Roger Ryan wrote: Thu Jul 19, 2012 12:48 pm
What is worth searching out is the documentary contained on Disc 5, "All Our Variant Futures", which runs nearly 30 minutes and details the differences between all of the edits and how green-screen effects were employed to "fix" problem moments in "The Final Cut". Surprisingly, this additional doc offers fresh insight even after you've sat through the seemingly exhaustive "Dangerous Days" documentary.
I've had the five-disc version since it came out, but I never bothered exploring the two BD's featuring the other cuts nor the extras that came with those discs. Now that I'm upgrading to the UHD, I figure might as well unload the set, so I finally took a look at the "All Our Variant Futures" doc, and it is indeed quite good. It's too bad they didn't transplant that to another disc on the UHD set, but they apparently wanted to re-use the 2007 disc masters. (For me, ideally the UHD set would have replaced the standard BD of the "final cut" with the BD of the workprint, thus saving the "All Our Variant Futures" doc in the process.)
Anyway, the biggest takeaways from it:
• It took a few years to gather all of the elements, and we're lucky they got them because the bulk of it was scheduled to be "junked" in 1988. Instead, it sat in limbo on pallets for over 12 years because the department never got the final authorization to do so. Thank heavens for bureacracy!
• They started work in the early '00s, but things came to a halt in 2002. It's not explained why, but around 2005, they suddenly got the green light and it was full speed ahead. Thanks to the delay, what was considered "state-of-the-art" had advanced considerably, and some things they did wouldn't have been possible just a few years earlier.
• The restoration producer - thankfully a fan who calls
Blade Runner his "favorite film" - made a list of continuity errors that needed to be addressed, which is SOP on modern day Hollywood productions anyway. Ridley Scott looked through the list (rolling his eyes at a few), and they clearly had to draw a line. As Roger Ryan alluded to, the biggest fix was the head of an obvious stunt double - they brought in Joanna Cassidy, applied some make-up and a little bit of costuming, then had her mimic the stunt double's movements in front of a green screen. After brushing out the stunt double's head (creating a "headless" scene), they pasted in the newly shot footage, then changed it with various digital tools until you had a perfect match. Cassidy was shown the results (as well as clips from intermediate stages) and she was pretty stunned that doing this was not only possible but pretty much flawless.
• The biggest surprise was that scene where Harrison Ford's lips read off different dialogue than what was finally picked. They couldn't find any matching alternates in the ADR recorded for that scene or from any other archival stems, so given the success of Cassidy's head transplant, instead of finding matching sound the producer decided to match the lips. But "Ford's probably busy...but I know he has sons?" Surprisingly, one guy knew Ben Ford from school, and he had a restaurant nearby (
which closed in 2014). Before they even shot it, they show him getting his jaw made-up (i.e. his father's scar applied to his chin), and immediately you can see his profile is an
exact match. (When we see him earlier from the front, the similarity is much less.) This becomes more apparent on-set when they do a 50/50 superimposition of him on-camera with the scene in question.
EDIT: Found this screengrab:
As you can see, no one's going to mistake him for his father, and IIRC this is how you first see Ben Ford in the featurette. But when they film/videotape him from the side, the resemblance from the nose down and around the jawline is startling. So again, very fortunate that the resemblance to his father was very much there from the angle they needed!
• I had no idea the famous dove shot was such a shitty mismatch. After Roy dies in the rain, he releases a dove, and when we see it fly off into the sky, there was originally NO VFX over a clear, blue daytime sky. They created a bunch of new composites and Scott picked the one he liked best.
• The biggest change may have been the sound mix. The picture restoration created a lot of holes in the soundtrack, particularly when they took out the voiceover. They found reels, but those had problems, from damaged or deteriorated spots to missing elements (one section was completely blanked or destroyed for reasons unknown), so they basically had to create a lot of new sound from scratch or fill in places that were now too sparse (again, mostly spots that had originally been mixed with voiceover - it's likely they kept sound effects to a minimum as to keep the voiceover track clear).
