Getting reacquainted with True Romance has forced me to re-evaluate my relationship with its director, the late Tony Scott. I said a lot of mean and grouchy things about his movies when he was alive – bad jokes about not seeing his films with a hangover, that his editing could detach the retina and induce epilepsy, all of that. A lot of it I’d stand by even now, but there were plenty of cheap shots as well, and those I disavow.
In the years since his shocking death, I’ve interviewed a lot of people who worked with Scott, and I make a point of asking what they thought of him. The responses are uniformly positive and sincerely affectionate: “other-dad”-type feelings; “insane and beautiful fucking madman!”; “I’d have done anything for that man.” Over and over again. Even some tears.
Whenever I picture Tony and his brother Ridley as young geordie lads in, say, 1951, I see Ridley, seven years older, quietly reading Dan Dare in the Eagle, sowing the seed of Alien, and Tony whacking a hornet’s nest with his cricket bat, just to see what terror and chaos will feel like. That’s how their films felt to me as well.
But as the years shake out, I find I’m more drawn now to Tony the excitable boy, than to Ridley the pictorialist, who never quite transcends his genius for production design. Tony was cinema unbuttoned and rampant: colour, noise, violence, speed, energy. He was the most unabashedly exuberant English film-maker since Michael Powell, and yet he seemed the most un-English of directors, born to a Wild Bill Wellman strain of havoc and hell-raising. And that Cadillac in the pool in The Last Boy Scout always makes me think of Tony Scott as cinema’s Keith Moon.
I scorned him like a snob, wrongly, but I loved The Last Boy Scout, with its demented opening football game, and Man On Fire. I’ll never love Days Of Thunder – I don’t miss the Don Simpson epoch one bit – and 29 years still isn’t enough distance between me and Top Gun, but I treasure Domino for its hybridised pseudo-biopic crime thriller-cum-celeb-heavy reality show qualities, and just for being ridiculous and insane in all the best ways.
Then there’s True Romance, where everything came together; an action movie with wit and brains. A Tarantino script that was openly self-referential, head over heels in love with good-bad movies and bullshitting about them, and with enough violence and bloodshed for 10 spaghetti westerns and 100 Asian action movies. Scott put together a cast of madmen (Val Kilmer, Dennis Hopper) and oddballs (Walken, Gandolfini, Oldman), stood well back, let them eat their lines alive, then painted the walls with their brains.
It almost hurt me back in 1993 to admit Tony Scott had made a great movie that was unmistakably a Tony Scott movie. But he had, and it was, and it still is.
