Perhaps the only thing as famous as “Blade Runner” itself is how much Scott and the movie’s star, Harrison Ford, hated working on it. Ford, who is one of Scott’s biggest competitors for the title of “Straightest Shooter in Hollywood,” has never refrained to complain about his experience during production or the various gripes he had with the film throughout post-production. The shoot wasn’t exactly a pleasure cruise for Scott, either:
“[The shoot] was a very bad experience for me. I had horrendous partners. Financial guys, who were killing me every day. I’d been very successful in the running of a company, and I knew I was making something very, very special. So I would never take no for an answer. But they didn’t understand what they had. You shoot it, and you edit it, and you mix it. And by the time you’re halfway through, everyone’s saying it’s too slow. You’ve got to learn, as a director, you can’t listen to anybody. I knew I was making something very, very special. And now it’s one of the most important science-fiction films ever made which everybody feeds off. Every bloody film.”
Scott’s lack of humility is certainly — for lack of a better way of phrasing it — on-brand for him, but that’s one of the perks that comes with directing a genuinely landmark sci-fi film. Even to this day, Scott can’t resist taking a dig at the critics who dismissed “Blade Runner”:
“I hadn’t seen ‘Blade Runner’ for 20 years. Really. But I just watched it. And it’s not slow. The information coming at you is so original and interesting, talking about biological creations, and mining off-world, which, in those days, they said was silly. I say, ‘Go f**k yourself.'”