In the final act of Blade Runner, Deckard (Harrison Ford) flees the vengeful replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), outmatched by hisstrength and rage. He finds himself hanging from the side of a building, but is unexpectedly saved by the androidbefore he falls.
Aware that his four-year lifespan is coming to an inevitable end, Batty summarises his experiencesand perspective to his one-time adversary:
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Though he has failed in his search for immortality, Batty's newly-acquired humanism does not go unappreciated by Deckard, nor has it been ignored by the millions of people who rate Blade Runner as a science fiction benchmark. Ridley Scott understandably has the greatest share of praise for film, but Blade Runner's most famous speech - indeed, one of the greatest death soliloquies in cinema history - wasn't anything to do with him.
Blade Runner's script waswritten by Hampton Fancher (who also wrote the sequel, Blade Runner 2049) and then revised by David Peoples, but Scott permitted his actors to view it as a foundation and improvise if it would help characterisation. For example, Edward James Olmos improvised the "Cityspeak" spoken by his character, a mix of (among others) Japanese, German and Russian.
Likewise, Rutger Hauer had read the dying monologue intended for him by the screenwriters, and felt that changes could be made.
Scott noted in an interview this year that he was pleased with the changes Hauer had made; the production was over budget, rushed and Scott was about to lose creative control to the studio:"He wrote it at one o'clock in the morning and I was going to be fired at three."
What exactly were the alterations? Hauer had mostly justshortened Fancher's lines, which started as:
I have known adventures, seen places you people will never see, I've been Offworld and back...frontiers! I've stood on the back deck of a blinker bound for the Plutition Camps with sweat in my eyes watching the stars fight on the shoulder of Orion. I've felt wind in my hair, riding test boats off the black galaxies and seen an attack fleet burn like a match and disappear. I've seen it...felt it!
While it could be perceived as an actor taking issue with the script, Hauer saw his amendments as benefiting Roy Batty's arc and preserving the message of the speech. If time was short for the character, his last words should acknowledge this with their brevity."His batteries are going. He has no time to say good-bye, except maybe to briefly talk about things he'd seen. 'Life is short' - boom!" said the actor.
He was still enthused by the many lifeexperiences the script mentioned. Their focus on off-world mattersgave the linesa grander feel, introducing details that meant little to viewers but letthem imagine a wider (and more amazing) universe away from the endless night of 2019 Los Angeles; to add to this, he came up with the concepts of C-beams and the Tannhauser Gate. Certainly, they open fandebate over their in-canon significance (like Han Solo's "twelve parsecs" boast in Star Wars), but whether Hauer intended secret thematic links to Wagner and German medieval legend or just thought they sounded cool is vaguer.
The most famous addition (and surely the source of reported on-set emotional responses) was the tears in rain simile, which is attributed to Hauer. In the film, Roy Batty is fortunate enough that his demise coincides with a downpour.
The monologue is also helped by another of Hauer's ideas, for his character to be holding a dove, and to release it upon death. Most critics see it as an allegory for the soul escaping, but it's also worth noting that the dove has appeared spontaneously in Batty's hand more or less unnoticed in the prior chase scene, as if the speech concludes the replicant's acquisition of a spirit.
Sure, in Blade Runner's world real animals are hard to find and we are never told if this dove is authentic synthetic. But as with Batty, his composition is unimportant so long as he has any kind of "soul" (or representation thereof). As for "time to die", that was a line retainedfrom thescript without alteration.
Though the film has enjoyed retrospective approval, especially because of Hauer's approach to this scene, there were at the time many who would have wanted their memories of the production to be lost in time. Deckard's exhaustion at the end of the monologuewas shared by Harrison Ford.The scene's completion also meant the end of filming, and what had been an unhappy production experience for Ford, Scott and others was over.
Related Topics
- Doves,
- Sci-fi movies,
- Los Angeles,
- Harrison Ford
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