'Blade Runner,' Take 3

Ridley Scott was living in London in 1980 but looking for a leading man for his first Hollywood movie. The script was a strange one -- it was a surreal tale adapted from a 1968 novel about murderous artificial people in futuristic Los Angeles -- and Scott didn't have a certain title since he couldn't use the more-than-a-mouthful name of the book: "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" Scott did have a star in mind, though: He had seen "Star Wars" and decided that he wanted his star to be the actor who had played that charming scoundrel Han Solo.

"The reaction of one of the producers was: 'Who the hell is Harrison Ford?' One of the reasons I went for Harrison was the fact that I knew that Steven [Spielberg] and George [Lucas] were doing this thing called ["Raiders of the Lost Ark"]. It smelled good to me. I simply called up Harrison's agent and said, 'I want to meet Harrison as soon as possible.' Like two days later we met and he turned up with the stubble and the hat and the leather jacket on because he had been shooting. It was like 10 o'clock at night. So my meeting for 'Blade Runner' was with Indiana Jones."

Scott chuckled at the memory, then groaned, reached for a bag of ice and propped his leg up on a chair. The 69-year-old British filmmaker was fresh from knee surgery -- "Too much tennis," he said with a sad shrug -- and at the time was still working on his 19th film, "American Gangster," due in theaters in November. But he was eager to talk about "Blade Runner" and the past because he's getting a rare chance to revisit and reengage both. Scott oversaw a new remastered version of the film that enhances its Vangelis score, adds snap to its visual effects and even includes a bit of new footage, all for the 25th anniversary of the dystopian epic. "Blade Runner: The Final Cut" will be shown for a month at the Landmark Theatre in West L.A. and then will go on sale as a DVD in November.

The tale of "Blade Runner" is not a sunny one. The version of the film that reached theaters in 1982 (it opened against "E.T.") was weighted down with a somnambulant voice-over narrative and a tacked-on ending that Scott loathed; the set too had been a contentious one, with Ford and Scott locked in a surly struggle. Also, Philip K. Dick, the author of "Do Androids Dream," died just four months before the film reached the screen.