Blade runner

How Ridley Scott conjured that opening cityscape.

Just before the Voight-Kampff test. Just after the opening crawl and ‘LOS ANGELES, NOVEMBER 2019’ card. Vangelis’ twinkly synth score lifts the curtain on a future LA that was nicknamed ‘Hades’ landscape’ by the crew who created it. It’s not hard to see why. A darkly glittering panorama that belches fire, it seems to be a living thing that would devour you as soon as look at you. “When I close my eyes, I can still see that opening sequence,” said Philip K. Dick, who saw the first 20 minutes of Blade Runner before his untimely death. “It’s like being transported to the ultimate city of the future, with all the good things and all the bad things about it.”

It’s difficult to believe that it was just a 13 by 18-foot miniature built on a plywood table. The task of creating the LA of the future for Ridley Scott’s defining sci-fi fell to special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull. Along with his crew at Entertainment Effects Group in Marina del Rey, California, he crafted thousands of brass cutouts, all inspired by ’80s photos of oppressive industrial skylines. Stacked in rows and etched with detail, they created the illusion of a vast skyline.

Seven miles of fibre optics and 20,000 lights powered the landscape, necessitating fans to help keep the studio from burning up. A smoke

machine, meanwhile, wreathed the model in a noir-ish mist to give a sense of depth, and the flaming pylons were shot under cover of night in a car park.

Scott himself has described the film’s backdrop as “industrial imperialism”; a dystopian world “run and owned by three corporations”. That sense of suffocating industrialisation is all over this sequence, not least in the super-close-up image of an eye, in which the city lights and fiery torrents are reflected and distorted.

“I literally came out in a state of shock,” recalled Philip K. Dick of the footage he saw. Yes, and this was only the beginning… JW