In
a May 1982 interview for Starlog
magazine, Hampton Fancher summed up
his approach
to the first screenplay of the novel Do Androids
Dream
of Electric Sheep?,
"It was never intended, I don't think,
except maybe in
the first draft, to
stay close to the novel. The novel
had a lot
of impossibilities as far as
movie making goes. Basically,
the
novel was just a diving board premise
to ump from what was
originally
taken, and then from that point, after
the first
draft, it sort of acquired a
life of its own and never delved
too
much into anything that the novel was
dealing with. It was a
different
animal almost from the beginning".
Even though the film is loosely
adapted
from the Philip K. Dick novel, there are still
clear
references to the book in the film,
although only in a verbal sense,
but it does
show how the original story has influenced the
film and
its meaning. One example of this is
during the opening scene with the
Voight-Kampff
test - a sophisticated empathy test, to provoke
a
psychological or emotional response by asking |
the
recipient a series of carefully constructed
questions. The character,
Holden, a blade
runner, is using the device to test an employee
of
the Tyrell Corporation, Leon. The latter is
discovered to be a
replicant, and he shoots
Holden several times with a gun before
Holden
has time to decipher the information given to him.
During this test, Holden explains to Leon
that he is "walking
through a desert when you
suddenly look down and discover a tortoise
that
has just crawled from underneath a rock. You
reach down and
flip the tortoise on its back and
just stare at the creature, watching
its tiny
legs beat erratically in the air under a blazing
hot desert
sun". In the climax of the novel the
policeman, Rick Deckard - they are
not referred
to as blade runners in the novel - discovers
that the
android, Rachael Rosen, has just killed
his real goat, which he bought
with two or three
bounty rewards, by throwing it off the top of
his
housing block, where he kept the animal.
Deckard feels remorse because
of this and he
sets off in his flying "spinner" car beyond the
city
limits into the desert wastelands. As he |