memories.
  • Bryant is played by M. Emmett Walsh, who's been one of the ultimate 'That Guy's' over countless films, usually playing some sort of sleazy, amoral character.
• Prop Recycling:
  • The spinners' dashboard displays are taken from Alien. Ridley Scott directed both films, so this may actually be a Shout-Out.
  • The roof of the police headquarters building was originally the ceiling of the Mothership interior from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
  • One of the buildings next door to the police station is a model of the Millennium Falcon tilted vertically and covered with Christmas lights.
  • The Dark Star miniature can be seen in the background near the police station as well.
  • Additionally, later sci-fi films would sometimes recycle props and set pieces from this one. Be on the lookout for a spinner in the junkyard in Soldier, and check out Craig Bierko's apartment in The Thirteenth Floor.
  • Some of the Lord of Darkness' palace interiors from Legend (most notably, the huge, spiraling columns) were featured in this film.
• Throw It In: Somehow "The tiny elevator whizzes down the huge nighttime pyramid" turned into stars zooming past the elevator cage on the screen. Since there is no way you would actually see this from an earthbound elevator, as anybody who has ever strolled down a hill at night intuitively understands, the result was to inject an unintentional Flash Back into the visuals at that point ... which luckily fit together with Roy's Final Speech a few minutes later.
  • Or, it's a view of the constant falling rain from Roy's perspective in the glass elevator...
  • Rachael initially believed herself to be human, based on memories duplicated from Tyrell's niece (named Sarah in the novels).
  • Depending on the version, Deckard is hinted to various degrees to be a replicant with false memories himself, something that was overtly teased in the novelization. The film's director Ridley Scott says he is, while Harrison Ford and both of the film's writers say he is not. That particular argument is a good way to make enemies in the fandom. It's that divisive.
  • Interestingly, the climactic confrontation between Deckard and Roy Batty takes place in the Bradbury Building -- which was also the setting of "Demon With a Glass Hand", the classic Tomato in the Mirror episode of The Outer Limits. This probably was not accidental.
  • Additional behind-the-scenes material on the DVDs reveals that the movie script contained a scene in which Roy Batty, after killing Tyrell, enters a lab adjacent to Tyrell's penthouse apartment and finds out that the real scientist Tyrell died years ago; Roy Batty finds a cloning chamber and evidence that the "Tyrell" he killed was also merely a replicant, programmed with Tyrell's memories.
• Troubled Production: One of the most (in)famous in movie history.
• What Could Have Been:
  • In the early 1970s, a relatively unknown young director named Martin Scorsese was in line to direct the film.
  • This was offered to Ralph Bakshi. He passed on it, but recommended Ridley Scott for the director's chair. And the rest is history...
  • Dustin Hoffman was originally cast as Deckard. Scott intended to subvert the typical image of the burly Hardboiled Detective, and Hoffman would fit that well. This period of the film's pre-production got so far that even some of the early storyboards featured Hoffman's likeness on images of Deckard.
  • An earlier draft of the script, called "Dangerous Days" would have been a far more action-packed affair, including a famous unused scene where Deckard shot a seemingly innocuous man, then took his skull apart to reveal mechanical components.
• Word of Saint Paul: Harrison Ford has stated that he believed Deckard to not be a replicant, as being one would undercut the theme of his character rediscovering his own humanity, and turns the man vs. machine climactic battle into a robot vs. robot fight. Ridley Scott on the other hand, claims that Deckard was always meant to be a replicant. After the Directors Cut, Ford changed his stance and now says Deckard is a Replicant.