Before “Blade Runner 2049” opened, Denis Villeneuve hoped that we wouldn’t know much about his film:
“I think that it’s great for an audience to experience the movie as [critics] did, which is that you have no preconceived idea. I think that for me, myself as a cinephile, I love to receive a movie being almost a virgin, knowing as little as possible. There’s a hunger among bloggers right now to be the first one to spoil everything, and that’s sad a little bit because it diminishes the pleasure of the audience,” Villeneuve said in October.
“… people want to know too many things before. They should read about the movie after they see it, not before,” he added later that month.
Now he says that not only did he not want us to know anything, he actually didn't even want us to know that Harrison Ford was in the movie.
“Listen, as a film director I would love to keep everything a secret, I would love the audience just to trust and come to the theater having not seen anything of the movie,” Villeneuve said on the Empire Podcast. “Because of course, when you design the film you try to create surprises, tension… at the end of the day it would have been tough because everyone knew that Harrison was on the project, but yes, the answer I would have loved the audience not to know how he appears, where he appears, yeah.”
A peeve I had with BR2049 was that it was almost a foregone conclusion how Deckard was going to be introduced to us, come on admit it, and when it did happen it was rather dull and uninspiring, it's the glaring flaw of the film. Imagine how incredible that would have been? Not knowing Ford was in it.
I'm torn between thinking BR2049 is a good movie or a great movie because of the Ford section, except for that great hologram fight sequence, which leads to a kidnapping I rather wasn't that interested in. There must have been a disconnect between studio and diretcor because we all knew the actor was in it just based on official production photos.