People either want a pigeonhole or have a comfortable preconception about what they're sitting and seeing. It's a bit like 20 years of Westerns, and, now, 45 years of cop movies. People are comfortable with the roles, and even though every nook and cranny has been explored, they'll still sit through endless variations, permutations on cops and bad guys, right? In this instance, I was doing a cop and a different bad guy. And to justify the creation of the bad guy, i.e., replication, I had to justify that the outside world would support that idea. So, then, it has to be in the future. So, the future that I had seen portrayed to that particular point — without being specific or mentioning names, because that means I'm getting really critical — all of the urban films until that moment had been pretty ordinary to not very good. So, it was a challenge to say — it's the same as trying to do a monster movie it's, like, Aliens is a monster movie. Alien is a C film elevated to an A film, honestly, by it being well done and a great monster. If it hadn't had that great monster, even with a wonderful cast, it wouldn't have been as good, I don't think. So, in this instance, my special effect, behind it all, would be the world. That's why I put together [industrial designer] Syd Mead and people like that who were actually serious futurists, great speculators, great imagination, looking to the future, where the big test is saying, draw me a car in 30 years' time without it looking like bad science fiction
Blade Runner 2099 Live Action Series in the Works at Amazon Prime