Pre-central interest.
Think well and read carefully.
Pre-central interest.
Art direction, set design, I think generally was one massive challenge.
That evolution told us it had to be this much money, better make it on a backlog.
Michael had a saying that when Ridley takes out the pencil, it's hundreds of dollars
and when he takes out a pen, it's thousands of dollars.
I saw a very large canvas.
I saw a very eclectic canvas where basically we were going to make our own rules.
Sid Mead, although his visual influence on Blade Runner was indeed great,
was only part of a larger entity called the art department.
Now every film has an art department and this is where the designs and the blueprints
and the whole overall visual concept of the films is nailed before filming starts.
The person in charge of the art department is called a production designer.
On Blade Runner that was the guy named Lawrence Paul and Larry had a lot to do
with hiring the other people in the art department and coordinating all of the varying looks
and synthesizing them to Ridley's specification.
Ridley would hand little tiny drawings, we called Ridley Grimm's, to Sherman
and Sherman would then do fairly large renderings in tone and light
and they were gorgeous.
Mentor was doing the production illustrations of the sets that Larry was building.
Mentor Huberner, a grand old gentleman of the real classic movies, did his lock off drawings
and I think Conte pencil, they were gorgeous, gorgeous drawings.
In retrospect I guess I seduced the process of being hired in the first place
only to do the vehicles and because I could render, I've been rendering for 20 years
at the time I started the movie business.
So I knew how to reproduce the mood, lighting, the fixtures, what you saw
and I had never done isolated object on a white sheet of paper
because that's not the way things exist in the real world, they have surroundings.
The street set which has the oblong sort of hot dog shaped lights
around the corner of the building, that was right from the painting,
right exactly from the painting.
So all these things went together based on sketches from Ridley,
direction from him through Lawrence Paul to myself,
accompanying Lawrence Paul to the Warner Brothers Back Lock.
I designed the interior of Deckard's bedroom
which was supposed to be the ultimate movable bachelor pad, fun pit kind of thing,
that was never built.
A futurist Sid Mead was one of the great illustrators of industrial objects,
cars, electric irons, apartments, skyscrapers, cityscapes, urban development
and I looked at this thought, looking at them as if they were fantasy.
Now Sid was actually a great preview on where we've gone.
We had also gone to the Frank Lloyd Wright Ennis Brown House
but when we had gotten to Lloyd Wright's house and I had photographed it
I realized the way the concrete blocks were designed and broken out in coffers
and it literally felt like a cave enclosure.
That was the whole tip-off for the whole set.
For me, design-wise, it was to make it feel totally claustrophobic
and there were two locations that Ridley liked in LA.
One was the Bradbury Building and the other was Union Station.
The Bradbury Building turned out to be the hotel where one of our key characters lived
and Union Station turned out to be the police station.
We built the set in the corner of the station and the set is still there in Union Station.
It's part of the offices now and we made a deal with them to cut back on the location fee
if they would take the set which they did.
I think, funnily enough, it took somebody not to come from LA to actually do it in LA
because I'm new, I haven't seen this before and I'm going wow, that's good, that's good.
And the Bradbury's great and we put a little cheap canopy on.
I even brought the columns from the studio because they're only styrofoam.
So I had a style of crunchy kind of comic strip architecture which is nearly real.
It's real, you've got to make it real.
The Bradbury Building, everyone in the TV series uses that night
and said, you know, basically, back off, I'm going to use it.
I'll shoot it the way you haven't seen it before.
Being an architectural student, I said, you know, it doesn't make any sense to me
that you're walking along the corridor of the Bradbury Building
and all of a sudden you walk in and there's these plaster walls.
And I said, it doesn't make any sense to me and I mean, that was exactly the point
and why does it have to make sense and isn't it so much more interesting
that the architecture is different.
And I think what he said to me was, don't rationalize with me.
