You remember the spider that lived in a bush outside your window? Orange body, green legs - - watched her build a web all summer. And then one day there's a big egg in it. . . . The egg hatched. . . and a hundred baby spiders came out . . . and they ate her.
Implants. Those aren't your memories, Mofo members, they're somebody else's. I am Rick Deckard. Now let me show you the memories of directors and artists who weighed in on Blade Runner . . . . .
Directors And Other Artists On Blade Runner
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.
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.
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.
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.
Guillermo Del Toro - Writer, Director, Producer
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 voice-over in Blade Runner, if you listen to it, sounds like a guy reading prose while he's sitting on the john.
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.
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."
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."
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.'
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.
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.
I leave you now with this parting question. Remember when you were six? You and your brother snuck into an empty building through a basement window. You were going to play doctor? He showed you his and when it got to be your turn, you chickened and ran. Remember that? You ever tell anybody that? Your mother, Yoda, anybody, huh?