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Gaff is one of the most memorable characters in Blade Runner, in spite of his very short part. "Gaff almost didn't exist as a character in the script. We had to make him up from start to finish. Gaff was so indeterminate that I literally built him during the shots. I firstly asked Ridley if I could enrich the character and make him more interesting to the public. The first part I invented was the one of a Japanese/Mexican guy, with an incredible languages mastery. He spoke ten languages fluently. But he was also a very interesting person from the moral point of view and a little ambiguous. You may note that he liked whether Deckard or the replicants. And he was also dressed in a good manner. I thought Gaff should have got more nationalities in his blood. Thus we added Hispanic mustache, punk hair cut and China blue eyes. When he talks to Deckard at the Noodle Bar, he speaks an illegible language. This tongue is called 'Cityspeak'. "The birth of cityspeak is really interesting. "When Icreated for the first time Gaff's character, I was speaking the same way latin boys living in Eas Los Angeles do, using a language of their own. So I gave Gaff a street slang. But someday Ridley decided that this guy had to speak Japanese. So I turned back and translated in Japanese the things the character said, adding subtitles in English. It should have been a mysterious and futuristic language. This was ok for me, since I had lived in the Philippines for some time, and I remembered how the taxi guys were speaking in their dialect using some English words now and then. The first idea of mine was to take some different real languages and mix them down, such as French, Chinese, German and Japanese. Then I went to Berliz School of Languages in Los Angeles, and translated and learnt to pronounce all these little pieces of dialogue. It was something strange, but it was fitting well into Gaff". Here is an example of cityspeak:
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