The Story Behind 'Blade Runner'

In 1982, the Nexus 6 was not an Android smartphone (heck, the iPhone was still 25 years away); it was an android in what would come to be regarded as a science-fiction masterpiece—the motion picture Bract Runner.

The story of how Bract Runner—and its sequel, Blade Runner 2049—fabricated it to the silver screen takes every bit many dips and turns as 1 of those flying L.A. constabulary cars. And the man in the driver'due south seat for much of information technology is a 79-year-old costless spirit now based in Brooklyn, screenwriter Hampton Fancher.

"I never idea about writing it in the first place," Fancher told PCMag. "I didn't experience qualified or interested in scientific discipline fiction. It was but a commercial venture idea for me, which I had never had before or since probably."

Hampton Fancher as seen in Michael Almereyda's ESCAPES. Courtesy of Grasshopper Film.

Fancher'due south motivation was personal: his close friend Brian Kelly, who starred in the hit 1960's Boob tube series Flipper, was partially paralyzed later on getting into an accident on one of Fancher's motorcycles in 1970. Even though it wasn't Fancher's fault, he on some level felt responsible for Kelly, who pleaded with Fancher to come upwards with a picture show projection. Fancher gave Kelly a phone number for Phillip K. Dick, who wrote the 1968 science-fiction novel Exercise Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Fancher met Dick in the mid-1970s, just Dick seemed to have petty use for Fancher; he seemed more than interested in Fancher'southward girlfriend. And so when Fancher gave Brian Kelly Dick's telephone number, he didn't think anything would come up of information technology. "It was only brand work, you lot know. It was a way he could follow a petty dream for a second," Fancher says.

Merely Kelly came back a week after and informed Fancher he had secured the film rights to Practice Androids Dream for a mere $2,000. Actress Barbara Hershey talked the reluctant Fancher into writing the screenplay, just Fancher—who had written a agglomeration of screenplays that weren't caused—agreed to do so only if Kelly covered his $300-a-month rent. A year later, the showtime draft of the Blade Runner script was done.

Kelly and Fancher brought in producer Michael Deeley—who won a Best Film Oscar in 1979 for producing The Deer Hunter—and the project got the green low-cal.

During filming, Fancher clashed with director Ridley Scott. Fancher at present looks dorsum on his objections as os-headed, but at the fourth dimension he was so incensed that he tried to accept his proper name taken off the credits. That effort failed, thanks to the intervention of David Peoples, who was brought in equally a second screenwriter.

The first fourth dimension Fancher saw the finished Blade Runner was at a screening for movie industry insiders at the Academy of Moving-picture show Arts and Sciences. He was prepared for disaster, but "equally before long as you saw that L.A. nightscape [in the opener], everybody lost their cookies," Fancher recalls. "There was a palpable joy in that theater. They loved it."

Fancher approached Ridley Scott after the screening and apologized.

Fast forward to the 21st century. Hampton Fancher starts hearing rumors that a Bract Runner sequel is in the works. Merely no ane from Ridley Scott's part calls him. Fancher's agent and friends urge him to attain out. "Hampton, this is your thought. You lot're the 1," they tell him.

"I said, 'Finish. I'm non going to do annihilation about that,'" he recalls. "My pride. So, I put it out of my mind, actually."

By 2022, Fancher had finished a book of brusk stories when his publisher called and said there was room for one more than. So, he took a scene that didn't make information technology into the original Bract Runner and turned it into a curt story. The afternoon he completed the story, he got a telephone phone call from Ridley Scott.

"He says, 'Hey, Hampton.' And I said, 'Ridley, you lot finally hit the bottom of the butt, didn't you lot? You must be desperate.' And nosotros laughed. And he said, 'So, you got any ideas?'"

Fancher reads Scott the outset paragraph of the simply-completed short story. And the director asks Fancher if he can come to England. On the flight to London, Fancher works on the narrative line for Bract Runner 2049 and later on writes the first draft of the screenplay. He creates the character of K, played by Ryan Gosling in the sequel (known as Kard in the short story). Like Deckard in the original Blade Runner, K isn't quite sure if he'southward a replicant.

"Hampton's DNA is in the start pic," says Michael Almereyda, director of Escapes, a documentary about Fancher'southward life. "Information technology's a dandy trajectory that his name is all the same on the film and that he'southward recognized as the co-creator of the story. Then it's non incidental. Whatever he did, information technology's not incidental."

Almereyda regards Fancher as a daredevil whose defiance of a conventional life has served him well. "He's chosen his path, fallen off the path, and fallen dorsum on various paths," Almereyda notes.

Those paths include going to Espana every bit a teenager and condign a flamenco dancer, and acting in dozens of movies and major TV shows in America, including Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and Perry Mason. During his Hollywood years, the alpine handsome actor was romantically involved with a number of actresses, including Teri Garr and Sue Lyon, the star of Lolita. The two married when Lyon was 17 and Fancher 24; they divorced 2 years later.

Fancher, who has taught screenwriting at NYU and Columbia, does not regard Blade Runner equally the pinnacle of his career. Only two other screenplays he wrote were made into movies. One of them, The Minus Human being, he too directed.

Fancher says he has iv or v finished screenplays upwardly his sleeve and he'southward hoping that his brief render to the spotlight with the Blade Runner sequel may help get one of them made.

"At this point because in that location's some knocks on the door, maybe I'll open the door and i of those things will come up to fruition," he told PCMag just prior to flight to Los Angeles to lookout man Blade Runner 2049.