Ridley Scott reveals how financiers did not believe him in casting Harrison Ford in Blade Runner

Ridley Scott's Blade Runner has seen immense success since its 1982 release and has since been considered one of the greatest and most influential science fiction films of all time.

Starring Harrison Ford as the lead, Blade Runner, despite its massive success, did not exactly have the smoothest journey to the big screen, as Scott reveals now. The director spoke up about how he struggled to convince financiers to support his choice of Harrison in the cast.

Harrison wasn't exactly the starlet then as he stands today, and Scott went through hardships to convince the team of his potential. Speaking to GQ magazine, the director said,

“Harrison Ford was not a star. He had just finished flying the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars. I remember my financiers saying, ‘Who the fuck is Harrison Ford?’ And I said, ‘You’re going to find out.’ So Harry became my leading man.”

He also opened up on how he wished to create a new world with Blade Runner, a feat that he later succeeded in as the film got a sequel and a TV show. Referring to the writing process that went behind the film, he said,

“I spent five months with a very good writer, Hampton Fancher, who’d really written a play adapted from [the novel] Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And so I read the book and felt there were 90 stories in the first 20 pages and I thought, ‘It’s too complex.'"

He added,

“But I sat with Hampton and said, ‘You’ve written this beautiful story that takes place in an apartment. It’s an internal story where a ‘hunter’ falls in love with his quarry. Love your cadence, love the rhythm of your dialogue, love your dialogue, love the idea. I want to see what happens when he goes out the door.’ And from that moment on, we just went boom.”

Harrison Ford's role in Blade Runner

Ford played Rick Deckard in Blade Runner, a futuristic cop who falls in love with one of the androids he was asked to chase down. The film has been applauded for its cutting-edge themes Harrison's brilliant portrayal of Deckard and of course, the plot twist in the end that gave audiences the idea that Deckard himself was an android.

Blade Runner did not exactly woo the audience upon its initial release and had a slow reception at the box office. Over time, however, the film has emerged as somewhat of a cult classic and has been shelved as one of the best films in the genre, cementing Scott's place in the industry as a masterful director and Ford as one of the best in his field.

Blade Runner saw a sequel starring Ryan Gosling in 2017 that received similar success, thanks to Gosling and Scott. The film will also be getting a TV series as a sequel, called Blade Runner 2099 which began filming recently and will likely be released in the recent years.