Dennis Gassner explains how he visualized an update on one of film?s most famous urban landscapes Production designer Dennis Gassner?s history with Blade Runner, the famed Ridley Scott sci-fi noir of the early ?80s, began well before he took on the monumental task of designing sets for its long-awaited sequel, Blade Runner 2049. When Gassner was starting out in Hollywood, working for Francis Ford Coppola in the art department of the director?s American Zoetrope Studios, he recalls being introduced to a man who needed neon.
The man, director Ridley Scott, wanted to see all the used neon signs from a recent Coppola film, the Las Vegas musical flop One From the Heart. Gassner gave him all the old signs for free, unwittingly adding a key element to the Tokyo-inspired streetscapes of the original Blade Runner, routinely cited as one of the most gorgeous, inspired set designs in cinema. An update of a Philip K. Dick novel about androids and artificial intelligence, featuring a bold imagining of the future by artist Syd Mead, Blade Runner birthed its own visual language, a striking vision of a future Los Angeles.
When Gassner began working with the sequel, directed by Denis Villeneuve, he took a darker turn. When asked about the one word that would describe the Blade Runner 2049 universe, set after world-altering crises and ecological collapse reshape the future, Villeneuve simply replied, ?brutal.? Curbed spoke to Gassner, a Hollywood veteran responsible for the look of ...