“Here is Dave Dryer on the right. Dave Dryer is really the hero of this project. My partner, Richard Yuricich, and I developed this whole thing with Ripley. We got it all knowing that I was going to be starting the production of Brainstorm about midway through the production of Blade Runner. And we got Dave to come in and stand in for us and take over the photography and all the projects we got started.”

Missing Slide.

 “Right there is a projector, on the other side of this camera is a projector. And this projector is going to project 35mm movies of those big bursts of flame and smoke and explosions. This camera is on a track right there, it’s going to slowly creep forward, but with many different exposures. Some of the exposures will be in the smoke of the whole environmental feel of it the lighting of the fiber optics. But then there will be additional exposures added to it of these explosions and flames projected from this projector on to little white movie screens that we would put out here in the miniature these little pieces of white cardboard with the edges painted black. And we projected the explosions and then we would time the light so that when the explosion went off a pool of light would shine on the buildings below.

“This was actually amazingly easy to make. Fairly straight forward. And it didn’t take too long. And it worked really well. We’re really happy with it. One funny story about the explosions... we never really thought about having explosions initially, and neither had Ridley. But, I remembered that I had a box of film that I’d been lugging around for years. Because I was working for Michelangelo Antonioni, a famous Italian director, on a movie called Zabriskie Point. And he was going to film an Armageddon scene. I was hired to do this job. We brought a bunch of pyrotechnic maniacs out to the California desert one night. We said we want the biggest subatomic explosions that you guys can make. We had these hi-speed 35 mm ballistic cameras set-up. And they would fill these gigantic 10 foot wide caldrons with raw gasoline, and then - in plastic bags - drop 15 pounds of dynamite, phosphorus, all kinds of mixtures. We’d roll the cameras and blow these things off. It was amazing. Everybody thought planes had crashed in the desert. The cops would call...even though we had permission. Anyways... Antonioni changed his mind. He didn’t like what we were doing. He didn’t understand the process we were going through. He was kind of a live action director. He said why can’t you just blow up a refrigerator or something. Make it “symbolically” the end of the world? I didn’t finish Zabriskie Point. I had all these explosions. So, we found a home for them here in Blade Runner.”

Missing Slide

“Here’s another pan-over, looking from the cameras’ point of view. You can see these foreground pieces, which are in fact dimensional, they are all just little vacuum formed models. Then, all these little towers are built up with lights on them. If you think of the Mother Ship in Close Encounters, with these prongs sticking out of it and small lights on the end, it’s almost the exactly the same thing. We do procure the work without a lot of thought or experimentation. Then, in the distant background, you see those two little pyramids, those are just flat-styled pyramids. Plexiglas boxes with photographs on them lit from inside with neon.”

“This is the only pyramid building. There never were two. We use the same acid-etched technique on the surface of the pyramid. This is really like a light box with a bunch of fluorescent tubes of neon inside of it. But, then there are these layers of acid-etched bronze-looking copper. And it made a really great effect. You had to make one piece of art work, replicate it many times, stick it on these light boxes, and it looked pretty good, pretty quickly. This pyramid only has two sides to it, and these weird leaning buildings that I came up with. I’m going to show you where these leaning buildings show up again later in the movie, posing as other buildings.”

“This is one pyramid shot this way. And then we flipped it 90 degrees and shot it this way. It is actually, both, the same building. Two different exposures of the same building joined right here, with an optical matte line. [The Spinner there, is] basically, a UFO on Close Encounters. The same lens flare. This bright light, the source of the light...we used all the same techniques. Only this is one of the Spinners.”

“This is the face of the pyramid. It’s built on a scale of about four times larger than the long shot pyramid. This is the 65mm camera, it’s on a vertical track, so I could move up and silt down, under motion control, so we can do several exposures of that as well."