Tony Scott

Shocked to hear of Tony Scott’s suicide.

In recent years he had become best known for being the director of big, ballsy action movies starring Denzel Washington, but a look at his career shows that he was so much more than that.

Like many people my age, I was very taken with Top Gun. At 12 years old I had no idea there was a roaring homosexual subtext to the whole thing, so I just loved the fighter plane excitement and the Kelly McGillis sauciness. It takes a deft hand to make that work, and Tony had just that.

The Last Boy Scout was also excellent and really established the Tony Scott Movie as a genre all of its own: dripping with testosterone and chopped apart with the kind of cuts that made you suspect the editor was an epileptic woodpecker, the emphasis was on masculine ACTION. And why not?

Crimson Tide was also very good, but I think most of us really look at True Romance as his best film, and indeed one of the greats of the 1990s. It’s cool, funny, full of great characters (hello, Brad Pitt) and repays endless repeat viewings, particularly this scene:

He was also responsible for a lot of good stuff beyond the films he directed (for example, he exec produced The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford), and for that we owe him another big old thank you.

Cheers, Tony. You will be missed.