and
naive that it's content is effectively
conveyed by action, grimace, and
gesture (as
between Laurel and Hardy).
The director's most significant area of
control is over what happens
within the image.
Their control is over action, in
detail,
organisation and emphasis, which enables them to
produce a
personal treatment of the script
situation. On occasion the treatment
can be so
personal as to constitute a reversal of the
attitudes
contained in the script or novel.
Ridley Scott, as director, invented
not the idea
of the story, but the images which express it in
the
film.
Originally Ridley Scott had shot three
different endings to the
film. The reason for
this can only be interpreted as an aim
for
commercial viability through popular acceptance.
All three
endings would be shown to preview
auniences, in Denver, Dallas and San
Diego, who
would be handed cards and asked to vote on
different
aspects of the film, ending included.
All these different endings to
the film were |
never seen by Philip K. Dick, but he did manage
to read
the final confrontation scene between
the replicant Roy Batty and Rick
Deckard, played
by the American actor Harrison Ford (Star Wars
and
Raiders of the Lost Ark).
After a long, fierce chase scene through
the dark corridors of J.F.
Sebastian's tenemant
block - in the novel this character is
called
J.R. Isidore - Deckard is saved by Batty just
before he falls
to his death. The replicant, at
the last few moments of its four year
life-span,
begins to envy Deckard’s normal, human
existence. He also
wants Deckard to witness his
death to (possibly) make him feel guilty
for
killing or 'retiring' his fellow replicants.
Philip K. Dick
thought this new ending had far
more emotion compared to the novels
climax of
Deckard successfully killing all the androids
who are
hiding out in J.R. Isidore's building:
"I have to admit that in some
ways Peoples
improved over the book, but I don't want
to
emphasise the point too much either". (Starlog,
Feb., 1982)
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