Friday, June 4, 2010
Dangerous Days - The Making of Blade Runner
If, like me, you're a sad Blade Runner fanboy you'll be fascinated by the three hour doc Dangerous Days by Charles de Lauzirika which the mysterious SME1984 has uploaded onto YouTube. It explains pretty much everything you've ever wondered about: the fate of the fifth replicant, the unicorn, who invented city speak, who wrote Roy's last line, the voice over, the endings. It is utterly compelling stuff and seemingly everyone has been generous with their time and thoughts. Near the end of the documentary Guillermo del Toro talks about how he left Blade Runner as a completely different person than when he went in, embracing this vision of the future. I felt the same way except I didn't really see this as vision of the future at all. I saw the movie in an empty cinema in Belfast in 1982. I went home in the rain, past the bomb sites and security check points, as the army APC's and Land Rovers drove past me and the intelligence corps's observation gazelle helicopter hovered continously above at 1000 feet. To me Blade Runner was always more about the now than the future and it seems more nowy than ever.
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51 comments:
Nowy is nice.
Deckard is *not* a replicant!
Way to put things in perspective Adrian.
Currently reading "Resurrection Man". I had never heard of the S.B's before. It seems to me that R.M. might have been an influential novel to some of the modern Irish Crime writers, as it came out some time ago.
Something unintended crept into my mind as I was reading this, so I poked around a little. This documentary is apparently part of the DVD Special Editions released in 2007.
Now I'm curious about the copyright ramifications of posting the entirety of this, and whether many of us, who depend on the validity and sanctity of copyright, should be watching it.
Just wondering.
Seana
Thank you.
Matt
I completely agree. If you believe the auteur theory of film making then the film is the director's vision and he is the author and Ridley wants us to believe that Deckard is a replicant. However nobody else thinks it and it isnt logical. The fifth replicant was another woman who David Peoples wrote in and was to have died and had a cool sounding replicant funeral. Unfortunately they ran out of money.
Sean
Yeah I know Eoin a little bit. You should read his book about spooks following Princess Diana. I thought it was his best.
Dana
I think it might be a good thing for Warner Brothers. Get more people interested in the film and buy the DVD or the box set. And if they dont like it, they will make youtube take it down.
More likely I think will be the response of Vangelis's record company who will object and make youtube take it down.
I haven't seen Blade Runner, but the picture you paint of when you saw it is an...interesting one to me. I can't "see" real life being like that being an American all my life. Picking your brain would be interesting I think.
Phil Dick's daughter aint bad looking at all.
Yes, by the time the movie was made it didn't look all that m,uch like the future. It's interesting that when Philip K. Dick was writing and publishing his books he wasn't one of the "big-names" in sci fi. I remember at a convention in Boston in 1977 people dismissing him as a paranoid crank and a bad writer.
Now, he may have borrowed heavily for his ideas about identity and reality, he still wrapped them up in sme cool packages.
And if someone ever makes a movie out of The Man in the High Castle I'm there.
Glenna
I can't tell if you'd like it but I certainly do even after all these years.
Anon
And as I understand it she's the executor and principal heir of his estate, which you may want to know if you're an Argentinian polo player or creepy European royality.
John
There are a lot of bad books. Roughly twenty by my reckoning. But six good ones and another six great ones and thats not a bad score. I'd go along with High Castle from 62 but for me the period 1970-1982 is when PKD really got interesting.
Glenna
Oh and yeah picking my brain is not half as interesting as you'd think it would be.
I'm with Matt, Deckard is not a replicant. If he is, as Sir Ridley claims, then there's no internal logic to the plot.
Simply put, if Deckard is a replicant, there's no way he would continually get his ass handed to him by the real replicants in hand-to-hand combat.
This mention of auteur theory reminds me of LOST a little bit...and how the head writers/exec producers would go on podcasts or TV specials and tell the audience that the story was never about all the crazy s--t or mysteries on the island, it was always about the characters. Apparently, half the audience had been wrong the whole time about what LOST was.
But I digress.
Brian
In general I say believe the writers not the director. None of the writers on Blade Runner feel that Deckard is a replicant.
However the writers on Lost arent really telling the truth are they? They would have us believe that they had this coherent vision thing going on when in fact they were obviously making it up as they went along.
Adrian,
Thanks for the info on "12.23." Going to give it a go, after "Dead Yard", which I have now, and am also reading along with R.M.
Never saw BLADE RUNNER but I'm going to give it shot, as it sounds interesting.
Seana,
My uncle lives in Santa Cruz, and my mom, who has become a huge fan of this blog's host, has him hooked as well.
Off topic, but I don't know why the sports world is going ga-ga over the replay of the supposedly blown call that cost Armando Galarraga a perfect game. The two angles from which the play is shown are simply inconclusive. They do not show Galarraga's foot hitting the bag before the runner's.
==========================
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
OK, that comment had nothing to do with blades, but it did involve a runner.
Brian, that was an interesting comment about what Lost's writers claim for the show. Without having seen the show, my tendency is to suspect the writers are talking shite.
For some reason, authors seem to consider character more respectable than plot. In two years' worth of hearing writers asked: Which comes first, plot ot character? I have heard just one (Leighton Gage) say plot. I think authors look down on plot, at least for public consumption.
==========================
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Peter
This is my comment to the New York Times debate blog on the matter:
adrian mckinty
melbourne
June 3rd, 201010:16 pm
Reversing the call now by Selig would be making a bad situation worse. The game is finished and that's an end to it.
Ok, now on to the more important point. The analogies with rugby, cricket, football etc. are largely false because baseball is all about trusting the umpire to call balls and strikes. A player who vociferously argues balls and strikes is - rightly - tossed from the game because baseball's entire existence depends upon the fiction that umpires know where the strike zone is and call it consistently pitch after pitch, inning after inning. This of course is a nonsense but we need to believe in this fiction for there to be any baseball at all. Undermining the umpires authority by allowing video replay or overturning the game result would be pulling back the curtain Wizard of Oz fashion to reveal this inconvenient truth.
Yes it's tough luck when a call doesn't go your way but there is no objective external truth in baseball. The truth is decided on the diamond by the umpires and if we start taking away blocks of certainty from them the whole Jenga-like structure of baseball is going to collapse.
Sean
I got the book when it was still a "work in progress" so I forgot what the title was there. Its great though.
Adrian, I watched a trailer of it, I might just give it a try. It looks like an interesting movie but the weirdness level might be a bit much. We'll have to see.
As for Lost, I'm pretty sure the writers were B.S-ing everyone about knowing where it was going. When the ending finally came it seemed to much like something they wrote because they didn't know what else to do with it. I was pretty disappointed.
I'm barely managing to keep my eyes open long enough to type this. I'll catch up on the other replies and the posted link in the morning.
Sean--your uncle lives in Santa Cruz? Does that mean I'm going to have to clean up my act and start telling the truth? I certainly hope not.
I haven't ever really got into the Bladerunner cult, though I remember going to see the director's cut of the movie with some friends--I think it was one of the first where they did that wasn't it? But I am a Philip K. Dick fan. I am not sure I am as into the late,late stuff as I was into the early stuff. Actually, I enjoyed pretty much everything he wrote. Maybe Adrian could give us a list of some sort. I know he hates that activity, but we could beg him I suppose...
Which comes first, plot ot character?
"What is character but the basis of action; what is action but the illustration of character?" - Henry James
Marco
Good old Henry James. Great quotes, interesting guy, generally pretty tedious books. His brother however...
Peter
You can have a good story with boring characters. The Matrix for example has four or five really dull characters, even the villain is (I think on purpose) dull but the plot carries you along and the film is a good one.
You can also of course have a succesful work of art with a poor plot and good characters. Waiting For Godot pour example.
And there are the books with boring characters and boring plots which are just amazingly successful. We all know about lots of those.
Glenna
Well it is science fiction so it is going to the weird.
Seana
A quick list of my top 5.
1. A Scanner Darkly
2. Flow My Tears The Policeman Said
3. The Man in the High Castle
4. Ubik
5. The Divine Invasion Trilogy
True enough Adrian.
Thanks for the list, I was needed more books to hunt down :)
5. The Divine Invasion Trilogy
That's cheating, you know.
I also like:
The Cosmic Puppets - Eye in the Sky - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch - A Maze of Death
And many of the short stories.
Adrian, I should have mentioned that those authors who always answered, "Character before plot" were crime writers. I had no reason to doubt them, but I think there's a feeling among them that crime writing has to be more than shoot-em-ups and fistfights.I don't know; call it the male-protagonist-who-drinks-and-has-relationship-problems syndrome.
==========================
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Peter, I think in crime fiction it's a reaction aainst the criticism that books aren't really "literature" because they're about clues and puzzles and the characters are just a means to an end.
But most literature has been moving away from plot-driven narratives to character studies - that whole, "domestication" of liteature from Heingway going into war zones to get stories to Cheever in the suburbs and, well, whatever it is we have now.
Thanks for the list and the supplement, Adrian and Marco. I've read all of them except Ubik I think, and probably no short stories. But it's been so long since I read any of them that it's probably time for a revisit.
I like Henry James, though. A lot. Turn of the Screw not so much.
That's it. Character is considered more serious than action. But I can also well imagine a reaction in which writers say the hell with it and write stories that are more purely plot or action, just for the hell of it.
They were quite a talented family, Hank and his brother Bill James.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Adrian,
I just finished 50 Grand this morning..I really enjoyed it. I'm curious, how much of your description of life in Cuba is true to life and how much is made up for the sake of the story?
Glenna
Fairview is entirely fictional. Cuba entirely true.
Peter, John
I've been thinking about this and for me its neither. Almost always its the words that come first. The words hovering around a particular image or idea. The image grows and then character and plot come second. Of course thats maybe why I have so many abandoned novels in my drawer.
If dont think I've ever gotten a really good completely original idea.
Seana
In that case you should try Colm Toibin's The Master.
Marco
Yeah it is a bit of a cheat but I did seem them in 1 volume once.
I've been thinking about this and for me its neither. Almost always its the words that come first.
Nice to hear that, too. That's another thing that crime writers rarely talk about in my experience, at least not in public: words. I wonder why they would fail to acknowledge the material out of which they build their stories.
At last year's Crimefest. I cheered when Steven Hague added prose style to plot and character as key constituent of crime writing. Few crime writers do this.
==========================
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
I've been thinking about this and for me its neither. Almost always its the words that come first.
It's funny, that's exactly what I've been trying to put into words as I've been reading your book. I get frustrated with a lot of authors because even though they describe every detail of the wood on a table, you can't really picture the scene and I find myself skipping paragraphs to get back to the story. In reading 50 Grand, I could "see" Cuba even though there weren't those paragraphs of long descriptions. It makes a difference.
Fairview is entirely fictional. Cuba entirely true.
I suddenly feel very sheltered..
The Divine Invasion Trilogy - sounds like it would have been a good title for C S Lewis's science fiction trilogy if he had put them all together under one cover (That Hideous Strength, Out of the Silent Planet, and Voyage to Venus). Like me, these are maybe a bit too old-fashioned for youse guys, but I like science fiction when there is a clever metaphor going on - but one that a normal guy can get.
Lost? well that is a good title too for me!
I get frustrated with a lot of authors because even though they describe every detail of the wood on a table, you can't really picture the scene
Stephen King said something like, you can write about a rabbit, in a cage, with a blue, number 8 on his back. There is no need to provide added info on the rabbit or the cage. It is the blue # 8 that is the important detail to the reader and the story.
Marco, you've been around here long enough to know that cheating on lists is kind of a McKinty trademark.
Colm Toibin's The Master--noted. It's funny but there were two novels about James that came out at the same time--I can't remember who the other author was. But since there were two, I didn't read either.
And as Barzun says, any truly original ideas would of course be completely ignored. So I wouldn't sweat it.
There is no need to provide added info on the rabbit or the cage. It is the blue # 8 that is the important detail to the reader and the story.
The #8 is what would be important to a Red Sox fan like Stephen King, isn't it.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
I have to say that although I think S. King's advice is good in its way, I don't think it should become a universal prescription.
If you ask me, life's too short to read a book about some sicko who goes around painting numbers on rabbits.
Maybe it's bad with rabbits, but it seems to be perfectly okay with sheep. I mean if painting animals is your thing.
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