STACK #156 Oct 2017

CINEMA FEATURE

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Denis Villeneuve was determined to bring the film noir aesthetic and spirit of the original film to Blade Runner 2049 . Words Scott Hocking

“I ’m not supposed to be here with you, I’m very busy doing a movie right now,” says Denis Villeneuve when STACK meets with him at San Diego Comic-Con. “I have three crews working in Los Angeles and I’m meant to be doing sound, music and VFX right now.” That movie is Blade Runner 2049 , the highly anticipated sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 science fiction classic which brought forties’ film noir elements to a bleak future of bioengineered human replicants and the cops who terminate them. Villeneuve says it was “love at first sight” when he first saw Blade Runner . “It was science fiction that was doing its job, which is to explore the human condition and ask deep questions about our identity and relationship with memory. At the time it was great to see a movie where morality is blurred. I didn’t know who were the good and bad guys. It’s a movie that stayed with me through the years.” Set 30 years after the events of the original, the sequel involves another Blade Runner,

precise plot details are still tightly under wraps, Villeneuve promises Blade Runner 2049 will be a very existential detective story with more dynamic action sequences. In approaching the sequel, he says his main goal was to respect the spirit of the first movie. “When I say spirit, I’m talking about the film noir aesthetic and rhythm. I also wanted to stay in contact with Roy Batty, Deckard, and all those characters in the first one. I hope I succeeded, but that I cannot judge. We did our best and it is [the audience] who will say how they feel about it.”

Director Denis Villeneuve on the set of Blade Runner 2049 .

Blade Runner 2049 is Villenueve’s second venture into science fiction following last year’s Arrival , which received eight Oscar nominations including Best Picture and Director. On the strength of Arrival , as well as his other films – which include Prisoners and Sicario – the Blade Runner sequel is in very capable hands. But Villeneuve himself wasn’t so sure

played by Ryan Gosling, who is searching for Harrison Ford’s character, Deckard, in order to solve

a long buried secret. While

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