Los Angeles – On June 27, director Tony Scott had nearly finished his homage to British socialite model-turned-bounty hunter Domino Harvey when he heard the news: Harvey, daughter of actor Laurence Harvey, had been found dead at age 35 in her West Hollywood cottage. Autopsy reports later revealed she had overdosed on fentanyl, a morphinelike painkiller.
“It was hard, because I saw myself as a surrogate father figure,” Scott said. “Whenever Domino hit a really dark patch in her life she’d call me for advice, and I’d try to guide her and tell her, ‘Listen, you’re going to kick down one too many doors one day and there’s gonna be a bigger gun on the other side. The way you conduct your life you have to be careful.’ … It was very sad when she died, but I can’t say it was unexpected.”
Scott added an “In Loving Memory” epilogue but otherwise let “Domino,” the film, speak for itself. Keira Knightley stars as the gun-toting, bustier-clad 20-year-old who rebels against her newly remarried mother (Jacqueline Bisset) after they have relocated from London to Beverly Hills.
Kicked out of college for punching a sorority sister, the anti-social beauty joins a team of bail bondsmen (Mickey Rourke and Venezuelan actor Edgar Ramirez). Catching bail-jumping fugitives with an arsenal ranging from lap dances to shotguns, Domino and company unwittingly get caught up in a $10 million kidnapping scam that culminates in a bloody shootout atop Las Vegas’ Stratosphere Tower.
On a recent afternoon, Scott hurtled around L.A. freeways in his Hummer taking production meetings for his next picture “Déjà Vu.” Dressed in his usual uniform – T-shirt, faded pink baseball cap and one of 12 identical pairs of shorts he wears to minimize wardrobe decisions – the burly 61-year-old British-born filmmaker says he first became fascinated with Domino Harvey about a dozen years ago when he spotted an article about her in an English tabloid. “I tracked her down in Los Angeles, sat down with her and decided, damn, I want to make a movie about this girl.”
Beyond being bright and gorgeous, Scott said, “Domino had a lot of pathos, a lot of vulnerability and a lot of edge…. I like people who go to places that other normal human beings don’t want to touch.”
Intrigued by the unlikely bond formed by the ostensibly refined British heiress and her ex-con colleagues, Scott acquired rights to Harvey’s life story. For the next decade, in between making action pictures like “Crimson Tide,” “Enemy of the State” and “Man on Fire,” he tried to develop a script that did justice to his anarchic muse.
After seeing Richard Kelly’s absurdist time-travel picture “Donnie Darko,” Scott hired the young filmmaker to invent a fictional adventure featuring the real-life characters. He gave Kelly free rein to concoct a “manufactured” version of Harvey and her motley crew.
Kelly’s script took outlandish liberties, creating roles for Jerry Springer and “Beverly Hills, 90210” stars Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Green, who play themselves as hosts of a reality-based series that follows Domino during a Mescaline-enhanced encounter in the desert with Tom Waits’ Bible-thumping preacher.
The black-humored script hooked Knightley, whom Scott cast after he had spotted glimmers of spunk in her “Pirates of the Caribbean” performance. Scott did his preproduction homework by going bounty hunting with a tough Israeli-born fugitive catcher named Little Zeke.
“I went out on one bust when we drove into Compton, the toughest part of L.A., on a Friday night when everyone’s got a paycheck and all the drug dealers are out. We drive up in three SUVs, and Zeke says, OK light ’em up – I think he means turn on your flashlights, but no: Out come the AK-47s and the 45s. We charge down an alley way past Rottweilers and pit bulls, bust down a door, the guy’s not there. I turn around and we’re in a cul de sac, all these faces staring at us. I’m standing there thinking, ‘This is the wrong place to die.”‘
Scott also spent time with Ed Mosbey, the bounty hunter played by Rourke. He learned that the tough exterior belied so much job-related stress that Mosbey suffered from irritable bowel syndrome.
To convey the characters’ volatile milieu, Scott put his trademark kinetic visual style to work, employing black-and-white film, digital video, color-reversal processing and hand-cranked cameras to create a jittery sense of menace.
“I use those cameras to create speed changes that make you feel uncomfortable or neurotic, so the audience feels, ‘Oh wow, some bad stuff’s gonna come down.”‘
“Domino’s” stylized violence proved sufficiently disturbing that Fox, which has a first-look deal with Tony and his brother Ridley, declined to finance the film. Instead, Scott and his producers found backing from New Line Cinema.
“I think this movie was a little too dangerous for Fox. I’d just done ‘Man on Fire,’ which is about as far as they wanted to go. ‘Domino’ is sort of a tough road, but, I think, an interesting road.
“People used to ask me, well, what’s the movie about, and I’d say its like ‘The Royal Tennenbaums,’ a little bit of ‘Taxi Driver’ and a little ‘True Romance’ all molded together. ‘Domino’ is funny and it’s dark, and it’s all messed up. I like that.”
