Ridley Scott felt Harrison Ford would be something exceptional in Hollywood, despite others’ doubts decades ago.
During a recent video interview with GQ magazine, the filmmaker reflected on the casting for 1982’s Blade Runner.
Ford, who eventually earned the lead part in the picture, was not as well-known as he is now. Despite the fact that the actor had previously played Han Solo in George Lucas’ 1977 film Star Wars and Steven Spielberg’s 1981 blockbuster Raiders of the Lost Ark, Scott required some convincing to be cast.
“Harrison Ford was not a star. He had just finished flying the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars,” the director explained. “I remember my financiers saying, ‘Who the fuck is Harrison Ford?’ And I said, ‘You’re going to find out.’ So Harry became my leading man.”
The plot of Blade Runner centres on Deckard (Ford), a Blade Runner who has to track down and eliminate four fugitive Replicants who stole a spaceship and came back to Earth to track down their creator.
The Gladiator II director also talked candidly about his goal of “inventing a new world” with the science fiction movie.
“I spent five months with a very good writer, Hampton Fancher, who’d really written a play adapted from [the novel] Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And so I read the book and felt there were 90 stories in the first 20 pages and I thought, ‘It’s too complex,’” Scott recalled.
He continued, “But I sat with Hampton and said, ‘You’ve written this beautiful story that takes place in an apartment. It’s an internal story where a ‘hunter’ falls in love with his quarry. Love your cadence, love the rhythm of your dialogue, love your dialogue, love the idea. I want to see what happens when he goes out the door.’ And from that moment on, we just went boom.”
In the end, Blade Runner became a franchise with TV series and a sequel. Later, Ford returned for Blade Runner 2049 in 2017.
