Tony Scott names the hardest movie of his career: “The most challenging and brilliant adventure”

Posted On January 12, 2025January 12, 2025

Although he wasn’t as famous as his brother Ridley, Tony Scott made some of the most successful movies of his era. Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop II, and Enemy of the State demonstrated his prowess as an action director, and he stuck with the genre for most of his career.

Like his brother, Scott started as an artist and made television commercials before transitioning into feature films. His debut as a feature director was no small production. 1983’s The Hunger starred an unlikely assemblage of A-listers, including David Bowie, Susan Sarandon, and Catherine Deneuve. Even though it didn’t gain much traction with critics or audiences, it demonstrated Scott’s distinctive visual flair and caught the eye of the producer, who offered him the movie that would change everything.

Top Gun was an ambitious film, but it wasn’t expected to be anywhere near as successful as it was. Starring a young actor who had yet to become a household name and made for a budget of $15million, it could easily have been a boilerplate action movie if not for the explosive directorial style that Scott brought to the cockpit and megawatt charisma that Tom Cruise brought to his role.

The logistical challenge of making a movie about fighter pilots in the mid-1980s when technology was nowhere near as compact or versatile as it is today was enormous, especially for a director who had only ever made one other Hollywood movie, but Scott made it look as easy as filming a monologue at a kitchen table. It went on to score more than $370million at the box office and catapulted the director and star to fame.

It’s reasonable to assume that Top Gun would be the most challenging film of Scott’s career. He was new to Hollywood, after all, and the task of making a movie in midair would be a nightmare even with current technology. Doing what he did with $15million is even more impressive, especially considering that Joseph Kosinski’s 2022 sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, had a budget in the range of $170-177m.

However, during a 2010 interview with film critic Emanuel Levy, the director revealed that his most recent film, Unstoppable, was the bigger challenge. The film is, in many ways, exactly the opposite of Top Gun. Instead of being set around whizzing fighter jets, it’s set largely within the two-by-two-and-a-half metre confines of a freight train car. It stars Denzel Washington and Chris Pine as a veteran engineer and a rookie train conductor respectively, who try to stop a runaway locomotive carrying explosive chemicals, and it is even more nail-biting than Top Gun. 

“It’s a movie that starts out at 50 miles an hour and ends up at 150 mph; it’s speed-on-speed,” Scott said. It was more than just the logistics, though. Unlike Top Gun, which contains many scenes in which the characters interact outside the action sequences, Unstoppable unfolds at top speed with no chance for the characters to catch their breaths.

“This was the most challenging and brilliant adventure I’ve ever encountered because I had to tell a character story inside something going very, very fast,” Scott explained. “It’s always about the performances – how I look at these two characters in a way I haven’t done before and be honest to who they are.”

Although the film didn’t match the box office earnings of Top Gun, it pulled in over $167million and earned strong reviews for its taut suspense and moving performances. It also turned out to be Scott’s final film before his death in 2012.

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