In a way, there's something of a positive note hidden within having witnessed the decline (of sorts) of a
Great Movie Director over a couple of decades... it leads you to begin to truly appreciate what a concerted, gestalt effort making a cinematic masterpiece is.
At 15, having been utterly blown away when first experiencing it (the original release cut) around 7 years old, I went out to HMV in Town and bought
Blade Runner: The Director's Cut (still pretty much the definitive version for me) on VHS with about £16 of my own pocket money. It was part of Warner Home Video's
Maverick Directors series; some of you probably bought that one too I imagine, it looks like this:
Warner released quite a few class flicks under that particular label - I was properly getting into my films then, and I still remember going and buying
Badlands,
Don't Look Now,
Pee Wee's Big Adventure,
True Romance,
The Man Who Fell To Earth, and the Director's cut of
The Wild Bunch all from the same series. Cost me over a hundred quid overall, but an awesome little video sub-collection nonetheless, and there were a few others in the run too like
Deliverance and
Performance that my pockets just couldn't stretch to.
Anyway, if you take a look at that packaging, it's
The Director's Cut of a Sci-Fi
'Masterpiece' released on the
Maverick Directors label, and if you asked me back then who "made"
Blade Runner, I would have instantly answered The Peerless Visionary Genius Ridley Scott. But today, I think it's the one film out of all of those I bought with the least sense of 'one man's vision' about it. It's still my favourite by lightyears, but I now consider it to be the collaborative artistic fruit of Syd Mead, Douglas Trumbull, Jordan Cronenweth, David Snyder, Lawrence Paull, Hampton Fancher, David Peoples, Terry Rawlings, Vangelis, Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, and countless other cast & crew members whose ingenuity and improvisation significantly shaped the final, perfect product, with Ridley being the creative manager overseeing it all, demanding constant excellence and stubbornly carrying it to completion against all obstacles. Scott gets his name plastered all over it, but it's no more his very own
"master's piece" than can our European Cups be considered entirely down to Paisley/Fagan/Benitez alone. Ridley Scott had helped assemble a phenomenally talented side for both
Blade Runner and
Alien [Giger, Cobb, Foss, Goldsmith, etc.], and it's his Keegans, Dalglishes & Gerrards (and Kennedys, Faircloughs & Biscans) whose art and industry brought it all to fruition.
Point I'm making, is Ridley Scott ever such a visionary without an assortment of absolute visionaries-in-their-field doing the groundwork for him? A true classic of any genre seems to - more often than not - require a variety of brilliant creative minds all contributing at the very top of their game, under the leadership of a shrewd, resourceful, resolute figurehead (a la Kubrick), along with that strange magic of shit just coming together at the right time & place. I believe Ridley needs to sprinkle his auteur glitter on the solid foundations handcrafted by clever artisans and wordsmiths, reining in the movie mogul megalomania and paying closer attention to the all-important little details (like he once was famed for), if he's ever to reach anything like the artistic heights he scaled with the work his Big Industry Name is built upon. There seems to be this sort of creative 'laziness' that pervades his stuff of recent years, like "oh that'll do, it'll all look so slick they won't notice", whereas he used to demand take after take after take to achieve utter perfection, brilliantly pissing everyone off in the process; that's what makes it so much more disappointing - that was his
thing, what helped make him one of that collection of
'Maverick Directors', the seal of quality craftmanship that had fairly come to be expected of him. Essentially, he needs to get back to doing his due dilligence.
I say all this in anticipation, if that's the word, of his
'Blade Runner sequel', coming hot off the heels of the 30th anniversary, which I'm sure will have the studio especially eager to get it rushed out while the iron's hot, while there's still a renewed exploitable surge in interest. Hopefully, those who also worked on the original (if any are even hired again!!) will want to protect their legacy, and with any luck can themselves exercise better creative quality control than seems to have happened on this
not-Alien quasi-prequel.
