_ I first saw Blade Runner, as a kid, on VHS at home. My dad had the 1991 Director's Cut in the cupboard. What attracted me to the film was the brilliant poster on the box, it was intriguing and visually wonderful. The film speaks for itself - I didn't really know what was going on when I first saw it but the visuals and the music left a definite imprint on me forever. Having now seen the film many times over the years it no longer seems foreign to me. Multiple viewings haven't lessened the impact at all; it has in fact firmly established it as my favorite film of all time.

Any film I watched after that was judged to the quality of Blade Runner and nothing really comes close to it. Every single aspect from the music, the production design, the sound effects, the costume, the cinematography, and the visual effects to the characters is something can only exist in that universe created by Ridley Scott and the entire team behind the production. It is the result of a singular vision. All of the elements that contributed to the film were exactly right and if you removed any one of them it would have been to the detriment of the final film in my opinion. That is what Blade Runner does best; it creates a visceral experience unlike anything you will watch. For me I can almost smell the film, the rain constantly bearing down on you really leaves an impression. I don't want to write a book on the film as so much of it is already covered in various online resources and mostly by the documentary Dangerous Days, if you haven't seen it get a copy of the 2007 Final Cut edition and watch it. It takes you through the arduous process of getting the film made and is so much more than a simple behind the scenes.

The idea of creating a fan film, because this is what it boils down to at the end of the day was quite easy for me, the execution of the filming was another story altogether. I knew exactly what I didn't want to do with this film. I didn't want to make a carbon copy of the original source material, a good example of this would be pretty much any Star Wars fan film I ever seen. They (the filmmakers) take a scene from the movie and recreate it albeit (sometimes) very cheaply and usually place emphasis on a light saber battles. If you have seen ten fan films you have seen them all in my opinion. When deciding the route to take with Tears In The Rain it was our intention to focus on a singular idea for a story and work from there. I co-wrote the script with Evan James Dembskey who should take credit for all the actual writing. Between us we spent two years on and off in our spare time making small contributions to the script. It wasn’t until late in the writing process that the story actually took a good shape.

Our goal was to avoid the clichés of the ‘fan film genre’ if you can say that some exist in the first place. We wanted to tell a mature story and focus our efforts into telling a story that had substance. It could have been easy to write a story about some guy who hunts down Replicants and chases them through the city in a cool car chase scene. That was what we wanted to stay away from. In my opinion we took a tougher route and focused on characters. In this day and age of CGI and fast paced gaming and social content this is a risk, however the story should always come first and we believe there exists a group of fans new and old who will appreciate what we tried to do.

What has always been compelling about Blade Runner to me at least, was the idea that Replicants were indistinguishable from humans. Harrison Ford could easily have made a mistake and killed a human by mistake. That concept is what we decided to start with, a simple story of talking heads in a diner. I am a fan of the story the film is based on by Philip K Dick – Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep. We pay homage to that story in our script and very few people will probably even notice. Rick Deckard ruthlessly hunts down these Replicants in a manner that forces the viewer to question why they need to be killed in the first place. Rutger Hauer plays Roy Batty to perfection, if he was just a big brute the entire arc of the story would not have been as poignant as it was. At the end of the film Roy Batty knows he is dying and yet he decides to save Deckard even though he killed all his friends. That is what the film is about, humanity and as an audience member you can take away from it what you will.

The question of humanity is front and center especially with the debate surrounding Rick Deckard’s origins, is he a Replicant? There are various clues throughout the movie that seem to strongly indicate he is, even Ridley Scott in interviews years later said Deckard was a Replicant. I personally lean towards him being a Replicant while others do not accept this at all. Tears In The Rain is a “what if” story. What if someone was retired and there existed doubt in the mind of the audience? We took that and wrote a story that serves as a prequel of sorts. We decided to tell a film that took place five years before the start of Deckard’s story in a time where the same knowledge and tools weren’t available.

How do you recreate the look of a film such as Blade Runner when you do not have the same budget nor the same amount of time to achieve it? The answer is you try your best.

I knew we simply would never be able to come even close to the sheer depth of character detail and world that is inherent in every frame of Blade Runner. Rather than attempt to pull it off we opted to create something that was our own and yet could share the DNA of BR (from here on out Blade Runner will be known as BR). Maybe one day in the future it would be nice to have a real budget and go all out and really explore the possibilities. If we get funding then we shall try, until then it remains only a dream. The story of Tears In The Rain is a prequel of sorts but not linked to the previous characters so we had some room to play with. The goal was to capture the essence and the spirit of BR as much as possible.

Doing this with only ten hours  of shooting time and $1200 budget would prove to quite a challenge. I did not want to hide behind CGI and hope to dazzle people and get them to say: "wow look how close they came to copying BR." No, I wanted us to create a world that was not a direct rip off of BR, and I really believe there is a distinction to copying from and drawing inspiration from a film or any source material. This extends not only to the visual but the auditory elements too. It would be a disservice to the entire intention of the film to use Vangelis's original score. If that is the kind of film we were going to make I would have simply ripped the BR blu ray and digitally comped in our characters into existing footage. It would have made life easier, let me tell you. I opted to have an original score composed for this film again the intention is not to simply clone the source material but really be inspired by it. The composer Geo Hohn has a difficult task ahead of him but I know he will pull through the challenge and deliver a unique score.

Pictures courtesy of Christopher Lee Dos Santos and Barend Stofberg.