Let’s start with what didn’t come true. The people of Earth have not begun migrating to “off-world” colonies in the wake of environmental catastrophe. A race of androids, so advanced that they are nearly indistinguishable from humans, has not infiltrated society. There are no flying cars. And the streets of Los Angeles are not littered with neon ads for Pan Am and Atari.

In other ways, though, the world that Blade Runner foresaw in 1982 isn’t so far from the one we’re living in. Set in a dystopian 2019, the film unfurled a pitch-dark vision of overpopulated streets, urban decay, ecological neglect, and corporate hegemony—a world in which technology has become so nuanced, so ingrained in everyday life, that we’ve been forced to ask ourselves in new and unsettling ways, What makes us human?

Like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner used science fiction to contemplative, sometimes confounding ends. But its legacy is as much visual as philosophical, giving rise to the stylized cyberpunk chic of The Matrix, the nocturnal manga of Ghost in the Shell, and the apocalyptic noir of countless video games. Filmmakers from Guillermo del Toro to Christopher Nolan cite it as an influence, and its aesthetic DNA has permeated everything from George Michael’s “Freeek!” video to Jean Paul Gaultier’s 2009 fall couture show and Raf Simons’s recent collection of futuristic rainwear.

The film’s decades-long reach continues with the October release of Blade Runner 2049, a sequel re-uniting the original star (Harrison Ford), screenwriter (Hampton Fancher), and director (Ridley Scott, as executive producer). And yet, any one of these men could tell you that a new Blade Runner, 35 years on, is the last thing they would have predicted when the original opened to decidedly mixed reviews and what seemed liked certain obscurity. Even more surprising is that the trio managed to reconvene at all, after a production process so harrowing and contentious that some crew members called the original film “Blood Runner.”

“It was a long slog,” Harrison Ford says now. “I didn’t really find it that physically difficult—I thought it was mentally difficult.”

So, how did a movie marked by infighting, artistic compromise, and commercial failure manage to burrow its way into pop-culture immortality? Much of the answer lies with Ridley Scott, whose hyper-detailed imaginative vision was matched only by his Draconian means of realizing it. It would be wrong, though, to call Blade Runner an auteurist masterpiece—it’s also a mess, perpetually at odds with itself, the product of shifting alliances and offscreen subterfuge. If the film thrums with mystery, that’s in part because its key players could never agree on the most basic questions, among them: Is the main character even a human being?

The story of Blade Runner begins with a walking enigma: Philip K. Dick. A science-fiction author of relentless creativity and self-doubt, Dick was ignored by the mainstream literary world for much of his life, only to be caricatured after his death, in the words of his friend Tim Powers, as a “wild-eyed, drug-addled, lunatic misogynist who imagined God was talking to him all the time.”

Dick was born on December 16, 1928. Entranced with science fiction from boyhood, he began writing quickie paperbacks in the 50s and 60s, often fueled by amphetamines. As a young man, Dick was living in Berkeley, doing research for The Man in the High Castle (1962), a speculative novel envisioning a United States ruled by victorious Axis powers. Alone in the closed stacks at U.C. Berkeley, he discovered the diaries of an SS officer stationed in Warsaw. One line struck him: “We are kept awake at night by the cries of starving children.” “I thought, There is amongst us something that is a bipedal humanoid, morphologically identical to the human being but that is not human,” he later told Star Log. “It is not human to complain in your diary that starving children are keeping you awake.”

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel that would inspire Blade Runner, was published in 1968. Set in the far-off year 1992, after a nuclear war has decimated animal life, the novel follows Rick Deckard, a California bounty hunter hired to expire rogue “andys.” Much of the book’s mordant humor would be stripped from Blade Runner, as would its quirkier subplots, one of which involved a virtual-reality religion called Mercerism. But at its heart was ambiguity: What if coldhearted killing has turned Deckard into something more machine than human? And why did most androids seem to Deckard to have more “vitality and desire to live” than his own wife?

Almost as soon as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was published, the movies came calling. In 1969, Martin Scorsese and the screenwriter Jay Cocks approached Dick about adapting Androids, but they never got around to optioning it.

In 1974, the book was optioned by the producer Herb Jaffe and his son Robert, who wrote a screenplay that turned Dick’s cerebral satire into a Get Smart–style adventure spoof. Dick was horrified. When Robert Jaffe flew down to Santa Ana to meet him, the author said, “Shall I beat you up here at the airport, or shall I beat you up back at my apartment?”

Around that same time, Hampton Fancher, a wild-haired actor who had been a journeyman on TV shows such as Gunsmoke and Rawhide, had come into a bit of money and was looking for a literary property to option. “It was a very mercenary enterprise,” Fancher says now. “I’m not a big science-fiction guy. Didn’t know who Dick was.”

By 1977, the Jaffes had let their option on Androids expire. Brian Kelly, the Flipper actor who had turned to producing after being partially paralyzed in a motorcycle accident, was looking for a project and Fancher mentioned the book. Dick was at “a low point,” his agent, Russell Galen, says, and he needed the money.

Kelly connected Fancher, who would write the screenplay, with Michael Deeley, the British producer known for The Man Who Fell to Earth and The Deer Hunter. A canny businessman with a stiff upper lip, Deeley couldn’t imagine how Androids could work as a commercial film. Undeterred, Fancher delivered a screenplay that changed Deeley’s mind. The producer was particularly fascinated by the romance between Deckard and Rachael, a nubile young android who doesn’t realize she’s an android. Still, the screenplay was less a science-fiction adventure than a metaphysical chamber piece. Under Deeley’s guidance, Fancher sheared extraneous elements (like Deckard’s wife and their pet electric sheep), and the title changed to Mechanismo, then to Dangerous Days.

Deeley went about hawking the new script to studios and searching for a director. Robert Mulligan (To Kill a Mockingbird) was briefly attached, but he wanted more control than Deeley was offering. By February 1980, Dangerous Days had found its visionary: Ridley Scott, a self-described “tough nut” who viewed filmmaking as a form of warfare.

At 42, Scott was known for his visual prowess, a director-designer hybrid who had made his career directing commercials, then broken out in film with The Duellists and the 1979 science-fiction smash Alien. When Deeley approached him about Dangerous Days, Scott declined, since he was already attached to Dune.

Then, in early 1980, Scott’s brother Frank died of skin cancer at the age of 45. It was a blow that left the director in a dark mood, perhaps one that matched the gloomy future of Dangerous Days. More to the point, Dune was still a year off from production, and Scott was eager to lose himself in his work. “I was so down,” he says now. “I needed to do something.”

With Scott on board, the production team began hashing out the screenplay at Sunset Gower Studios, in Hollywood, working every day for five months. Scott saw the picture as a film noir set 40 years in the future, complete with femmes fatales and detectives in trench coats. But what would those detectives be called? Fancher found the answer—and the film’s final title—in the Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs’s novella, Blade Runner (A Movie), based on a story treatment for an unrelated film that was never made.

Scott wanted to flex his talent for world-making, but Fancher’s script was set mostly indoors. “What’s outside the window, Hampton?” the director would urge him. “The whole exterior of Blade Runner was designed every morning, just talking about it and going onto paper,” Scott says. But Fancher was a slow and reluctant re-writer—Deeley nicknamed him “Happen Faster”—and had become attached to the script’s idiosyncrasies. “It was maddening,” Fancher says, “because Ridley is full of ideas, and Tuesday is different than Monday. I would disagree with him on certain things. And he knew better than I did, but I was too arrogant to give in.” Frustrated, Deeley went behind Fancher’s back and hired the writer David Peoples, who had come recommended by Scott’s brother Tony, also a director. Peoples was fast, he was good with dialogue, and, unlike Fancher, he would do as he was told. Like a secret mistress, Peoples spent weeks sequestered at the Chateau Marmont, writing and re-writing on color-coordinated pages, trying to keep up with Scott’s brainstorms. Knowing that Scott hated the term “android,” Peoples came up with “replicant,” prompted by a biology term he had learned from his daughter. Neither Fancher nor Peoples knew of the other’s involvement (although Scott claims he had introduced them and it was “very gentlemanly”).

Then, around Christmas 1980, Scott’s aide Ivor Powell invited Fancher for dinner and handed him a script. Fancher figured it was a different movie entirely, until he flipped the page and realized it was a re-written Blade Runner. “I stood up and started crying, tears coming down my face,” Fancher recalls. “Ivor put his arm around me. He told me this was going to happen before—he said, ‘I know my man. If you don’t do what he wants, he’ll get someone who will.’”

Days later, Fancher stormed into the production office and screamed, “Why?!”

“Elegance is one thing, Hampton,” Deeley told him. “Making a film is another.”

“Fuck you guys,” Fancher said, and returned home to Carmel.

The character of Rick Deckard had evolved, over the succession of drafts, from the befuddled bureaucrat of Dick’s novel to a hard-boiled gumshoe. For the part, Fancher was initially thinking Robert Mitchum. Scott and Deeley, meanwhile, were thinking Dustin Hoffman—the antithesis of an alpha-male hero.

The director and producer flew to New York to meet with Hoffman, who talked their ears off about everything from the character to cryogenics. After a few weeks, Deeley began to think Hoffman’s enthusiasms were dragging down the process. “I felt it was getting out of hand—the film seemed as though it was drifting on an endless ocean,” he wrote in his 2009 memoir. Hoffman and Blade Runner parted ways.

According to Fancher, his then girlfriend, Barbara Hershey, was the first to suggest Harrison Ford. Though Star Wars had made the former carpenter world-famous, he still hadn’t carried his own mega-hit. Steven Spielberg invited Scott and Deeley to London, where he was shooting Raiders of the Lost Ark. “After watching only a few minutes of the Raiders rushes, Ridley and I knew we wanted Harrison,” Deeley wrote. There was just one catch: when they met Ford in his hotel, he was wearing his Indiana Jones fedora.

“Shit, I wanted that hat for Deckard,” Scott told Deeley.

“Tough,” Deeley responded. “We lost a hat, but we gained a star.”

Katy Haber, Deeley’s right hand, suggested the Dutch star Rutger Hauer for the role of Roy Batty, the leader of the replicants. His look was perfect: the kind of blond Übermensch some future Dr. Frankenstein might dream up in a lab. Scott cast him sight unseen, but he wasn’t prepared for Hauer’s impish sense of humor, introduced by way of a gag that relied on the era’s less-than-progressive sensibilities. At their first meeting in L.A., Hauer walked in wearing a Kenzo sweater with a fox across the chest, candy-pink pants, and Elton John sunglasses.

Scott turned ashen. “He took me in the other room,” Haber recalls, “and he said, ‘He’s a fucking woofter!’ ”—British slang for gay. “I said, ‘Ridley, can’t you see he’s pulling a fast one on you?’ ”

Fancher had written the role of Rachael for Hershey, but Scott was entranced by the screen test of Sean Young, a 21-year-old newcomer who had done the Bill Murray comedy Stripes. Sure, she was green, but Scott cared less about experience than about optics, and he saw Young as a classic beauty in the mold of Vivien Leigh; he asked Haber to coach her so that her acting could live up to her look.

For the role of Pris, the lethal punk sexbot, casting director Jane Feinberg thought back to a spunky teenager she’d met in Chicago, who had auditioned for a bit role in Breaking Away wearing a sequined bow-tie choker. Daryl Hannah, not yet 20, was now living in Los Angeles. At her screen test, she pulled a blond fright wig from a basket, and her character’s iconic look was born. The cast was rounded out with Edward James Olmos, as the detective Gaff (for whom Olmos invented his own dialect of “City Speak”), and Joanna Cassidy, cast as the snake dancer Zhora in part because she had her own Burmese python.

As the cast came together, the financing fell apart. The indie company Filmways, which had signed on to finance the production when the budget was around $12 million, abruptly pulled out most of their money once the budget was increased to $20 million, leaving Deeley with two weeks to drum up that amount. The Englishman tap-danced around Hollywood, getting $7.5 million from Alan Ladd, Jr., at Warner Bros. and another $7.5 from the Hong Kong mogul Run Run Shaw. For the rest, he turned to Jerry Perenchio, a former boxing promoter who would later become the billionaire chairman of Univision.

Through Tandem Productions, Perenchio invested with his partner Bud Yorkin, a movie and TV director and producer. In addition to supplying the remainder of the budget, Yorkin and Perenchio (who have both died since 2015) were the completion-bond guarantors, which meant they would put up extra funds—and gain control—if the film ran over budget. Both men saw Blade Runner as an action-adventure blockbuster. What neither realized was that Ridley Scott was making a $28 million art film.

To walk through the Warner Bros. back lot in 1981 was to enter a multi-sensory immersive landscape: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis meets downtown Tokyo, wet with artificial rain and lit with neon. The old buildings of “New York Street” had been retrofitted with pipes and mechanical junk. Loudspeakers blasted Pink Floyd, and the air was thick with smoke and the smell of boiling noodles.

Scott had hired the industrial designer Syd Mead to sketch the movie’s flying cars, or “spinners.” Credited as “visual futurist,” Mead filled out his drawings with elaborate backdrops, which Scott passed on to the production designer, Lawrence G. Paull, to convert into handcrafted cityscapes. There were design elements and props that no moviegoer would ever see, but which nonetheless set the mood, such as newsstands filled with futurist magazines called Krotch and Kill.

On the first morning of shooting, Scott arrived at the pseudo-Egyptian set of the Tyrell Corporation, the all-powerful replicant manufacturer. He looked through the lens and announced that the 24-foot-high columns had been installed upside down and would need to be flipped. Filming was postponed several hours as the crew got to work.

“In a way, it’s like a benevolent dictatorship,” Scott says of his directing style. But his micro-managing approach didn’t please everyone. Department heads who were used to making their own decisions now found themselves carrying out orders. Scott, meanwhile, was unaccustomed to Hollywood union rules. Barred from operating his own camera, he set up a video-playback booth that isolated him from the actors.

The arrangement was irksome to his leading man. “Ridley made a tactical error, because Harrison very much wanted to collaborate,” says Paul M. Sammon, a journalist who was embedded on set and later turned his reportage into the book Future Noir. “He wasn’t going to be the type of guy who said, ‘I’m a superstar—just let me do my thing.’ ” Strain between director and star had begun in pre-production, as Scott became entranced by the notion that Deckard, like Rachael, was a replicant but didn’t know it. Ford hated the idea. “I felt that the audience needed to have someone on-screen that they could emotionally relate to as though they were a human being,” the actor says. They were stuck at an impasse.

Then, without telling his star, Scott started inserting visual clues that Deckard was non-human. Midway through the film, Deckard has a drunken daydream of a unicorn galloping through a forest. In the last scene, he finds that Gaff, a fellow blade runner, has left an origami unicorn at his front door—a sign that his innermost thoughts were actually implanted. When they shot the scene, according to Sammon, Ford realized what was happening and yelled, “Goddammit, I thought we said I wasn’t a replicant!”

As the summer dragged on, the set of Blade Runner turned rancid. The cast and crew had worked more than 50 nights, racing against dawn. “It took a few weeks to get into full vampire mode,” Ford says. Crew members were wet, tired, and testy, with some unable or unwilling to keep up with Scott’s brusque perfectionism. In late June, the Manchester Guardian published an interview in which Scott said he preferred working with British crews over American ones, since he could tell them what he wanted and they’d reply, “Yes, Guv’nor.” “Ridley read the article and left it in his trailer,” Haber recalls, “and his camper driver found the article, printed up 20 or 30 copies, and left them next to the coffee canteen so that the entire crew could see it.”

Thus began the T-shirt War.

It was makeup supervisor Marvin Westmore who decided he’d had enough. After reading the interview, he designed and distributed some 60 T-shirts that read YES GUV’NOR MY ASS! in big black letters. Others said, “Will Rogers never met Ridley Scott.” “Ridley came up to me and said, ‘Who’s Will Rogers?’ ” says Haber, who informed him of Rogers’s famous adage, “I never met a man I didn’t like.”

“Oh, God,” Scott replied. “What are we going to do?”

Within hours, the British contingent—Scott, Haber, Michael Deeley, Ivor Powell—returned wearing their own T-shirts: XENOPHOBIA SUCKS. This, Haber claims, broke the tension on set.

Jerry Perenchio and Bud Yorkin weren’t happy, though—from what they could see, Scott was wasting time and money. “Their mandate was: ‘Get it done, get it done fast,’” Sammon says. “They thought they had signed onto a slam-bang Star Wars action picture, and instead they had this dystopian metropolis with an alcoholic hero who shoots women in the back.”

With a potential directors’ strike threatening to shut down production, the last few days of shooting were “nightmarish,” Deeley wrote. Special effects costs and overtime fees added a few more million to the budget, which only further aggravated Yorkin and Perenchio. “The last money is always the most expensive money,” Scott says, “because they’ll take your balls if they can.”

By the time they got to Deckard’s climactic rooftop confrontation with Roy Batty, the crew had been working 36 hours straight. In the scene, Batty rescues a dangling Deckard from the rain-washed edifice and, with his life span winding down, delivers a poetic soliloquy on mortality: “All those moments will be lost in time. Like tears in rain. Time . . . to die.”

Rutger Hauer had added those lines himself at the table read. “As he read it,” David Peoples recalled, “he looked at me with a sheepish naughty-boy-in-school look.”

Philip K. Dick hadn’t been involved in the adaptation of his book, and what he knew he didn’t like. When he got hold of Fancher’s original script, he was so mortified, he later said, he thought about moving to the Soviet Union to work in a lightbulb factory.

He wasn’t thrilled about Ridley Scott either. In February 1981, he wrote in SelecTV Guide of flicks like Alien, “A monster is a monster; a spaceship is a spaceship.” Worried about what a rogue author might do, the producers did damage control. Every week or two, a young publicist named Jeff Walker would drive down to Dick’s apartment, in Santa Ana, for coffee, spreading out sketches of Syd Mead’s flying cars and retrofitted buildings. “The whole idea was to show him that the film really did reflect the novel,” Walker says.

Dick’s disdain began to thaw, especially when he saw stills of the actors. Rutger Hauer reminded him of “the Nordic superman that Hitler said would come marching out of the laboratory”—a nod to the Nazi inspiration for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? He was so captivated by Sean Young that he asked Walker if he could meet her, calling her the “super destructive cruel beautiful dark-haired woman that I eternally write about and now I’ve seen a photograph of her and I know that she exists and I will seek her out and presumably she will destroy me.” Walker declined to set up a meeting.

Despite Dick’s slight, Scott also decided to make nice. In November, he invited Dick to visit the special-effects shop in Culver City, where Blade Runner was in postproduction. Scott says he found Dick “surprisingly non-eccentric. He smoked a lot—I smoked a lot.” After a tour, Dick was ushered into a screening room and shown the first 15 or 20 minutes of Blade Runner. He was ecstatic. When the lights came up, he told the director, “It’s like you could see into my mind!”

Following the Culver City trip, Dick was breathlessly anticipating the release. Buoyed as he was, Dick told his friend Maer Wilson he was getting subliminal messages from his television that “the world as we know it” was about to end. On February 18, 1982, he missed an appointment with his therapist. Wilson couldn’t get through on the phone. His neighbors found him unconscious on his living-room floor. He was taken to the hospital, having suffered a stroke. On March 2, less than four months before the release of Blade Runner, Dick died, at the age of 53.

“I think it’s marvelous,” Ridley Scott told his editor, Terry Rawlings, the first time they watched all the footage. “But what the fuck does it mean?”

Still, the filmmakers were certain they had a masterpiece—until the public weighed in. Days after Dick died, Blade Runner played sneak previews in Denver and Dallas. Audience members sent back survey cards saying they were confused by the plot. Suddenly, Scott and Deeley were having a crisis of confidence.

Scott cut the unicorn daydream—the giveaway that Deckard is a replicant—leaving the origami ending even more cryptic. More fateful was the addition of a voice-over. Narration had been in the script from the beginning, a nod to 40s film noir, but Harrison Ford had objected—he wanted the audience to experience the things that were being narrated. “I felt that I was a detective who did very little detecting,” he says. Now, with test audiences puzzled, the voice-over made an unwelcome return.

“I was obliged by my contract to record that narration, which I found awkward and uninspired,” says Ford, who assumed it would never get used. He growled his way through the text, occasionally chuckling at how “bloody awful” it was. His delivery was so stilted that a theory would later circulate that he had tried to sabotage the narration with bad acting. (He has denied this.)

Then there was the ending. Scott had originally closed the picture on an ambiguous note, with Deckard and Rachael fleeing into an elevator. After Denver and Dallas, he convinced himself he needed a “happy ending,” which would have to be done on the cheap. Ford and Young were called to the San Bernadino Mountains for a quickie shot of the lovers driving into a lush forest. “I wasn’t keen on the idea,” Ford recalls (though he was “delighted that we were shooting something during the day”). To round out the footage, Scott got Stanley Kubrick to give him unused helicopter shots from The Shining.

The new cut of Blade Runner was slated for release on June 25, 1982. What the studio hadn’t counted on was another fantasy film eating up the summer box office: Steven Spielberg’s E.T., which came out two weeks ahead of Blade Runner. In the optimistic glow of the early Reagan era, E.T. spoke to the power of the human heart, while Blade Runner forecasted technological doom. Not helping matters were the tepid reviews, including one that said, “I suspect my blender and toaster oven would just love it.” But the critic who stung the most was The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, who clucked, “Scott seems to be trapped in his own alleyways, without a map.”

The film made a respectable $6 million in its opening weekend. Then, with word of mouth tied up almost entirely by E.T., its box office went over a cliff.

A few years later, Fancher was recognized by a clerk at the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore in New York City: “You’re Hampton Fancher! Oh, my God—we have a Blade Runner club.”

“What’s a Blade Runner club?,” Fancher asked.

It was his first inkling that Blade Runner might have an afterlife as a cult classic. Thanks to midnight screenings and the rise of VHS, fans could now pore over Scott’s intricate cityscapes. Christopher Nolan, then a boarding-school student at Haileybury, watched a pirated tape at his teacher’s house. “It was terrible quality, but it absolutely got its hooks into me and never left,” says Nolan, who later drew on Blade Runner for his rendering of Gotham City in Batman Begins. “I’d never seen anything that looked remotely like it.”

Denis Villeneuve, director of Blade Runner 2049, was a 14-year-old science-fiction addict when he saw a French-dubbed version in his small town in Quebec. “Those first images of the spinner flying over that dark, polluted Los Angeles with the Vangelis music is by far one of the strongest and most powerful openings of all time,” he says. “It didn’t feel like a fantasy—it felt like a time machine.”

In 1989, the same year that Blade Runner became Voyager’s top-selling laser disc, a Warner Bros. employee stumbled on a 70-mm. work print of the film, sans voice-over and happy ending. It screened in 1991 at San Francisco’s Castro and the NuArt Theatre, in L.A., with lines around the block. Fancher recalls, “The manager was up at the door, and I said, ‘I wrote this! Can I get in there?’ He said no.” A “director’s cut” with the reinstated unicorn scene was released in 1992, followed by a “final cut” in 2007, with fans dissecting each version with the zeal of Talmudic scholars.

Wedged between the hits Raiders of the Lost Ark and Return of the Jedi, Blade Runner was a rare box-office bomb for Harrison Ford, but it was a boon for its two main actresses. Daryl Hannah was soon cast in dewy ingénue roles in Splash and Wall Street, while Sean Young brought her smoldering sexuality to No Way Out and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. But Young’s career was sidelined by a series of bizarre moves, such as showing up on The Joan Rivers Show dressed as Catwoman and crashing Oscar parties, including Vanity Fair’s. (She declined to comment for this piece.)

Though he didn’t live to see it, Philip K. Dick became a Hollywood gold mine, with a filmography including Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, and The Adjustment Bureau. In 2007, his three children founded Electric Shepherd Productions to “steward” adaptations of their father’s work, and his daughter Isa is now an executive producer of Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle. Since Blade Runner, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? has never gone out of print.

As for the future that Blade Runner envisioned, Ridley Scott’s bleak 2019 seems prescient in our age of environmental degradation, omnipresent machines, and general foreboding. What is Apple, after all, if not a tech behemoth on par with the Tyrell Corporation? It even has its own enigmatic robo-woman with eerie flashes of humanity. Not long ago, I asked her, “Siri, do you dream of electric sheep?” “Electric sheep,” she purred back. “But only sometimes.”