The set of a Tony Scott movie is a place where every knob goes to at least 11. On this fall afternoon in L.A.'s shuttered, elegantly decayed Ambassador Hotel, the knobs go to at least 12 or 13. The Ambassador is where Scott is shooting his latest film, Domino, a gonzo action-comedy about real-life model--turned--bounty hunter Domino Harvey, played by Keira Knightley. Domino has been Scott's passion project for more than a decade. The 61-year-old director of such testosterone workouts as Top Gun, True Romance, and Crimson Tide has spent years getting to know Harvey and drawing out her wild life story--from growing up in a world of privilege as the daughter of The Manchurian Candidate star Laurence Harvey to chasing down fugitive criminals and flirting with death--and now he's hell-bent on doing it justice. Even though today's scene is mainly dialogue, with Knightley and costars Mickey Rourke, Christopher Walken, Jacqueline Bisset, Mena Suvari, and Edgar Ramirez seated around a conference table, Scott is shooting it like a guns-blazing Mexican standoff, multiple cameras rolling and energy amped up. Between takes, he's a blur in a baseball hat and running shoes. "Now we're cooking!" he yells, pumping his fist. Smash cut to nearly a year later: A somber Scott is seated in the production offices he shares with his brother, Ridley, quietly reflecting on the tragic turn the project has taken. Harvey, the muse of his movie, whom he came to consider almost a daughter, died on June 27 of an accidental overdose of painkillers at age 35. Though she had long wrestled with drug addiction and was facing federal charges of drug trafficking, Scott is still stunned. "In the 12 years I knew her, she was always getting in trouble," says Scott. "But at the end, I never saw her look healthier. She said, 'I'm clean. I feel really good.' Then bang, she was gone." Harvey lived on the edge; her fatalistic motto was "Heads you live, tails you die," and she sings a song with those exact lyrics on the Domino soundtrack. Scott made his film in that risk-taking spirit, pulling together a bizarro ensemble cast--which also includes Tom Waits, Macy Gray, and, spoofing themselves, former Beverly Hills, 90210 stars Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Green--and shooting in a manic, psychedelic style, with almost epilepsy-inducing shifts of film speed and color and music. But he couldn't have predicted Harvey's coin would have come up tails so soon, turning what was meant to be a fun, rock & roll action movie into a postmortem tribute. Now a film that had already posed significant marketing challenges--Scott describes it as Taxi Driver meets The Royal Tenenbaums, which makes about as much sense as anything--has become even trickier to sell, and its shell-shocked director is left wondering what kind of life it will have. "You never know," he says. "Film is such a fickle thing." Scott first encountered Harvey's story more than a decade ago in a British tabloid newspaper. Immediately seeing a potential movie in her rebellious odyssey, he tracked her down in the Beverly Hills home of her mother, '60s British fashion model Paulene Stone. "Domino was living above the garage with all her guns and Soldier of Fortune magazines and grubby underwear," Scott remembers. "That's what was fascinating to me: how polar opposite her worlds were." For years, he conducted interviews with Harvey, gathering material about her reckless youth and adventures with her bounty-hunting compatriots, Ed and Choco (played in the film by Rourke and Venezuelan newcomer Ramirez). A couple of writers took a crack at screenplays but they felt too conventional to Scott. Finally, he hooked up with writer-director Richard Kelly, hot off his cult hit Donnie Darko. Kelly spun the basic elements of Harvey's life into a completely invented, zigzagging story involving the Mob, a complicated con gone wrong, and reality television. "I thought the story should be a journey into the heart of darkness," Kelly says a little grandly. "I see it as a big satire, in a way, not only of action films but of where American culture is headed." Scott brought the project to Twentieth Century Fox, where he and his brother have a first-look deal, but, in the wake of his last film, the critically panned Denzel Washington revenge movie Man on Fire, the studio balked. "They said, 'Oh f---, he wants to do this now?'" says Scott. "I think they were a little scared of me and the material." Scott sent the script to New Line, which put up $15 million for domestic distribution rights and gave him free creative rein. "We thought it was unique and would stand out, and it was not that expensive," says New Line production president Toby Emmerich. He laughs. "We were probably too naive to be scared." Ever since seeing Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean, Scott had envisioned the actress playing Harvey: "For me, Keira was Domino. There's a little bit of Princess Di in there and a little bit of a football thug." When he sent the script to her, though, it took her some time to wrap her mind around it. "I'd never heard of Domino Harvey, " she says. "I thought, that's too crazy a story to be real. It wasn't until I met Tony that he went, 'No, I can introduce you to the girl.'" The role took Knightley far out of her comfort zone. Working with guns freaked her out ("I f---ing hated it--I'd never make it in the army"), while casting her own body double for the nude scenes was simply mortifying ("I've never cast a bum before. Do I introduce myself? Is it rude to stare at their bottoms?"). But while Domino couldn't have been a more radical departure from the film she'd just shot, Pride & Prejudice, she was happy switching things up: "I don't see the point in making films that are going to be exactly the same as each other." Knowing how Harvey had wrestled with her demons, few involved in Domino were shocked when news broke of her overdose. Still, her death in June hit Scott hard. Says Rourke: "I don't think I realized how deeply Tony felt about her until he got up to speak at the funeral. He could hardly talk. He was crushed." After Harvey's passing, questions suddenly swirled around the movie. It was too late to shoot a new ending. But within a few days, New Line did announce it was moving the film's release date earlier, from Thanksgiving to August. Scott insisted he couldn't get the film ready that quickly, so they settled on Oct. 14. He also had misgivings about "trying to capitalize off of someone dying. It just felt like bad taste in a way." Now, after all the years he's put into this project, Scott doesn't seem sure whether he's succeeded or not, or which way the dominoes will fall when the film hits theaters. "This movie is fucked up," he says. "I might have missed. You either love it or you hate it." He pauses and stares into his nearly empty cup of coffee. "Most of all, I just wish she could have seen it."

                                   ...:: Click here to return to www.uniquelyrourke.com ::...