What If Our World is Their Heaven

by Gwen Lee

  There’s this one scene—I can talk about this because this has been shown, it was shown over NBC-TV here in a segment on special effects. And again it’s the woman in the transparent raincoat who’s trying to run through this crowd. And there’s just people everywhere. I mean, and they’re not going anywhere, they’re just wandering around, they’re just—and they’re not milling they’re—it’s like they’re all looking for trouble, with great—with a mixture of apathy and desire, you know. And she just cannot get across the street because of all these people. She collides, and you can’t even—I can’t even figure out what she collides with. All of a sudden you see her hit something and fall. There’s a phone booth there and it’s just—it’s just like everything that is awful about the city but at the same time everything that is fascinating about it. And, uh, the production studio explained that what they foresee in this city of the future—and this in many ways is a futurist projection—it’s not so much escapist, it’s kind of a futurist projection of what life will be like in every major metropolis forty years from now. Uh, that there will be these incredible racial ethnic groups, like, all the different Oriental countries, Laotian, you know, all the different, Indonesian, you know, Chinese, you know, Korean, Hong Kong, I mean, all these languages, this polyglot from Southeast Asia. And, uh, it’s grim but the way the production company explained it was the seamy part, you know, the tawdry part is infinitely more tawdry, infinitely more seamy than what it is now. But the glamorous part is infinitely more glamorous. And what happens is the street, the actual ground level has become essentially one vast access or service road to the city. The city is up in the air. And all the people on the outside, sort of the losers, are walking around on the street level. And all the beautiful people are up about forty stories. And when you get up forty stories it’s like getting through Dante’s Divine Comedy, going up through hell to purgatory to heaven. And they are just living great, I mean, they are doing fine up there, forty stories up, and then it becomes very, very glamorous.

  So you go from this incredible thing with the rubble and the grit and the smog and the weird looking people and the incredible neon signs. I mean, those neon signs—I mean, the information that is fired at you in that film we were told you would literally have to go five times to see it before you could assimilate the information that is fired at you. For instance, going past a drugstore, there are actual magazines, with actual covers, with actual articles, and the same with the newspapers. That the titles of the articles and the names of the authors of the articles and, uh, some of them never appear on the screen. Some are only seen by the actors. Uh, the actors enter an environment when they were being filmed. I saw some footage, of a couple takes of Ridley Scott, uh, I mean, uh, not Ridley Scott, uh, Harrison Ford, jumping down from a low building onto the ground level, and it was a world that he was in, it was actually a different world and we were told, yes, when they are in that set they are in that world at that time.

  LEE: Are we talking about now like a whole new environment or a whole new concept in filmmaking—is this a new approach?

  DICK: There’s a lot of really new things involved here, because they’re using all the special effects in such a way in order to subordinate them to the characters. By making them lived in. For instance, one of the scenes that Sid Meed drew up was, uh, Harrison Ford’s kitchen. He went into a lot of detail about that, just the kitchen. In fact, right there is Sid Meed’s drawing. (points to drawing) There is the kitchen and right above it is the actual set with Harrison Ford standing there. That is the kitchen, you see, there’s the set and there’s the drawing. The kitchen alone is like an entire control room on a ship except that it’s lived in. Uh, somebody had pointed out that it turned out that when Kubrick filmed 2001 that the people on the spaceship, that when the actors went to put on the uniforms they discovered that the name of the hypothetical manufacturer of the uniforms had been stenciled on the inside of the underwear part, as if they had actually been manufactured in the future. And this idea carries throughout Blade Runner. That the actors are really in a world when they’re acting. I mean, they are seeing newspapers that are there only for them to see, that will not appear on the screen. And, uh, in fact, one of Doug Trumball’s technicians showed us a painting, a background of some neon signs, and when you see the film you think you’re seeing neon signs reading “liquor,” and “laundromat,” you know, and “drug-store,” you know, and “7–11” but actually you’re seeing the names of the different members of the production crew, they wrote their own names on the signs, it’s their names. But see, this happens so fast on the screen that your brain can’t pick it up. George Smith, you know, Ed Brown, that’s what the signs say. So you go five times and you still can’t get it all—it just fires, it’s a tremendous information dump. And the—on the audience—and see, looking back on what I saw twenty minutes of, I saw, I realized that what we are entering is an information decade. We are in an information decade. Information is the lifeblood, you know, the metabolism of the modern world. And basically people will be going to this film as information junkies. I mean, they will be going in as information junkies. When they see the film, they’re going to see much more information than they can absorb and they really will want to come back, because information is a stimulus to the brain, and the brain loves to be stimulated. The brain actually, the human brain, craves stimulation. And this movie will stimulate the brain, the brain will not be lulled. Harrison Ford said himself, “This is not an escapist film.” It really is not an escapist film.

  LEE: It’s not comparable then to Raiders of the Lost Ark, or—

  DICK: Well, in some ways it is because [of] how they got action. I mean, Harrison Ford again plays a man of action. Uh, there’ll be a lot of gunfire exchange, and there will be quite a bit of violence. But there will be a lot more besides, there will be a great deal besides. Now I’ve read the screenplay—

  LEE: Have you received a rating on it yet?

  DICK: They’re going for PG. They started out for R and they’re going over it and changing it to accommodate PG, and that’s because they want to make it possible for the kids to come to the film alone without, you know, having to have an adult with them. But they’re not making substantial changes, I understand. Um, it—it’s going to be what they call “hard-core PG.” In other words, it’s going to border on the edge of R. So it’s not going to be just something like the Disney studios, heaven forbid, turn out, like The Black Hole, which just, I mean, nobody over the age of twelve is going to go to something like that. Or if they do they’re not going to enjoy it. But—

  LEE: What about, you know, your original book, does Blade Runner pretty well correspond with that? I mean, are fans going to be confused if they read the book first?

  DICK: Uh, OK. Now I’ve read the screenplay. Now I have not read the screenplay that they actually used in shooting, because they changed everything, as is quite common in films, throughout, and they did shoot several endings. Maybe I’m not supposed to say this, but they shot three different endings that I know of. And they’re still deciding which to use. So, Ridley Scott shot all the possibilities that could occur at the end. They’re all there. They’re all in the can, and he’s trying to decide which one to go with. Now, the screenplay is excellent; they brought in a guy who had done some award-winning TV documentaries. A guy by the name of David W. Peoples. And he did that Debolt family one, remember that? He wrote that. And he did that Trinity one on Oppenheimer. And, uh, he went over the screenplay and he apparently went back to the book and he made a great screenplay out of it. Now, there are a lot of differences between the movie and the book, and, uh, what I say about this is, having given long thought to it—uh, and I haven’t seen the complete movie, I’ve read the screenplay, I’ve seen twenty minutes of the movie, but there are substantial differences, there’s no doubt about that, because I discussed it with Ridley Scott—is that each reinforces the other. That is, if you see the movie first, and then you read the book, you will
get more material when you read the book than you had had in the movie so that you would be adding material. Or, if you start with the book. Then you can go to the movie, and then you get more material. So they don’t fight each other. The book and the movie do not fight each other. They reinforce each other, but they are different. Now there were certain things in the book that were completely left out of the movie. Uh, the animals are left out, the electric animals. They, uh, the imitation animals are left out. Uh, in fact, animals aren’t really a factor in the movie at all. The sacredness of animal life. That’s out. And, uh—

  LEE: How long a picture is this going to be? They can’t fit in everything, I guess.

  DICK: No, no. The book had about sixteen plots going through it and they would have had to make a movie lasting sixteen hours. And it would have been impossible. And this is not how you make a movie out of a book. You don’t go scene by scene. I mean, this was the trouble with Death in Venice, for example. And you just cannot do it. It just won’t work out. Because a lot of the book consists of just long conversations. A movie moves and a book talks, and that’s the difference, you see. A book has to do with words and a movie has to do with events. But, uh, they cut out the part about Mercer, the savior, they cut that out. But they concentrated on the main theme, and the main theme is the hunting down of the replicants. And the effect that having to kill these replicants has on Rick Deckard, the detective, the attrition on him of killing creatures which although technically are not human, they are genetic replicants. They are official humans. And they are dangerous, uh, but he sees in them a certain beauty and a certain nobility. And, uh, he begins really to question, you know, what he’s doing. I mean, uh, this was really the main point in the novel, was where Deckard—the novel is set in a single day. In a single day Rick Deckard, the detective, tracks down all of the androids, as they’re called in the book, and kills every one of them, in that single day. So that it starts out with him getting up in the morning and it ends with him going to bed that night. During that one day he has “retired,” as the term is in the book, every android that has been assigned to him that day. And he wants the money very badly. He’s a bounty hunter, and he gets a set sum for each android that he kills. So the time is compressed in the book just to a twenty-four-hour period. But as he kills them, it becomes progressively more and more difficult for him, and he questions more and more what he’s doing. Until finally the distinction between him and the androids begins to blur. I mean, he is essentially doing something so awful that anything that they might do is equally awful.

  LEE: What is the motive behind this bounty hunting of the androids?

  DICK: It’s interesting in the book. The motive is that if he gets enough money he can buy a live animal. This is set after World War Three, and there are almost no animals alive. And animals are very, very valuable and they are a status symbol. And they have, like, animal row instead of automobile row—

  LEE: This explains the electronic animals.

  DICK: Yeah, right. So he wants to own a real live animal. And he’s got a fake animal, a robot sheep that grazes up on the roof of their condominium building. And it’s not alive, it’s just—it just goes through all the motions and all the neighbors are fooled and they think the sheep is alive and it’s just, you know, it’s got computer chips, you know, and, uh, (laughs) they even have these fake veterinarian organizations where—when your electric animal breaks down this thing shows up in a white coat, you know, and he looks like he’s a vet and he’s not. He’s an electronics technician. And they hustle this and they also have circuits built in when an electronic animal begins to malfunction it makes noises like a real animal. Like it gargles and wheezes and moans and its eyes roll up, you know, and it acts like its a sick real animal. So even when your animal malfunctions and it’s electric, you know, it still looks like it’s a sick animal.

  LEE: They’re not using it in the movie, though, that much.

  DICK: They’re not using it at all.

  LEE: Oh, not at all?

  DICK: No. they are not going to have animals. Animals are not functioning in the film.

  LEE: Oh. Sounds like an interesting part of the whole idea.

  DICK: Well, I kinda liked it. You know.

  LEE: Yeah.

  DICK: Uh, I liked the book, and I wanted to have the original novel rereleased, I did not want to do a novelization or have a novelization done based on the screenplay because I wanted to get some of this stuff about the animals—

  LEE: This is the Ballantine publication coming out?

  DICK: Yeah, that’s the Ballantine edition.

  LEE: Yeah, it won’t be based on the screenplay, then?

  DICK: It will be—the Ballantine book is exactly the novel that I wrote in 1968.

  LEE: It is?

  DICK: Precisely the novel I wrote. It’s simply a reissue of the original novel.

  LEE: Oh, I see.

  DICK: It will have all the things about the animals and all the things about this mysterious savior, Mercer, who has the miraculous power of bringing dead animals back to life which is like the ultimate divine power in a world where most of the animals are dead. Like, there’ll be a few cats, a few dogs, and so on. But some species are completely extinct. And everybody carries an animal book with them, like the Kelley Bluebook for cars, you know, and they are constantly appraising the cost and value of animals, which changes all the time. They look up and see what this month their sheep is worth, and they’re always going down to animal row and looking in the windows at the different animals and trying to work out down payments that they can buy animals on, get them home and so forth. They had to cut that out of the movie, because they wanted to concentrate on the hunting down of the replicants. So all the themes have to be carried by the actual contact between Rick Deckard, the detective, and the replicants, or as I call them, androids. And it really all comes to a climax between the detective and two particular ones: a woman, Rachael Rosen, who’s played by Sean Young, and that’s Rachael up there, and she’s an android, only she doesn’t know she’s an android.

  That’s an idea that I invented years ago. I have a lock on that idea, that’s my idea. That’s one of the few original ideas I’ve ever contributed to science fiction. I mean, most of my ideas are rehash—but that was my original idea, was that a guy could be an android and not know it. And I wrote that in a story very early, 1953, that story came out in Astounding and it was called “Impostor” and it was about a man who was getting ready to go to work at a big scientific research project and all of a sudden he’s arrested by the FBI and told that he’s not Spence Oldham, he’s an android who’s been sent to earth to replace Spence Oldham to carry a bomb into this great scientific research place to blow it up. Well, he thinks he is Spence Oldham. Well, it turns out he’s wrong: he’s an android, he’s got a bomb inside him, and the trigger that sets off the bomb is when he says, “Good Lord, I am an android.” And that’s all it takes. As soon as he says that sentence, he blows up. Destroys the entire, you know, half the planet, see. But that was a very early story of mine. That was one of the first stories I ever sold, so that idea is now public property. I mean, this is used all the time in science fiction, it’s like time travel, you know, or you know, ecology, or anything uh, people are always finding out they’re androids like in the film Alien, remember, one of the crew members turns out to be an android?

  LEE: Oh, yes. I remember that.

  DICK: Well, you know, what can I tell you. You know, I invented that idea. Well, the next step is that the person doesn’t even know himself he’s an android. It’s like Alfred E. Newman saying, “Who, me?” You know, it’s like, “I’m an android—you’re kidding!” You know, so, but I have a lock on that idea, I invented it, you know, and anybody who wants to use that idea they got to come to me. Or, so my attorneys say.

  So, in this film we have one of the replicants, doesn’t know it’s a replicant. I believe it’s Rachael. And she says, “I’m a what? I’m a replicant? Liar!�
�� You know, and then they tell her she’s got all these implanted memories, you know, and everything, and she says, “Damnation, some days you can’t win, no matter what you do.” But, you know, she’s real pretty, you know, and this happens in the novel. This happens in the novel, so, you know, I’m not giving anything about the film away because it’s all in the book. If you have a lot of money you can buy a copy of the book. I was telling you before, the book is now unavailable, you know, it’s a collector’s item, because it’s been off the market—we held it off the market to release it in conjunction with the film. It’s been off the market for a number of years. It was withdrawn, and uh—

  LEE: So they will release the screenplay version of the film.

  DICK: Well, OK, they will release the original novel and they’ll release a photo book, that is, there will be shots from the movie and they will have, like, 7,500 words of text from the screenplay to go with the photos, you see.

  LEE: Oh, I see. Sort of like a synopsis of the movie.