This year’s awaited surprise Midnight movie has been revealed. The 64th Venice Film Festival presents the world premiere of Blade Runner: The Final Cut (2007), the definitive version of Ridley Scott’s 1982 masterpiece, starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos, Daryl Hannah and Joanna Cassidy.
To celebrate Blade Runner’s twenty-fifth anniversary, that already screened out of competition at the Venice Film Festival in 1982, the director Ridley Scott (Alien, Hannibal and a three-time Oscar® nominee, Best Director, for Gladiator, Thelma & Louise and Black Hawk Down) has returned to post-production work on the film in order to create the eagerly awaited new version, Blade Runner: The Final Cut, restored, re-mastered and scanned at 4K resolution, featuring previously unreleased and extended scenes, new improved special effects and with a Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track, all of which the 64th Venice Film Festival will be presenting, as a world premiere, on Saturday 1st September at midnight in the Sala Grande, in the presence of Ridley Scott.
Blade Runner, a post-modern classic, sci-fi and cyberpunk film noir, is based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, an author whose work has repeatedly been adapted to the big screen (Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, Paycheck). Ridley Scott’s powerful visual spectacle, which received immediate public and critical acclaim for its explosive prophetic force, innovative style and original mise en scène, offers a profound reflection on the gaze within a context wherein meaning is dominated by simulacrum and artificiality. Following its world premiere in Venice, Blade Runner: The Final Cut will be showcased on limited release from 5th October in cinemas in New York and Los Angeles, and released in the USA on DVD by Warner Home Video from 18th December 2007.
Ridley Scott directed the Academy Award winning film Gladiator and received Oscar nominations for directing Black Hawk Down and Thelma & Louise. Born on November 30, 1937 in South Shields, Northumberland, England and raised in London, Cumbria, Wales and Germany, he made his feature film directorial debut with The Duellists and followed it with Alien and Blade Runner. Scott's other directing credits include the upcoming American Gangster, A Good Year, Kingdom of Heaven, Matchstick Men, White Squall, G.I. Jane and Hannibal, the sequel to The Silence of the Lambs. Scott served as producer on Scott Free Films' In Her Shoes, Tristan + Isolde and most recently the upcoming The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford starring Brad Pitt and in competition at the 64th Venice Film Festival.
Venice, August 1st 2007
