When he died, some obituaries said that the actor Rutger Hauer improvised his death speech
in Blade Runner.
It was his most famous moment in his most famous performance, but the claim that it was improvised is horseshit.
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Good writing makes good books, and Blade Runner is based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K Dick. The novel is terrific, but far more complex than the movie, with several plotlines, while the movie zooms in on just one story about a cop named Decker, who’s hunting runaway androids.
(This is not a review of the book or the movie, so I’m going to toss spoilers enthusiastically. If you haven’t read the book and/or seen the movie, you oughta do both, before reading further.)
Hauer played the renegade android Baty, and in the novel, the character dies quickly, with no particular
drama and no dialogue. There’s no mention of the Tannhäuser Gate.
David Webb Peoples and Hampton Fancher wrote the script for Blade Runner, and in the first draft, Baty simply dies and without words, similar to his death in the novel. That was deemed not cinematically compelling, so they rewrote it, and in the final shooting script, here’s what Baty was going to say as his batteries drain and his synthetic life ends:
I’ve seen things… seen things you little people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion bright as magnesium… I rode on the back decks of a blinker and watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments… they’ll be gone.
That’s similar to what he says in the film, but not quite a match, and what he says in the film is much better. If you’ve seen it, you remember the scene, and the words.
Hauer was dissatisfied with his lines, and thought Baty’s soliloquy could be better than what was scripted, so he sat down with a pen and made it better.
He removed the insult of ‘little people’ and just said ‘people’, but delivered the line in such a way it leaves the insult intact.
He shortened one of the android’s memories, and eliminated another, and tightened the next-to-last sentence.
He added a final sentence that echoes earlier dialogue, when Baty had shouted “Time to die!” as a threat to Harrison Ford’s character. Saying “Time to die” again explains everything that came before, in the scene and in the movie.
And then he acted the hell out of it the next day.
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
It’s just one little paragraph, but it’s sweet perfection, a masterpiece of writing and rewriting, by David Webb Peoples, Hampton Fancher, and Rutger Hauer. Saying it was “improvised” is an insult to all three of them.
And it’s even more remarkable when you remember that English wasn’t Hauer’s native language.
10/3/2020
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