RIP Tony Scott

I came across Tony Scott in my youth after falling in love with Alien and Blade Runner with a phrase like “…Ridley’s got a brother?” but it took me a while to recognize the talent for what it was. Films come and go and we see many each year, but over time I began to look at the filmography on the internet of the man who made me laugh out loud with True Romance. Eventually, you look at the list of titles and acknowledge not only how many of his films you have seen, but how many you really enjoyed!

Sure, Top Gun was pure eye-candy entertainment, but it worked! Other films equally impressed: Crimson Tide managed to get a whole tense story out of claustrophobic surroundings, Spy Game was an exercise in how to slow burn the tension in a simple tale between well acted characters, and the line of work he crafted with Denzel Washington speak for themselves as solid entertainment thrillers.

When you create a piece of entertainment, what are you really doing? Creating an art form? A mutable, malleable thing that reacts to the audience emotions? Or are you creating a mechanical thing, a construct whose sole purpose is to manipulate the emotions of the viewer to make them feel exactly what you want them to feel at any give moment?

Some would argue the former, some would absolutely argue the latter.

Tony Scott was a master at the latter, a genius in taking a script, identifying the emotions within the words on the page, and doing whatever he had to do to get that look, that feel, to manipulate his audience into rooting for that character or feeling that emotion at precisely the right time.

He didn’t pass off films as something they weren’t: he recognized the core, the strength, the heart of each story, and knew precisely what he had to do to sell that concept in the minds of the audience.

He was a gentleman, a master at his craft, and a gentle entertainer, and the world of cinema is worse off this morning, one day after his untimely but understandable curtain close.

RIP Tony. We’ll miss you, mate.

God Bless.