We had the pleasure of talking to the wonderful Tony Scott earlier this week, and inbetween gabbing about his new movie Domino, which opens today, the Geordie-born director was more than happy to spill the beans on his upcoming slate.
That’s a slate, mind, that was seemingly reduced by one earlier this week when Scott dropped out of the big-budget Jerry Bruckheimer thriller, Déjà Vu, which would have starred Denzel Washington as an FBI agent who can travel back in time. Scott didn’t pull out over the old creative differences, though – he withdrew because the movie was set in New Orleans and, understandably, wasn’t ready to go.
Reports indicated that Bruckheimer and Washington were poring over a list of replacement directors, but Scott is adamant that the project, for him, is not yet dead.
“There’s still hope,” he said. “We were a month out when it all went down. It's not just a location disappearing, it was the ferries which were available to us. A centrepiece of this movie is a ferry getting blown up by a domestic terrorist. It was hard.
“This movie's a very hi-tech movie and I'd never been to New Orleans before. I spent one day there and I said 'we're going to shoot the movie here'. Because it was this hi-tech movie set in a place that could be in a timewarp. It's nothing like America. It could be a suburb of Madrid or Mexico City, or a bit of Montmartre in Paris. It's out there and it's so sad it's gone.”
If Déjà Vu doesn’t happen, it’s likely that the 61 year-old director will continue his policy of sticking to hard-edged action thrillers.
“There's something else called Lucky Strike. It's about real guys again. I'm always inspired by the real world, and they're guys that repossess aircraft. Amex are the biggest leasers of aircraft, and there are twelve guys – actually there's ten now, as two of 'em got killed – but if a drug cartel pay the first instalment and won't pay the rest, they send these guys down to pick up the aircraft. This one is out there.”
Sounds good. Anything else on the Scott agenda? “Warriors is another one,” he said, referring to his mooted remake of the Walter Hill gang thriller, “and I want to do something on the Hell's Angels. That’s a fantastic project. It's medieval warriors in 2005, from the Hunter Thompson book.”
Whatever he chooses to do, we wish him all the best and will of course keep an eye on its development. For the full interview with Tony Scott, click here.