Daily Dialogue — August 27, 2014
Tyrell: I’m surprised you didn’t come here sooner.
Roy: It’s not an easy thing to meet your maker.
Tyrell: What can he do for you?
Roy: Can the maker repair what he makes?
Tyrell: Would you like to be modified?
Roy: [to J. F. Sebastian] Stay here. [to Tyrell] Had in mind something a little more radical.
Tyrell: What..? What seems to be the problem?
Roy: Death.
Tyrell: Death. Well, I’m afraid that’s a little out of my jurisdiction, you…
Roy: I want more life, Father.
Tyrell: The facts of life: To make an alteration in the evolvement of an organic life system is fatal. A coding sequence cannot be revised once it’s been established.
Roy: Why not?
Tyrell: Because by the second day of incubation, any cells that have undergone reversion mutations give rise to revertant colonies like rats leaving a sinking ship; then the ship sinks.
Roy: What about EMS recombination?
Tyrell: We’ve already tried it. Ethyl methane sulfonate is an alkylating agent and a potent mutagen. It created a virus so lethal the subject was dead before he left the table.
Roy: Then a repressor protein that blocks the operating cells.
Tyrell: Wouldn’t obstruct replication, but it does give rise to an error i replication so that the newly formed DNA strand carries a mutation and you’ve got a virus again. But this — all of this is academic. You were made as well as we could make you.
Roy: But not to last.
Tyrell: The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very very brightly, Roy. Look at you. You’re the prodigal son. You’re quite a prize!
Roy: I’ve done questionable things.
Tyrell: Also extraordinary things. Revel in your time!
Roy: Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn’t let you in heaven for.
Kisses Tyrell and kills him.
— Blade Runner (1982), screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, based on the novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” by Phillip K. Dick
The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Delivering Bad News. Today’s suggestion by JasperLamarCrab.
Trivia: Although Philip K. Dick saw only the opening 20 minutes of footage prior to his death on March 2, 1982, he was extremely impressed, and has been quoted by Paul Sammon as saying, “It was my own interior world. They caught it perfectly.” However neither Ridley Scott nor screenwriter David Webb Peoples actually read Dick’s novel.
Dialogue On Dialogue: Commentary by JasperLamarCrab: “The dialogue in this scene, where Roy Batty gets the bad news we all get at some point, runs the gamut from medical jargon to the poetic, yet it’s all of a piece — tough to pull off!”
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