Tony Scott:'THE MOST frightening thing I do in my life is getting up and shooting movies," said director Tony Scott in 2009.
“Every morning, I’m bolt upright on one hour or two hours’ sleep, before the alarm clock goes off. That’s a good thing. That fear motivates me, and I enjoy that fear.”
Scott’s take on film-making as an adrenalised, intimidating experience in itself was reflected in the tone and pace of his hits, which included Top Gun (1986), Beverly Hills Cop II (1987) and Days of Thunder (1990).
A lover of fast cars and motorbikes on the screen and off, Scott was adept at injecting thrills into his slick films.
This approach rarely brought him critical acclaim and his movies were sometimes unfavourably compared with the more ambitious, philosophical works of his older brother Sir Ridley Scott, director of Gladiator (2000) and Prometheus (2012).
Unlike Ridley, he was never nominated for an Oscar. Nonetheless, several of Tony’s films were rewarded with huge commercial success, as audiences bought wholeheartedly into his vision.
He has died at the age of 68 after jumping from a bridge in Los Angeles.
Scott was born in North Shields, Tyne and Wear, northeast England, the youngest of the three sons of Col Francis Percy Scott, who served in the Royal Engineers, and his wife Elizabeth.
Ridley was seven years Tony’s senior; the oldest brother, Frank, was a sailor.
Like Ridley, Tony attended Grangefield school, Stockton-on-Tees, and West Hartlepool College of Art (now Cleveland College of Art and Design).
He completed a fine arts degree at Sunderland Art School (now the University of Sunderland).
At 16 he starred as a boy playing truant in the short black-and-white film Boy and Bicycle (1965), directed by Ridley, who was studying at the Royal College of Art.
Tony also attended the college and graduated with the intention of becoming a fine artist.
However, in the late 1960s, the pair established Ridley Scott Associates, a TV commercial production company.
“Tony had wanted to do documentaries at first,” recalled Ridley.
“I told him, ‘Don’t go to the BBC, come to me first.’ I knew that he had a fondness for cars, so I told him, ‘Come work with me and within a year you’ll have a Ferrari.’ And he did.”
Tony duly became a prolific director of commercials. By the early 1980s, a number of British directors who had also started out on advertisements were making an impact in Hollywood.
Alan Parker (Midnight Express, 1978), Hugh Hudson (Chariots of Fire, 1981), Adrian Lyne (Flashdance, 1983) and Ridley all paved the way for Tony’s film career.
It had begun humbly with a television adaptation of Henry James’s short story The Author of Beltraffio in the mid-1970s.
Despite its visual style, his first feature film, The Hunger (1982), which starred David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve as lovelorn vampires, failed to make much of an impression with critics.
Roger Ebert called it “an agonisingly bad vampire movie, circling around an exquisitely effective sex scene”.
That scene, featuring Deneuve and Susan Sarandon, helped the film gradually acquire something of a cult following.
A commercial led to Scott being hired for his next, and most enduring, feature.
Producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer had seen a TV car advertisement in which Scott depicted a Saab 900 racing a Saab 37 Viggen fighter jet.
The pair approached him to direct Top Gun, a romantic thriller about a naval pilot in training, with a charismatic cast headed by Tom Cruise.
Scott delivered a film that glamorised the sleek contours of the military hardware and which is powered by rapid-fire editing and a big-hair, big-shoulder-pads pop soundtrack. Top Gun was made for $15 million and returned more than 20 times that amount.
Looking back, Scott explained that he and his countrymen found it difficult to be accepted in Hollywood.
“We were criticised about style over content . . . I was constantly being criticised, and my press was horrible.”
Despite the bad reviews, his career as a director of action movies took off rapidly, with Beverly Hills Cop II, Revenge (1990), a Mexico-set crime flick starring Kevin Costner, and Days of Thunder.
Along with Top Gun, the last of these best epitomises Scott’s early directing style.
Switching from fighter aircraft to the Nascar auto-racing circuit, with Cruise once more in the lead role, Scott admitted with refreshing candour that it was difficult to generate excitement from an event that involves cars driving around in circles.
In True Romance (1993), scripted by Quentin Tarantino, Scott replaced technological glitz with sharp dialogue, and proved he could direct an ensemble cast with panache.
The matchless line-up included Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken, Brad Pitt and Gary Oldman.
He then settled into a sequence of moderately entertaining, star-powered thrillers such as Crimson Tide (1995), The Fan (1996) and Enemy of the State (1998), each of which featured apocalyptic tones and convincing performances (from Denzel Washington, Robert De Niro and Will Smith respectively).
None was as blatant in their worship of fast, dangerous machinery or as broad in their emotional brushstrokes as the earlier films had been, and they performed less well at the box office as a result.
But what they did have was subtlety and sophistication: Crimson Tide featured characterful interplay between Washington and Gene Hackman and was enhanced by its claustrophobic submarine setting, while Enemy of the State weaved a dense plot of paranoia and conspiracy.
Scott also teamed up with Washington for Man on Fire (2004), Deja Vu (2006), The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009) and Unstoppable (2010).
Man on Fire and Domino (2005) revealed his increasing ability to investigate a complex character: an ex-CIA operative with a death wish in the former, and an unlikely bounty hunter, portrayed by Keira Knightley, in the latter. It all showed he was maturing as a director.
Along with Ridley, he was an executive producer on the TV series Numb3rs (2005-10) and The Good Wife (2009-12).
They also worked together on the film The A-Team (2010), directed by Joe Carnahan, who credited Scott as a mentor.
Scott’s first two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his third wife, actor Donna Scott, who appeared in several of his films, and their sons, Frank and Max. – (Guardian service)
Anthony David Scott, born June 21st, 1944; died August 19th, 2012