After years of creative wrangling and more versions than its obsessive fans can keep track of, “Blade Runner,” director Ridley Scott’s 1982 science-fiction cinema masterpiece, has finally been restored to its visionary original shape, thanks in large part to his longtime collaborator and DVD producer, Charles de Lauzirika.

“Basically the point was to get everything back to the way Ridley wanted it to be,” de Lauzirika says.

The film, which premiered at a special gala at the New York Film Festival in September, rolls out to theaters in New York and Los Angeles on October 5, followed by a big DVD release just in time for you to blow big bucks for the holidays on December 18.

Based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,” “Blade Runner” is essentially a 1940s-style neo-noir set in a dark, rain-soaked, neon-punk 2019 Los Angeles. The story follows Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a detective tracking dangerous human clones, or “replicants,” who have arrived from off-world colonies.

History of the future

“Blade Runner” was first released in theaters in 1982 to poor commercial and critical response. Scott was never happy with this version, but because of struggles over creative control (this was only Scott’s third feature) and an ownership tug-of-war (Warner Bros. had to cede to two producers who had a financial stake in the film), he was forced to “dumb down” the movie with an over-expository voice-over and an incongruously silly happy ending.

In 1990, a Warner Bros. employee accidentally sent an original workprint to a 70mm festival in Los Angeles. Cine-geeks everywhere went nuts. “So in 1992,” de Lauzirika says, “the studio rushed to release a cobbled-together director’s cut, despite it not being Ridley’s full vision.” In 2000, de Lauzirika was finally given access to “the vault” and went to work on what would become “Blade Runner: The Final Cut.”

New stuff

“People love the atmosphere of urban chaos in Los Angeles 2019,” de Lauzirika observes. To help better realize Scott’s dark, bleak world, they added additional street scenes of Deckard wandering around in the rain. “It’s minor, but it adds a lot of flavor,” he says. “Many of the changes focused on fixing the infamous continuity errors and glitches that targeted key things that took you out of the film or that hurt your appreciation of it.”

For example, when Deckard visits the snake dealer, his dialogue is wildly out of sync. So Ben Ford, Harrison’s son, came in to “re-mouth” the actual dialogue, and the filmmakers cut-and-pasted his mouth over Harrison’s face. “It’s funny,” the producer notes, “because Ben is currently the age that Harrison was when he made the film.”

They also brought back actor Joanna Cassidy to reshoot her face in front of green screen for the scene when her character, Zhora, gets shot and tumbles through glass. “When I was a kid and saw it in the theater, I remember thinking it was a very obvious stunt double with a bad wig,” de Lauzirika says.

Deckard’s ‘Briefcase’

Though the voice-over is still gone, de Lauzirika discovered an “alternative” Harrison Ford voice-over that he included, for fun, with the deleted scenes, part of the loaded extras in the “Deckard’s Briefcase” five-DVD collector’s edition. Also included is a new, three-and-a-half-hour documentary featuring artwork, archival footage (check out Daryl Hannah’s stunt double who looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger) and over 80 interviews with everyone from Scott and Ford to filmmakers who were hugely influenced by the film, like Frank Darabont and Guillermo del Toro.
 
Is Deckard a replicant?

And the ending is bleaker than ever. The 1992 version ended with a scene in which Deckard discovers an origami unicorn left by a character named Gaff, hinting that Deckard is a replicant. The scene was preceded by one where Deckard dreams of a unicorn (implying that his dreams and thoughts are programmed, like a replicant's), and de Lauzirika found footage from the original negative to make it clearer that Deckard is dreaming.

But the controversy rages on: Is Deckard really a replicant? “Ridley believes he’s a replicant. Harrison believes he’s not,” de Lauzirika explains. “And that’s the interesting thing: It’s really up to the viewer. Co-screenwriter Hampton Fancher brought up a good point, which is: It’s the question that’s interesting, the answer is stupid. The new final cut, it doesn’t say definitively one way or another, but it does have a few more clues. All of Philip K. Dick’s work is about questions of memory and identity, and this is no different.”

Does ‘Blade Runner’ still matter?

Beyond its sweeping influence on science fiction, cinema, design and even urban planning, "Blade Runner" also predicted—with startling precision—the pressing global social issues of today: corporate control, genetic engineering, immigration and urban overpopulation. “People who see this new release for the first time will say, ‘What’s the big deal?’ Because they’ve seen 25 years of post-‘Blade Runner’ and they’ll think it’s ripping everything off, and it’s not—it started everything we see now. Look at Times Square: that’s 'Blade Runner.'”

So is this the final ‘Final Cut’?

“Absolutely. This is the final-cut version,” de Lauzirika laughs. “That’s kind of the reason why I suggested to call it ‘The Final Cut,’ to basically sabotage any future attempts to recut the film. We promise. We swear to god. This is the last version of the film.”
 

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