Dangerous Days

image: interior of the Bradbury building. source.

Last Friday we watched Blade Runner at school. Before I (belatedly) returned the DVD to Aro Video, I thought I'd have a look at the other disc in the box. Thinking it would just be boring outtakes or extra footage, perhaps a narration from the director, I popped the disc in to play and was blown away by the three and a half hour long documentary called Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner.

The documentary, produced 25 years after the release of Blade Runner, followed the evolution of the film from conception to post-production. Providing a profound insight into the writing, art direction, set-making, directing and acting, one begins to fully comprehend the enormous feat that was producing a film-noir-sci-fi on a limited budget and prior to the invention of CGI.

The inspiration for Blade Runner began with Phillip K. Dick's novel 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep', but drew heavily on other artistic sources such as graphic novels and futurist illustrations. It is captivating to view the film emerging from the stunning storyboard illustrations and sketches, the mood and vision of the graphite on paper translating so clearly to screen.

From an architectural perspective, there is plenty to love about Blade Runner. Visually, it is a stunner. All darkness, haze, neon and rain, it oozes intense mood without being overly stylised. The film was shot primarily in two locations - a back lot of the Warner Brother Studios, and in the Bradbury building, an architectural landmark in LA. The art directors also drew directly from FLW's Ennis House.

The back lot of the studio was a generic street-scene, with a smattering of your average buildings designed to look as if they could belong to a street of any North American city. This set has been used countless times in westerns and other film genres,  lacking any interest of its own. The interesting part is how this average back lot was adapted to belong to Scott's vision of Los Angeles in 2019.

Due to financial constraints they couldn't simply build a whole new street scene, so they retrofitted the run-of-the-mill buildings with steaming ducts, clusters of neon signs, vicious parking meters and a melange of  futuristic vehicles. This evolution of existing architecture provides a more believable counterpoint to the idea of a wholly reconstructed urban future.

That dark, pyramidal building with the exterior elevators which houses the Tyrell Corporation, at 700 stories high verges on a megastructure. Deckard's apartment, built inside a studio, cost upwards of $150,000. Its dark, cave-like interior and textile block motif were taken directly from the Ennis House. The Ennis House has a strange, other-worldly monumentality, and also influenced those enormous bottom heavy columns on the interior of Tyrell's office. A well-known piece of architectural trivia is that the columns were installed upside down and Scott would not begin shooting until they were removed and installed correctly.

Dangerous Days would be of interest to anyone curious about creative professions, the battle of wills and balancing talents. Both Ridley Scott and head writer Hampton Fancher had clear visions of how the film ought to be, with Scott assuming the uncompromising my-way-or-the-highway stance depicted by Howard Roark in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. I'm difficult to please with films but wouldn't hesitate to say that Blade Runner is a masterpiece, both as a piece of artwork and subtle social commentary. So I strongly recommend this documentary to anyone who has seen Blade Runner, and if you haven't seen it recently, watch the final cut (2007) and this will hopefully pique your interest enough to sit through the lengthy making-of.