The knives are out: How Blade Runner was plagued by rows between its director and star

By Geoffrey Macnab
Published: 05 October 2007

In hindsight, it is no surprise that the set of Blade Runner (1982) was so unhappy. In one corner was Harrison Ford, at that stage the most bankable star in movie history. "James Stewart, Humphrey Bogart – I don't care who you put up there. This guy was generating more box-office dollars than any human being ever," says his co-star in the film, Edward James Olmos. "He'd done Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and he'd just finished Raiders of the Lost Ark."

In the other corner was the British director Ridley Scott, the ex-art school student from South Shields who had by that stage directed more than 2,000 commercials and a pair of highly respected feature films, The Duellists (1977 ) and Alien (1979).

Scott was used to having his own way – but so was Ford. On most of his movies, Ford was treated with kid gloves. Directors would fawn over his every move, cater to his every whim. That wasn't Scott's method. "Do it again," he'd gruffly tell his star. It wasn't his habit or inclination to flatter his actors. Besides, Scott had his own battles to fight with the Hollywood studio bosses and wasn't about to defer to his leading man.

"My sets are usually hilarious, great fun, and everybody wants more," he protests at the idea that he is an autocratic film-maker. "I had already done The Duellists. I had already done Alien. All those were happy sets and I was two and a half thousand commercials in – probably the most successful commercial maker of that day. I know how to run the floor. But in Hollywood, I was a new kid on the block."

Scott regarded the studio bosses as interfering control freaks. He didn't blame them, though. After all, making a sci-fi epic like Blade Runner was an immensely risky and expensive endeavour. Any false step that Scott might make could cost the studios millions of dollars. They therefore questioned every decision he made. Scott's reaction was to snap back. As he says today: "The only way I could get through this was literally to drive the bus – so I drove the bus and I don't think it was a very happy set."

Ford's discomfort was evident. "He did not like that picture. He never liked it," says Olmos. Adding to his discomfort was Ford's lingering sense that perhaps it had been a mistake to accept the role of Rick Deckard, the replicant killer. This was a man who beats up and kills women: a futuristic version of the kind of private eyes you find in Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, but also a character with a very dark side. Whatever else, Deckard was no Indiana Jones.

In September, when Warner Brothers organised a press junket at the Venice Film Festival to celebrate Blade Runner: The Final Cut, a 25th anniversary version of the film, almost the entire cast seemed to be in attendance: Sean Young, Rutger Hauer and Darryl Hannah were all there, as was Scott. There was no sign, though, of Ford. The film is clearly a source of torment as much as of pride to him. Perhaps that is why his performance still registers so strongly. There is a bristling intensity – a sense of a barely suppressed anger – that you do not find in his more conventional action hero roles.

Still, Scott says that he had little idea a quarter of a century ago just how influential Blade Runner would prove. It had been a difficult production, but after his battles with the studio and his difficult star, he had moved on. As he puts it, he didn't have "sleepless nights over the film".

Back in the 1980s, Scott was much in demand as a director of pop promos. He couldn't help but notice that band after band kept on talking about Blade Runner. "It's always interesting how rock and roll gets it faster than anyone else," he says today.

Then, he discovered from Warner Brothers that Blade Runner was the second most requested title in its entire library of films, behind only Casablanca. In the early 1990s, the film was shown at the Santa Monica Film Festival. By mistake, someone had sent an old 65mm preview copy rather than the version originally released. Suddenly, the audience realised that this wasn't the film they knew. Scott credits this screening with sparking the interest of the studio in releasing a new version of the film.

It is one of the ironies of the DVD era that the same Hollywood companies that imposed their will on reluctant directors are belatedly allowing them to have their way. The "director's cut" works for everyone – it gives the film-maker the chance to fulfill his or her original vision, while providing the studio's home entertainment arm with a new product to market.

Scott's first director's cut of Blade Runner was released in 1992, without the voiceover or the happy ending. Now, it is being seen again in a restored, remastered version, featuring previously unreleased and extended scenes, and new, improved special effects. In truth, though, the essence of the film has never changed. This is a story about technology threatening to annihilate humanity. It portrays Los Angeles in 2019 as a dystopian metropolis, dark, brooding and dirty.

You can't exactly call the film (based on Philip K Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) prophetic. The idea of a grim futuristic world controlled by big, bad corporations was already a cliché in 1982. Scott has also always acknowledged that he owed as much to Raymond Chandler-like private eye yarns as to sci-fi in the way he shaped his story.

Even so, Blade Runner seems as topical as ever. Its premise is that the Tyrell Corporation's replicants – or cyborgs – are being used as slave labour "off world" and, after a rebellion, have been declared illegal on Earth. At a time when Western countries are terrified of potential terrorists in their midst and of foreign labour stealing jobs, this storyline has a strange new resonance.

One actor for whom the film has never lost its mystqiue is Hannah. While others in Venice recalled a difficult and sometimes fraught production, she spoke in openly nostalgic terms of her experiences as a teenage actress on Blade Runner. "It's my favourite film that I have ever been in. My inspiration to be in movies was to live in another reality, and in this case it was built for me to the most detailed, beautiful extent. The sets were exquisite, the costumes were exquisite," she said as she proudly displayed a scar on her elbow from one of the scenes in which she slipped on set fell through a window. "I didn't have to work at all to be transported to another reality."

Hannah's remark is instructive. The reason that Blade Runner is still being talked about 25 years after it was made is precisely that it takes viewers into a bewitching but highly unsettling futuristic world.

Warner Brothers is promising that the new version is the final and definitive Blade Runner. Scott, it seems, is not so sure. "It's like finishing a painting – you never really do," the former Royal College student says, adding that there is always room for improvement or re-thinking. "You still walk into a room and look at it."

'Blade Runner: the Final Cut' goes on limited release on 23 November; the special edition DVD is released on 3 December.

[via The Independent]

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Ingmar Bergman: Unpublished letters show the Swedish auteur was courted by the American studios

By Geoffrey Macnab
Published: 12 October 2007

Cary Grant in The Seventh Seal? Laurence Olivier in Wild Strawberries? Jennifer Jones in Summer With Monika? Robert Ryan in The Virgin Spring? Harry Belafonte in Cries and Whispers? Jean Seberg in Persona?

Of course, such casting in the films of Ingmar Bergman would have been absurd. However, I have seen documents lodged in the Ingmar Bergman Archive at the Swedish Film Institute that show all of the above discussed working with Bergman at one time or another.

In a 1959 lecture entitled "What It Takes to Make a Film", Bergman told students at Lund University that film-makers were like conjurors, but that their ability to create magic was dependent on their films being able to make money. The moment films lost their audience, "the conjuror would be deprived of his magic wand".

We are so used to the idea of Bergman as a great European auteur that it is easy to overlook the battles that he – like every other director – had to fight with financiers, producers and distributors over which actors he used.

"To produce a 2,500m-long tapeworm, which sucks life and spirit out of actors, producers and directors. That is what making a film involves," he gloomily explained. "That and many other things, much more and much worse."

Bergman clearly found the "business" of film-making sapping and sometimes soul-destroying. "It would be of interest," he suggested, "if a scientist could one day invent a scale or measure which could tell how much talent, initiative, genius and creative ability have been destroyed by the industry in its ruthless effective sausage machine."

Part of Bergman's greatness lay in his uncompromising approach to his work – his refusal to be sucked into the sausage machine. Nonetheless, when you read his business letters to his American agents, you quickly realise how many temptations were laid in his path and how close he – like almost every other major European director before him – came to being co-opted by Hollywood.

By the early 1960s, Bergman was a major force in the US. The Virgin Spring (1960) had won a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries had both been successes on the US arthouse circuit. The Hollywood studios were desperate to work with Bergman and were ready to pay him huge amounts of money.

"My success depends on my making films, which I have written and directed all by myself," Bergman wrote to his US agents in 1959. With either naiveté or outrageous cheek, he asked if Hollywood could simply "order a film by me, in exactly the same way you order a picture of a painter, without first telling him what it is going to be like. I think that would be the best of all the ideas."

This was never going to happen. The whole point about the Hollywood system was that film-makers became part of the machine. They were pampered, flattered and paid outrageous amounts of money, but they were obliged to sacrifice their independence. That was the nature of the Faustian pact. As Bergman's agent wrote back to him: "At the present time I do not think that the major companies, and they are the only ones able to finance important pictures, will simply order a film made by you as one orders a painting."

Even so, the Swedish director was clearly intrigued and flattered by the interest that Hollywood showed in him.

One of the first – and least likely – proposals was for Bergman to direct actor and crooner Belafonte in a film about Pushkin in 1959. This was always going to be a non-starter. "I have now given up my mind to make the Belafonte film," Bergman wrote (in his idiosyncratic English) to his US agent Bernie Wilens at the William Morris Agency. "I think that B is not the actor who shall create the genius Pushkin."

Belafonte was ready to travel to Stockholm to lobby Bergman. Plans were made to screen Belafonte's latest film Odds Against Tomorrow for the Swedish director, but it quickly became apparent even to the thick-skinned Hollywood agents that Bergman wasn't going to be swayed.

Unabashed, the agents continued to suggest new projects that could present Bergman "to the American audience in your first American effort". Soon, they were proposing that Bergman should direct a film called "Jean Christophe", to star Hope Lange and to be produced by her husband Don Murray.

"Hope Lange has starred in quite a few pictures here. Undoubtedly, you must have seen The Best of Everything and Peyton Place," Wilens wrote to Bergman in a fit of misplaced confidence. One film that Bergman was highly unlikely to have seen was a Hollywood melodrama like Peyton Place. This project also quickly stalled.

David O Selznick (one of the most famous producers in Hollywood history) invited Bergman to spend a week with him in Nassau to discuss potential collaborations. Selznick was keen for Bergman to direct an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Victory or a project called "The Wall" to star Jones, his wife and the lead actress in A Farewell to Arms. Bergman was quick to dismiss such proposals. After all, he had worked with Selznick before.

"At that time I was very young and wrote a script on Ibsen's A Doll's House," Bergman recalled. "Mr Selznick ows [sic] me still $2,000, that I had the right, after our contract, to get. When I applied to the agreement, Mr Selznick's representative answered: 'You have to be thankful for what you get. If you want to bring an action you have to do that in USA, and I assure you that Mr Selznick has the economical possibilities to find the best lawyers.'"

Bergman was furious when the US trade press announced prematurely that he had struck a deal with Paramount. Nor was he impressed when the studio bosses came courting him in person. "I often cogitate over these American producers," he wrote. "When they meet an artist, the whole time they talk about how artistic they are themselves. They talk about their lives, their married complications, their practical jokes and their pictures. They uninterruptedly weigh and measure the artist they talk with... They believe that their power and their money make them interesting, and they unconsciously expose their amazing lack of spiritual quality."

The Swedish director admitted that his encounters with studio moguls invariably made him think about the famous encounter between Samuel Goldwyn and the playwright George Bernard Shaw. "Dear Mr Goldwyn, after our long conversations I now understand that you are interested in the art and I am interested in the money," Shaw is reported to have told the studio boss.

Nonetheless, there was one US project that really did tantalise Bergman – a possible adaptation of Albert Camus' The Fall (La Chute). The rights were in the hands of producer Walter Wanger (a Hollywood veteran who had worked with Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang, and who had recently produced Invasion of the Body Snatchers and I Want to Live!).

When the project was first mooted in the late 1950s, Camus was still alive and Bergman was keen to work with him. The early signs were promising. The director was clearly fascinated by Camus' book (about a lawyer who falls from grace), and was determined to make the film "without compromise and with real ruthlessness".

There was no chance of that. The agents were already busy tinkering. United Artists, the potential financiers, wanted Grant and Ryan in the leading roles. Bergman immediately balked at such an idea. "It is a matter, of course, that I am choosing the actors myself," he protested. "Cary Grant is a very good comedy actor but has no qualifications at all to play the lawyer in La Chute."

It was even suggested that Grant (an admirer of Bergman's) should meet Bergman face-to-face in London to try to talk him round. The Swedish director was having none of it. Nor was he any more receptive when Laurence Olivier was suggested instead. After Camus' death in 1960, he abandoned any idea of making The Fall.

American projects continued to be floated, but now even the agents grudgingly accepted that he was not just another director for hire, ready to be made part of the latest Hollywood star-driven "package". He did eventually make films in English (The Touch and The Serpent's Egg) and work with American actors (Elliott Gould and David Carradine, respectively). However, the idea – which seemed a possibility in the early 1960s – that he might follow the example of his fellow Swedes Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller and have a stab at working in Hollywood was soon abandoned.

Nonetheless, Hollywood figures remained intensely curious about Bergman. Among the most poignant business letters in the Bergman archive is one written speculatively to him in January 1979 by the American icon Seberg, who was to commit suicide later that year. "You are a very busy man and I shall be brief," she scrawled in blue biro in a letter addressed to Bergman at the Opera Company in Stockholm. "For so many long years, I have been wanting to work with you. Maybe you know my film work, for example Breathless, Joan of Arc [directed by Otto Preminger] and Bonjour Tristesse."

Her weight, she informed Bergman, was 47 kilos, her age 40. "I look a bit like Bibi Andersson," she suggested. It was true – she did have an uncanny resemblance to Andersson, one of Bergman's best-known actresses. Both were sylph-like, with close-cropped blond hair. She adds a postscript: "Have you ever gone through psychoanalysis?"

The letter is written in Swedish, a language Seberg had just begun learning (perhaps expressly with the idea of approaching Bergman). "Wouldn't it be possible, I humbly beg of you, to try and make a film together?" she asks, signing herself off as "the most devoted friend you have".

Bergman, it seems, didn't send a reply.

Ingmar Bergman's 'The Image Makers' is released alongside Victor Sjöström's 'The Phantom Carriage' by Tartan on 12 November; Geoffrey Macnab's book on Bergman will be published by IB Tauris next year.

[via The Independent]

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Samuel Fuller: Dark knight

The director Sam Fuller created some of the most powerful war movies of the Fifties. He might get the credit he deserves at last, says Geoffrey Macnab
Published: 15 October 2007

"He has a tabloid mentality... he has to hit you with the headlines, hit you with the prose," Martin Scorsese once said of the maverick film-maker Sam Fuller. To those of you who don't remember or know him, Fuller was one of the great pioneers of American cinema. His disciples range from Scorsese to Jean-Luc Godard, from Quentin Tarantino and Curtis Hanson to Wim Wenders and Tim Robbins.

It is hard to say whether Fuller was a highbrow in lowbrow garb, or vice versa. Whatever the case, his movies dealt in provocative, intelligent and sometimes sensationalist fashion with issues that other directors wouldn't go near.

Long before Brokeback Mountain, he was exploring the idea of love between cowboys in I Shot Jesse James (1949). He was ready to tackle such subjects as racism and insanity in Shock Corridor (1963), and even paedophilia in The Naked Kiss (1964).

His war films have a ring of authenticity that you don't find in Saving Private Ryan or The Thin Red Line simply because he was speaking from first-hand experience. As an infantry man, he was on Omaha Beach on 6 June 1944.

Three of Fuller's best films – House of Bamboo (1955), Fixed Bayonets! (1951) and Hell and High Water (1952) – have just been released on DVD in the UK for the first time. They deal with typical Fuller subjects – US ex-GIs on a murderous rampage in Tokyo, veterans fighting a rearguard action during the Korean War, and an ex-Navy officer trying to stop the Russians from dropping an atomic bomb on Korea.

But Fuller wasn't only a great film-maker. In his younger years, he was a celebrated New York crime reporter and pulp novelist. Now, more than 60 years after its original publication, his 1944 bestseller The Dark Page is being republished. It is an embroiled Oedipal tale about Carl Chapman, the editor of a New York tabloid, and his young star reporter, Lance McLeary.

The reporter is investigating a murder that the editor knows more about than he is letting on. The book works both as a hardboiled thriller and as an evocation of a lost era in US tabloid journalism, when the hard-drinking and endlessly cynical reporters all behaved as if they were on leave from The Front Page .

Christa Lang, his widow (Fuller died in 1997), points out that there were some striking parallels between Fuller and his fictional creation, the brilliant but amoral editor. In the novel, Chapman is appalled when a tubercular woman turns up at a Lonely Hearts Ball he has organised to boost circulation, claiming to be his wife. In real-life, Fuller himself was once trapped into a bigamous marriage. When he was 24 and had just sold his first screenplay (the musical Hats Off) to Hollywood, he was dragged down to Tijuana, Mexico, by a real-life femme fatale who married him there.

The only hitch was that Fuller's new wife, Mae Scriven, already had a husband – the legendary comedian, Buster Keaton. The fact that Keaton had wed Scriven by accident (or so he claimed), during an "alcoholic blackout", didn't change the legality of the situation. Fuller was so appalled that he quickly annulled the marriage.

By the 1970s, Fuller had become a cult figure among a new generation of directors and young counter-culture rebels. Jim Morrison, the lead singer of The Doors, wanted to form a production company with him.

The German film-maker Wim Wenders, who cast him in four of his movies, calls him "one of the great movie directors of the 20th century, sure. But most certainly its greatest storyteller. In my book, at least." Even so, he is a forgotten figure in Hollywood.

'The Dark Page' by Sam Fuller is published by Kingly Books, priced £10.95; 'House of Bamboo', 'Fixed Bayonets' and 'Hell and High Water' are out now on DVD

[via The Independent]

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