Director Denis Villeneuve Proved to Us He Loves Blade Runner More Than Anybody

More than anything, Blade Runner is a story about the end of empire, capitalism taken to its grim logical conclusion. That is the case for both the 1982 classic directed by Ridley Scott and the long-awaited sequel, Blade Runner 2049 (out Oct. 6), starring Harrison Ford and Ryan Gosling. The profit motive has destroyed the environment; the wealthy have fled to interplanetary colonies; and those who remain on Earth — humans and androids alike — live in dense squalor congested by pollution and garish advertisements. And yet, it’s also beautiful. Director Denis Villeneuve (Arrival) says that despite the bleakness of Blade Runner 2049‘s subject matter, his film is fundamentally an optimistic one. He spoke to TIME about illustrating this vision, bridging the three-and-a-half-decade gap between the original and his sequel, and why his film needed a hopeful coda. You faced a daunting task: not only making a sequel to one of the most celebrated films of all time, but also dealing with a highly specific visual world. What traits of the original film did you feel you needed to preserve? Villeneuve: In the first movie, you were seeing layers of time. Most of the time in sci-fi movies, the world is purely a vision of the future, but in the original Blade Runner, you felt the dirt that was coming out of ages. That was something I wanted to bring back. I wanted to make sure that we were as specifically true to film noir as the first movie was. I wanted the atmospher...
Source: TIME.com: Top Science and Health Stories - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized blade runner harrison ford Hollywood movies Ryan Gosling Source Type: news