The “coked-up” 2005 movie Tony Scott wished he could do over: “I fucked up on that one”
His brother might have the better filmography, mostly because Alien and Blade Runner are two of the greatest and most influential movies of the last 50 years, but you could argue that Tony Scott made more of a lasting impact on cinema than his older sibling, Ridley.
The younger of the two specialised in stylish, kinetic, and past-paced genre films, and his distinctive visual style hit action cinema like a breath of fresh air in the 1980s. As good as some of decade’s offerings were, they weren’t exactly renowned for their dizzying, inventive camerawork or frenetic editing.
Michael Bay may have taken it too far, referring to his love of fast cutting as “fucking the frame,” but if Scott hadn’t been out there doing it before any of his peers, then ‘Bayhem’ wouldn’t exist, and you could say about the post-Bourne explosion in every action flick under the sun opting for shaky-cam.
He was often accused of being style over substance, but he didn’t give a shit, and neither did audiences, with Top Gun, Crimson Tide, Enemy of the State, True Romance, The Last Boy Scout, Man on Fire, and Unstoppable, just some of his credits that still hold up in one way or another as reliably rewatchable, entertaining, and altogether bombastic thrillers.
Four of his last five features starred Denzel Washington in the leading role, and in a strange way, it seems fitting that the only one of them that didn’t was the one he regretted. As much as he was a self-proclaimed populist, Scott always exhaustively researched his pictures, and when he embedded himself with the inspirations behind 2005’s Domino, he admitted that he picked up a little too much.
On paper, it should have been a winner. A proven director tackling a hybrid of a biopic and actioner that starred one of Hollywood’s fastest-rising young stars, Keira Knightley, in the role of Domino Harvey, the English socialite who became a bounty hunter in the United States, had all of the potential in the world.
Unfortunately, it was crap. Watching the movie, it felt like Scott was veering on becoming a parody of his signature style, and he knew it. “I hung out with these bounty hunters who were coked up all the time, they’re all on speed and meth, and the movie was a product of my research,” he explained. “Everything in the way I shoot the movie is dictated by the world when I touch it.”
As a result, the editing was more scattershot than usual, the plot was nigh-on incomprehensible, and the visuals were off-putting rather than dazzling. Thanks to his time spent with those aforementioned coke-sniffers, he let it inform the aesthetic, and he wished he hadn’t. “I think I was wrong,” Scott acknowledged. “I didn’t let it breathe enough.”
Fair play to the filmmaker for holding his hands up and admitting that he’d been “overcome by the insanity of the world that I was touching.” Or, to put an even finer point it, per Scott: “I think I fucked up on that one.” He did, and star Christopher Walken would agree, because he hated Domino, too.
