The thrill seeker

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Tony Scott (1944 to 2012)

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In life and death, filmmaker Tony Scott, like the films he made — Top Gun (1986), True Romance (1990), Crimson Tide (1995), Enemy of the State (1998), Spy Game (2001) and Man of Fire (2004) amongst others — was a thrill seeker.

The manner in which he chose to end his life — a man, who’s on top of his game, drives up to a bridge in the middle of the night and jumps to his death — could have very well been a scene from one of his films. Only that on celluloid, this would be the starting point of the story.
The man who made Tom Cruise into an overnight star was destined to be great but as long as he remained within limits. One of the things that Scott always had to contend himself with was the looming shadow of his more illustrious sibling. By the time Tony came into his own, Ridley Scott had already directed Alien (1979), Bladerunner (1982) and the seminal 1984 Apple commercial. Tony Scott’s debut featured David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon and was an unmitigated disaster with the audiences as well as the critics. Perhaps The Hunger (1983) was a vampire film that was decades ahead of its time. His next feature not only made Tom Cruise a global icon but also established his credentials as a director who would go on to redefine action as Hollywood knew it. With Ray Bans, jeans and the bomber jacket, Top Gun went on to define an entire era much like what James Dean did to the 1950s.
Tony Scott’s films weren’t cerebral like his brother’s or even as raw like those of Sam Peckinpah’s (The Wild Bunch and Stray Dogs, among others). In fact, Tony Scott managed to make a special place for himself and was always ahead of the curve. In 1990, he directed True Romance that was written by Quentin Tarantino. The tale of newly wed Clarence and Alabama who have ruthless gangsters trailing them is the most Tarantinoesque that isn’t directed by Tarantino and it wouldn’t be totally incorrect to say that Scott’s style seems to have rubbed off on Tarantino. Scott never tried to cape his films with any charade of highbrow sensibility and this honesty of intentions made them a worthwhile cinematic journey. A Tony Scott film might be enjoyed most with popcorn and cola but to label it as a simple action flick would be a gross injustice. His characters, be it a nuclear submarine captain (Crimson Tide), a veteran train engineer (Unstoppable, 2010), a subway dispatcher (the 2009 remake film, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3) or a bodyguard (Man on Fire), their worlds were relatable to a broad spectrum of the audience and when Scott shook the happy order of things sparks flew.
It would take Hollywood almost a decade to come up with Michael Bay and his Bad Boys (1995), The Rock (1996) or Armageddon (1998) to be a worthy challenger to Scott. To think that Bay’s pulsating action and quick editing where the average shot length is three seconds or less is a step-up on Scott is as wrong as it gets. While the average shot length of The Rock was 2.6 seconds and Armageddon was 2.3 seconds, Scott edited True Romance at an average shot length of 1.5 seconds almost five years before Bay burst on to the scene. There is much more to Scot’s films than frenzied cutting, the heavily employed coloured filters, dazzling cinematography or even the mesmerising production design.
For Scott, well-etched characters and their moral stand-offs were more important than the usual features of a regular A-grade Hollywood production. From the look of it, Crimson Tide is about nail-biting tension between a trigger-happy nuclear submarine captain (Gene Hackman) and his First Office (Denzel Washington) over protocol regarding the deployment of a nuclear missile. But scratch a little and you are rewarded with one of the most extreme cinematic relationships that looks at something as general as the definition of reality viewed by two people where nothing less than the future of mankind depends on who overpowers the situation. Even the women in Scott films, such as Kelly McGillis (Top Gun), Patricia Arquette (True Romance) or Keira Knightley (Domino, 2005), are much more than mere embellishments like Megan Fox in Michael Bay’s Transformers (2007).
Along with elder brother Ridley Scott, Tony Scott was also instrumental in producing many interesting films like Life in a Day (2011), a documentary shot by filmmakers all over the world that would show future generations what it was like to be alive on a particular day in 2010, and RKO 281 (1999) that chronicled the trials of making Citizen Kane (1942).
For a man who invented the new action template that Hollywood gleefully uses till date, Scott’s films were box-office hits that weren’t greeted by the critics with the same aversion they have for the genre now. Scott was so devastated by the reviews of The Hunger that he never bothered with them ever again but in spite of making so-called crowd-pleasing action films, critics never shied away from giving him his due. Roger Ebert said Scott was an “inspired craftsman” and that is perhaps the best way to remember him.