Just about a year ago, Blade Runner 2049 editor Joe Walker revealed that director Denis Villeneuve’s original cut of the film was four hours long and split into two parts, with the first half focusing on Ryan Gosling’s K learning about who he is (or who he thinks he is) and the second half starting after the high-tech sex scene between K and Mackenzie Davis’ character. Walker said there was never really any intention of releasing the movie as a four-hour epic, and he said back then that a lot of the cuts involved simply trimming the dialogue, but now Walker has given some more details to Collider on what was cut—and it definitely sounds like it was nothing particularly crucial.
Specifically, Walker says there were some “experimental things” that were cut, which seems to refer to artsy shots like the first sequence with Jared Leto’s ridiculous water-filled office. He also says that he and Villeneuve had to cut “several scenes” of K doing the baseline tests that are used to establish whether or not he’s acting outside of his regular android programming. There are really only two scenes like that in the movie, one early on where he passes the test perfectly and another after he’s beginning to suspect he’s a miracle baby that is much shakier, but Walker says these went on longer in the four-hour version of the movie.
Seeing as how these scenes in the actual movie are mostly just Ryan Gosling giving nonsense answers to dramatic questions for a few minutes, trimming them down was definitely the right idea. This isn’t a bad scene, but try to imagine it going on for much, much longer: