Tony Scott - Directing Style

Directing Style

Katey Rich of Cinema Blend wrote that Scott had a "trademark frenetic camera style", which Scott spoke about in June 2009, in reference to The Taking of Pelham 123:

It's about energy and it's about momentum, and I think the movie's very exciting, and it's not one individual thing. The true excitement comes from the actors—that gives you the true drama—and whatever I can do with the camera, that's icing on the cake. I wanted the movie to grab you. I use four cameras and I maybe do three takes—so the actors love it. Maybe I move it more than I should, but that's the nature of the way I am.

Scott also spoke about his career in general:

What always leads me in terms of my movies are characters. 'Go into the real world, cast these people in the real world, and find me role models for my writers.' Then I reverse-engineer. I don't change the structure of the script, but I use my research. That's always been my mantra, and that's what gets me excited, because I get to educate and entertain myself in terms of worlds I could never normally touch, other than the fact that I'm a director. If you look at my body of work, there's always a dark side to my characters. They've always got a skeleton in the closet, they've always got a subtext. I like that. Whether it's Bruce Willis in Last Boy Scout or Denzel Washington in The Taking of Pelham 123. I think fear, and there's two ways of looking at fear. The most frightening thing I do in my life is getting up and shooting movies. Commercials, movies, every morning I'm bolt upright on one hour two hours sleep, before the alarm clock goes off. That's a good thing. That fear motivates me, and I enjoy that fear. I'm perverse in that way. I do other things. I've rock climbed all my life. Whenever I finish a movie, I do multi-day ascents, I go hang on a wall in Yosemite. That fear is tangible. That's black and white. I can make this hold or that hold. The other fear is intangible, it's very abstract, and that's more frightening.

Manohla Dargis of The New York Times wrote that Scott was "one of the most influential film directors of the past 25 years, if also one of the most consistently and egregiously underloved by critics" and called him "ne of the pop futurists of the contemporary blockbuster". She felt that "here was plenty about his work that was problematic and at times offensive, yet it could have terrific pop, vigor, beauty and a near pure cinema quality. These were, more than anything, films by someone who wanted to pull you in hard and never let you go." Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly wrote that "the propulsive, at times borderline preposterous popcorn-thriller storylines; the slice-and-dice editing and the images that somehow managed to glow with grit; the fireball violence, often glimpsed in smeary-techno telephoto shots; the way he had of making actors seem volatile and dynamic and, at the same time, lacking almost any subtext" were qualities of Scott's films that both "excited audiences about his work" and "kept him locked outside the gates of critical respectability."

Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter wrote that after Top Gun, Scott "found his commercial niche as a brash, flashy, sometimes vulgar action painter on celluloid", citing Beverly Hills Cop II, Days of Thunder, The Last Boy Scout, True Romance, and The Fan as examples. McCarthy concluded that Unstoppable, Scott's final film, was one of his best: Apart from having "its director's fingerprints all over it: the commitment to extreme action, frenetic cutting, stripped-down dialogue", McCarthy found "a social critique embedded in its guts; it was about disconnected working-class stiffs living marginal lives on society's sidings, about the barely submerged anger of a neglected underclass", something which "always had been lacking from Tony Scott's work, some connection to the real world rather than just silly flyboy stuff and meaningful glances accompanied by this year's pop music hit." Betsy Sharkey of The Los Angeles Times wrote that Denzel Washington—who starred in Crimson Tide, Man on Fire, Déjà Vu, The Taking of Pelham 123, and Unstoppable—was Scott's muse, and Scott "was at his best when Washington was in the picture. The characters the actor played are the archetype of the kind of men Scott made. At their core, and what guided all the actions that followed, was a fundamental decency. They were flawed men to be sure, some more than others, but men who accorded dignity to anyone who deserved it."