‘Blade Runner 2049’ Director Talks Narration, Score, & Running Time

Harrison Ford Blade Runner

Blade Runner 2049 director Denis Villeneuve has a tough act to follow with the movie’s long-awaited sequel, but he’s definitely up to the task as he talks in detail about whether or not the movie has narration, recreating the iconic score of the original, and what the film’s initial running time was.

Collider recently got a chance to Villeneuve prior to the Warner Brothers presentation at the San Diego Comic Con. The director revealed that, as a prank, he gave Harrison Ford lines for narration in post-production, calling back to the infamous executive-mandated narration that was thrown in to the theatrical cut of Blade Runner. When specifically asked if 2049 actually has narration of any kind, Villeneuve quickly shut that down:

“No. There’s no narration. It’s something that I don’t think would have been welcome and the movie doesn’t need one. It was not part of the project – it was never intended to have a voice-over, but we were making jokes about that. It would have been a strange thing to see the fans faces if the movie had started with narration voice over.”

Villeneuve also went into detail on why it was important to him that the film stays close to the score that Vangelis composed for the 1983 classic, even though the composer declined to return to the movie:

“There are some components in the original movie that made that movie stand out. One of those components was the Vangelis music – it’s was a very specific sound, and for me, there was no negotiation about that. It’s very important that the music of 2049 would be directly inspired by Vangelis’ work as much as the cinematography was directly inspired by the original movie. There’s things in the DNA of Blade Runner, so we try to stay faithful to that DNA.”

Villeneuve also noted that he heard very positive things from the film’s initial cut and that he was pleased to say that the responses to the movie helped them clearly understand that they were moving in the right direction. Villeneuve was also asked about the movie’s running time and how long the current cut of the film is, to which he added the following:

“I think that the very first cut the assembly cut, where the editor takes the whole story, it was something like 3 hours and 50 minutes… The movie right now would be something like 2 hours, 30 minutes.”

He noted that his assembly cuts – even for smaller movies – have a tendency to be incredibly long, so being nearly 4 hours long less surprising than it initially sounds. The full interview can be seen below:

Blade Runner 2049 will show audiences things they won’t believe on October 6, 2017. Its cast includes Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Hiam Abbass, Barkhad Abdi, Ana de Armas, Dave Bautista, David Dastmalchian, Mackenzie Davis, Sylvia Hoeks, Lennie James, Carla Juri, Jared Leto, Edward James Olmos, and Robin Wright.

Source: YouTube