The legendary movie Harrison Ford will always regret: “This movie gets worse every screening”

Harrison Ford has now become one of the more charming members of the Hollywood elite. But his position hasn’t always been guaranteed. The actor, famed for his roles in Star Wars and Indiana Jones, hasn’t always been the family-friendly ragamuffin he has come across as in his latter years. For some time, he operated with a far more caustic tongue, an organ he unleashed not just on the work of others but even his own movies.  

Ridley Scott’s 1982 picture Blade Runner, the movie adaptation of Phillip K Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is often cited as the perfect rainy day film, one of the greatest movies of all time, let alone one of the pioneering moments of science fiction. The film starred Ford as the titular Blade Runner, Rick Deckard and Rutger Hauer as the android replicant Roy Batty. Vangelis also produced an indomitable score.

However, despite the film’s undoubted excellence, Harrison Ford expressed his regrets over Blade Runner last year when he presented the Academy Award for ‘Best Editing’. He pulled out a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket and reeled off several “editorial suggestions” about the film he had written after watching an early screening of it.

“Opening too choppy,” Ford said. “Why is this voiceover track so terrible? He sounds drugged. Were they all on drugs? Dekker at the piano is interminable. The flashback dialogue is confusing. Is he listening to a tape? Why do we need the third cut to the eggs? The synagogue music is awful on the street. We’ve got to use Vangelis. Up to Zora’s death, the movie is deadly dull. This movie gets worse every screening.”

Ford was particularly annoyed about the voiceover recording. He said he “was obliged by my contract to record that narration, which [he] found awkward and uninspired”. In fairness to Ford, Scott also felt that the voiceover was poor and removed it from the film’s 2007 Director’s Cut version.

Discussing the complicated nature of editing a film, Ford added: “The possibilities may seem endless, but the editor will work tirelessly, often in isolation, to make thousands of choices, placing the right piece of the right length in the right order to arrive at the best version of what the movie wants to be. It’s an extremely difficult process, not for the impatient, not for the faint of heart.”

Confirming the actor’s position as one of the more difficult contributors to any production, Scott once claimed that Ford was the “biggest pain in the ass” he had ever worked with. “He’ll forgive me because now I get on with him,” he added. “Now he’s become charming. But he knows a lot, that’s the problem. When we worked together, it was my first film up, and I was the new kid on the block. But we made a good movie.“

They certainly did. The picture is regarded as one of the most enduring works of the 20th century. It would shape science fiction as we know it and further push Harrison Ford’s career into the stratosphere. With this one role, Ford would establish himself not only as a family-forward favourite, built on charm and snappy one-liners but also situate himself among the more serious actors in Hollywood. He may not like it, but Deckard would round out the humanity of Ford and make him a legend in yet one more way. 

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