Reddit reviews Future Noir Revised & Updated Edition: The Making of Blade Runner

Well, it's always going to be controversial.

According to Ridley Scott, Deckard IS a Replicant, and over the years, he's released two cuts of the film to move towards making this more explicitly unambiguous.

According to several other key creative minds on the film, including the producer, the writers, and the main actor, it was always meant to be left subtle and ambiguous.

According to me, I much prefer the film with it left ambiguous.

I think it has a much more interesting meaning and purpose to it that way, and is just a better film, frankly. Ridley is known for being a stubborn old goat who domineers all he surveys, but he ain't the boss of me, and I think he's just plain wrong.

Anyway, over the years, I have seen so many various cuts and alternate scenes and versions (such as the megacut on Disc 4 of the box set) that Blade Runner has kind of become the ultimate Phil Dick movie, in that it exists in several different self-contradictory forms simultaneously in a way that is both nonsensical and impossible, very much like the plots of many of his books. I find that to be the greatest tribute to PDK of all (even if it is the unintentional result of a notoriously volatile production).

I can't recommend reading Paul M Sammon's Future Noir highly enough, if you have any interest in this subject.

Edit: Newer link. Looks like even books get a 'Final Cut' nowadays.

I think it was just the 1st edition that was out of print for so long. There was a second edition -- that I never picked up -- that came out for the 25th anniversary ten years ago. It must have also gone out of print at some point, as I'm actually having more difficulty finding a copy of that than the original edition.

I don't know how likely it will happen, but there is a link on the book's Amazon listing to request an ebook. You'll probably have to scroll down and it will be on the right side and have a picture of a kindle.

Future Noir by Paul Sammon also goes into a lot of juicy detail. Scott wasn't getting along with anyone; the crew disliked Scott so much that they printed up T-shirts to protest what they felt was an overly authoritarian style. Ford and Sean Young also didn't get along.