The first thing I'll generally do when I wake in the morning is grab my phone, check work mail and then twitter. The tweet that caught my attention this morning was an incredibly shocking one from a news agency saying "Tony Scott jumps to death off of LA bridge." I immediately went to my computer and made sure it wasn’t a horrific prank of some sort - in retrospect i wish it had been.
Scott was always an underrated filmmaker and self-described his directorial style as a "little more rock and roll" than his elder sibling, Ridley. He has made some downright superb films; True Romance, Crimson Tide and Man on Fire amongst them. He excelled in a genre that casually ruins the careers of young filmmakers on a regular basis. His blockbuster action debut, Top Gun, came out nearly three decades ago, making Tom Cruise a global superstar and creating a template for the summer tent pole movie that has been followed since. His consistency as a filmmaker was genuinely staggering; if he wasn’t developing or directing a film he was producing TV or movies with his big brother, through their hugely successful company Scott Free Productions. Simply put, few directors have enjoyed the kind of career that Tony Scott had and few ever will. His films are iconic, endlessly quotable and wonderfully entertaining and they always will be.
There's no point speculating as to what drives someone to do something like this. No one was inside Tony Scott's head and no one, other than those close to him, knew what was going on in his life when he parked his car, walked out to the bridge and scaled a fence at the edge of the bridge "without hesitation." The coming days and weeks will bring much speculation but I for one won't be getting caught up in that. We've lost a superb filmmaker and my thoughts are with those that were close to him.
