Director Sir Ridley Scott regards this movie as probably his most personal and complete movie, and also regards it as his personal favorite. He also noted that it "set the pace for many things".
After Philip K. Dick saw Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard on-set, Dick declared: "He has been more Deckard than I had imagined. It has been incredible. Deckard exists!"
The final scene was shot hours before the producers were due to take creative control away from Sir Ridley Scott.
Philip K. Dick personally approved of Rutger Hauer, describing him as, "the perfect Batty-cold, Aryan, flawless".
Philip K. Dick first came up with the idea for his novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" in 1962, when researching "The Man in the High Castle", which deals with the Nazis conquering the planet in the 1940s. Dick had been granted access to archived World War II Gestapo documents in the University of California at Berkley, and had come across diaries written by S.S. men stationed in Poland, which he found almost unreadable in their casual cruelty and lack of human empathy. One sentence in particular troubled him: "We are kept awake at night by the cries of starving children." Dick was so horrified by this sentence that he reasoned there was obviously something wrong with the man who wrote it. This led him to hypothesize that Nazism in general was a defective group mind, a mind so emotionally flawed that the word human could not be applied to them. Their lack of empathy was so pronounced that Dick reasoned they couldn't be referred to as human beings, even though their outward appearance seemed to indicate that they were human. The novel sprang from this. And, interestingly enough, it is now thought that some people are "Occupational Psychopaths" due to low-functioning amygdala, the fear centers of the brain's limbic system.
Ridley Scott: [opening scroll] The movie opens with a scroll about the replicants and the Blade Runners.