'Blade Runner' Director Denis Villeneuve Says the Sequel 'Has Its Own Life'

‘Blade Runner’ opening sequence (Warner Bros.)

Denis Villeneuve, director of the Blade Runner sequel, gave The Hollywood Reporter an update on how he’s coming to grips with the challenge of following in the footsteps of Ridley Scott’s 1982 future-noir masterpiece. The Canadian filmmaker (Sicario) — in Venice for the festival screening of his new sci-fi drama Arrival starring Amy Adams — called Blade Runner “one of the best films in the past 50 years,” and described his current anxiety about tackling the sequel, which stars Ryan Gosling, Jared Leto, and Harrison Ford (reprising his original role as Rick Deckard).

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“For me, what terrorizes me right now is what I’m doing is taking Blade Runner and making it my own, and that is horrific,” Villeneuve confessed. “To realize that when I look at the dailies, it’s not Ridley Scott, it’s me, and that it’s different. It’s still the same universe, we are still in the same dream, but it’s mine, so it’s like I have no idea how you people will react, I don’t know. It has its own life.”
Though he may be stressed about comparisons to Scott’s film (“It’s not possible to live up to the original,” he told THR), Villeneuve is confident in his stars. Fellow Canadian Gosling, he said, is “insanely good.”

“It’s the first time I’ve worked with him and I never had someone that was as much a trouper, as dedicated, as precise and engaged,” the director said of Gosling. “I said to him, you know, we are going to do it together and it’s like walking in a dark room with a lighter trying to find the way out. It’s a huge room and we are alone and it’s dark and it’s cold. And he said, ‘Yeah, I understand exactly.’ But we have a lot of fun.”

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Villeneuve is similarly effusive about Ford (though they haven’t started shooting his scenes yet). “To my great relief…you know Harrison Ford he was one of my biggest heroes,” he said. “I grew up with him, so to meet a man like that who is kind of a legend in your heart, that has that kind of humility, generosity, open-mindedness, and simplicity, one of the nicest human beings I’ve met.”
Blade Runner is set for release in October 2017; Arrival reaches U.S. theaters on Nov. 11.

Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Arrival’: Watch the trailer