Independent Documentary Review – Like Tears In Rain

Ah…coincidence. A few days ago I saw a T-shirt which featured a graphic of a man with his head lowered in a torrential rain storm. Under the graphic is the simple phrase Like Tears In Rain. The image is made up mainly of white diagonal lines on a black background. Despite this, it is obvious that the man with his head lowered in the pouring rain is Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty. He has just delivered the lines he wrote for Batty’s end following a fist fight with Rick Deckard, the eponymous  Blade Runner played by Harrison Ford. Apparently, according to Hauer, the terminal speech was “a couple of pages of opera talk and hi-tech speech with no bearing on the rest of the film”. 

As a result, the night before filming, he “put a knife in it” without director Ridley Scott’s knowledge. He cut it back to…I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. 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 tears in rain. Time to die. Following filming the scene with Hauer’s version, members of the crew applauded, with some even in tears. It was one of those speeches where the pauses are almost more powerful than the words. I love that scene and I bought the T-shirt.

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 The coincidence I mentioned earlier was that my new T-shirt had just arrived when I received an email asking if I was available to watch and review a documentary about Rutger Hauer called Like Tears In Rain! Now it will be way too corny for me to say that I wore my new Like Tears In Rain T-shirt while I watched Like Tears In Rain so I won’t. Anyway, I expected this film to be the usual collection of talking heads saying what an accomplished actor Rutger was and snippets from various films supporting their claims.

In fact, Like Tears In Rain is something much more interesting. While there are a fair few celebrity contributors (Whoopi Goldberg, Paul Verhoeven, Miranda Richardson, Vincent D’Onofrio, Robert Rodriguez, and a barely recognisable Mickey Rourke) the main theme of the documentary is something entirely different. It seems that throughout his life, Rutger Hauer was a compulsive recorder of events; he always had a cine or video camera running. The vast majority of his recordings were stored in a storage unit in Los Angeles but were tragically lost in a flood.

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 That is until shortly after his death when a small box was found in his house in The Netherlands by   his goddaughter, Sanna Fabery de Jonge. This contained a few rolls of film and some video tapes. Rutger’s last private footage which no one has seen before. Until now. Sanna, as well as being Rutger’s goddaughter, is also an accomplished write and producer. She took the opportunity to make her directorial debut making a biographical documentary about her “second father”. And it is the contributions made by Rutger’s actual and adopted family that are more descriptive of the man and the actor.

I’m not going to say much about the films he made which are so memorable. What I will say is that I so fondly remember him being the face of Guinness from 1987 to 1994. He appeared as the epitome of the black stuff. Dressed all in black with his mop of blond hair he was the embodiment of a pint of cool, smooth nectar. They are available to watch on YouTube and I recommend anyone to go and take a look. Like Tears in Rain is available to stream on 10 March 2025 on Viaplay (available as an Amazon Prime Video Channels add on)

Independent Film Grade: A+

Rob Williams

Former teacher, lecturer, homelessness administrator, pharmacy dispenser now happily retired, happily married, and a very happy granddad. I live next to the Mersey but on the side Daniel Craig and Taron Egerton come from rather than the side the Beatles came from!