Tears in rain soliloquy

Script and improvisation

In Blade Runner, the dying replicant Roy Batty introspectively makes the speech during a rain downpour, moments before his own death:

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. [laughs] Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like [coughs] tears in rain. Time to die.

In the Channel 4 documentary On the Edge of Blade Runner, Hauer, director Ridley Scott, and screenwriter David Peoples asserted that Hauer wrote the "Tears in Rain" speech. There were earlier versions of the speech in Peoples' draft screenplays; one included the sentence "I rode on the back decks of a blinker and watched c-beams glitter in the dark, near the Tanhauser Gate"^[5] In his autobiography, Hauer said he merely cut the original scripted speech by several lines, adding only "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain"^[6] although the original script, displayed during the documentary, before Hauer's rewrite, does not mention "Tanhauser Gate":

I've known adventures, seen places you people will never see, I've been Offworld and back... frontiers! I've stood on the back deck of a blinker bound for the Plutition Camps with sweat in my eyes watching the stars fight on the shoulder of Orion...I've felt wind in my hair, riding test boats off the black galaxies and seen an attack fleet burn like a match and disappear. I've seen it, felt it...!

Hauer described this as "opera talk" and "hi-tech speech" with no bearing on the rest of the film, so he "put a knife in it" the night before filming, without Scott's knowledge.^[7] In interview with Dan Jolin, Hauer said that these final lines showed that Batty wanted to "make his mark on existence ... the robot in the final scene, by dying, shows Deckard what areal man is made of."^[8]

When Hauer performed the scene, the film crew applauded and some even cried. This was due to the power of the dying speech coming at the end of an exhausting shoot.^[9]