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...”W
ait, one more thing. So is Deckard
in fact a replicant or not? Surely
a weathered Ford brings into question
Scott’s Director’s Cut ruling — which the
director still stands by — that Deckard
had been a skin job, like his prey stymied
by a four-year lifespan. But amazingly, that
debate between director and star is still
raging on.
“I will remember this all my life,” laughs
Villeneuve. “We had this dinner in Budapest
with great wine, and Harrison and Ridley
were arguing very seriously, yelling at each
other in the restaurant. They are like grumpy
old friends — they love each other but they
are still fighting.”
For Villeneuve the beauty lies in not
knowing: this is a sequel to all versions of
Blade Runner. “I love that feeling,” he says.
“I wanted to go on with the mystery. It’s
good to have tension.”Blade Runner 2049 opens in cinemas this
Thursday. It’ll be reviewed in next week’s issue.