Leading men aside, when it came to casting, Villeneuve noticed
something strange. There are faces that fit the Blade Runner universe and
faces that don’t. “There is something theatrical in the first movie, very
operatic,” he says. This is what led him to Hoeks for Luv, the Dutch actor
reading a Roy Batty scene from the original in her impressive audition tape.
And for Joi (both names pun on emotional states), he found Cuban actor
de Armas, who like Hoeks wasn’t even born when the original came out.
Asked to define Joi, she says she is “K’s best friend, his lover, his
cheerleader... She has a big surprise.”
For Neander Wallace, Luv’s superior and resident of a minimalist
high-rise, like the first film’s Tyrell, Villeneuve needed a rock star. “Our first
thought had been David Bowie, who had influenced Blade Runner in many
ways. When we learned the sad news, we looked around for someone with
qualities like that.”
They found them in Jared Leto, erstwhile rock star and Method
exponent. He was “highly dedicated” says the director, but alas can say
no more. Not even whether Leto sent his cast-mates an origami rat.
of the sequel is bigger and
grimmer. With only the budget to portray one neighbourhood, Scott had
imagined an industrio-grim metropolis that splayed from San Diego to San
Francisco, street after street of scrambled multicultural subsistence. But K’s
search will lead him out to the suburbs, enshrouded in nuclear fog the colour
of orangeade, ghost zones evacuated by the rich for the offworld dream.
“I asked Denis to give me one word to encompass his film,” reveals
production designer Dennis Gassner. “And he said: ‘chaos’.”
This is a more turbulent vision than Scott’s tech-noir — a dystopia of a
dystopia, where the disintegrating ecosystem brings toxic snow and banks of
roiling mist. The population is more diverse and desperate. “I hope this is a
worst-case scenario,” says Gosling, wondering at the film’s prophetic powers.
On the four-hectare backlot, standing sullen against parched fields, is
a lonely farmhouse. This is for the opening sequence. It is a sequence with
history: lifted from Dick, it was conceived by Scott to open the original,
with Deckard “retiring” a farmer, pulling out his jawbone to find a serial �