Tony Scott: Where the Boys Are

"In Days of Thunder we never had the chance to come to grips with the darkness or the lightness of it. I think with more time, it could've been a much better movie. I mean, we got some of the best car footage ever. We got great stuff that never even hit the editing table. It still did $86 million."

We're all milling around in the heat, waiting for the next take. A group of young stuntmen is taking up a collection to entice a man named Bob into riding down a steep slope leading into the Valley on a dolly. The present bid is $500 and the stuntmen are playing off the presence of a gorgeous woman to cloud Bob's ability to reason. For the moment it appears to be working--as Bob peers over the edge, assessing the rough spots, his peripheral vision conspicuously encompasses the silhouette of the woman.

My inclination is to warn Bob that if he goes ahead with this, the only bone left unbroken in his body will be the stirrup bone in his left ear. But we men must make our own way, even if it means having them find you in the middle of Ventura Boulevard strapped to a dolly with every inch of flesh ripped from your body by thorns. Bob is ultimately spared through the dispassionate intervention of the stunt coordinator, who chews everyone out and says he's going to need that dolly shortly.

Tony has returned after the last take of the convertible top stunt, which ended in success. We have some time while preparations for the launching of the Cadillac are under way. Tony eases into discussing the biggest trauma of his career: "Simpson and Bruckheimer are very, very smart in that they make one particular kind of movie and they manage to be the best at it. They specialize. But for me, I have been pigeonholed in a way, as a person who does action movies. I tried to get out of that pigeonhole with Revenge."

Tony pauses to reflect, his gaze set on the tailpipe of the El Camino. "David Lean was once asked what his main problem, on a day-to-day basis as a director was. He said fatigue--mental and physical. And that fatigue keeps you from keeping perspective and an eye on what you want to do and say with your movie. On Revenge I didn't actually get fatigued--I got beaten up."

According to Scott, Revenge (an adaptation from the exceptional Jim Harrison novella which, unlike the film, has an unsentimental ending) was a project John Huston once wanted to make with Ray Stark. "Huston tried for 10 years to make the film, but Stark kept putting it off--it wasn't the kind of material that Ray Stark normally does. And then I think Ray eventually made the film as an homage to Huston after he died. But it was clear that he simply didn't have an understanding for the material. It's funny, too, because I've had misgivings on different projects. But on Revenge, I read the script and said to myself, I want to do this movie."

But the movie he made, says Scott, was very different from the movie that was released. "What I did was basically taken away from me. I was editing under instructions. And it was made clear to me that if I didn't do as I was told, I'd be removed from the project."

Is Shane holstering his gun while the bad guys bully the town? "How could you allow that to happen?" I ask. "Well, there's nothing you can do. You're owned. You're a hired gun as a director. You're owned by the studio and by the producer. So I tried to hang on to it as long as I could, but in the end I lost sight of it. Directors often say, 'Fuck, you should see my cut, then look at the studio cut. You can't tell the difference.' Well, in this case there was an enormous difference. And it was a difference in tone. A big difference, especially because tone is very important in that movie. Mine was much darker, much more unforgiving, much stranger, much more offbeat--as was the Jim Harrison story--and that's what was lost.

"An edit is the most important tool of a director, besides his own vision. An editor is like the director's hand, in terms of putting the paint on the canvas. They consider themselves artists as well, and they should. You would hardly tell Michelangelo not to slop paint all over his walls, now, would you? Therefore, it's extremely important to have a talented editor working with you. And some of these guys [producers] think that editing is just the process of assembling the movie."

We are momentarily interrupted by a report squawking over a walkie-talkie. Much to my dismay, the leaping Cadillac stunt will be delayed for close to an hour, due to a crimped fuel pump. Tony's thoughts, however, are still on Revenge, which was keelhauled by critics and avoided by moviegoers. "Eventually what I'd love to do is get it back and reedit it even if it doesn't leave my house. But it's sad. Saying I told you so doesn't help. It was 18 months out of my life. A director's time on earth with his work is very limited. Very few manage to maintain the quality of their work. It's the fatigue--lifelong fatigue brought on by the necessity to keep fighting the studios. It's mental as well as physical and I think what happens to directors is they finally grow tired with fighting the studios constantly. It just gets too damn hard and they lose the quality and the edge. I hope it doesn't happen to me, but it just might and I'm aware of it constantly."

By now I'm thinking about how much a director's career is like a football player's. You're on top for six to eight years, then you go on to do bad color commentary or weedeater and beer commercials.

"I think there's a variety of colors inside me that are different from the majority of guys in this town," Scott continues. "There's a lot of darkness, strangeness inside of me. I think for straight-out action, I have a broader range of emotional cuts--stranger cuts--that gives me the ability to do the cross-section of films that I've done."

How much autonomy Scott will have in the postproduction phase of Boy Scout poses an intriguing question, in light of the present big-budget paranoia serving as Hollywood's malady du jour. At the very least, he's found a compatriot in screenwriter Shane Black, whom Tony describes as "a loner who lives vicariously through his characters. If you meet him, he's stiff and boyish and not anything like the stuff he writes. Shane is very smart. He has the ability I see in myself, which is to write darkness, strangeness and humor. He has a broad range of talent in terms of putting all these different moods on the paper. I like to think that I am able to do the same thing on celluloid.

"The script is very manipulative in the best sense of the word because it's entertainment and you have these guys who have this humor and wit--they're fast with their tongues and fast on their feet. And this is crosscut with the darkness and the violence and the strangeness. It begins like a Woody Allen movie, where you have Art Donovan [a colorful ex-football player, noted for his flat-top haircut as much as his skewered candor] sitting there, saying football is fucked, the players are only in it for the money. Then Glenn Miller fades in over a downpour in Cleveland, where these guys are all getting messed up. You sense something dark and ominous coming in the way it's shot. It's a football game, but it's not the way a football game is normally lit."

The stuntman who'll be driving the Cadillac Seville when it flies off the top of Griffith Park has shimmied a quarter of the way down the side of the cliff. He wears hard shoes and is dressed like Tony Manero, indicating Bronx ancestry. From where we're standing, we can watch him dramatically surveying the lay of the hill, like a perspective homeowner imagining the location of his study. He removes a large, rusting pipe where he thinks the Seville might go through.

"Originally, we wanted to go through the Hollywood sign," Tony squints, happy again with the prospect of engines gunning and thrills nearing. "We wanted to go right through the 'W' but we got bureaucratically torpedoed. We cleared the chamber of commerce, but the residents committee killed us at the last minute."

Two production assistants are walking us to the spot where the Seville will become airborne while Tony, pulling up his sweat socks, hedges on the future. "I'm reluctant to talk about what I want to do next because I'm afraid it tempts providence, but I'm interested in a project called Interview With a Vampire. It's between Stephen Frears and myself, with Michael Cristofer as the writer. But Frears--I love what Frears does--it really pisses me off 'cause he's good. Also, I might be doing a film with Rid--he'll produce and I'll direct. A strange ecological piece done in the Amazon for Carolco. It's almost a documentary, sort of paralleling Dances With Wolves. But," he adds with a wry smile, "darker and stranger."

I can see the Seville making its way slowly up the dirt fire road, kicking up a rooster tail of dust. The atmosphere among the crew has taken on the pregame feel of the Super-bowl; everyone is charged up. Tony pads his vest for one of his two admitted vices, a cigar. And the other? "Women," he professes without missing a beat. "That's more of a virtue, I would think." "Well, they make for a healthy life," Tony Scott grins conspiratorially, his forehead blushing with sunburn.

They're clearing the area of all vehicles now, 15 minutes and counting from the launch of the Seville into the late afternoon haze. I am slouched in a courtesy van, hoping Tony doesn't spot me, forgetting that the windows are heavily tinted. The last time I see him, he's pointing at the van, ordering the driver back out of the way with a string of casual obscenities. As we're driving back down the hill, the shuttle operator, without turning around, asks: "Wow, man--you're not staying for the stunt?"

"I wish I could. But I have to be somewhere at five." The driver nods impassively, strongly hinting that my attention will no longer be required for the duration of the ride. In the end, we all have to live with our private secrets. What I have to do is pick up my kids from school and broil some swordfish before it spoils.

Michael Angeli wrote our September cover story on River Phoenix.

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