The Movie Doctors. Simon Mayo

by acid rain and advertisements for ‘Off-World’ colonies (an alternative to the misery of Earth), Blade Runner was designed to unsettle its audience, to leave them pondering the mysteries of their humanity while dazzling them with all-too-believable snapshots of a disturbingly plausible future.

      For the title role of Deckard, Scott cast Harrison Ford, still hot from the sci-fi success of Star Wars (1977), which had introduced a new generation of viewers to the crowd-pleasing thrills of a Buck Rogers serial. From the outset, Scott and Ford were at loggerheads, the actor believing that his director was more interested in lighting a shot than in engaging with his cast. In 2000, Scott explained to Dr Kermode that ‘I was not given then to spending a lot of time on explanation and stroking. I’ve got too much to do to get what I want, because I have a performance as well.’ Indeed, it wasn’t until the days of Thelma & Louise (1991) that Scott would begin to be considered an ‘actor’s director’, the visual style of his early films apparently taking precedence over his interaction with the performers.

      One of the key disagreements between Scott and Ford was the true nature of Deckard’s character. Although it was never made explicit in the original script, Scott had become obsessed with the idea that Deckard was himself an android, a replicant hunting his own kind, with no knowledge of his own artificial nature.

      This tantalising idea is not quite as groundbreaking as it sounds. A robot hater turns out to be a robot himself at the end of The Creation of the Humanoids (1962), and many other stories, films and TV episodes have the same twist – including ‘Demon With a Glass Hand’ (The Outer Limits, 1964), which was filmed in the Bradbury Building, just like Blade Runner. In fact, the theme of Deckard’s artificiality (which is not present in Dick’s source) had been introduced accidentally by the screenwriters, who had misunderstood each other’s rewrites – both have credited the other with coming up with the idea, as is evidenced in Dr Kermode’s 2000 documentary, On the Edge of Blade Runner. For Scott, this was a eureka moment, a way to crack the enigma of Dick’s source and cut to the heart of the story’s central man-vs.-machine dichotomy. Indeed, it proved a talismanic riddle in his original cut of Blade Runner, which ended with Deckard and Rachael (Sean Young) exiting into the darkness of an uncertain future, her death assured, his implied . . .

      Artistically, this ending made perfect sense. But having spent tens of millions of dollars funding Scott’s ever-expanding epic, financiers wanted to be certain that the finished film would go down well with the same audiences who had whooped and cheered at Harrison’s Han Solo role in Star Wars. Test cards from early preview screenings, however, revealed that viewers were both depressed and confused; depressed by the downbeat nature of the story, and confused by the twists and turns of the plot, which seemed to them utterly incomprehensible.

      Worried that the movie was going to sink, the film-makers embarked upon hasty recuts, adding an explanatory voice-over (a generic concession which had its roots in early script drafts), removing Deckard’s inhuman origins, and – most ridiculously – concocting an utterly stupid happy ending in which Rachael is granted a new lease of life and the lovers escape into unpolluted nature to live happily ever after. Calling upon the assistance of Stanley Kubrick, Scott used out-take footage from the opening sequence of The Shining (1980) to conjure up an entirely new finale featuring shots of rolling hills, over which Deckard and Rachael’s triumph over all odds could be played. In this new version, Blade Runner ends on an unambiguously upbeat note, the lovers united for ever despite the previous action which had made absolutely clear that no such resolution could ever be reached.

      The new ending was utter baloney, but as far as the test cards were concerned it was what the audience wanted, and that was that.

      As it turned out, most audiences didn’t want Blade Runner, with or without its new happy ending. During its first-run theatrical release the movie spectacularly failed to recoup its extravagant costs, leaving its financiers in the red, and leaving Scott with the stigma of having helmed an expensive flop.

      It wasn’t until some years later, when an earlier cut of Blade Runner was screened (almost by accident) to an adoring audience, that Scott’s prophetic instincts were proved right. Reissued in variously recut forms (the ‘Director’s Cut’ and so-called ‘Final Cut’) Blade Runner became a belated cult hit, praised by fans for its bleak, uncompromising tone and hailed by critics as one of the most important genre movies of the decade. Today, it is almost impossible to watch a big-budget sci-fi movie without seeing Scott’s trademark fingerprints everywhere you look. Just as 2001 changed the look and feel of sci-fi for a generation, so Blade Runner became the creative font from which all future fantasies would draw.

      The fact that giving Blade Runner a happy ending didn’t make it a hit would seem to prove once and for all that Hollywood’s infatuation with an upbeat finale is at best misplaced, and at worst plain bonkers. Yet the history of modern cinema is littered with examples of producers attempting to make movies ‘better’ (and in the process making them much, much worse) by slapping a happy face onto the end of the final reel.

      Take the case of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985). A tragicomic vision of an Orwellian future (the film was once saddled with the potential alternative title Nineteen Eighty-Four and a Half), Gilliam’s masterpiece was centrally concerned with the triumph of imagination over reality. Its anti-hero Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) is a near-future office worker who falls in love with the rebellious Jill Layton (Kim Greist) only to be crushed by the forces of a faceless totalitarian authority which tramples individual human emotion under a mountain of bureaucratic red tape. While the script boasted a celebration of the liberating power of artifice and invention, the plot follows an inexorable path toward physical imprisonment; the body suffering while the mind is set free.

      A graduate of the hugely successful Monty Python team, Gilliam had already racked up directing credits on Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Jabberwocky (1977) and Time Bandits (1981), the last of which had taken over $40 million in the US – a handsome return on its $5 million budget. Viewed by executives at Universal as a maverick talent with crossover potential, Gilliam had received the green light to go ahead with Brazil despite the dark undertones of its uncompromising script. But when production was completed, executive Sid Sheinberg declared that Brazil required savage re-editing and (most importantly) a new, happy ending.

      As per Gilliam’s version (released internationally by Fox), Brazil ends with the bound and tortured Sam Lowry escaping the horrors of the real world by drifting into a fantastical reverie. Imagining an action-packed jailbreak led by Robert De Niro’s anarchic heating engineer Harry Tuttle, the film’s final movement sees Sam and Jill break out of the stifling confines of the city into the lush greenery of the countryside – only to cut back suddenly to Sam still in the clutches of the authorities, a catatonic smile on his face, humming the film’s recurrent theme ‘Aquarela do Brasil’. ‘He’s got away from us,’ observes Deputy Minister Mr Helpmann (Peter Vaughan), the camera pulling back to show Sam in the vast and terrifying surroundings of the ‘Information Retrieval’ room (Croydon B Power Station providing an ominous location), his body bound, his mind . . . broken?

      Dear Sid Sheinberg

      When are you going to release my film, ‘BRAZIL’?

      Terry Gilliam

      It’s an extremely powerful ending, which can be read either as a stark celebration of the liberating power of imagination, or as a bleak admission that the forces of evil will always prevail in the ‘real’ world. In this version of the film, Jill has in fact been ‘killed resisting arrest’ (‘the odd thing is it appears to have happened twice . . .’) and Sam is once again alone in a cold and uncaring world, defeated by bureaucracy, corruption and incompetence. Only in his dreams can he prevail over the forces of darkness, while on Earth chaos reigns.

      Sheinberg, who had problems with the whole film, absolutely hated this ending. As far as he was concerned, no audience would want to watch a movie which concluded that the real world was a nightmare in which lovers are crushed by jackbooted authoritarianism. For Sheinberg, it was essential that Sam and Jill wind up together, that their ‘happy