Harrison Ford uses Oscar soapbox to get some Blade Runner complaints off his

I was compelled by my contract to do the narration. When I first agreed to do the film, I told Ridley there was too much information given to the audience in narration. I said, “Let’s take it out and put it into scenes and let the audience acquire this information in a narrative fashion, without being told it.” And he said it was a good idea. We sat around the kitchen table and we did it. When we got done, the studio said nobody will understand this f*ing movie. We have to create a narrative. They had already thrown Ridley off the movie – they were over budget. So I was compelled by my contract to record this narration, which I did five or six different times. Finally, I show up to do it for the last time and there’s this old Hollywood writer sitting there, pipe sticking out of his mouth, pounding away at this portable typewriter in one of the studios. I had never seen this guy before, so I stuck my head in and said, “Hi, I’m Harrison Ford.” He kind of waves me off. He came to hand me his pages. To this day, I still don’t remember who he was, and so I said, “Look, I’ve done this five times before. I’m not going to argue with you about anything. I’ve argued and I’ve never won, so I’m just going to read this 10 times, and you guys do with it what you will.” I did that. Did I deliberately do it badly? No. I delivered it to the best of my ability given that I had no input. I never thought they’d use it. But I didn’t try and sandbag it. It was simply bad narration.