'Like Tears In Rain' - Blade Runner And The Story Of That Speech
Before he made Blade Runner, few people outside of his native Holland had heard of Rutger Hauer. After playing a homicidal Aryan cyborg, no one would ever forget him.
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ship on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears… in rain… Time… to die.”
Any survey of great movie speeches would have to prominently feature the above soliloquy from Ridley Scott’s science-fiction masterpiece Blade Runner. The lines are delivered by Roy Batty, a villainous cyborg or ‘replicant’ who’s forced to confront his own ‘mortality’. As for the man who delivers them, Dutch actor Rutger Hauer, we partially have him to thank for their poetry.”
“I’m still proud of Batty’s final speech,” says the Breukelen-born actor. “As it was originally written, the speech was a bit longer, like half-a-page of dialogue. I said to Ridley the night before we shot it, ‘This speech is way too long’. Batty has no time to say goodbye – he has maybe a few moments to talk about things he’s seen. I said we should do it very fast and very simply and as profoundly as possible. When we filmed the speech the next day, I cut a little bit out of the opening and then improvised those closing lines. From ‘All those moments’ on, that’s mine.”
‘Like tears in rain’ – poetry such as this runs throughout Blade Runner. It’s to be found in David Webb Peoples’ script, the astonishing production design of Lawrence Paul, Vangelis’s synth score, and of course Scott’s effortless direction. As for the performances, Harrison Ford’s turn as replicant-pursuing cop Rick Deckard has long divided people – when the film was rereleased in 1991 in an erroneously named ‘Director’s Cut’, Ford’s monotone narration was ditched, so improving both the film and the quality of his performance.
Rutger Hauer, on the other hand, is so electric that it’s impossible to take your eyes off of him. Every time he’s on screen, the picture crackles with excitement and anticipation. But how did an actor who was such a relative unknown in the US land so crucial a part?
“Ridley really liked my early films,” explains the man recently seen in Hobo With A Shotgun and HBO’s True Blood. “Oddly enough, he cast me before we’d even meet one another. He was just a big fan of the films I’d made with Paul Verhoeven like Turkish Delight and Soldier Of Orange. I was just honoured to know that such great artist was aware of my work.”
And as he’s too modest to talk up his casting, Hauer is also insistent that the credit for Batty’s astonishing monologue be shared with the screenwriter. “Everyone always writes about me and that speech, and ignores David Webb Peoples. I loved those images that David came up with – attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion,
c-beams glittering. I thought they were interesting even if you didn’t really understand them. They were dreamlike.”
As indeed is an awful lot of Blade Runner.