During
the month of September, Cody will be posting a five article series looking over
the filmography of Tony Scott.
Part IV covers Scott's film work from The Fan (1996) through Man on Fire (2004).
THE FAN (1996)
The Fan was shot 2:35.1, but I'm not sure if there's been a home video release that had the film in its proper aspect ratio. The DVD I watched it on was, unfortunately, pan and scan only.
In the mid-'90s, Tony and his brother Ridley were part of a consortium that purchased Shepperton Studios in England, and around the same time the brothers also got their production company Scott Free up and running. Both brothers made movies in 1996 that were Scott Free productions. Ridley's was White Squall, and The Fan was Tony's first Scott Free movie. In the sixteen years since, Scott Free Productions have added fifty titles to Tony Scott's filmography as a producer, titles that include his own movies, brother Ridley's Prometheus, films including The Grey, The A-Team, Cyrus, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and Welcome to the Rileys (directed by Ridley's son Jake), and TV shows including The Good Wife and Numb3rs.
ENEMY OF THE STATE (1998)
SPY GAME (2001)
It's April of 1991 and CIA agent Tom Bishop has gone rogue, heading up an unauthorized mission to break a woman out of a prison in China. The rescue fails, and Bishop is arrested for espionage. The United States government is notified that Bishop will be executed in twenty-four hours.
Nathan Muir, the man who recruited Bishop into the agency, is called into a meeting at the Langley headquarters on the day of his retirement so he can relay to a group of bureaucrats his personal perspective on the career and character of Tom Bishop. Once in the meeting, Muir quickly figures out that what the suits are really looking for is an excuse to just let Bishop be killed.
The film sort of plays out like a spy thriller anthology, with three segments playing out in flashback as Muir tells the story of his history with Bishop. Story 1: Their first meeting, in Vietnam in 1975, when Muir chose the young sniper to perform an assassination. Story 2: Berlin, 1976, Muir recruits Bishop into the CIA and they pull off a defector transportation/Soviet mole hunt called Operation Rodeo. Story 3: Beirut, 1985, Bishop meets and falls for a woman while working to take down a terrorist leader and Muir inadvertently sets into motion the chain of events that led Bishop to his current predicament.
In the 1991 Langley wrap around, Muir spends his time between stories doing his best to save Bishop by making surreptitious phone calls, typing letters, sending faxes, and making forgeries.
I really enjoy Spy Game, and with two smart spy movies back-to-back, Tony Scott ended the '90s and started the 2000s in a way that was right up my alley.
Scott's style was showing signs of evolution around this time. Though his films still had running times around two hours, the shooting and pacing was feeling more frantic, the editing quicker, and Scott was eager to do some experimenting. Since Spy Game was separated into segments that took place in different locations and different time periods, Scott wanted to give each segment its own specific look. Most of the footage he had seen from the Vietnam war was shot on 16mm black and white, so Scott wanted to shoot the Vietnam segment in black and white, then desaturate it into a green-tinted sepia. Berlin would look cold and blue. Beirut would be shot on the reversal stock of 1985, which would provide such rich colors that it would seem like a heightened reality.
The studio and producers wouldn't allow Scott to shoot different parts of the movie on different film stocks or in black and white, though, telling him that this "wasn't an art movie." He had to shoot on the stock of the day, but he was allowed to digitally manipulate the picture in post-production, so the segments do all have their own looks. Vietnam is sepia, Berlin is cold and blue, Beirut does have richer colors.
Spy Game is dedicated to the memory of Tony and Ridley Scott's mother, Elizabeth Jean Scott, who passed away in 2001 at the age of 95.
In 2002, Tony and Ridley produced the second season of BMW's The Hire short films, a series that starred Clive Owen as The Driver, a man who travels the globe taking jobs that put him behind the wheel of a BMW and often put his life in danger. I did a write-up on the entire series last month, including the short that Tony Scott directed himself to end the season. This is what I wrote about that one:
BEAT THE DEVIL (2002)
November, 1954. James Brown sold his soul to The Devil to gain the abilities that would make him the Godfather of Soul. November, 2002. With the aging process taking its toll on him and his career, Brown wants to re-negotiate the contract. Accompanied to The Devil's Las Vegas apartment by The Driver, Brown suggests a deal, another soul for another fifty years. He's offering The Driver's soul. A wager is made that I'm not quite clear on the rules of, but it involves a drag race from the Vegas strip to a railroad crossing in the desert, The Driver and James Brown vs. The Devil and his driver Bob, played by Danny Trejo. Gary Oldman is The Devil, James Brown is James Brown, and Marilyn Manson makes a cameo appearance as himself.
Director Tony Scott ends this series with a dose of pure insanity, using the short to test out some experimental ideas he had for his next feature, Man on Fire. He said he wanted to make the audience feel like they were on crystal meth while they were watching Beat the Devil and he's pretty successful at achieving that goal. The characters are manic, the editing hyperactive, the camera all over the place, zooming in and out. Speed, sound, and color timing are manipulated, logic is out the window.
Beat the Devil isn't really my bag, but James Brown's line "I traded a sunrise for a sunset" has always stuck with me for some reason.
MAN ON FIRE (2004)
Soon after making The Hunger in 1983, Tony Scott began working on an adaptation of A.J. Quinnell's 1980 novel Man on Fire, a story inspired by real life kidnapping cases. The movie was going to be shot in Italy, what was then "the kidnapping capital of the world", and Scott got Robert De Niro attached to star in the lead role of John Creasy. (After Marlon Brando turned it down because it was too physical.) The project soon fell apart for Scott, though, and he went on to make Top Gun, while Man on Fire was eventually made and released in 1987, starring Scott Glenn and directed by French filmmaker Élie Chouraqui.
Years later, producer Arnon Milchan still had the rights to make an film version of Quinnell's novel, and brought the project back to Scott.
When Man on Fire finally did make it to the screen under the direction of Tony Scott, Denzel Washington was in the role of John Creasy, and the setting was moved to Mexico, since kidnapping was no longer the epidemic in Italy that it had been thirty years earlier.
John Creasy is in a bad mental state by the time he retires from a sixteen year military career that consisted primarily of counter-terrorist work. He's depressed, suicidal, an alcoholic, and has trouble reconciling his Christianity with all the killing he's had to do. He goes down to Mexico to visit an old friend, and that old friend has soon found him a job, working as a live-in bodyguard for the seven-year-old daughter of an auto plant owner. Creasy is not a sociable man, he doesn't want to have to do much talking to people, but he can do the job of protecting the little girl.
Creasy remains distant at first, but he and the girl soon come to care deeply for each other. She brightens up his life, helps him overcome his depression and alcoholism, he coaches her to become a better swimmer... And then, after a bloody shootout in the streets, the little girl is kidnapped. The ransom exchange goes wrong and the girl's family is notified that she's been killed. When Creasy, who was shot multiple times, hears this, even though he's not yet properly healed, he sets off on a rampage of revenge to find and kill everyone involved with the kidnapping organization.
Like in The Fan, Nine Inch Nails music is used to score certain dark or intense scenes. Instrumental tracks from six different NIN songs are featured, but the vocals are not used, so thankfully unlike in The Fan there are never lyrics that unintentionally convey that Creasy would like to have forceful sex with the people he's confronting.
There is a scene in the film where Creasy attempts suicide, which adds an uncomfortable element to Tony Scott's audio commentary now. It's troubling to hear him say things like "the toughest thing anybody can do in life is attempt to take their own life".
Man on Fire is the film on which Scott really re-invented himself. Having tested out all of his experimental ideas on the Beat the Devil short, he was confident to put them to use on the feature, and this time he was allowed to do whatever he wanted. His idea was to put viewers into the damaged mindset of Creasy, and does so by using different film stocks, including the "heightened reality" of reversal stock, a hand-cranked camera cranked at different speeds throughout scenes, speed ramp editing and flashes, blurring, shaking, zooms. The footage was divided up between three editors with different approaches, then put through cross process to add more contrast. Scott and his editors even toyed with the use of subtitles, putting them on the screen not just when characters are speaking Spanish, but for key phrases spoken in English as well. They play with how the words come up on the screen, not content to just have full sentences appear at the bottom like usual.
Scott's new aesthetic didn't always sit well with me, it already didn't work for me with Beat the Devil, but I do have to commend him for still being so willing to switch things up, experiment and evolve that he ended up changing his style substantially this far into his career.
A remake of Man on Fire was produced in India the following year, titled Ek Ajnabee.
Tony Scott has a pretty good strike rate with me. Of these films I've seen Man on Fire, Spy Game and Enemy of the State and I thought they were all quite good. My favourite of the three would probably be Enemy, mainly because it has Gene Hackman.
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