Canadian director Denis Villeneuve had fended off numerous requests to direct big-budget sequels until he was approached to make a follow-up to Ridley Scott’s 1982 neo-noir sci-fi film “Blade Runner.”
“I accepted to do ‘Blade Runner’ because it was meaningful,” Villeneuve, the director of last year’s cerebral alien sci-fi film “Arrival,” told Reuters.
“The resonance of the first movie in my life, the love I have for it, it’s worth it to take that risk,” he added.
“Blade Runner 2049,” in theaters on Oct. 6, will pick up 30 years after the events of the first movie, when human-like robots were hunted by police in a dystopian Los Angeles.
“We created a world that is an extension of the first movie, a projection of its future, where some laws and some rules will be in relationship with the first movie and not with today,” Villeneuve said.
The first film followed Harrison Ford as “blade runner” Rick Deckard, an expert on hunting the humanoid Replicant robots living on earth illegally, against a backdrop of a futuristic Los Angeles depicted as a hybrid of Eastern and Western cultural influences.
In a new trailer released this week, the sequel returns to a dystopian California after the ecosystem has broken down, where a Los Angeles police officer (Ryan Gosling) stumbles upon a secret that could jeopardize society and seeks out Deckard, who has been missing for 30 years.
