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Ridley Scott knew Harrison Ford would be someone special in Hollywood, despite others questioning him decades ago.
During a retrospective video interview for GQ magazine, the filmmaker recently looked back at the casting for 1982’s Blade Runner.
At the time, Ford, who ultimately landed the lead role in the film, wasn’t the household name he is today. Though the actor had already starred as Han Solo in George Lucas’ 1977 film Star Wars and Steven Spielberg’s 1981 movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, Scott still had to do some convincing regarding his casting.
“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.”
Blade Runner follows Deckard (Ford), a Blade Runner who must pursue and terminate four escaped Replicants who stole a ship in space and have returned to Earth to find their creator.
Elsewhere in the GQ video, the Gladiator II filmmaker also opened up about his vision of “inventing a new world” with the sci-fi film.
“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.”
Blade Runner ultimately turned into a franchise with a sequel and TV shows. Ford later reprised his role for 2017’s Blade Runner 2049.
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