T
he Los Angeles 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 multi-
cultural 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 off-world 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 populationOrange is the new dread: Mother Earth is in a bad shape in 2049. Said
director Denis Villeneuve at the San Diego Comic Con in July: “The
eco-system collapsed and climate is totally unpredictable and harsh.
The world is just even more unfriendly. The good news is we are still
here, and in a way there is optimism in the darkness. The frontiers
between humanity and what is design become even more blurred.”
There’s also no Internet in the future. “An EMP [electromagnetic pulse]
that destroyed all the records. The digital world went away, so they
lost track of everything. In this world, there’s another way of dealing
with memory, which is that they back to a more analogue approach.”
No matter
what we achieve,
we will always be
compared with a
masterpiece. But
what we are doing
is so insane, it gives
you freedom.
- Director Denis Villeneuve