Steven Spielberg - Director, Producer
I thought Ridley painted a very bleak but brilliant vision of life on earth in a few years. It's kind of acid rain and sushi. In fact, it's coming true faster than most science fiction films come true. Blade Runner is almost upon us. It was ultranoir.
Zack Snyder - Director, Writer
I first saw Blade Runner when I was 16. It rocked my world. All those incredible images were burned into my psyche. It's one of those movies you can't help but quote, an involuntary reference source that will be recycled throughout cinema forever. It's like a lesson from the master saying, 'Go out into the world and do good.'
Guillermo Del Toro:
This movie is one of the movies that changed my life. I came out of it and I was not the same person. This movie, to me, embodies the elegance, the power, the uniqueness, of a film experience. Blade Runner is simply one of those cinematic drugs, that when I first saw it, I never saw the world the same way again.
David Fincher - Director, Producer
The voiceover in Blade Runner, if you listen to it, sounds like a guy reading prose while he's sitting on the john.
Joel Schumacher - Director, Writer
When I watch a movie, I like to have the feeling that the person (Jordan Cronenweth) who brought the look to the photography had a real vision, whether it's Blade Runner or The Wages of Fear. You feel you're there, inside that world. I appreciate that talent the way I appreciate a great piece of music.
Andy and Larry Wachowski - Director, Writer
Blade Runner was a benchmark science fiction film, a masterpiece. Of course there's influence. But we were like the only guys who liked that movie when we saw it, everyone else hated it.
Tony Scott - Director, Producer
Blade Runner for me is...Ridley's movie. Cause Blade Runner took a piece of his soul as well. Yeah. It was very hard. He did Blade Runner at a time when the film community, Hollywood was not ready for...that sort of obsession with detail.
Michael Crichton - Writer
But by "Blade Runner" in the 1980s, a different image of the future had emerged - a hodge-podge city that had grown organically, and was full of chaotic disconnects. It envisioned an Asian model of urban growth, and indeed many urban landscapes today look as if they are right out of Blade Runner.
Curtis Harrington - Director
One of my favorite films of the last 20 years or so is "Blade Runner." "Blade Runner" is just magnificent in its own way. But the director has directed a lot of guff too. So I can't say Ridley Scott is one of my favorite directors because he goes from directing a masterpiece like that to "G. I. Jane." So there's no consistency.
Chris Cunningham - Director
Ridley said some time ago that with Blade Runner, for him, the design was the statement. Well, for me," says Cunningham, "the atmosphere was the statement. I can't think of another film that has such a strong atmosphere. So melancholy, and the strangest feeling of nostalgia for a place and time that never was.
Joseph Kahn - Director
If you want to become an aesthetic filmaker there is no other way to cross that threshhold....unless you study Blade Runner. Blade Runner is almost a playbook, I feel, for filmaking of the last 30 years.
Brian Lonano - Editor, Producer
I definitely wanted "Attackazoids!" to be very experimental with its imagery, special effects and story structure. I don't think this will limit its appeal because science fiction is very impressionistic and image-driven to begin with.
2001: A Space Odyssey is a great film that is image-driven and its story is simple. Blade Runner is another great example. Not that I can compare myself with the greats.
John Alan Simon - Producer
When I first saw Blade Runner (when it was originally released), I was disappointed that it lacked the humor of the novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?". I thought it was a bit dull, though visually stunning. On viewing the Director's version, I've really upgraded my assessment.
Sara Maitland - Writer
Stanley Kubrick complained about Blade Runner, that if it was that difficult to determine who was a replicant - why did it matter? Why do they have to be hunted down? If robots are made by us and act like us, why are they not our children?
Mark Romaneck:
Of all the big, influential, science-fiction films, the ones that made a real serious stab at predicting the way things would be, this film [Blade Runner] has been the most accurate.
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Terry Gilliam - Director, Writer
After The Fisher King, Richard LaGravenese who wrote the film, and I went to the studio with his script for Philip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly. Nobody's done a Dick novel right yet; Blade Runner was stunningly good, but Dick's idea was missing - that people were killing replicants to buy real animals.
I saw how to make Scanner cheaply, and for it to be disturbing. But did the studio say, 'These two guys just made us our second-most profitable film of the year, let's give them the money to develop the idea?' No. I simply wasn't understanding the rules of this place called Hollywood.
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Paul Verhoeven - Director
I have to continuously run old movies to keep my faith in cinema. When I feel very depressed I look at Ivan the Terrible or The Rules of the Game or Metropolis or even Blade Runner, say, or The Terminator or something like that, or every Hitchcock movie � or maybe 50% per cent of them.
I need them � sometimes I come home completely depressed and I have to put them on. It�s so difficult in an industry where the parameters have become so much those of pure entertainment, to still keep your belief that cinema is an art.
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Christopher Nolan - Director, Writer
I have always been a huge fan of Ridley Scott and certainly when I was a kid. Alien, Blade Runner just blew me away because they created these extraordinary worlds that were just completely immersive. I was also an enormous Stanley Kubrick fan for similar reasons.
Before the shooting began, Christopher Nolan invited the whole film crew to a private screening of Blade Runner (1982). After the film he said to the whole crew, "This is how we're going to make Batman."
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Duncan Jones - Director
It looks like I'm going to be doing another science-fiction film next. I love Blade Runner, it's one of my favorite films, and I've always been really... depressed that there was never - not a sequel, because I don't think it's right to make a sequel about Blade Runner, but no one's really tried to make a film which was set in the same kind of world or had that same kind of field.
The only reason that I mention Blade Runner is because there?s something about that particular film, where they really created a believable and realistic living breathing futuristic world. For all of the other films that have tried to do that I don't think anything has come as close the way Blade Runner has to creating something believable. Something that feels real and organic.
It's like going to a real city and shooting a film there. You just get a sense that this place exists. In most of the science fiction films, it always feels a bit fake and a bit flat, but Blade Runner really didn't. That's the aspect of Blade Runner I'm hoping to capture.
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Andrew Dominik - Director, Writer
The problem with director's cuts is that no one really sees them. I'm not even sure if I believe in them per se, because you can't really give somebody back the first experience of seeing a movie.
I don't know how I feel about them, really. I guess there's no doubt that the director's cut of Blade Runner is better than the version that was released in the theater, but I saw that version when it came out and it still had a big impact on me.
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Mamoru Oshii - Director, Writer
People tend to classify my movies as cyberpunk fictions but I personally don't think they are. There are some films that I really enjoy such as Blade Runner, and they may have been helpful in making my movies to a certain degree, but I think many filmmakers consider so other than just myself.
When you create a film dealing with humans and cyborgs, you have no choice but to refer back to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, as this movie is probably the foundation of movies with this theme.
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Richard Linklater - Director, Writer
My opinions on previous Philip K. Dick adaptations are probably really similar to everybody else's. I think we all rally around 'Blade Runner'. I like the original cut of 'Blade Runner' more than the Director's Cut -- the so-called 'Director's Cut'. I liked the narrator.
I hear there's a new DVD coming out with three different versions, and I'm waiting for that, because the original cut has become unavailable. It's more in the film noir tradition to have a narrated voice -- and you kind of need it to pull the elements together. It's not cheesy or bad in any way. It's classic. But I saw it in the theater at the time, too, so maybe it's just special to me.
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Ari Folman - Director
If you see Blade Runner today, it's probably the best sci-fi movie ever made. It still holds up, it's still a very fresh movie. Unbelievably made, with so much talent - everyone involved. And everything's made for real! Can you imagine that?
There were no digital effects back then. If you look at Prometheus, for example, there's no comparison. Ridley Scott has all the money and technology in the world to make it, but his handcrafted movie was ten times better. But it depends on who does it.
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Alex Rivera - Director
The most memorable things about Blade Runner is the ambiance of the world, this part-Chinese, part-Chicano future where robot slaves are rebelling. It's the stew of the future and getting to see that which draws us into science fiction.
. . . . . Blade Runner and so many other science fictions tell us about a future where robots are built to work and all of a sudden they rebel and want to kill people. Then Harrison Ford or Will Smith or somebody has to kill the robots. Intellectually, that's what they give us.
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John Toll - Cinematographer
I met Jordan right after he shot Blade Runner. I went to a screening of Blade Runner with him when he saw it from the beginning to end for the first time � other than in timing sessions. It was unbelievable.
It was about two o'clock in the afternoon, and there were about 20 people in the theater. Bing Sokolsky and Ernie Holzman were there. We all did commercials together. I was Jordan's operator and Bing and Ernie were his assistants.
We sat in the theater with Jordan watching Blade Runner. He was so enthusiastic it was like being with a kid at Christmas. It wasn't his work that excited him. He was almost detached from his specific work.
He was actually watching the photography as part of a total story. He got very vocal as we were watching the film. He started whooping and hollering and it was genuine. You couldn't blame him, it was absolutely stunning. No one else in the theater seemed to mind.
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Bill Mechanic - Producer
To me -- and I don't mean this with any disrespect at all to the film -- there was no best picture last year. Was "Gladiator" the best of the choices? Not for me to judge. ... "Gladiator" didn't transport my life, and nothing on those top five movies did.
Erin Brockovich didn't change my life. They're good movies, well made, good pieces of entertainment. I enjoyed them. Do I think they're the ultimate test of greatness? Ridley Scott made "Blade Runner," and "Blade Runner" is, to me, a much better movie than "Gladiator." "Alien" is a better movie than "Gladiator." Those movies will stand the test of time or have stood the test of time.
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William Gibson - Writer
Blade Runner came out while I was still writing Neuromancer, he wrote in his online diaries a couple of months ago. �I was about a third of the way into the manuscript. When I saw (the first twenty minutes of) Blade Runner, I figured my unfinished first novel was sunk, done for.
Everyone would assume I�d copped my visual texture from this astonishingly fine-looking film. But that didn�t happen. The general audience didn�t seem to get it, relatively few people saw it, and it simply vanished, leaving nary a ripple. Where it went, though, was straight through the collective membrane where it silently went nova, irradiating everything from clothing-design to serious architecture.
What other movie has left actual office-buildings in its stylistic wake? The future we live in today is something not only the '50s could never have dreamed of, but I think would have regarded with deep and genuine horror. As far as the '50s is concerned, we're living Blade Runner and Neuromancer right now."
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Greg Pak - Director, Writer
I think Blade Runner is tremendous. I like the way the replicants have real emotional lives; they may do terrible things, but we understand their motivations and almost love them anyway. I actually prefer the way they're depicted in the movie to the way they're depicted in the original Philip K. Dick novel.
Dick makes them incapable of any real emotion, which strikes me as false. Ultimately, if a machine is able to think with as much complexity as a human and has the ability to learn, I'm guessing that an emotional life will inevitably follow.
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Tyler Bates - Composer
There are moments in the score where it definitely reflects that and you would probably say Blade Runner, because you hear us playing an CS-80 keyboard, which is pretty famously associated with that film . . .
Blade Runner just spilled over into pop culture all together so, I think it was one of those early movies that song and score sort of had a similarity to them as far as how people perceived their musical experience with that film. There are just a lot of movies like that.
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Michel Chion - Composer
Sometimes a film appears which tries to recover this idea of an organic unity of all sounds. In my opinion, Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, US, 1982) is one rare recent film which tried to do this and which succeeded because of an analogical content relation between the electronic sounds as noise and Vangelis' synthesised music, and also because of the rhythmic conception of the film as a whole.
This is a kind of rhythmic pyramid which goes from broad rhythms on the deep notes, electronic 'drones', to quicker rhythms in the ultrahigh notes, and also because of the 'symphonic' conceptualisation, the admirable organic mix achieved by Graham Hartstone.
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Vito Acconci - Designer, Architect
Blade Runner is probably just as big an influence on architects as a lot of architecture. But you know Blade Runner came at such an interesting, Post-Modern time, and came out of that, but it was a very different version of Post-Modernism than a lot of architects were doing at the time. It was Post-Modernism because it was desperate, because you were building on the ruins of the old, which Rome has done for a long time.
In 2001, the future is all white, it's built as if there was nothing there. Blade Runner kind of shrugs its shoulders and says, well, you can't get rid of everything, so let's build on it. Blade Runner, I don't know if it introduced me to the concept, but I started to think of architecture as a parasite.
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Mark Leckey
The film that has had the greatest influence on me is Blade Runner (1982, directed by Ridley Scott). I love this film for the same reasons I love Roxy Music: they share a sense of yearning for the past and the future, for another place and another time, but it�s flattened out, so everything seems to occur at the same time in the same space.
In Blade Runner you really feel that everything and everyone is piled on top of each other, mounting up like wreckage at the feet of the angel of history.
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