Tyrell Corporation

Screenshot of the Tyrell Corp. from Blade Runner.

The Tyrell Corporation is a powerful corporation from the 1982 Ridley Scott film Blade Runner. Based in Los Angeles in the year AF 19, Tyrell is named after its founder Eldon Tyrell and is a high-tech corporation primarily concerned with the production of androids.

The company's motto is "More human than human".

The building

The corporation is headquartered in two large, pyramid-like structures that lie on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Elevators (technically inclinators, as they ascend at an angle) run along the outside of the massive structures, which both are at least 800 stories high.

Special effects photographic supervisor Douglas Trumbull, in the 1982 Official souvenir magazine, stated,

"I can't remember exactly, but I think the pyramid was a composite of my own ideas and Director Ridley Scott's. Originally the Tyrell building was going to be right in town, it was going to be a massive building right inside the city. We decided it would be much more visual and stark to place it way outside the town, so that it really rose above the horizon

"The pyramid was the first miniature we built. Across its base it was probably eight feet by eight feet. The top was probably two feet square. It was built prior to principal photography, because the first scene shot was the interior of Tyrell's office, and we had to have process plates of the other pyramid outside the window. So we had to build the pyramid, photograph it, prepare the plates and do front projection on that set." (Souvenir magazine, pg. 7.)

In the film

Blade Runner Rick Deckard visits the Tyrell Corporation to discuss a recent rash of Replicant returns to Earth with Tyrell. He administers a Voight-Kampff machine test to Rachel, Tyrell's assistant.

Tyrell's massive office, where Deckard administers the test has a huge automatic shade which lowers with the push of a button. It is in this room where we meet Tyrell's pet owl, which is a replicant.

Roy Batty, the leader of the replicants, later convinces J. F. Sebastian, a genetic engineer with the company, to bring him to Tyrell's quarters at the top of the building, on the pretense of a chess move in an ongoing game between him and Tyrell. It is there that Batty kills Tyrell after he said he had no way to help him "get more life."

Production Designer Lawrence G. Paull said of the room: "We dressed Tyrell's room to look like the Pope's bedroom, very elaborate, very eclectic decor. The headboard was a $25,000 Chinese screen and the bed was two kingsize beds put together. There were big concrete columns which were 4-foot square and rose 25 feet in the air. Instead of just using raw concrete, we took material and actually draped the column so it had a very religious kind of overtone to it." (Souvenir magazine, p. 50.)

It is notable that in the film, the only time we see the sun is in the Tyrell Corporation's building, when Deckard is interrogating Rachael.