And then they start chasing him down…well he has to fight once and a while. “From the point where they start chasing him, he hasn’t done so much harm. “I don’t think this is a villain,” he said, promoting Blade Runner. Rather he presents Batty as a frightened soul lashing out at a world that has condemned him to a meaningless death. That’s partly due to the sheer punch of the tears in the rain speech.īut also because, whenever Batty is on screen, Hauer resists playing him as a brutal ’bot in the Terminator mode. Those are heavy topics for a sci-fi blockbuster starring an actor best known as Han Solo (Ford) and released the same summer as An Officer and a Gentleman and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. There he hoped his creator, Dr Eldon Tyrell, would have a cure for his dimming batteries. And so, with six other droids, he hijacked a shuttle and set course for earth. Cursed, as we all are with an awareness of mortality, the Nexus-6 replicant was also burdened with knowing the precise moment he would die.
I shave everything that I feel you don’t need.”īatty was, on the page at least, the villain in Blade Runner. Hauer’s special gift was to perceive that the replicant leader was ultimately the victim, not the bad guy. “So, I look at the script, and I look at my part, because I don’t want to touch anybody ’s parts. “The overwritten stuff comes from the writer and all the executives, but the audience can feel it, and even the best actor cannot sell me with language that is overwritten. “You know, I think a lot of scripts are overwritten,” Hauer told the Radio Times in 2017. The crucial insight he brought was that, as we face the end, the less we say the harder it hits. The sad postscript to all this, of course, is that Haeur would pass away in 2019 – the year Blade Runner is set and when Batty’s lights go dim. He was eager for Blade Runner to be something else –weighty, mournful, a mediation on existence.
Scott’s previous movie, Alien, had been the best sort of hokum. He told the Dutchman that he should bring his own perspective to Batty. Scott had sought out Hauer for the part of Batty after seeing him in Paul Verhoeven’s World War Two drama Soldier of Orange. Part of the reason is that it flowed from the depths of Hauer’s being. How incredible a speech delivered by a psychopathic robot in an often overwrought and overcooked sci-fi movie should convey that universal truth so stunningly. With a minimum of words he conveys the wonder of life, and the terrible flip side: that everyone we do or think, all that we achieve, everyone we love… in the end it all slips away and is forgotten. Batty’s artificial life span of three years is ticking down to its final moments.
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