In Wired Magazine, Ted Greenwald interviews director Ridley Scott, who discusses his much cut and recut 1982 sci-fi classic Blade Runner. The film's definitive, forever-and-ever director's cut — appropriately renamed Blade Runner: The Final Cut — will be screened at the upcoming New York Film Festival:
"It's been ongoing so long, it never went away. So I'm used to it. It kept reemerging, and that's when I realized that it had really unusual staying power. And it's all very well, at the time, as the person who made it, to say, 'Well, I knew it had.' But I didn't, really, at the time. I knew I'd done a pretty interesting movie which, in fact, was extremely interesting but was so unusual that the majority of people were taken aback. They simply didn't get it. Or, I think, better now to say they were enormously distracted by the environment."
The interview is well worth reading, though it's more than a tad disheartening to see what a difference a couple of decades make: Ridley Scott went from epoch-making classics like Alien and Blade Runner to making epic trash like Gladiator and Black Hawk Down — not to mention G.I. Jane, Hannibal, Kingdom of Heaven, A Good Year, etc.