Blade Runner 2049: Ridley Scott Dissects His Favorite Scene from the 1982 Classic

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Well, I was the new guy on the block,

and not a kid at this point, I'm like 42, 43.

The scene would be Rick Deckard meeting Rachael,

who is -- we don't know at this point is a replicant,

we think is simply an extremely beautiful woman.

It's artificial.

Rick is being introduced to Rachael

by a man called Tyrell.

Tyrell is the head of this giant corporation,

probably wealthier than,

bigger than anything that we know of today.

In a sense becomes a kind of competition

between the skill of Rick Deckard, as a Blade Runner,

and deducing whether or not Rachael in fact

is human or otherwise.

In the scene, there's this device

which is called a Voight-Kampff machine,

which measures the blink in the iris

in reaction to questions,

therefore in a funny kind of way,

is a perfect lie detector.

And Rick sits at a table, and opens up the machine,

focuses on her eye, and starts to ask her the questions.

He shows you his butterfly collection,

plus the killing jar.

I'd take him to the doctor.

To Rick Deckard, it's just a joke.

Replicants are like any other machine.

He appears to be oblivious to her beauty,

and is unimpressed by what he sees,

and at the end of it he says,

how can she not know what she is?

How can it not know, he calls her it.

So obviously she's a race apart.

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So I'd done a lot of fashion, a lot of Chanel,

things like that, television commercials,

but this would be my third film.

And so I was very aware,

very, very, very aware of cosmetics,

I didn't love the hair on the first day,

I said, you know what, can we take the hair down,

and so what I did, I sat in there

and kind of fundamentally went through the hair again,

and the make-up again,

I think I ended up painting her lips, actually.

And I always thought of an actress,

I think I mean Hedy Lamarr,

who had a severity which was spectacular.

Of course it is.

I'm making the film at a time

when digital doesn't even have a word.

I said, how the hell do I differentiate between a replicant,

I need to have light in their eyes,

in the way that the leopard's eyes in 2001.

And I said, How the hell do I do that?

I want it there occasionally, so it's not insistent,

it becomes too robotic.

Every now and again, I want a glint.

So he said, let me think about it,

this is typical Doug, who came up with a simple half mirror,

you have a sheet of glass that is half mirror,

and the mirror is mounted on the camera,

in front of the lens at a 45 degree angle.

On one side, just behind the camera,

what in those days we'd call a pup, a very small light,

which is on a dimmer.

And you just turn it up, the subject sitting here,

looking straight into the camera, you turn up this light,

which is reflecting from the mirror into the lens,

but is not being photographed in the camera.

She moved, and you got golden light from her retina.

Genius.

I was always accused in my first, all my films,

I've been accused of being too visual, too pretty,

and I'm going, well, we are dealing in pictures,

so how could I be too visual?

I was very defensive of what I do, what I did.

There was a tray of water,

with mirror pieces in the bottom,

and somebody's doing that, of hard light,

and the light's doing that, and lapping all over the walls.

It was the set, the sets for The Shining, so one evening,

I drifted into the ballroom, where the bar was,

in the corner, that was a pretty spectacular set.

When I saw the film,

the barman came on, and it was Joe Turkel.

I went, there he is.

And I wanted a kind of almost comic strip,

the darks of a dark comic strip,

and I searched through a comic and I found these glasses,

and we made them.

Indulge me.

Joe, God bless him, thirty years on,

looks exactly the same as he did then,

I think he's pickled.

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