Les Jones

A&E > Blade Runner: The Final Cut

Ridley Scott is releasing an extensive re-edit of Blade Runner:

But the director didn't stop there. As the millennium turned, he continued polishing: erasing stray f/x wires, trimming shots originally extended to accommodate the voice-over, even rebuilding a scene in which the stunt double was obvious. Now he's ready to release Blade Runner: The Final Cut, which will hit theaters in Los Angeles and New York in October, with a DVD to follow in December.

Wired: Part of your work in making the new version was eliminating visible wires. Given your legendary attention to detail, how did flaws like that get into the original print?

Scott:Because you can't make a spinner fly without a crank. That's why it was raining in the shot, to hide the cables. Today we assume it's all digital. It's not — it's a 2-ton spinner being hoisted around the corner by a large crank that literally brought it down, landed it, and took it off again. Bloody good crane driver, right? You have four points on the cable that keep it steady. When I watched the movie, I always used to sit there staring at the cables. Then eventually one or two of the geeks spotted them. So we took them out.

Whoa. So the rain that was considered atmospheric was to hide wires? Again I say, whoa.

So this sounds interesting, but I'm kinda skeered of the the George Lucas effect here. Scott starts cleaning up minor problems in FX and along the way "Oh, hey! While I've got the film reels out of the cans I might as well change plot points that fans have taken as canon for two decades." Effen George Lucas.