Ryan Gosling and director Denis Villeneuve have 'no idea how the world will react' to the risky 'Blade Runner 2049'

For more than a year, "Blade Runner 2049" director Denis Villeneuve and star Ryan Gosling have been working under the cover of CIA-level stealthiness. On the film's Budapest set, copies of the script for the long-awaited sequel to Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi neo-noir classic were held so closely -- literally locked away in safes when not in use -- that many crew members never laid eyes on one. Actors would sign out their sides on the day they were shooting a scene and be required to sign them back in before going home, lest the merest hint of a spoiler leak. On a late-September afternoon, with the film's Oct. 6 release just days away, Villeneuve and Gosling sat in a windowless conference room in a hotel in downtown Los Angeles, preparing to finally let audiences in on their secret -- and wondering what they will make of it. "When you make a movie as a filmmaker, it's like you bring people in a boat and you say, 'We will discover America together,' " said Villeneuve, the French Canadian director of such films as 2015's crime thriller "Sicario" and the 2016 cerebral sci-fi hit "Arrival."