Tony Scott

Tony Scott directed commercials before he directed features and never entirely stopped shooting like it. Born in North Shields in 1944 and trained at the Royal College of Art, he arrived in Hollywood alongside a generation of British advertising directors, his older brother Ridley among them, and made his feature debut with the vampire picture The Hunger in 1983.

Top Gun (1986) turned him into an industry, and it is worth noticing how strange it looks now: golden backlight, jets shot like sports cars, an emotional register borrowed wholesale from a perfume spot. What he was actually good at is harder to sell in a trailer. He built films around two people talking in a confined space and made the talking feel like combat. Crimson Tide is a submarine and an argument. Spy Game is largely a man on a telephone. The Last Boy Scout and True Romance are Shane Black and Quentin Tarantino scripts delivered without the smirk a lesser director would have added.

His last decade got faster and stranger. Man on Fire, Domino and Deja Vu are cut close to abstraction, with flash frames, drifting subtitles and colour that changes inside a single shot, and audiences split hard over them. He finished with two Denzel Washington machine-in-motion pictures, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 and Unstoppable, the second as clean and unfussy as anything he made. He and Ridley shared a BAFTA for outstanding British contribution to cinema in 1995. He died in 2012.