number. Jettisoned by budget crunches, it has been revived for the sequel.
In some new guise, this is where we will be introduced to K.
Next door, an elaborate metal wall is under construction, part of
a chase sequence through a “trash set”. Evidence the film has a bigger
budget than its predecessor. “It is sustained by strong energy and action,”
promises the director. “But we will not be Marvel or Star Wars.”
Villeneuve has kept to traditional brushstrokes: models, sets, only
marginal CGI. Full-size spinners have been winched into the sky. Weta
Workshop has made miniature cityscapes in tribute to the great Douglas
Trumbull’s miraculous models. In the props department there is the gratifying
sight of bicycles, neon-striped umbrellas and noodle stoves. Ask after
a Voight-Kampff machine, however, and there are hurried glances and
another apology — we can’t go there. Instead, Empire is handed Deckard’s
blaster, which fits snugly into the palm. Props master Doug Harlocker had to
replicate it from a $250,000 original that the collector insisted on bringing
personally, presumably so they could catch a glimpse of future collectibles.
Gosling had to remind himself not to gape at the staggering sets — this
was supposed to be K’s daily beat. “I remember this one scene, one-eighth
of a page: my character goes to a desk and talks to a guy,” he says. “I got to
set and they had built a desk that took up the entire soundstage. It’s going
to be in the film for five seconds.”
It had taken about that long for legendary director of photography
Roger Deakins to agree to shoot the film, but six months for him to study
the original. Villeneuve had given his collaborator licence not to be
constrained by physics. “Do what you feel is right,” he told him. Dream
your own dream. “Harrison described it once as a visual score,” says
Gosling. “The light played like music.”
Villeneuve likes to describe it as being an Atari movie, not an Apple
one. It is, he says, “atemporal”, giving the word the full benefit of his liquid
French-Canadian vowels. There are no cell phones. Long-defunct
companies like Pan Am, TDK and Atari, whose logos teemed in the skyline
of the first film, are still going concerns. Throughout production, the
director has had the strange sensation he was making something that
already existed. He was like an archaeologist, digging it out of the dust.
Among the clutter of cyber-steampunk props is a case of memory
beads, translucent orbs the size of a tangerine containing fragments of
brain tissue that record and implant memories. Older tissue is prone to
distortion. “Memory is our central theme,” allows Villeneuve. “How are
we constructed from our memories?”
In a sense the sequel is about our collective memory of the original.
Blade Runner 2049 is a film infected with nostalgia for itself — a time
machine that runs in two directions at once: future and past, more Blade
Runner than Blade Runner.
Working with his regular composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, Villeneuve has
found he can’t escape the melancholy synths of future past. “We explored
different avenues, we tried different sounds, but it is a part of the film’s
DNA. We will not be afraid to be dangerously Vangelis...”