The filmmaker Tony Scott died at around 12.30 p.m. yesterday when he jumped from the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro, California. The case is being treated as a suicide. “There’s nothing to indicate it is anything else at this time,” said Lt. Joe Bale of the Los Angeles County coroner’s office.
Scott, 68, was best known as the director of “Top Gun,” “Days of Thunder,” “True Romance,” and “Crimson Tide.” Born in Stockton-on-Tees, England, he was the younger brother (by seven years) and business partner of Sir Ridley Scott.
A graduate of the Royal College of Art, Scott had originally intended to be a painter. He was considering a career as a maker of documentaries at the BBC when Ridley invited him into his commercials company. He directed thousands of TV “ads” and oversaw the company while his brother was developing his film career. In 1985, he made his feature debut on the elegant, erotic vampire film “The Hunger,” starring Catherine Deneuve, David Bowie, and Susan Sarandon. Although a box-office failure, it was stylistically influential and subsequently become a cult favorite.
Scott would never be so arty again. A lover of machines and speed, he resumed – after a two-and-a-half-year struggle to get a Hollywood job – with “Top Gun” (1986), the gung-ho fighter-pilot movie that made Tom Cruise an action superstar and began Scott’s successful collaboration with the producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. It returned $350 million on its $15 million budget. Extolling the power of velocity to drive box-office sales, Scott would direct Cruise again in the auto racing actioner “Days of Thunder” (1990) and the superbly crafted runaway freight train thriller “Unstoppable” (2010), his last film and easily the best of the three.
Scott’s movies tended to stylishness, implausibility, and different shades of machismo (“The Hunger” aside, he seemed uninterested in women characters). They include “Beverly Hills Cop II” (1987), “Revenge” (1990), “The Last Boy Scout” (1991), “The Fan” (1996), “Enemy of the State” (1998), “Spy Game” (2001), “Man on Fire” (2004), “Déjà Vu” (2006), and a remake of “The Taking of Pelham 123” (2009).
The Cold War submarine thriller “Crimson Tide” (1995), which drew on the prowess of Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman, was Scott’s most exciting film about professionals under duress. “Domino” (2005), the story of model-turned-bounty hunter Domino Harvey (Keira Knightley), daughter of Laurence Harvey, may have had a woman protagonist, but one who was living a traditional male fantasy.
Scott’s most likeable woman character is Alabama, the hooker played by Patricia Arquette in the drugs heist thriller “True Romance” (1993), his best film. Quentin Tarantino’s screenplay deserves much of the credit, but it was Scott who directed the great falling-in-love scene in which Alabama’s eyes roam all over the face of Christian Slater’s Clarence as he describes his favorite comic book. It was Scott, too, who oversaw Gary Oldman’s indelible turn as the Rastafarian pimp and the classic showdown between Chistopher Walken’s gangster and Dennis Hopper’s security guard, Clarence’s father. Notwithstanding his immense facility with action, “True Romance” makes one wish Scott had put more accent on character and less on hardware, though Hollywood accountants might disagree.
Scott is survived by his third wife, Donna Wilson Scott, and their twin sons, Frank and Max.