Tony Scott -- The Real Touch

I loved reading this tribute to Tony Scott, the film director who recently took his own life, by jumping off a bridge... turns out he was seriously ill, and you can't really fault the guy for taking matters into his own hands...

Anyway, very cool interview conducted by Kim Morgan, who is always entertaining and enlightening when it comes to movies.  I was inspired to rent "True Romance," which Tony Scott mentioned as his one of his own personal favorites.  It does hold up. Some kind of pulp classic.  It's very, very Tarantino.  Great script, superb acting all around.  I was never a Christian Slater fan, but in retrospect his performance is just fine.

The movie is a homage to action movies.  Very film-smart, and self-reverential.  And that musical score and narration reminded me so much of Terence Malick's "Badlands" - one of the great, great films!  

The violence in "True Romance" is bold and brutal.  There is a key scene with Patricia Arquette that is over the top violent.  I seem to recall that the first time I saw the film it was "too much" - couldn't handle seeing the pretty girl brutalized.  This time around, it seemed "less real" more stylized... and I suppose more integral to the scene and the movie...

And I do love this quote... I suppose this kind of defines Scott's movie-making aesthetic...

"Once you’ve touched the real world, there’s nothing more fascinating and nothing stranger than the real world and the people." -- Tony Scott