5. Edward James Olmos Attended Night Classes To Craft His Own Cityspeak
Often it is the little touches which really set a great movie apart from an average one, and if there's one thing that Blade Runner has by the bucket load, it's finishing touches. From the futuristic magazines on the racks of street vendors to the electrocution warning on the parking meters - none of which are actually visible in the movie itself - the film's universe is a perfectly realised balance of nuance and details. One detail which is hard to avoid is the weird and wonderful dialogue spoken by the character Gaff, Deckard's fellow cop whose presence in the movie is more fundamental to the plot than many realise. Played by Edward James Olmos, Gaff speaks in a strange combination of multiple languages known as Cityspeak - to put this dialogue together and give the impression of a future world in which language and culture have merged, Olmos attended numerous night classes in a variety of languages before merging them into the words we hear in the film. It's only in the closing moments of Blade Runner that Gaff speaks in plain English, delivering the final lines, "It's too bad she won't live. But then again, who does?"
