Most film fans hold the work of Stan­ley Kubrick and Wes Ander­son in high regard, even if they don’t find one, the oth­er, or both to their par­tic­u­lar taste. And at first glance, it might seem hard to under­stand what kind of taste could pos­si­bly encom­pass both Kubrick and Ander­son. The for­mer made most­ly com­plex and emo­tion­al­ly chilled peri­od pieces, visu­al­ly grand yet stark, tinged with grim humor, and pos­sess­ing a dim view of human­i­ty. The lat­ter makes col­or­ful, out­ward­ly high-spir­it­ed come­dies, some­times even ani­mat­ed ones, that seem to delight in their own care­ful­ly cul­ti­vat­ed aes­thet­ics.

But both bod­ies of work reveal direc­to­r­i­al minds that take cin­e­ma itself very seri­ous­ly indeed. “Kubrick is one of my favorites,” says Ander­son in an inter­view clip used in the video essay com­par­ing shots from his films to shots from Kubrick­’s, just above. “Usu­al­ly, by the time I’m mak­ing the movie, I don’t real­ly know where I’m steal­ing every­thing from. By the time it’s a movie, I think it’s my thing, and I for­get where I took it all — but I think I’m always pret­ty influ­enced by Kubrick.” That influ­ence, on a visu­al lev­el, does come through in this com­par­i­son, cer­tain­ly in all those first-per­son per­spec­tives and views through port­holes, but even more so with the cam­era moves, espe­cial­ly in the track­ing shots and zooms.

As Bill Mur­ray said in a 1999 inter­view with Char­lie Rose of Rush­more, the pic­ture that would make Mur­ray an Ander­son reg­u­lar, “Boy, this has got some great moves in it.” By that he meant “the way sto­ries get told in pic­tures.” A film­mak­er needs a script, of course, but “the way you shoot it, too, shows how you want to impact things on an audi­ence.” He describes Ander­son and his col­lab­o­ra­tors as pos­sessed of “an enor­mous film cul­ture,” recall­ing shots from cin­e­ma past and, in their own pro­duc­tions, repur­pos­ing them com­plete­ly. Mur­ray remem­bers Ander­son describ­ing a shot in Rush­more as “one I saw in Bar­ry Lyn­don.” “You remem­ber Bar­ry Lyn­don?” Mur­ray asks Rose. “It was this enor­mous thing. Ours, though, is the inter­mis­sion of the school play.”

That school play, you may recall, appears as one of sev­er­al put on by Rush­more’s pro­tag­o­nist Max Fis­ch­er, whose sen­si­bil­i­ties (and artis­tic abil­i­ties) may dif­fer from Ander­son­’s, but who shows just the same zeal for cre­ative­ly “rip­ping off” from the movies. “I talk to a lot of those guys who come in here, these young direc­tors,” Rose says of Ander­son and his gen­er­a­tion. “They’ve seen every movie. They’re more stu­dents of cin­e­ma than most.” Mur­ray cau­tions that “it always gets per­vert­ed when peo­ple say, ‘Oh, the good ones copy, the great ones steal,’ ” an idea that can lead to emp­ty for­mal trib­utes, but “Wes,” to his mind, was dif­fer­ent. Pos­sessed of both “mind and body,” he “just knows how to get these things togeth­er in one place,” using the lan­guage of cin­e­ma, whether invent­ed or bor­rowed, for max­i­mum impact — as, in a dif­fer­ent yet star­tling­ly sim­i­lar way, did Kubrick.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Shin­ing Reimag­ined as Wes Ander­son and David Lynch Movies

The Per­fect Sym­me­try of Wes Anderson’s Movies

Sig­na­ture Shots from the Films of Stan­ley Kubrick: One-Point Per­spec­tive

A Glimpse Into How Wes Ander­son Cre­ative­ly Remixes/Recycles Scenes in His Dif­fer­ent Films

Cult Films by Kubrick, Taran­ti­no & Wes Ander­son Re-imag­ined as 8‑Bit Video Games

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The open­ing Voight-Kampff test that turns explo­sive, the flight over the high-rise rooftops and past the tow­er-side video geisha of 2019 Los Ange­les, Roy Bat­ty’s dying mono­logue on the rainy rooftop, Deckard pick­ing up Gaff’s origa­mi uni­corn: like any oth­er movie mer­it­ing clas­sic sta­tus, Blade Run­ner less pos­sess­es mem­o­rable scenes than com­pris­es noth­ing but mem­o­rable scenes. Fans have, of course, argued for their favorites, and if you have one your­self you can now com­pare your judg­ment against that of the film’s direc­tor Rid­ley Scott, who talks about which Blade Run­ner scene he holds in high­est esteem in the new video from Wired above.

Scott picks the scene when Deckard, Har­ri­son Ford’s hunter of the arti­fi­cial human beings known as repli­cants, vis­its the offices of the colos­sal Tyrell Cor­po­ra­tion that invent­ed them and inter­views an immac­u­late­ly put-togeth­er young lady, almost a vision out of film noir, named Rachael.

But that’s no lady — that’s a repli­cant, at least accord­ing to the Voight-Kampff gear he breaks out and sets up for the pro­ce­dure. “To Rick Deckard, it’s just a job,” says Scott. “He appears to be obliv­i­ous to the beau­ty and is unim­pressed by what he sees. At the end of it, he says, ‘How can it now know what it is?’ He calls her ‘it.’ So obvi­ous­ly she’s a race apart.”

But how to sig­nal that to the audi­ence, show­ing with­out telling? Scott speaks of mod­el­ing Rachael after Hedy Lamarr, the Aus­tri­an-born star from the gold­en age of Hol­ly­wood “who had a sever­i­ty which was spec­tac­u­lar.” Still work­ing at a time in cin­e­ma when “dig­i­tal does­n’t have a word,” he want­ed a way to dif­fer­en­ti­ate repli­cants from humans by putting an unusu­al “light in their eyes” (he ref­er­ences the leop­ard in the begin­ning of Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey). Spe­cial effects super­vi­sor Dou­glas Trum­bull (who’d also worked on 2011) came up with a cam­era-mount­ed half-mir­ror that would, just often enough, tilt to make a “gold­en light” reflect off the reti­nas of Rachael and the oth­er repli­cants. Scot­t’s ver­dict: “Genius.”

Many of us would say the same about most oth­er aspects of Blade Run­ner as well. But as with any artis­ti­cal­ly rich film, nobody, not even the direc­tor, has the final say about it. Scott may have an unam­bigu­ous atti­tude about the best part of Blade Run­ner, but then, he also has an unam­bigu­ous answer to the sto­ry’s cen­tral ques­tion of whether not just Rachael but Deckard him­self is a repli­cant. Will Denis Vil­leneu­ve’s soon upcom­ing sequel Blade Run­ner 2049 hon­or, ignore, or work around that answer? More to the point, will it, in the full­ness of time, con­tribute as much to our col­lec­tive mem­o­ry as did the orig­i­nal? Only one test, of the kind that hap­pens in the movie the­ater, will reveal that to us.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art of Mak­ing Blade Run­ner: See the Orig­i­nal Sketch­book, Sto­ry­boards, On-Set Polaroids & More

How Rid­ley Scott’s Blade Run­ner Illu­mi­nates the Cen­tral Prob­lem of Moder­ni­ty

Blade Run­ner 2049’s New Mak­ing-Of Fea­turette Gives You a Sneak Peek Inside the Long-Await­ed Sequel

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.