Press Record.

Blade Runner: The Final Cut is the final Ridley Scott approved edit.
Now exclusively showing in full digital at the Regent Theatre 551 Mount Pleasant Road.

Wired: Well, let me ask you the obvious question, which is: You did a director's cut in 1992. Why wasn't that the final word?

Scott: The director's cut in 1992 was actually the removal of the voice-over and the ending. But data-wise it wasn't a very well put-together transition onto disc, honestly. It was represented on a disc, and the disc wasn't terribly good. Technically, it didn't look that great. And it should look great, because Blade Runner, at the time, was pretty formidable — is pretty formidable even now, actually.

Wired: I've read that there are wires and shadows in the earlier versions of the movie that you've eliminated.

Scott: Mm-hmm, yeah.

Wired: Given the design focus that you have, and you're famous for your attention to detail, I just wonder: How did wires and shadows get into the original print?

Because you can't make a spinner fly without a crank. That's why it was raining in the shot, because the rain would help to hide the cables. But when that spinner comes around the corner — we always say today, "Oh, that's digital." It's not. That's a real 2-ton spinner being hoisted out around the corner and brought around the corner by a large crank that literally brought it down, landed it, and took it off again. Bloody good crane driver, right? You have four points on the cable that keep it steady. Because those big cranes are incredibly technically accurate. So he could do that. But I always used to sit there staring at the cables. Then eventually one or two of the geeks spotted it. So we took those out.

Wired: I see.

Scott: I was tempted not to, because I thought it was quite charming that there were cables still in the shot, you know. And there was when Roy Batty came out of the phone booth, and for some bizarre reason we never noticed that somebody's thumb was in the bottom left-hand corner. The phone booth was automatic door and I couldn't de-automate it, and I was getting really beaten up because we were against the gun, so I just shot. I was, by then, getting a two-take Charlie. And there was the bloody thumb in the shot. We just left it in there for a while. It's things like that, the little mistakes like that, that you're tempted to leave them in actually. It's a signature saying, "Yes, it is fiction, it is fantastical moviemaking."

Read Wired Magazine's Interview with Ridley Scott here