Blade Runner cuts: five versions, one line

The Blade Runner cuts, in one line

Five cuts, one sentence

Captain Bryant briefs Deckard the same way in every version of Blade Runner: six replicants jumped a shuttle, some died in an electrical field, the rest are in Los Angeles. But how many died depends on which disc you own.

What the line proves

Six escaped. Four are on screen. So only “two” closes the arithmetic, and only the first and last versions say it. The line was right in the print that previewed in Denver in March 1982, wrong in both releases that year and in the 1992 re-edit, and right again in 2007. The reason, as the screenplay-history page explains, is that the production cut a fifth replicant named Mary from the shooting script for budget, and nobody rewrote Bryant afterward.

This page follows that line, and every other line, across the five cuts. The method, in short, is a dialogue diff: the subtitle track of each cut, laid against the next, with the sound cues stripped out. The result is smaller than the cut-mythology suggests. In all, four transitions, about 120 differing blocks, and most of them are one voice laid over a film whose lines never moved.

Three other versions exist and are not diffed here, because no transcript of them does: the San Diego sneak preview of May 8, 1982, which Sammon records in Future Noir as carrying three scenes no later cut has; the 1986 CBS broadcast edit; and the near-four-hour assembly Scott screened for studio staff before the sneaks. The five that circulate on disc are also the five with subtitle tracks, so the method stops where the transcripts do.

The Blade Runner cuts by the numbers

Cut one

The Workprint: the version the Final Cut went back to

The Workprint is the rough print Warner Bros. sneaked in Denver on March 5, 1982 and Dallas the next night. Ridley Scott, in Sammon’s Future Noir, called it “a workprint. Something that was pretty rough, but close enough to what I was after to let a preview audience see.” Hence no colour timing, the last two reels missing Vangelis, and one piece of narration: a short passage over Batty’s death that David Peoples had written on March 9, 1981, the first day of shooting, for his otherwise narration-free script.

It leaked eight years later. “It wasn’t until 1990, when the work print leaked out at that Fairfax 70mm Film Festival” that anyone outside the production saw it again, as the 2007 featurette All Our Variant Futures tells it, and the response to those screenings is what produced the Director’s Cut.

Three things are on the Workprint’s dialogue track that the next three cuts lose and the Final Cut restores:

Three lines the Final Cut took back

Bryant’s dossier on Leon: “Ammunition loader on intergalactic runs… The only way you can hurt him is to kill him.” The 1982 and 1992 cuts replace it with a tortoise-and-turtle exchange.

Deckard’s “Kowalski” at the Yukon Hotel.

“Two of them got fried.”

And “father,” not “fucker,” at the end of “I want more life” — the word the 1982 and 1992 cuts changed and the Final Cut changed back.

The elevator

So the Final Cut’s famous continuity fixes are not inventions. Rather, they are the Workprint’s lines, put back after twenty-five years. Meanwhile, the Workprint ends on the elevator: Gaff’s rooftop line, “Do you love me / Do you trust me” over the corridor, the doors, and the line again. No unicorn, no forest.

Cut two

The Theatrical: fifty-two changes, almost all of them one voice

Set the Workprint against the 1982 release and the diff returns 52 differing blocks. Strip out subtitle house style and the air-traffic chatter the Theatrical trims, and what remains is additions, not replacements. In other words, nobody’s lines change. Instead, a voice sits on top of them.

Twelve passages, no replaced lines

The narration arrives under nine minutes in — “Ex-cop. Ex-Blade Runner. Ex-killer.” — and keeps coming: Gaff and Cityspeak, Bryant and “skin-jobs,” the bathtub scale, Rachael’s photographs, the report on Zhora, the speech on the roof, and the drive north, “Four years, he figured. He was wrong.” Twelve passages by this page’s count, which groups a run of consecutive narration lines as one passage; counted line by line it is thirteen, which is the figure most accounts give. Yet every one of them is absent from the Workprint and from both later cuts.

The overlay: one scene, two layers

The photographs on Deckard’s piano, as the diff sees them. The lines underneath are in every cut, whereas the lines on top are in two.

Three recording sessions

Who wrote them, however, took three tries. Harrison Ford recorded the narration on November 5, 1981 at Goldwyn Sound from a script by Darryl Ponicsan, which Scott rejected; again on January 12, 1982 at Pinewood from a version Peoples assembled out of his own and Fancher’s earlier material, which the Tandem executives rejected on January 21; and a third time after the sneaks, in a Beverly Hills studio with Bud Yorkin and Katy Haber and without Scott or Deeley, from a script by Roland Kibbee, stitched from his own lines and “selections from previous narrations.” That third one is the release; Sammon walks all three sessions in Future Noir.

The borrowed ending

The other addition is the ending. Specifically, after the elevator, the Theatrical cuts to mountains and a highway. Deeley’s Monument Valley shoot came back “a lot of cloud and a lot of snow… completely useless,” so Scott asked Stanley Kubrick for helicopter outtakes from The Shining, and “within about 17 hours, I had six weeks of helicopter footage.” Both men tell it on Dangerous Days, and Deeley tells it again on the writers’ commentary.

Cut three

The International: one word of dialogue

The diff between the Theatrical and the International cut is one block. Batty counts off Deckard’s broken fingers, and the International loses “Five.” That is the entire dialogue difference.

Fifteen seconds in three places

Everything else the International adds is footage, about fifteen seconds of it, in three places, by Sammon’s count: close-ups of Batty’s thumbs going into and coming out of Tyrell’s eyes; Pris pulling Deckard’s nose back, and a third shot fired into her after she falls; and the nail going through, and out of, Batty’s hand. The editors cut the shots after the Denver and Dallas audiences “rejected the intensity of these moments,” and they played only outside the United States until Criterion put the International on a laserdisc.

For a page about dialogue, then, the International is a footnote. For the Roy and Rachael pages, however, it isn’t: the eyes and the nail are the two images the International owns.

Cut four

The Director’s Cut: subtraction, then one insert

Against the Theatrical, the 1992 Director’s Cut returns 22 differing blocks. Nearly all of them, unsurprisingly, are the narration coming back out — the twelve passages above, deleted — and the drive north with it. What replaces the “Ex-killer” narration is what had been under it in the Workprint: the colony advertisement, “This announcement has been brought to you by the Shimago-Dominguez Corporation.”

The insert the diff cannot see

The one addition has no dialogue, which is why the diff can’t see it: the unicorn, at the piano, around 42 minutes. It did not come from Legend — the featurette and Scott’s commentary both take up the supposition that it was “an outtake” — and it appears in no draft of the screenplay. Its effect, though, is on the last scene: Gaff’s tinfoil unicorn, which the Workprint and the Theatrical play as a gauntlet, now reads as a reveal. The screenplay-history page walks what each document commits to on that question; this page only notes that the Director’s Cut changes the ending without changing a line of it.

A 1982 cut with the voice removed

The Director’s Cut also inherits the Theatrical’s mistakes. “One got fried.” The turtle exchange where Bryant’s dossier was. Likewise the out-of-sync line at the snake dealer’s. In effect, it is a 1982 cut minus the voice plus one shot, and Scott, on the featurette, said as much: the Workprint “wasn’t his true director’s cut,” and Warner built the 1992 version fast to put one out.

Cut five

The Final Cut: sixteen changes in three kinds

Against the Director’s Cut, the 2007 Final Cut returns 16 differing blocks. Fortunately, they sort cleanly.

Continuity

Continuity. “Two of them got fried.” Bryant’s Leon dossier restored over the turtle exchange. “Kowalski,” with Ford’s son Benjamin’s mouth composited over Ford’s so the word matches the lips, a fix the featurette shows being made. Each of these, again, is a Workprint line.

Taste

Taste. Batty, before he kills Tyrell, says “I want more life—” and finishes the sentence differently: “…fucker” in both 1982 releases and in 1992, “…father” in 2007. One word, and consequently the scene changes from a threat to a plea. It is also a Workprint line: the sneak-preview audiences heard “father.” The Roy Batty page owns that change.

House style

House style. “Hiya, Deck” against “Hi, Deck,” “97” against “Ninety-seven,” hyphens in “voice-print.” These are the subtitle houses disagreeing, not the film, and the diff can’t tell the difference. Accordingly, ignore them.

What the diff cannot see

Then there is what the diff can’t see at all, because it isn’t dialogue: Joanna Cassidy’s face on Zhora’s stunt double, the extra shots of Pris, and the dove, rebuilt in CG so it rises into a night sky instead of a daylight one — “that dove represents Batty’s soul going to heaven,” as the featurette puts it. It also cannot see the 2007 colour grade, which is the difference people who own both discs argue about most. After all, a dialogue diff measures lines, not timing; the Final Cut’s cooler grade against the Director’s Cut’s warmer one is real, visible, and outside this page’s method.

The fixed point

The line that never changed

Finally, run the diff on the rooftop and it returns nothing. Hauer’s speech is identical in all five cuts, down to the subtitle house’s spelling of “Tannhauser.” The Theatrical and the International lay narration over its last seconds — “I don’t know why he saved my life” — but the speech under the narration does not move. In fact, it is the one passage in the film nobody rewrote after the night Hauer played it.

Four drafts on paper, none in the cutting room

That is worth noticing because it was the most rewritten passage before that night. The screenplay history traces it: nothing in July 1980, “Plutition Camps” in December, “Tanhauser Gate” in February, and then Hauer’s knife the night before the shoot. Hence four drafts on paper, zero in the cutting room.

The verdict

Which cut is the real one

The question assumes one of them is the film and the others are variants. The diff, however, says otherwise. Each cut is a draft of the same two hours, and the drafts differ in exactly the ways screenplay drafts differ: a voice added, a voice removed, a line fixed, a line unfixed, an ending swapped, a character’s one word softened.

A cut for each reason to watch

If you want the film with the arithmetic right and the voice off, that’s the Final Cut. To hear what three writers and a producer thought the film needed explained, watch the Theatrical instead, the only place Kibbee’s narration survives. For the 1982 edit without the voice, there’s the Workprint, and it’s a better version of the Director’s Cut than the Director’s Cut is. The International, meanwhile, is the Theatrical with fifteen seconds of blood. Lastly, the Director’s Cut is the one that made the unicorn mean something, and the only reason to watch it now is to see that happen without 2007’s fixes around it.

What none of them is

What none of them is, is the screenplay. The February 1981 draft, for instance, ends in a forest with Rachael alive and Gaff in pursuit, and the rewriting never stopped.

Questions

Questions about the Blade Runner cuts

Which is which

Which to watch

How to check this page

Blade Runner cuts: sources and how to check them

The ledger’s minute markers come from the five subtitle transcripts, under the codes below; the production facts in the text come from Sammon’s chapters and the 2007 featurettes and commentaries, each named where the text uses it.

The transcripts and the record

Not used

Not used: the 1982 San Diego sneak (May 8) and the Van Nuys screening, which Sammon records but for which no transcript exists; and the Final Cut’s visual-effects fixes beyond the three named, which the featurette catalogues and which belong to a page about images, not lines.

For the drafts, the hub page, Blade Runner, walks the three dated drafts the cuts descend from. For the cuts themselves, the most useful outside record is the BRmovie.com scripts page, which also carries the narration credit.