Blade Runner 2049 director Denis Villeneuve: 'We made a monster. I won't do it again'

When Denis Villeneuve first showed Blade Runner 2049 to Ridley Scott, he wasn’t sure exactly what he had. But he knew he had something. He had spent months paring an hour and 15 minutes off his initial, four-hour rough cut of the film – a belated sequel to Scott’s own monumental science-fiction/film noir hybrid, about a detective hunting lifelike androids in a desolate future Los Angeles.

By the time of that test screening, nothing else seemed dispensable. And though Scott would later grumpily describe the 163-minute version as “way too f------ long”, saying he would have trimmed another half-hour from it, the studio executives were more warily upbeat.

They’d given the director of Sicario and Arrival $185 million (£131 million) to make a mature and uncompromising sequel to Blade Runner, and for better or worse, that was exactly what he had delivered. Four months on, Villeneuve recalls one...