Though eyes have been on Harrison Ford lately with “Star Wars: Episode VII” news, he’s got his eye on a “Blade Runner” sequel — at least, that’s what he told Redditors during his Ask Me Anything on Sunday.
When asked how he felt about a sequel to Ridley Scott’s sci-fi thriller, Ford was receptive to the idea.
“I’m quite curious and excited about seeing a new script for Blade Runner if in fact the opportunity would exist to do another, if it’s a good script I would be very anxious to work with Ridley Scott again, he’s a very talented and passionate filmmaker,” wrote Ford. “And I think it would be very interesting to revisit the character.”
Still, when asked which set he worked on was the most difficult, he replied that it was “Blade Runner,” as he said they worked 50 nights in a row and “it was always raining.”
Ford still couldn’t completely dodge the “Star Wars” questions. There was a rumor that his famous “I know” line (Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia: “I love you”/Ford: “I know”) was ad libbed, but Ford clarified that there was more to it than that.
It’s not really an ad lib, it was a suggestion, and movie making’s a real collaborative process at its best,” wrote Ford. “You don’t ad lib it, you suggest it and then you try something in rehearsal and then you agree. So it was my suggestion, because I thought it was more of a character line than what was written, but the director and Carrie and I all thought it was a good idea at the time so we did it.”
Ford also shared a story from one of the most iconic scenes in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” In the scene, Ford is being chased through the streets of Cairo when he crosses a swordsman who wishes to duel. Instead of going toe-to-toe with him, Ford’s Indiana Jones simply shoots him.
The scene, apparently, was less a matter of script-writing genius and more a matter of convenience for Ford, who was suffering from dysentery at the time. Ford shared the whole story on the Reddit board:
“We were shooting in Tunisia, and the script had a scene in which I fight a swordsman, an expert swordsman, it was meant to be the ultimate duel between sword and whip. And I was suffering from dysentery, really, found it inconvenient to be out of my trailer for more than 10 minutes at a time. We’d done a brief rehearsal of the scene the night before we were meant to shoot it, and both Steve and I realized it would take 2 or 3 days to shoot this. And it was the last thing we were meant to shoot in Tunisia before we left to shoot in England. And the scene before this in the film included a whip fight against 5 bad guys that were trying to kidnap Marian, so I thought it was a bit redundant. I was puzzling how to get out of this 3 days of shooting, so when I got to set I proposed to Steven that we just shoot the son a bitch and Steve said “I was thinking that as well.” So he drew his sword, the poor guy was a wonderful British stuntman who had practiced his sword skills for months in order to do this job, and was quite surprised by the idea that we would dispatch him in 5 minutes. But he flourished his sword, I pulled out my gun and shot him, and then we went back to England.”
The full AMA can be found here.
