Versions of Blade Runner - The Director's Cut (1992)

The Director's Cut (1992)

In October 1989, film-restorer Michael Arick discovered a 70 mm print of Blade Runner at the Warner Bros. vaults while searching for footage from Gypsy. When the Cineplex Odeon Fairfax Theater in Los Angeles learned of this discovery, the theater management successfully got permission from Warners to screen the print for a film festival set for the following May. Until the screening, no one was aware that this print was that of the workprint version. Owing to this surprise, Warners booked more screenings of the now-advertised "Director's Cut" of Blade Runner in 15 American cities.

Ridley Scott publicly disowned this workprint version of the film as a Director's Cut, citing that it was roughly edited, lacked a key scene, and the climax did not feature the score composed for the film by Vangelis (it was a temp track using Jerry Goldsmith's score from Planet of the Apes). In response to Scott's dissatisfaction, Warners briefly allowed theatrical screenings of the workprint beginning in the fall of 1991, but only at the NuArt Theater in Los Angeles and the Castro Theatre in San Francisco. As a response to these sell-out screenings of the workprint (and screenings of the theatrical cut in Houston and Washington, D.C.), in addition to the film's resurgent cult popularity in the early '90s, Warner Bros. decided to assemble a definitive Director's Cut of the film, with direction from Scott, for an official theatrical re-release in 1992.

Warners hired Arick, who was already doing consultation work for them, to head the project with Scott. He started by spending several months in London with Les Healey, who had been the assistant editor on Blade Runner, attempting to compile a list of the changes that Scott wanted made to the film. He also received a number of suggestions/directions directly from the director himself. Three major changes were made to the film, which most people agree significantly changed the feel of the picture:

• The removal of Deckard's explanatory voice-over
• The insertion of a dream sequence of a unicorn running through a forest
• The removal of the studio-imposed "happy ending", including some associated visuals which had originally run under the film's end-credits. This made the film end ambiguously when the elevator doors closed.

The original sequence of Deckard's unicorn dream was not found in a print of sufficient quality; the original scene shows Deckard intercut with the running unicorn. Arick was thus forced to use a different print that shows only the unicorn running, without any intercutting to Deckard. This footage was inserted into what had previously been a continuous tracking shot. The unicorn scene suggests a completely different ending to the film: Gaff's origami unicorn means that Deckard's dreams are known to him, implying that Deckard's memories are artificial, and therefore he would be a replicant of the same generation as Rachael.

The cut did not include much of the "extra violence" included in the "International" version of the film.

Scott has since complained that time and money constraints, along with his obligation to Thelma & Louise, kept him from retooling the film in a completely satisfactory manner. While he is happier with the 1992 release of the film than with the original theatrical version, he has never felt entirely comfortable with it as his definitive Director's Cut.

In 2000, Harrison Ford gave his view on the Director’s Cut of the film saying, although he thought it "spectacular," it didn’t "move him at all." He gave a brief reason: "They haven't put anything in, so it's still an exercise in design."

Originally released as a single-disc DVD in March 1997, with both pan-and-scan and widescreen versions on different sides, the Director's Cut was one of the first DVDs on the market. However, it is of low quality compared to DVDs of later standards, due to it being produced in the early days of the format. Warner Home Video re-released it with a new transfer in 2006 as a "Digitally Remastered Version". The 1997 stereo (2.0) audio track remained unchanged, however.