El Blade Runner: A Western

The goal of our project was to reshoot Blade Runner as an Italian spaghetti western, since we saw both Blade Runner and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly recently. We thought that both movies had flexible enough settings and plots that we could combine the two easily.

We chose the scene where Deckard is infiltrating the nightclub towards the beginning of the movie, trying to determine whether or not Zhora is a replicant. It wouldn't make much sense for an android to be hiding in the old west, so instead we made Zhora into a generic outlaw who is hiding from Deckard, who is now a sheriff, by posing as a bartender. The scene starts with Deckard bluffing his way into Zhora's dressing room by pretending to be from an organization that helps performers, and he starts checking the room for holes and cameras. We thought that the most likely comparison to the wild west (without getting too lewd) would be having a health inspector check a saloon for health problems. Deckard also asks if Zhora's holographic snake is real, to which she says "Of course not, do you think I'd be working in a place like this if I could afford a real snake?" The closest comparison we could find was the price of wood in the old west, so we had Deckard ask about the quality of the wood in the saloon instead.

After this point we kept the basic outline of the scene almost identical to the original. Zhora becomes suspicious of Deckard and fights him with some kung fu moves before running away and eventually being shot by Deckard. In our scene the same thing happens, except Deckard has an uzi since it was all that we could find. It is still an older gun than what Deckard had in the original Blade Runner, so the idea still stands.

While we were recording, we realized that the phone we were using wasn't recording any audio for some reason. At first we were going to use another phone, but then we remembered that many westerns were originally recorded in Italian before being dubbed over by English voice actors. Because of this, we decided to to keep our old silent footage and dub over it.