LUDIC LOG

From the DVD special edition of "Blade Runner", visionary director Ridley Scott and critically acclaimed writer David Webb Peoples discuss two scenes that were excised even from the well-known director's cut.

Scene 1: David Webb Peoples.

What I wanted to emphasize here was something that was lost, in the film version, from Dick's original novel, and that's the class conflict aspect. There was a tremendous sadness to the Decker character, not the least of which was because his divorce and tenuous financial condition left him unable to afford the preeminent status symbol of his era, an artificial animal. This is one reason why the scenes with the artificial owl at Tyrell Industries is so important.

In the scene where Rachel returns to Decker, weeping over her lost memory, I had written a scene where I'm able to explicate, in a relatively short time, some of the unresolved class conflict from the novel. What happens, basically, is that Decker and Rachel engage in a very casual, very natural, and yet very tense and erotic, discussion of the economic realities of America in 2021. Decker, it turns out, is (as in the novel) a confused, self-loathing bourgeois, while Rachel, although working in an ultra-capitalist milieu, was implanted with the memories of a Frankfurt Schooler. It makes their desperate kiss much more sensible and sensual.

The studio said it slowed the whole thing down. The amazing thing is, I wrote the exact same scene for "Unforgiven", and they said the same thing.

Scene 2: Ridley Scott.

We had dropped a lot of hints about the relationship between the commander, Roy Batty, and the pleasure-model Pris, but I felt that in the celebratory moments after they befriended J.F. Sebastian, and in order to drive that splinter between Pris and Sebastian that emphasized their otherness, they deserved a love scene. It would also help to establish the dichotomy between the replicants and the humans, how they are more similar than different, for Batty and Pris to have a relationship that mirrored that of Decker and Rachel.

Now, look here, at the screen. The way it was filmed, there's no way you can tell me that's "full penetration", as the producers claimed. And even if it were, it's done in the most tasteful possible way. How you get fellatio out of this part here, well, I guess the studio heads have a pretty active imagination. Maybe they should be directing the movies.