It’s a question almost as old as the movie itself -- is Blade Runner’s Rick Deckard actually a Replicant? Is the hunter also that which he hunts? The true nature of the Harrison Ford character has been shrouded in ambiguity for decades, a fact complicated by the multiple cuts of the 1982 classic film, the various, often contradictory quotes from the people who made the movie (including director Ridley Scott and Ford himself), and of course the very mindset of Blade Runner, which operates in that middle ground between mystery and revelation.
And now, with the release of Blade Runner 2049, the question of Deckard’s status as human or Replicant is coming up once again. I spoke to Ford and the team behind the film recently, and while no one was revealing any spoilers, we did get into what it means to be an android and why this question is so important in the Blade Runner films. Watch the video above for the full chat, or read on…
“It matters a lot to Replicants,” said Ford on the issue of Replicant or human. “Because they’re assigned to their lives. They’re manufactured. You know, they’re biologically manufactured. And not in the old-fashioned, fun way, but in a lab. They’re owned. And so they can be assigned to a lifespan, to a horrible job. And then they can be retired according to the wishes of their maker. That presents certain moral issues, doesn’t it?”
Director Denis Villeneuve thinks it’s the question that’s most intriguing here, not the answer.
“I think it’s interesting, too, to see a character that is doubting about his own identity,” says the French Canadian filmmaker. “At the birth of the first Blade Runner, the book that inspired the first Blade Runner, written [by] Philip K. Dick, had that very strong sense of inner paranoia, where people were doubting about [themselves]. And I think the question is more interesting. There’s more -- I love mysteries. So I think that it’s more interesting than ... answering that question.”
Jared Leto plays Niander Wallace in 2049, a latter-day Tyrell who has continued the legacy of mass-producing Replicants. His character sees Replicants as the way of the future for mankind, which is definitely a different perspective than most of the humans in these films take towards their android slaves.
“Sometimes you wanna know who you’re sleeping with,” he says. “Other times, you don’t really have to. But I think that it’s a fascinating world. And I think what really works about Blade Runner is it takes us to a place that could exist. It takes us to a place that could be us in the future.”
Guardians of the Galaxy star Dave Bautista also costars in Blade Runner 2049 as Sapper Morton, and he takes a pretty sympathetic approach to the Replicants and, as Roy Batty once put it, what it means to be a slave…
“A lot of people may have missed in the first one, but … the more I watched it, the more I understood that the Replicants, they weren’t really the bad guys,” he says. “They just… all they wanted was to live. And how do you not appreciate that?”
Blade Runner 2049 opens in theaters this Friday.
Talk to Senior Editor Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottCollura.
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