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.

How did the Black List get start­ed? Not the Hol­ly­wood black­list that ruined the careers of count­less direc­tors, actors and actress­es dur­ing the 1940s and 1950s. No, we mean the Black List, cre­at­ed by Franklin Leonard in 2005, which has allowed more than 300 scripts, once stuck in Hol­ly­wood pur­ga­to­ry, to get turned into fea­ture films–films like Slum­dog Mil­lion­aire, The King’s Speech, Argo and Spot­light.  This all start­ed when Leonard cre­at­ed a sim­ple sur­vey, ask­ing near­ly 100 movies exec­u­tives to name their favorite scripts that had not yet been made as fea­ture films. The new Vox video above tells the rest of the sto­ry.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jean-Paul Sartre Writes a Script for John Huston’s Film on Freud (1958)

When Aldous Hux­ley Wrote a Script for Disney’s Alice in Won­der­land

How Movie Stu­dios Reject­ed Scripts Dur­ing the Silent-Film Era: A Cold, 17-Point Check­list Cir­ca 1915

Just as we would­n’t expect David Lynch to deliv­er a tra­di­tion­al movie, nor should we expect him to deliv­er a tra­di­tion­al com­mence­ment address. “I did an inter­view with the Des Moines Reg­is­ter and said that this would be a strange com­mence­ment speech,” the cre­ator of Eraser­head, Mul­hol­land Dri­ve, and (with Mark Frost) Twin Peaks tells the 2016 grad­u­at­ing class of the Mahar­ishi Uni­ver­si­ty of Man­age­ment by way of open­ing not a speech but an on-stage ques­tion-and-answer ses­sion. The ques­tions came from select stu­dents who want to know things like how he sees the world look­ing in ten years, what makes a good leader, and what makes a mean­ing­ful life.

One also wants to know how to “rec­on­cile a job or career with our dhar­ma or pur­pose.” To that ques­tion, the very first, Lynch can respond with only one word: “Wow.” But then, he had to have expect­ed that ques­tion from a stu­dent at MUM, an insti­tu­tion estab­lished to pro­vide some­thing called “Con­scious­ness-Based edu­ca­tion” under which you don’t just gain knowl­edge but “your aware­ness expands, improv­ing your abil­i­ty to absorb knowl­edge and see the big pic­ture.”

Inte­gral to all this is Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion, the tech­nique devel­oped by MUM founder (and guru to the likes of the Bea­t­les and the Beach Boys) Mahar­ishi Mahesh Yogi and which Lynch him­self has prac­ticed since 1973.

Even if you have no inter­est in Lynch’s mem­o­ries of the Mahar­ishi (a pos­si­ble sub­ject of a future movie of his, he implies), or in med­i­ta­tion of any kind, Lynch still dis­pens­es a fair few pieces of valu­able advice dur­ing these twen­ty min­utes. “I always equate ideas sort of like fish — we don’t make the fish, we catch the fish,” he says in response to one stu­dent who asks about how he falls in love with the ideas out of which his projects devel­op. “You fall in love with an idea and for me it may just be a frag­ment of a whole thing like a script, or a whole film, but this lit­tle frag­ment is so thrilling and you fall in love.” And “once you get one frag­ment, it’s like bait on a hook to catch more frag­ments.”

More con­crete­ly, anoth­er stu­dent asks Lynch to go back to his time at the Penn­syl­va­nia Acad­e­my of Fine Arts (which draws a “Whoa” from Lynch) and con­sid­er whether he’d make all the same deci­sions again. “I was very lucky,” he says of avoid­ing the drugs in vogue at the time because of the warn­ings of his friends. “They were all tak­ing them, but for some rea­son they warned me against it. So I guess I dodged a bul­let.” But he does admit to, after his dai­ly med­i­ta­tion prac­tice, nev­er fail­ing to imbibe one con­scious­ness-alter­ing sub­stance: cof­fee. And when an aspir­ing film­mak­er asks for the “one thing that you learned on one of your film sets that then became a life les­son,” Lynch reveals some­thing per­haps even more impor­tant to him than always get­ting his cof­fee: “Always have final cut.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Lynch Takes Aspir­ing Film­mak­ers Inside the Art & Craft of Mak­ing Indie Films

An Ani­mat­ed David Lynch Explains Where He Gets His Ideas

David Lynch Explains How Med­i­ta­tion Boosts Our Cre­ativ­i­ty (Plus Free Resources to Help You Start Med­i­tat­ing)

David Lynch Talks Med­i­ta­tion with Paul McCart­ney

Dai­ly Med­i­ta­tion Boosts & Revi­tal­izes the Brain and Reduces Stress, Har­vard Study Finds

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.

Rebel­lious dwarfs, crazed con­quis­ta­dors, delu­sion­al tycoons, wood-carv­ing ski jumpers: Wern­er Her­zog schol­ars who attempt to find a pat­tern in the film­mak­er’s choic­es of sub­ject mat­ter are vir­tu­al­ly guar­an­teed an inter­est­ing search, if an ulti­mate­ly futile one. But they must all start in the same place: Her­zog’s very first film Her­ak­les, which mash­es up the spec­ta­cles of body build­ing, auto rac­ing, and destruc­tion. It does all that in nine min­utes to a sound­track of sax­o­phone jazz, and with fre­quent ref­er­ences to the tit­u­lar hero of myth, whom you may know bet­ter by his Roman name of Her­cules.

“Would he clean the Augean sta­bles?” ask Her­ak­les’ sub­ti­tles over footage of one young Ger­man man show­ing off his well-shaped tor­so. “Would he dis­pose of the Ler­naean Hydra?” they ask of anoth­er as he strikes a pose.

Between clips of these body­builders per­form­ing their labors and ques­tions about whether they could per­form those of Her­cules, we see mil­i­taris­tic march­es, falling bombs, heaps of rub­ble, and a 1955 race­car crash at Le Mans that killed 83 peo­ple. All this jux­ta­po­si­tion tempts us to ask what mes­sage the nine­teen-year-old Her­zog want­ed to deliv­er, but, as in all his sub­se­quent work, he sure­ly want­ed less to make an artic­u­la­ble point than to explore the pos­si­bil­i­ties of cin­e­ma itself.

More recent­ly, in Paul Cron­in’s inter­view book Her­zog on Her­zog, the film­mak­er looks back on “my first blun­der, Her­ak­les” and finds it “rather stu­pid and point­less, though at the time it was an impor­tant test for me. It taught me about edit­ing togeth­er very diverse mate­r­i­al that would not nor­mal­ly sit com­fort­ably as a whole,” and in a sense pre­pared him for an entire cin­e­mat­ic career of very diverse mate­r­i­al that would not nor­mal­ly sit com­fort­ably as a whole. “For me it was fas­ci­nat­ing to edit mate­r­i­al togeth­er that had such sep­a­rate and indi­vid­ual lives. The film was some kind of an appren­tice­ship for me. I just felt it would be bet­ter to make a film than go to film school” — of the non-rogue vari­ety, any­way.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wern­er Her­zog Teach­es His First Online Course on Film­mak­ing

Wern­er Herzog’s Rogue Film School: Apply & Learn the Art of Gueril­la Film­mak­ing & Lock-Pick­ing

Por­trait Wern­er Her­zog: The Director’s Auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal Short Film from 1986

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.

Enter­tain­ment first, and art sec­ond? Has­n’t that always been the Amer­i­can way when it comes to film? And is that how the rest of the world sees it, espe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing France’s love of Jer­ry Lewis, Germany’s obses­sion with David Has­sel­hoff, and Chi­na tak­ing Nicholas Cage’s career choic­es more seri­ous­ly than he does him­self?

In this list of The 100 Great­est Amer­i­can Films, the BBC polled 62 inter­na­tion­al film crit­ics to see what they thought were the Unit­ed States’ endur­ing con­tri­bu­tions to cin­e­ma cul­ture. The films only need­ed to be fund­ed by Amer­i­can companies—the direc­tors could be from oth­er coun­tries. (If not, about a third of these choic­es would be dis­qual­i­fied. Five are by Hitch­cock alone.)

As for oth­er favorite direc­tors, Spiel­berg gets five (although the high­est entry, Jaws, comes in at 38) and Bil­ly Wilder gets five, with The Apart­ment the high­est ranked at 24. The most pop­u­lar decade for film is the 1970s, the top two being Coppola’s first two God­fa­ther films. (It would be inter­est­ing to know the medi­an age of these 62 crit­ics, just to see if their for­ma­tive years align with the decade.)

Of the 100, here’s the Top 10:

10. The God­fa­ther Part II (Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la, 1974)
9. Casablan­ca (Michael Cur­tiz, 1942)
8. Psy­cho (Alfred Hitch­cock, 1960)
7. Sin­gin’ in the Rain (Stan­ley Donen and Gene Kel­ly, 1952)
6. Sun­rise (F.W. Mur­nau, 1927)
5. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
4. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stan­ley Kubrick, 1968)
3. Ver­ti­go (Alfred Hitch­cock, 1958)
2. The God­fa­ther (Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la, 1972)
1. Cit­i­zen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

Com­par­ing this list to BFI’s 2012 list of the Top 100 films of all time, there isn’t much dif­fer­ence in the top spots. And, in the years to come, I sus­pect those top four films will switch places occa­sion­al­ly but nev­er real­ly leave.

Instead, the sur­pris­es come fur­ther down the list. Gone with the Wind used to be con­sid­ered a clas­sic, no doubt bol­stered by its box office suc­cess at the time. But its pol­i­tics have weak­ened its posi­tion, and, along with Birth of a Nation, it might not last anoth­er decade on such lists. On the flip side, black film­mak­ers have four films on the list and women direc­tors only one (Mesh­es of the After­noon one of the best exper­i­men­tal films of all time).

Oth­er inter­est­ing choic­es include The Lion King (the only ani­mat­ed film on the list), Sternberg’s The Shang­hai Ges­ture, and Minnelli’s The Band Wag­on (one of two musi­cals by the direc­tor on the list). What films would you like to see added or tak­en away? Is this a fair assess­ment of America’s worth? Let us know in the com­ments.

Above, you can watch a some­what idio­syn­crat­ic pre­sen­ta­tions of the films on the BBC list.

Relat­ed Con­tent:
The 100 Fun­ni­est Films of All Time, Accord­ing to 253 Film Crit­ics from 52 Coun­tries

The 10 Great­est Films of All Time Accord­ing to 358 Film­mak­ers

The 10 Great­est Films of All Time Accord­ing to 846 Film Crit­ics

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.