Yahoo Entertainment News has a brief article with Ridley Scott discussing the revamped BLADE RUNNER, which recently screened at the Venice Film Festival:
“I wasn’t used at that point in my career to having too many cooks in the kitchen, and I think there were many people who started to get involved.
“So out of it came a hybrid version of what I’d originally intended. Consequently … we had a bad opening, bad previews, confused previews. I was killed by some critics … then I thought it would be gone away for ever,” Scott said.
[…]
Over the years, five [sic] versions of the film have been released, but Scott said the “Final Cut” — which will be issued as a collector’s DVD edition later in the winter — was “really as it was intended to be.”
“A good film is like good book, you might go to the shelf and take it off and revisit it. There are not a lot of films I can do that with from my collection of material,” said Scott, whose other titles include international hits such as the first “Alien,” “Thelma & Louise” and “Gladiator.”
The article does err in stating that “five versions of the film have been released; actually, only three have been released: the original U.S. theatrical cut from 1982; the slightly bloodier European cut that later showed up on VHS tape in the U.S.; and the so-called “Director’s Cut” that was released in 1992. The fourth version is a 70mm work-print that was screened for preview audiences and later showed up in a handful of theatrical screenings, prompting interest that led to the “Director’s Cut” release. The fifth version is the new cut that Scott has supervised, integrating bits from all the previous versions.