Filmmaker Denis Villeneuve -- whose cinematic resume includes the critically acclaimed Sicario and Arrival -- may not quite be dreaming of electric sheep. It's clear, though, that the techno-centric future world of Blade Runner has occupied the majority of his waking moments over the past several months as the release of director’s sequel Blade Runner 2049 loomed ever closer.

Joining CBR and a small press roundtable, Villeneuve made it abundantly clear that he’s given considerable thought to just about every facet of filmmaker Ridley Scott’s groundbreaking and profoundly influential screen adaptation of sci-fi icon Phillip K. Dick’s seminal short story. So much so, in fact, that – as he reveals – the thought of sequelizing one of film’s most enduring, ambiguous and increasingly relevant touchstones didn’t phase him as much as one (including Villenuve himself) might suspect.

What gave you the confidence to do a sequel to a movie that is so beloved? What reassured you about this project?

Denis Villeneuve: Three things. First of all, I had the Ridley Scott blessing. That was the first thing I asked [for] once I said yes. I said, ”I will do it.” There were some conditions, and the first one is to make sure, firsthand, to be in front of him, looking at him in the eyes, having him saying, “You can do it.”

Second thing: The screenplay, I felt, had strong ideas in it. I’m not saying it was a perfect screenplay. I’m just saying that I understood why Ridley felt there was the potential to do a strong movie there.

And the third thing is, I’ve heard a lot of movies in my life, like sci-fi. I always said to myself, "It’s dangerous to do those big movies." There’s a lot of pressure when you make those big movies. I said, “If I do it one day, it will be for something that is really worthy, that is really meaningful artistically for me.”

The first movie, it’s one of my favorite movies. I said to myself, “Okay, they will do it. No matter what we think, this movie will move forward.” I said to myself, “I don’t know if I will succeed, but I know I will give it all my love and all my skills because I will work so hard.” I didn’t want it to fall into the hands of someone - at least I will be passionate about it, and I will give my blood to make sure that it respects the spirit of the first movie.

It was a bit arrogant, basically. [Laughs] I was very afraid to see a sequel of Blade Runner. I said, “At least if I do it, then I have some control over it.” That’s the truth. At least I can blame only myself.

You’ve got a powerhouse cast for this film. How important for you was it to get the people that you got?

In any movie, one of the most important parts of the film process is casting. You need strong actors – that’s a thing. I’m a very different director from Ridley Scott, but it’s the thing that both of us we have in common. We always aim for excellence with the actors in our casting. It’s like, there’s no compromise. With the casting I’ve done, one thing I’m sure is that the performances in the movie are very strong – very strong. Because I had the chance to do a massive casting around the world where I chose among the best working actors, young actors.

One thing I love in the screenplay is that there’s a lot of strong female parts. Femininity is very important in the second movie, like it was in the first movie. I had the pleasure to meet actors that sometimes are well known in their own countries, but less known in North America sometimes, like Sylvia Hoeks, and Ana de Armas and Carla Juri. There’s Mackenzie Davis, also, from Canada. Those young actresses are strong artists. They brought a lot to the movie. It was a long casting process.

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Who’s the secret weapon, do you think, of your cast?

I would say that those four young actors are the secret weapon, honestly, that’s the way I feel with great excitement. I would say the four of them, for different reasons, are like the movie’s secret weapon. I love the way you say that.

If you didn’t have Harrison [Ford], would it have fallen apart?

It was the other way around. Harrison was there before me. Because the birth of the project was with the producers from Alcon that were able to unfreeze the rights, which was… Honestly, I think it was like a master, how can I say that in English? It was a very high-skilled negotiation to get the right back to life. They unfroze something that was very difficult.

The first thing they did is they approached Ridley, of course, and said, Ridley, “It’s something we’re able to do, so we would love to do it with you.” Ridley, I think, came back to them after 15 minutes: “Fly to London now.”

So they met with Ridley, and Ridley had a lot of ideas, because the thing is that at the birth of the project, when he did the first original Blade Runner – that’s what he told me – he had the desire to follow the characters in other stories. It was a universe that was open. You have a detective in the future. So for him, it was not necessarily intended to be one movie. The desire was there. It’s just that there was so much shit that happened with the first movie that it froze there. He thought it was dead.

They went to Ridley, and they went to Hampton Fancher, and both of them had an idea to do a sequel that excited everybody. The first thing they did once they got the idea, they phoned Harrison. At the early stage of screenwriting, they asked him, because without Harrison, there was no movie. And Harrison said yes.

So Harrison was there before me. I didn’t go to Harrison. I had to be approved by Harrison. It’s a different thing. Once I agreed to make the screenplay, me, I needed to meet Ridley, to hear from his own voice that he wanted me to do this. Then I had to meet Harrison, to be scanned by Harrison, to make sure I would be Harrison Ford approved.

One of the things in the first Blade Runner movie is that it popularized this future-shock vision of cyber punk. The aesthetic imprint of it is all over the place now. People are familiar with a Blade Runner-esque vision of the future. Can you talk about some ways, aesthetically, that you want to surprise people again?

You’re putting your finger in the soft spot. Is it the soft spot? The painful spot? It’s one of the big challenges. The idea is like, it’s a movie that has been so much cut and paste through the years. It influenced sci-fi, and all the movies, even Star Wars, are influenced by Blade Runner. So how can you go back to something that was so original, but after that, became a landmark?

So it was a long process to find the keys. The keys were in the screenplay, and the ideas of Hampton about the way climate evolved. So basically, climate for me was a key. Climate means means different kind of light. That was something that I felt, with [cinematographer] Roger Deakins, we explored those ideas and came back with something that we feel is deeply inspired by the first movie, but slightly different. Let’s say that the first movie was made by a director that was born in England under the rain, and the second one is made by a Canadian director that was born in snow. So the light is different.

There are things that evolved, I would say. But it was difficult. It took a lot of work to try to extend the project, this universe, in the future, and try to find something that I hope will have some kind of freshness.

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You mention you wanted to stay true to the spirit of Blade Runner. What did that entail, and what about the original did you want to preserve for part of the sequel?

There was a melancholia in the first movie, that is a nostalgia feeling of loneliness, a feeling of existential doubt about kind of an inner paranoia about yourself that I wanted to keep alive in the second movie.

I wanted to keep the film noir aesthetic as well. Very important. And a certain kind of pacing that, honestly, I deeply love in the first movie. I tried to adapt it to today’s rhythm of movies, but I still tried my best to keep that tension alive, that pacing of the first movie, which I know Ridley told me that was a touch in which I was able to stay in a relationship with the first movie, that atmospheric quality that first movie had. So that would be the answer, I think.

There are multiple versions, multiple edits, of the original. Did that have any bearing on which movie you were making a sequel to? Did you look at all the different variations and decide where you were starting from?

It’s a good question. The thing is that I was raised with the first one. For me, there was one Blade Runner. At the time, there was no internet. I remember seeing the first movie and falling deeply in love with it. It became, for me, an instant classic. Me and my friends, we were deeply in love with the first. I remember a few months later, reading, making research, reading a review of the movie that was very bad. And I became so angry because I felt that the critic was all wrong, because he felt that the adaptation of Philip K. Dick novel was not right. At the time, I totally disagree.

I was raised with the first one, and then later on, I discovered what was the initial dream of Ridley, so I really love Ridley’s version too. The thing is that the key to make this movie was to be in between. Because the first movie is a story of a human falling in love with a design human being, with an artificial being. The story of the second movie is a replicant that doesn’t know he’s a replicant, and that slowly discovers own identity. So those are two different stories.

I felt that the key to deal with that was in the novel of Philip K. Dick, which was that, in the novel, the characters are doubting about themselves. They are not sure if they are replicants or not. They are like, from time to time, the detectives are having to run a Voight-Kampff [test] on themselves to make sure that they are humans. I love that idea.

So I decided that the movie will be - and that’s the way I’ve done it, is the idea that Deckard in the movie is like unsure, as we are, what his identity is. That, I love, because I love mystery. That’s an interesting thing for me. It’s not to know whether he is or not, it’s to doubt. I really love that.

But I’m saying, again, Harrison and Ridley are still arguing about that. If you put them in the same room, they don’t agree, and they start to talk very loud! So I sat in the middle.

You mentioned when you were younger you read the review of it and that it wasn’t like the original novel, you got really angry.

Not angry, but I didn’t agree at all. Yeah, exactly.

But you mentioned that you’re pulling more from this movie from the original novel. Would you say that in some ways your sequel is a little bit truer to the original novel itself than the original?

No, I would not go there. No, no. I think that it’s a movie that has the main source of inspiration is Blade Runner, the Ridley Scott movie. There are some, I feel, some little elements that are a wink to Philip K. Dick, but I would not try to - I would not say that. I would not dare say that. That’s why it would be much more easy if you had seen the movie, and then you can have your own reactions, and say, yes, no.

There’s a lot of secrecy surrounding this one. Certainly more so than on any other movie you’ve worked on.

It’s insane. It’s insane. At one point, I was talking to someone in my crew and I said, “Ooh, he didn’t read the screenplay.” It’s a thing, like those movies that are designed in total secrecy like that, like the “Star Wars” movies, or James Bond, because of the pressure on the internet. When there’s little spoilers, it goes viral. There’s like an appetite to spoil movies.

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Do you enjoy that? Do you enjoy working under that kind of secrecy?

Two things: most of the time, the way I was doing movies before this one is that you do a movie, and people are not really necessarily aware. They don’t care. Nobody was expecting or waiting for Sicario. I didn’t have to put my screenplay in my safe. Nobody cared. It was easy.

I love that the audience see the movie, knowing as less as possible. I think it’s very powerful when you don’t know a lot of things about a movie. One of my best, as a cinephile, experiences a while ago: I was a jury in a film festival. I watched every movie, not knowing a thing. Not knowing from where it was. You sat in a dark room, and the movie started. You don’t know if it’s a horror movie, it’s a comedy, you don’t know if it’s from Kazakhstan or United States. You don’t know anything. And the impact of that, discovering a movie this way is so powerful. I experienced 20 movies in a row, and I was like, “Oh boy!”

I wish we were still in that state. Because right now, people see tons of images. Two days ago, Joe Walker, my editor, saw the trailer, and he was watching like that. I was like, “It’s okay, Joe, it’s okay, it’s okay. There are things you work hard to try to keep secret to create tension, two characters in a room to create surprise in the movie. Then you look and the marketing department just show it all.

I don’t like it. I wish one day I will have control. I understand the importance of marketing. I understand it’s tough competition, I understand the needs, but I wish we were able to sell movies without showing too much of it, in a perfect world.

So you’re coming from not necessarily smaller films, but a little more focused and not anywhere near on this scale. So I’m curious for you, is this a scale that you enjoy doing? You have Dune lined up as well. You’re going into these bigger productions. Is that something that you’re gravitating towards on purpose, to do bigger films? Or is it just kind of happening naturally?

The thing is that it’s happening naturally, but also, I would have never, never said yes to a project like that ten years ago. It’s like a matter of, each movie has its own challenges. It’s a natural rhythm, as a filmmaker, to get challenges and to be inspired to have bigger risk, step by step. The movie has always been bigger, one after the other, from a technical point of view, and a scope point of view.

One of my favorite movies is Lawrence of Arabia. That, you need a lot of mastery and a lot of knowledge and experience to do a movie like that. It’s like, for me, slowly walking in that direction. Honestly, it’s a blessing. If you had told me ten years ago that I would direct Blade Runner, I would have laughed in your face in front of you. I would not think such a thing would be possible. Naturally it comes, but it’s a natural rhythm getting bigger.

I had the time of my life doing this movie, because to work in that scope with those resources, to have the chance to build the sets, “I’ve seen things…” – it’s true: There are some moments that I was like, “Wow, I never thought I would have the chance. Because we built everything, the sets, the vehicles. So there were moments where there are some specific scenes, I never thought I would have the chance to see that in my life as a director, to have the chance to have those toys, to be able to recreate live things live, because you feel that it’s real, that there’s a weight, that there’s a presence.

I always thought that Yoda in Empire Strikes Back was much more powerful and present than the ones after with CG. I’m not a big CG fan. I think there’s a lot of power there. It’s a powerful tool, but it can not just be that. We did our best, the best as we could, to always try to be live with models, with real vehicles. There’s always something real in each image, to shoot real landscapes, to try our best to add life in front of the camera.

A lot of shots are done all in camera. Deakins was the cinematographer, and the production designer, Dennis Gassner, they really put their mastery to be able to recreate my dream, which was like, if you live in an apartment, what you will see outside, there was no green screen. They were building the other street. There were live things, rigs of light that emitted the light of the spinner coming inside. And the rain was falling for real. It was real, and you were in 2049. You cannot do that in Montreal with indie movies. So I’m not saying I will do that all my life, but right now, I have the energy and some desires that require those kinds of resources.

The first movie, because of the source material, it’s a movie where it asks the viewer to think about how technology changes what it means to be human, how we interface with technology, how it changes our bodies, our lives. Do you feel like you’ve made a movie where technology lets us be more empathetic to each other, or disconnected from each other? There’s a lot of disconnection from each other in the first movie. Do you feel like you’re closing a loop there?

No, unfortunately. I think it’s an extension of the first movie. What you described is a lot about what science fiction is. To explore human condition, and the relationship with progress and the unknown. The story that they wrote was, because the DNA of the story is something – I adapted the story as a filmmaker, but the DNA is coming from Hampton. So it’s the same thematics as the first movie. I would say that we didn’t evolve in that regard, unfortunately. But we are still there, which is good news.

Do you feel like technology can do that?

No. No. I deeply believe that it has to come from ourselves inside, not from an outside device. That’s why sci-fi is so interesting, I think.