It takes one question — one simple, unassuming, innocuous question — to launch the infamously stoic Hollywood handsomes Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford into a five-minute round of animated banter. The question being: Was it intimidating for Gosling to work with Ford on Blade Runner 2049?
“He does a lot of his off-camera in Ugg boots with a cashmere wrap, so it took away the intimidation,” Gosling says, startling Ford into a belly laugh.
Ugg boots and a cashmere wrap? Surely that’s a rumour.
“Now it’s a rumour! No, of course not,” Ford says.
“I think he did that for me, not for his own comfort,” Gosling powers through, unperturbed by the denials. “Although I did find it very uncomfortable, too.”
“The crew was comfortable with nudity. But for you, I knew it would be distracting,” Ford concedes.
Gosling, marginally more serious for half-a-second, says the whole cast and crew — particularly director Denis Villeneuve and himself — were concerned with what Ford would think of their day-to-day shoots: “Denis and I often daily would say, ‘Is Harrison going to like this?’ [He has] a bull[expletive] meter, and a great one at that, and it helped us navigate some of our course.”
“Nobody ever asked me anything,” Ford disputes.
“Well, your face said it all,” Gosling says.
“That’s acting,” Ford retorts. Then, more earnestly: “Listen, [Ryan] arrives as a fully accredited — uh, what do they call ‘em? Actor. With a substantial career, with an agile intelligence, and a full member of the fraternity of storytellers. We’re all equal.”
“And a contract where I agree to a smaller trailer, which helps,” Gosling adds, always after the last word.
30 YEARS LATER
From the outside, Blade Runner 2049 seems like an impossible undertaking. It picks off thirty years after Ridley Scott’s cult classic Blade Runner, hurtling forward from the film’s 2019 setting. Gosling is Officer K, a chiselled operative who much like Rick Deckard (Ford) before him is hunting down replicants, i.e. genetically engineered human facsimiles.
One of the leftover questions from the 1982 film is whether Deckard himself has been a replicant all along. Part of the fun, Ford says, is that audiences could choose either.
“Replicants are indistinguishable from human beings except for the conditions under which they are made. Replicants are made industrially, if you will, and human beings are made in the fun way,” he quips, speaking to Gulf News tabloid! in Berlin.
The upcoming Blade Runner is shrouded in a bigger mystery, with Jared Leto as the blind, sinister mastermind Niander Wallace, who births these advanced Nexus models and delivers Shakespearean monologues in the process. Dutch actress Sylvia Hoeks is his conflicted right-hand, Luv (kind of a Harley Quinn to his Joker), while Cuban actress Ana de Armas plays Gosling’s love interest, Joi (who may or may not be human).
Meanwhile, the climate has gone berserk and Los Angeles looks more like a refugee camp, says Villeneuve; its outskirts are ruined, and a battle between hot and cold has left people crumbling in the centre of the city. There’s also an information blackout.
“An event that would have happened between both movies erased all the digital world in a split second, so it means that they lost everything. They came back to an analogue world, so my character needs to travel and meet people instead of sitting behind a computer,” says Villeneuve.
It’s ambitious enough that the movie nearly didn’t get made. The budget has been reported as anything between $150 and $200 million dollars. Large, looming, non-CGI sets provide breathtaking backdrop to the tense story. Original director Ridley Scott switched gears into executive producer, allowing Arrival director Villeneuve to take the reins. Visually, it retains with what made Blade Runner so striking: lights and shadows, and a colour palette that oscillates between overwhelming yellows and blues.
“Every decision I was making, I was thinking about [Ridley]. I felt a relationship with his aestheticism. I didn’t want to know when he will watch the movie — I would have died of a heart attack. I just wanted him to feel respected and that I didn’t [expletive] it up,” says Villeneuve.
The sequel is an understandably tough sell — perhaps even tougher than the first. (“I needed to be at peace with the fact that I could be, in the future, hated by everybody,” as Villeneuve puts it.) Advances in cybernetics and technology have put sci-fi in the unenviable position of needing to consistently out-do reality; shows like Black Mirror and Westworld have given it their best shot, while Villeneuve had to “kill off some elements of modernity, of science, in order to be able to go back to [making] an adventure movie.”
DOLLAR SIGN
Gosling was 12 years old when he watched Blade Runner, ten years after its initial release. He had rented it for a dollar as part of a four-for-four summer special and calls it four bucks well spent.
“It was unlike anything I had experienced before. It was transportive, very complicated emotionally. It felt very grounded and possible, and at the same time, it felt like this romantic nightmare. It created its own genre, really. Future noir,” he says.
But for all the accolades it has received, the film wasn’t a box office success. It took a while for it to bring money back into the studio and it received a thrashing from American critics.
“It may have been, by some assays, a failure,” admits Ford. “For me, it couldn’t have been a failure because it was a very useful experience. It wasn’t my money, so I wasn’t concerned about that aspect of it.”
Ford points towards the countless filmmakers who have cited Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner as the reason they became filmmakers — Villeneuve being one of them — as an indicator of ultimate triumph.
TOUGH SHOOT
For Ford, any doubts about returning to this franchise decades later — like Star Wars, like Indiana Jones — were assuaged by the script. The cast and crew had been shooting for months in Budapest before the 75-year-old actor arrived on set; it was different from the first film: “There was a little less rain, a little less strain, [plus] 30, 35 years to think about it. And it was fun. It was really fun.”
As for Gosling, who celebrates his 37th birthday in November — could this be the beginning of more Blade Runner films?
“You know, we’ll see,” says the Canadian actor. “It’s a very rich and complicated universe, and there are certainly more stories to be told. Whether they’ll have me back remains to be seen.”
There is, of course, still one little issue that needs to be dealt with: the trailers.
“It wasn’t in the contract, but when I saw that [Ryan] had the bigger trailer, I did say that... I won’t say what I said at the time, but ‘WTF’,” recalls Ford.
“I lived in the literal shadow of his trailer for three to four months,” says Gosling.
“If it was the shadow, what was the reason for the lawn furniture that suddenly grew up outside of your door?”
“You gotta laugh to keep from crying, I guess.”
QUOTE/UNQUOTE
Director Denis Villeneuve on Jared Leto’s method acting: “I deeply loved it. I had heard all those stories, and I had a bit of apprehension. The character is blind [and] Jared insisted that he wanted to not see. That was my Jared Leto experience. He didn’t come dressed as a woman, he didn’t send me a rat, he came on set blind. He never saw my crew, he never saw the set. A film set is dangerous — full of wires, full of holes. I was always afraid he would kill himself. I would direct him and say, ‘You’ve got to walk eight steps, and then you’re going to walk three steps, but just three, because if you do five, you fall.’ I had a lot of fun working with him. He’s crazy.”
RIDLEY SCOTT’S ‘BLADE RUNNER’ (1982): A RECAP
Set in a dystopian Los Angeles in 2019, Blade Runner is set in a future in which bioengineered androids known as replicants are manufactured by the powerful Tyrell Corporation (founded by Eldon Tyrell, played by Joe Turkel) to work on off-Earth colonies. When a fugitive group of replicants led by Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) escape back to Earth in an attempt to extend their lives beyond the fixed four years, retired LA cop and “blade runner” Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) accepts one last assignment to hunt them down. During his investigations, Deckard meets Rachael (Sean Young), an advanced replicant who causes him to question his mission. The film ends ambigously with Batty’s death which transforms Deckard and forces him to consider his own life, and he leaves with replicant Rachel, who may or may not have a short lifespan, to begin a life of peace.
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Don’t miss it
Blade Runner 2049 releases in the UAE on October 5.
