Loved his work
I enjoyed pretty much all of his movies on some level with the exceptions of Revenge, Domino, and Spy Game. He just really knew how to make good action movies!
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MovieChat Forums > Tony Scott Discussion > Loved his work
Anybody?
shareFor me he had more misses than hits, but True Romance and the Last Boy Scout are pretty damn great.
shareSlightly better than an outright hack. True Romance sparkles because of Tarantino’s script and the scene between Hopper and Walken. Domino has the IDENTICAL ending as True Romance. What a poverty of imagination!
shareHe was a great visual stylist but not much else, unfortunately. His movies tend to always feel really shallow and disposable with their sleek yet superficial use of color and needlessly hyper-kinetic editing. Unlike other filmmakers who started out in the realm of commercials (David Fincher, Alan Parker, his brother etc.), Scott never rose above the sensibilities of a MTV director. Granted, they aren't as low-brow as Michael Bay's and his editing is nowhere near as incomprehensible as Olivier Megaton's, but he pretty much set the stage for Hollywood's reliance on big, dumb, loud action pictures. He's nowhere near as smart an action director as James Cameron or Walter Hill.
shareHe was more than just an ADHD action director, Crimson Tide was a great drama/thriller with one of Gene Hackman’s best performances, The Last Boyscout had Willis’ best character outside of McClane, and True Romance was an all-star epic. Actors always did great work with him, especially Denzel.
Quentin Tarantino adores and makes a great case for his last film, Unstoppable, here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5W86NmR0PlI7EjK7NpuK5Z
That's mostly the work of the writers hired before him. To Scott's credit, he at least understands that audiences require sincere, heartfelt drama on some level to become engrossed in the big action set pieces. His way of capturing any of that said drama however, was extremely artificial. To show characters contemplating their place in the world, he'll just have them stand over big, gorgeous sunsets. To show people falling in love, he'll just have them kiss in slow-mo over silhouetted lighting. Even when his characters are in a state of distress, his way of showing it is just by making his shots look a bit more murky and saturated in post with a bunch of needless flash-bulb effects added for good measure. In short, he basically saw all the emotional and dramatic beats of a screenplay as just excuses for him to dabble in different types of stylistic excess. Like I said, he was primarily an MTV director above all else.
shareMichael Bay is an MTV director who is incapable of directing or even understanding drama, Tony Scott proves in the films I mentioned that he can elicit great performances from actors and bring good screenwriting to life, even if he decides to bathe the odd scene in expressive lighting.
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Yes, he can, but his main contribution to most of his films lies purely in visuals and aesthetics. Like I said, Scott understands on some level that action movies require some sort of emotional center at their core to draw in an audience, but his mentality as a filmmaker was always something along the lines of "Okay, I have just received a workable script in the mail. Now, I can start deciding on what lenses and filters to play with. I'll see how they fit into the story later." By comparison, a director like Steven Spielberg for instance, works with the mentality more akin to "Okay, I have just worked out a script that I like with those couple dozen writers I hired. Now, how do I shoot this thing in a way that grants the utmost emotional impact? Once I have that sorted, I'll decide on my lenses and filters from there." You understand the difference now?
shareI understand that there’s a spectrum and that your assertion that TS ‘was a great visual stylist but not much else‘ is unfair given his excellent work with actors and direction of powerful dramatic scenes, some of which have become iconic in cinema.
In fact, he’s better than his highly acclaimed brother Ridley when it comes to character and drama. Ridley’s much more of a style-bimbo.
Those scenes turned out as well as they did mainly because of the work writers like Tarantino and Shane Black poured in, not because of Tony Scott's direction. Scott is competent enough to at least be able to craft a good scene when there's one handed to him, but on his own, there's very little he can offer beyond slick visuals and hyper-kinetic cuts. One has to be on the level of Uwe Boll incompetent, to not be able to craft at least a half decent film when paired with writers of such caliber.
Ridley's also very much a visual stylist, but the guy is clearly more interested in story and character than Tony. On top of being able to tackle a wider range of films, he also isn't nearly as showoffy with his technique as his brother. He's even able to use visuals to enhance certain themes and ideas (most notably in Blade Runner) in a way that Tony was never been able to do. To sum it up, Ridley is a storyteller who happens to have a very distinctive visual style, while Tony is a visual stylist who happens to specialize in a very particular type of story.
No way, Ridley is a style-bimbo with some philosophical musings but he’s weak at character and relationships, Tony’s much better at real-world drama, as we can see from the examples I mentioned above, plus he can make stuff look gorgeous. Tarantino is absolutely correct in his praise for Tony Scott as a director.