Tony Scott: From Macho to Mellow

And what of working with the gifted, turbulent Ellen Barkin? "Her reputation is a tough one." Scott concedes. "She kept saying, "I'm in a Tony Scott movie, so I'll just stick my tits out and stick my lips out and paint them bright red.' Then she'd go on about how tough it is to be an actor, how tough this and that is, like she's got such a problem, and you have to say, 'Shut the fuck up, you bitch!' One of my talents is that I can diffuse people's anger very quickly with, 'Shut the fuck up, you bitch!' And then she smiles and once she smiles, her defenses are down and you're in. She plays a sportscaster who weaves herself into Wesley's life and she said, 'I don't understand why the woman is here, other than as some sort of sex interest.' And she certainly was right, so she brought to the table really good ideas that made her character live. She's fun, brilliant, and I really did enjoy working with her."

As we've talked. I've noticed Scott alluding to his growing clout as a moviemaker. Perhaps his sense of burgeoning power comes from having been powerless in the past to stem the intervention of certain producers and moneymen who decided to mess with his movies. His very first film, 1983's The Hunger, for example, got mauled by the studio. Ray Stark forced him to recut Revenge, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer glammed up his gritty vision of Top Gun. "I've twice stuck my fingers up producer's noses and threatened to punch out their lights if they didn't leave me alone,'' Scott asserts. "You see, I'm perceived as being very sweet, but people think there's something a little dangerous about me, and therefore they usually don't fuck with me."

But they did at the start. How about sharing a few war stories on The Hunger? "I was being stroked by various people who thought I was in the running to make Interview With the Vampire, which I had just read and loved," Scott recalls. "I tried to persuade MGM to ditch The Hunger altogether and do the Anne Rice book instead. Nothing doing. So I took a lot of the mood from the book and just brought it to The Hunger. Before that movie came out, the word on it was so great that I got first crack at Starman, the hot script at the time. Nobody had seen one foot of The Hunger, but I snagged this plum project. I kept talking to the studio executives about Starman in terms of movies like The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Road Warrior, Vanishing Point, which terrified them. Well, the studio guys saw The Hunger on a Tuesday evening and all had a heart attack, they hated it so much. I came into the studio Wednesday morning and my name on my parking space was whited out and security made me park in the general parking lot."

Scott recalls with malicious humor "a two-hour meeting at Fox with studio execs, who shall be nameless. They were all over me like a rash about how they hated The Hunger, all the while they were offering me something like Jaws XII, And at the end of this meeting, one of them said, 'Hey, how did you get that creature's head popping out of the guy's stomach in Alien, anyway?'"

Despite Scott's free-falling stock in Hollywood after The Hunger, producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer bet on his being the right guy to direct the Reagan-era recruitment poster that put Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer on the map. Top Gun was so huge that the Scott/Simpson/Bruckheimer troika spawned three more movies over the next decade. In the process, Scott grew especially close to Simpson. Was Scott at all surprised to learn last January that Simpson had been found dead in a manse so crammed with prescription narcotics that a police investigation is currently underway? "I've been waiting for years to get that phone call," Scott admits. "Earlier, there was that false alarm when someone called me and said. 'Do you know what happened to Don?' and I thought, 'He's dead,' but he wasn't. It was someone else who died at his home. But his death is a terrible hurt because I was so attached to him. I spent six years of the 12 that I knew him in his daily company. We had huge fights, but underneath all the madness and insanity, he was part of my family. He was like the last of the dying breed, the last of the John Barrymores, a wild man, a party animal. He was very funny, very smart, charming, lovable, had an acid tongue and could be a killer. People perceived him as being sad in the way he conducted his life because he lived alone with a staff and his maid. But that's how he was happy."

Maybe so, but Simpson was also reputed to seek release in the company of hookers. What does Scott make of Hollywood's intimate, increasingly blatant connection with prostitutes? "Boredom," he answers, sounding as if he knows whereof he speaks. "Boredom with doing it in the normal channels. When you get great-looking guys like actors, say, who can get women any which way, the only way they can get it up is paying for it. They get more sexual excitement out of doing it in unknown territory. These guys are always inundated with women. There's something exciting about hookers and having to pay for it as opposed to girls knocking on your door wanting you to do it with them."

While we're on the subject of women, what about Scott's adventures? Directors have traditionally ranked near the lop of the food chain when it comes to attracting highly eligible women. Think such old school giants as Victor Fleming. William Wyler, Charlie Chaplin, John Huston and Howard Hawks. "And most of them were ugly,'" Scott accedes, rubbing his palm over a thinning crop and calling himself "a bidding little Englishman, certainly not the prettiest thing on two legs." I'd wager a bet that, outside of a select group of actors, directors rule as Hollywood's babe magnets. What's the attraction? "Power dicks," asserts Scott, eyes twinkling. "It's all about the pursuit of power. There's something much more fascinating to women, though, about being involved with a creative business, rather than being the head of Citibank."

What are Scott's secrets for attracting and keeping desirable women? He leans in and whispers conspiratorially, "Ridley and I grew up in northern England close to the farming district." Oh, no, this doesn't involve consorting with livestock or anything, does it? He laughs, shakes his head no, and continues: "But Ridley and I did a lot of watching. When I was nine, the dad of a kid at our school bred this prize bull and put it out to stud. They'd bring the females to him. I remember one Saturday morning watching this female stand in a little corral while the bull licked her from top to toe from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. He licked her nose, her ears, everything, and it was brilliant. By the time he actually did the business, she was quivering like jelly. It made an impression. I look a leaf out of that bull's book for the rest of my life, and women think I'm a hero."

Scott emerged from an arts background to become one of England's top directors of TV commercials by creating montages of sirens in various stages of undress for Chanel perfumes and designer jeans. Any reminiscences of dalliances he cares to share? "I think I'm pretty astute in terms of what models and actresses are coming to me for," he says. "I've had my heart broken many times over the years. I got my lessons when I spent those 10 years in advertising doing underwater and girlie commercials. I practically had the pick of the crop then. Almost every January or February, I'd take six of the most beautiful women in the world and fly to some exotic place to shoot commercials. I got to learn quickly about when girls were on the make, although, as I said, I got my heart broken a few times that way."

Scott had a couple of marriages broken, too. While he refrains from discussing his affair with Brigitte Nielsen, who starred in his film Beverly Hills Cop II, he admits, "That was absolutely what brought my second marriage to an end." These days, however, things are different. Scott's third wife of just over 18 months, Donna, is, by all accounts, a most attractive, companionable woman 20 years his junior. To hear Scott tell it, they are very much in love and trying to have a child. "I've never had kids because I was sick when I was younger," he says. "Modern science now says that I can, so I'm trying. Donna is dying to have kids."

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