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b. 21 June, 1944, Tynemouth, Northumberland, England, UK
d. 19 August, 2012, San Pedro, Los Angeles, California, USA

When Tony Scott passed away at the age of 68, his unexpected death sent shockwaves through the Hollywood community. From there, the disbelief spread to friends, fans, and collaborators the world over. That Scott committed suicide by jumping off California’s Vincent Thomas Bridge made the tragedy even more incomprehensible. But aside from the speculation surrounding why he did what he did, something else began to swirl in the days, weeks, and months following the incident. Despite having directed several of the most popular and enduring blockbusters in recent American film history, Scott had long resided—at least as far as accolades and critical acclaim—in the shadows of his older brother, Ridley. Furthermore, his films, often accused of being devoted to style over substance, were regularly disparaged by those who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see past the audio-visual virtuosity of his work to appreciate the deep-seeded emotions, the prescient themes, and the narrative complexity that defined the best of his output. But this soon changed, and if there can then be any sort of silver lining in Scott’s untimely death, it’s that with the heartbreaking news came a newfound appreciation of his filmography and a renewed interest in his accomplishments.

As a young man, Anthony David Leighton Scott studied art at various institutions and had every intention of becoming a painter, a predilection that never quite left his conceptual mindset. Soon after joining his brother’s production company, however, Scott shifted his attention to filmmaking, directing television commercials and making plans for his feature directing career. “My goal was to make films but I got sidetracked into commercials,” Scott recalled, “and then I took off. I had 15 years [making them] and it was a blast.” 1 In 1969, Scott directed the 26-minute short, One of the Missing, based on a story by Ambrose Bierce. Featuring Ridley in an uncredited role (Ridley had previously cast Tony in his own 1965 short, Boy and Bicycle), the film is set during the American Civil War and follows the harrowing entrapment of a soldier behind enemy lines.

Loving Memory (Tony Scott, 1971)

Shot on black and white, 16mm stock, with Scott acting as his own cinematographer and editor, the film is a dreamlike rendering of the soldier’s precarious situation; intense close-ups and extended periods of silence prolong and magnify the tension as the protagonist weighs his options. This brief effort was effective enough to get Scott into London’s Royal College of Art, where his admission had earlier been denied, and not long after graduating, he directed a 50-minute picture for the British Film Institute. Taking place in the remote English countryside, Loving Memory (1971) centres on an elderly couple in the days after their automobile inadvertently strikes a young man on his bicycle. They take the boy’s body home and the wife dresses the corpse, cares for it, and converses with the deceased. By turns disturbing and touching, this quietly emotional film is distinguished for Scott’s use of bleak, low-key visuals, which stand in contrast to his subsequent endeavours, while a knack for steady pacing and potent anxiety preview those films to come. Loving Memory was also shot in black and white, but Scott was soon able to experiment with colour in 1976, when he directed The Author of Beltraffio, an episode of a television series based on the works of author Henry James. Here, however, as pointed out by filmmaker Cameron Beyl, Scott avoids the use of extreme colour that would characterise his later work and “employs an even, natural colour palette.” 2

The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983)

For his feature film debut, Scott considered an adaptation of the Anne Rice novel Interview with the Vampire, but instead, he arrived at an MGM project already in development, one which happened to deal with related subject matter. Largely encouraged by the quality of his commercial reel, Scott was hired to direct The Hunger in 1982, shooting in London as a stand-in for New York City. This erotic, ethereal film, based on Whitley Strieber’s 1981 novel, stars David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve, and Susan Sarandon, and although Scott claimed to be intimidated by such high-calibre performers, he nevertheless reveled in the film’s techno-sheen aesthetic. The tale of vampiric desperation and desire is eloquently enigmatic, described by Scott as “surreal” and “self-conscious,” 3 and many critics indeed viewed the film as unduly artsy and self-indulgent. Yet despite the lackluster reception, and again on the strength of his visual aptitude—specifically a 1984 commercial for Saab, featuring a Saab 900 turbo racing a Saab 37 Viggen fighter jet—American powerhouse producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer enlisted Scott to helm Top Gun, an amped-up movie about Navy pilots and their training school. Having conceived of the film as a much darker enterprise, akin to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), Scott showed initial hesitance in tackling the project, and further divergent approaches to the picture resulted in his being fired from the production three times. Once firmly on board, though, Scott and his cast, led by rapidly ascending star Tom Cruise, engaged in a concerted period of training and preparation, lending credence to the film’s thrilling aerial photography. Top Gun became a cultural phenomenon, playfully scrutinized as a homoerotic classic and viewed as a rather overt piece of pop propaganda; with its gung-ho parade of machismo and military might, the picture was, for Scott biographer Larry Taylor, like “a rock and roll video with militaristic fetishism masquerading as a movie” 4

Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986)

Scott re-teamed with Simpson and Bruckheimer in 1987, directing Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop II, the sequel to director Martin Brest’s popular 1984 film about fish-out-of-water Detroit police detective Axel Foley. Scott was keen to make a comedy and to work with Murphy, but he also expressed reservations. “As a director, I was ambivalent about taking on a sequel,” he stated, “and the film was a daunting prospect because the original had been so successful. But I loved Eddie and the boys and felt I could do a different movie.” 5 Although Scott’s film is slightly less comedic than Brest’s, Beverly Hills Cop II is immersed in intrigue and moves forward in a series of well-staged action sequences. Sardonically responding to the gaudy excesses of the Los Angeles area, Murphy’s Foley is emblematic of the actor’s energetic personality, and the gleeful depiction of his audacious theatrics resulted in a box office triumph. That success enabled Scott to then embark on a more personal project, adapting Jim Harrison’s 1979 novella, Revenge: A tale of love and betrayal, previously published in Esquire Magazine. Starring executive producer Kevin Costner, alongside Anthony Quinn and Madeleine Stowe, Revenge is an edgy picture, steeped in lust and ferocity, and it was released in a compromised version courtesy of producer Ray Stark, who frequently clashed with Scott over the film’s forbidding tone (Scott has since provided a “director’s cut” on Blu-ray, running about 30 minutes shorter). Scott favored a portrayal of instinctual sex and violence, of heedless passion and primal vengeance, but the abrasive retribution and seedy characters led some, like Roger Ebert, to decry Revenge’s unabated brutality. “I didn’t care about the outcome of the movie,” the famed critic wrote, “because its values seemed too twisted. In a film like this it is helpful to believe that at least one of the characters is acting wisely and well, and Revenge has no righteous characters – they’re all silly, stupid or ruthless.” 6

Beverly Hills Cop II (Tony Scott, 1987)

Returning to more commercial territory, and returning to Simpson, Bruckheimer, and Tom Cruise, Scott directed Days of Thunder in 1990, a fast-paced film about drivers in the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR). Written by Robert Towne, from a story by he and Cruise, the film co-stars Robert Duvall as Cruise’s seasoned mentor and Nicole Kidman as his obligatory love interest. Bearing obvious similarities with Top Gun (in themes, narrative structure, and characterizations), Days of Thunder distinguishes itself largely due to Scott’s inventively shot racing sequences, with cameras mounted on the vehicles as they speed along the sun-kissed raceways. While it was a commendable box office victory, the picture ran three months late on its production schedule, a result of bad weather and adversarial quarrels behind the scenes. An “overabundance of alpha males,” in the words of assistant director James Skotchdopole, 7 similarly tainted The Last Boy Scout (1991), where Scott worked amid the combative creative influences of producer Joel Silver and stars Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans. According to Taylor, Scott had actually passed on The Last Boy Scout, planning a war film set in the Middle East instead, but when he agreed to direct the grudgingly winning buddy-picture, revolving around an assassination plot, his fondness for stylized visuals mixed agreeably with the humour of Shane Black’s wisecracking screenplay.

Days of Thunder (Tony Scott, 1990)

Scott also arrived at his next project courtesy of a hot young screenwriter, in this case Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino had presented Scott with his scripts for both Reservoir Dogs and True Romance, but the budding filmmaker opted to direct the former himself, which he did in 1992, and although Scott provided an insider’s knowledge about Hollywood manoeuvrings to the latter, he was content to support what was on the page, confident in Tarantino’s “blueprint.” 8 Released in 1993, this quirky story of young, rebellious lovers (Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette) is a charming, romanticized crime film bursting with childlike naivete and cartoonish villains. But Scott’s increasing capacity for photographic bravado intensifies Tarantino’s comingling of cruelty, sexiness, and audacious comedy and further complements an eclectic cast that includes Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken, who engage in a profane faceoff that critic Oliver Lyttelton considers “the single finest scene of [Scott’s] career, and some of the most electric acting of the 1990s.” 9

True Romance (Tony Scott, 1993)

A far more ominous drama unfolds in Crimson Tide, a 1995 film Scott again made with Simpson and Bruckheimer. Hinging on the power-hungry captain of a nuclear missile submarine (Gene Hackman) and his feud with a cautious executive officer (Denzel Washington, in the first of his five collaborations with the director), the film brought Scott into familiar territory of life and death discord, this time escalated on an international scale. With script contributions from an uncredited Tarantino, who provides the film’s pop culture allusions, the Cold War tête-à-tête becomes a grand statement on the nature of warfare, and Scott’s deployment of handheld cameras, concentrated close-ups, and canted angles testify to his “machinelike rhythmic slickness,” which, according to Owen Gleiberman, “shapes the movie with great skill” while also “letting the performances and the tension build honestly.” 10 In 1995, the same year Shepperton Studios was purchased and restructured by the Scott brothers’ Percy Main Productions, which they renamed Scott Free Productions after the acquisition, Scott released The Fan. Featuring Wesley Snipes as a troubled baseball star and Robert DeNiro as an overzealous admirer, the film is an intense exploration of psychopathic obsession and self-destructive violence. Written by Phoef Sutton, based on Peter Abrahams’s novel, this taut, relentless picture weighs the proposed purity of “America’s game” against the dual descents of its entwined adversaries, resulting in an uncomfortable escalation of ill intentions and one of Scott’s most unnerving efforts.

Crimson Tide (Tony Scott, 1995)

More uncomfortable in premise than actual execution, Scott’s Enemy of the State (1998) plunges into an ambit of invasive privacy breaches and conspiratorial collusion, swiftly consuming an innocent Washington D.C. lawyer (Will Smith). Embroiled in a political scheme bolstered by extensive surveillance technology, Smith’s attorney finds reluctant assistance from a veteran in the field (Gene Hackman, in a variant of his character from The Conversation [1974]), but that reprieve hardly assuages the prevalence of the film’s rampant, apparently justified sense of paranoia. Scott’s somewhat analogous follow-up, 2001’s Spy Game, was described by the director as an “old fashioned story,” 11 one he enlivens with an elaborate flashback structure and the editorial manipulation of time and space and related conflicts. Set in 1991, Spy Game involves a retiring CIA agent (Robert Redford) who recalls his prior training of a young operative (Brad Pitt) while simultaneously orchestrating the present-day rescue of his former protegee from a Chinese prison, where he faces execution. Akin to Enemy of the State, Spy Game divulges pieces of information in a fragmented style, a multileveled mosaic of vantage points that coalesce multiple, mini-narratives into a larger, interconnected whole.

Enemy of the State (Tony Scott, 1998)

Though dizzyingly complex and thoroughly captivating, the visualization of Spy Game’s intricate chronicle seems mild compared to Scott’s even more frenetic Man on Fire (2004), for which he again united with Washington after nine years. Based on A.J. Quinnell’s 1980 novel of the same name, which had earlier been adapted by director Élie Chouraqui in 1987, the new screenplay by Brian Helgeland centres on a distressed mercenary (Washington) who is hired as a bodyguard for a young girl (Dakota Fanning) and forges a unique friendship with the child while exorcising his own demons. Following her kidnapping, the consummate soldier summons the skills of his former self and launches a relentless assault on the perpetrators, an unforgiving salvo executed by Scott in his most virtuosic form yet. With wildly fluctuating formats and staccato editing patterns, the film, writes Nick Clement, “is a stylistic tour de force and serves as a bridge from the post-Bruckheimer era to the more experimental/artiste period for the filmmaker.” 12

Man on Fire (Tony Scott, 2004)

While Man on Fire could be seen as “a genre picture that occasionally bordered on the avant-garde,” according to Clement, 13 Scott took the effectively erratic technique even further with Domino, a 2005 film based on the life of Los Angeles bounty hunter Domino Harvey, played by Keira Knightley. Blatantly blurring the lines between truth and fiction and deliriously exaggerating the exploits of the titular young heroine, the screenplay penned by Richard Kelly eschews elements of the conventional biopic and delights in labyrinthine temporal shifts and mutable points of view, usually with an infectiously reckless abandon. Domino is brimming with constant surprises and over-the-top insanity (little wonder reality television figures prominently in the picture), and Scott’s fantastic synchronicity of sex and violence borders on the absurd. “In a way,” notes Taylor, “Domino works as a parody of everything Scott has worked to so carefully to craft in Man on Fire. He was ripping off his own work, but not being clear enough to create honest satire. The result is a film somewhere in the middle, in limbo, set adrift like the story’s tragic antihero.” 14 Slightly more subdued in presentation and certainly more reflective in thematic bearing, Scott’s 2006 film Déjà Vu stars Washington as an ATF agent investigating a bombing in New Orleans, where the basics of the forensic procedural are augmented by technology allowing the agent to first view the days leading up to the event and then to actually travel back in time to prevent it from happening. Psychological and even spiritual dimensions add to the fundamental enquiry and provide a sufficient sense of internal humanity, countering the film’s high-concept, science fiction premise.

Domino (Tony Scott, 2005)

While maintaining a pronounced stylistic flamboyance, by this point his most perceptible trademark, Scott’s final two films were significantly more grounded in their approach toward a supported reality and the actions of ordinary protagonists. Scott regarded his The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009) to be less a remake of director Joseph Sargent’s 1974 original and more like an updated, modernized version of John Godey’s 1973 source novel. Like Déjà Vu, Pelham 123 establishes a setting of control and occupational oversight, but Scott pushes past the somewhat detached engagement between mediated forces and capitalises on the concentration of spatiotemporal strain. Pitting Denzel Washington’s everyman MTA dispatcher against John Travolta’s maniacal hijacker, Scott’s translation of the story is a dynamic depiction of dastardly villainous preparation and, with New York City acting as a supporting character in its own right, the virtuous deeds of a common citizen performing in his city’s best interest. In much the same way (minus personified opposition), Scott’s final film, Unstoppable, is about human error, human responsibility, and human solutions. Loosely based on the real-life incident of a runaway freight train, the 2010 film stars Washington and Chris Pine as an engineer and conductor, respectively, who race to thwart an explosive calamity as if it were all in a day’s work. To that end, Unstoppable was called the “best blue collar action movie” by Todd McCarthy, who argued that while “Scott doesn’t show any moves that he hasn’t used before [including] desaturated images, jumpy camerawork, abrupt cuts, spare and jokey dialogue exchanges and relentless forward movement,” in this film, “everything is stripped down to its essence and placed in the service of creating a piece that’s virtually wall-to-wall action with no distraction.” 15

The Taking of Pelham 123 (Tony Scott, 2009)

Adding to Unstoppable’s effectiveness, McCarthy continues, “is the essential credibility of both the mechanics and the setting.” 16 This twofold integrity has in fact been a vital aspect of Scott’s work throughout his career. In terms of location, often established in an assortment of scenic expositions, Scott has shown the insecurity of harsh, international locals, has basked in the ironic juxtaposition of California’s unremitting haze, its sunshine, and the downtrodden qualities of its less pictorial milieus, and has enhanced the bright lights and crowds of America’s sporting arenas. At the same time, Scott has dramatically staged decisive moments of friction in risky locations supplemented by external influences, like severe climate conditions, precarious structures, and, as in Unstoppable, the delicate staging of two trains and a helicopter, all moving at a breakneck pace. And concerning the exhaustive mechanics McCarthy speaks of, Scott has habitually devoted time and resources to the details of his depicted professions (what he calls their “tradecraft” 17), appending an attention to occupational specificity that not only gives his work a substantial degree of believability, but also, as in Top Gun and Days of Thunder, allocates significant interest in professional competition and collaboration.

Unstoppable (Tony Scott, 2010)

Divided along the lines of generally unambiguous opponent and allies, Scott’s characters thrive on the respective pressures of their work, with shifting gradations of consequence should they fail. They are driven by their passions and persevere against the odds of their endeavours. Accordingly, a militaristic backdrop has been particularly well-suited to Scott’s focus on professionalism and power, as seen in Crimson Tide’s volley between authorial control and protocol and the predispositions of human nature. Danger may also be inherent in a film like Spy Game, where necessary dexterity is forged alongside relationships based on collaboration and dependency, but these characters—usually men in Scott’s testosterone-driven cinema (save for Domino)—are capably bound to such inexorable circumstances. Or, as with Top Gun, Domino, Days of Thunder, and True Romance, they crave the danger and volatility, finding joy and release in the risks. Conversely, there are those like Washington’s MTA worker in The Taking of Pelham 123 and the belligerent tandem of The Last Boy Scout; these individuals accept what’s involved with their job even if the present situation takes them well beyond their pay-grade. Whether through sheer insolence, ambition, or pride (or all three, as in True Romance), Scott’s protagonists have something to prove, something to be achieved through their cleverness and proficiency. Functioning in a diverse compilation of high-pressure scenarios (professional sports, realms of military engagement, hasty individual pursuits), these fundamentally ordinary characters combat corrupt powers holding sway (The Last Boy Scout, Enemy of the State) and confront skewed patriotic ideals (Crimson Tide, Déjà Vu).

The Last Boy Scout (Tony Scott, 1991)

Here one comes to perhaps the most unappreciated aspect of Tony Scott’s work: the sensitive poignancy and psychological impact he so often provoked. Forbidden romances, redemptive reckonings, and ingratiating relationships all flow throughout Scott’s cinema. It’s therefore not surprising that just as Scott’s audio-visual propensity kept particular cinematographers and composers coming back for repeat collaborations (Jeffrey L. Kimball and Dan Mindel; Hans Zimmer and Harry Gregson-Williams), his understanding of performative needs likewise enticed recurrent actors (Washington, Hackman, Oldman), many of whom gave their best work when unleashed by Scott’s fondness for shooting with long lenses and utilizing multiple cameras in the service of spontaneity and character development. For critic Edgar Pablos, Scott brought “a lot of heart to his work and that’s what made his action movies mean something, because he knew the key to any action movie is the character and what happens to them. He made us care for them and their choices informed the action.” 18 Films like Top Gun and Days of Thunder, for example, reveal an unexpected though nonetheless compelling emotional resonance, where tragedy leaves the cocksure leads to face their mortality and the temptations of self-destruction, while The Hunger takes the relatable themes of aging and bodily transience to the extreme. The Hunger also introduced the common Scott motif of time constraints, which often serve to connect spectator engagement with character concern. Déjà Vu, Spy Game, and The Taking of Pelham 123 all highlight diminishing timelines and the unyielding ticking clock countdown to some predetermined breaking point.

Spy Game (Tony Scott, 2001)

Aside from his feature filmmaking, Scott worked in television as a producer and director, going behind the camera for two episodes of a Showtime spinoff series based on The Hunger (in 1997 and 1999) and directing one episode of Numb3rs, in 2007. More significantly, Scott honed and expanded his visual competence on music videos and commercials. An attuned ear for musical integration has indeed been one of the more notable facets of Scott’s filmography, from his use of Bob Seger’s “Shakedown” in Beverly Hills Cop II and Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” in Top Gun, to his incorporation of composer Hans Zimmer’s jubilant score in True Romance (he also directed music videos for Loggins and George Michael). But commercials in particular afforded Scott continued opportunity to experiment with film technique. His first credited commercial was for DIM Underwear in 1979, and later projects included a spot for Barclays Bank, featuring Anthony Hopkins, two commercials for Telecom Italia, one with Marlon Brando and one with Woody Allen, the United States Army, Malboro, Amazon.com, Dodge, and Mountain Dew. His most extravagant commercial venture was Beat the Devil, a 2002 contribution to the BMW film series, The Hire, which starred Clive Own in a series of extended action selections directed by Scott and other filmmakers such as John Woo, Wong Kar-Wai, and Guy Ritchie.

The Fan (Tony Scott, 1996)

These side endeavours were crucial to Scott’s evolving cinematic strategy, fueling a pictorial verve that ultimately became the defining aspect of his work. “As varying as Tony Scott’s oeuvre may have been from one film to the next,” Taylor points out, “he still managed to stamp each frame with his distinct visual language.” 19 The Hunger’s sensual ambiguity first introduced the ubiquitous fans, smoke effects, and filters that would permeate Scott’s films to come, and he was soon exulting in the subjective intensity of palpable speed in Top Gun and Days of Thunder, where the envisaged exhilaration merged into a perfunctory symbiosis of man and machine. The Last Boy Scout and True Romance showcased Scott’s increased action faculty, with quicker cuts, variable camera angles, shifts in speed, and single shot punctuation points, and Crimson Tide demonstrated what he could do with tactical shafts of light and a camera’s surprising mobility in relatively constricted confines. Scott considered film an audio-visual experience, drawing parallels to painting and his career-long pursuit of a complete canvas, a palette that extends to elements of production design and the balancing of one colour against another in terms of character types. Eventually, absorbing and distorting his action set-pieces, Scott advanced his formal idiosyncrasies into a crazed composite of lighting accents, fitful montage sequences, and rapid flash cuts (which he often attributed to his own short attention span). In this, Man on Fire and Domino are exceptional for their increased mixture of sonic and graphic elements into an abstract, disorienting, and amplified overlay. Yet this systematic arrangement of formal devices, no matter how radical, was never superfluous. Manohla Dargis notes the “common knock” of all style and no substance levelled against Scott, but argues the two aspects are inseparable and, in fact, “the excesses of Mr. Scott’s style invariably served those of his over-the-top stories.” 20 Domino is an exemplary case in point, where the film’s vivid, grim, and gritty aesthetic suits what writer Richard Kelly calls the “fever dream” 21 depiction of Domino’s life. And as Scott himself puts it, discussing the same film and its visualization of volatile conditions and states of mind, “if you think it that way you should see it that way.” 22

Ultimately, writes Cameron Beyl, “Tony Scott made the kinds of movies he loved, and had little pretensions about his work.” 23 But this productive, compliant view was seldom shared by the critical establishment. As noted by Dargis in her memorial tribute for The New York Times, Scott was “one of the most influential film directors of the past 25 years, if also one of the most consistently and egregiously underloved by critics.” 24 Since that fateful day in 2012, however, the positive reassessment of his work has positioned Scott as a preeminent “action auteur,” a rightful phrase of praise that was regrettably denied during his lifetime.

Filmography

Unstoppable (2010), also producer
The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009), also producer
Déjà vu (2006)
Domino (2005), also producer
Man on Fire (2004), also producer
Spy Game (2001)
Enemy of the State (1998)
The Fan (1996)
Crimson Tide (1995)
True Romance (1993)
The Last Boy Scout (1991)
Days of Thunder (1990)
Revenge (1990)
Beverly Hills Cop II (1987)
Top Gun (1986)
The Hunger (1983)
Loving Memory (1971), also writer
One of the Missing (1969), also writer

Select Bibliography

Larry Taylor, Tony Scott: A Filmmaker on Fire (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2019)

Endnotes

  1. Stephen Galloway, Tony Scott’s Unpublished Interview: ‘My Family Is Everything to Me,’ The Hollywood Reporter, 2012.
  2. Cameron Beyl, Tony Scott: The Ultimate Guide to His Films & Career, Indie Film Hustle, 2017.
  3. Tony Scott, The Hunger, Audio Commentary, Turner Entertainment, Blu-ray, 2015
  4. Larry Taylor, Tony Scott: A Filmmaker on Fire (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2019), p. 28
  5. Julie Makinen and Geoff Boucher, Tony Scott dies at 68; a film career in retrospective, Los Angeles Times, 2012.
  6. Roger Ebert, Revenge, Chicago Sun-Times, 1990.
  7. Owen Williams, Who killed The Last Boy Scout? Bruce Willis, Shane Black and the making of an action masterpiece, The Telegraph, 2016.
  8. Tony Scott, True Romance, Audio Commentary, Warner Home Video, Blu-ray, 2009
  9. Oliver Lyttelton, The Essentials: The 5 Best Tony Scott Films (IndieWire, 2012.
  10. Owen Gleiberman, Crimson Tide, Entertainment Weekly, 1995.
  11. Tony Scott, Spy Game, Audio Commentary, Universal Studios, Blu-ray, 2011
  12. Nick Clement, Tony Scott’s Man on Fire, Podcasting Them Softly, 2015.
  13. Nick Clement, Man on Fire, Back to the Movies, 2017.
  14. Taylor, p. 147
  15. Todd McCarthy, Unstoppable (The Hollywood Reporter, 2010.
  16. Ibid.
  17. Tony Scott, Unstoppable, Audio Commentary, Twentieth Century Fox, Blu-ray, 2010
  18. Edgar Pablos, All 16 Tony Scott Movies Ranked From Worst To Best, Taste of Cinema, 2017.
  19. Taylor, p. 5
  20. Manohla Dargis, A Director Who Excelled in Excess, New York Times, 2012.
  21. Tony Scott, Domino, Audio Commentary, Warner Home Video, Blu ray
  22. Ibid.
  23. Beyl, 2017
  24. Dargis, 2012

About The Author

Jeremy Carr is a faculty associate at Arizona State University and a visiting research fellow with the ASU Center for Film, Media and Popular Culture. He has written for Cineaste, Film International, CineAction, Cinema Retro, MUBI’s Notebook, Vague Visages, Movie Mezzanine, Cut Print Film, Bright Lights Film Journal, and The Moving Image.

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