Michael Mann and “Collateral” (2004)
Collateral (2004) - Michael Mann - excerpts and photographs transcribed from Taschen’s extensive book on Mann published in 2006.
[ Still from “Collateral” (2004) - Vincent (Tom Cruise) is a contract killer whose life starts to unravel in the course of one night.]
[ Bottom right caption : “Compare Michael [Mann] to Stanley [Kubrick]? I have to tell you that I can’t make that comparison. You can’t make direct comparisons between people who have that kind of command over their craft. Kubrick, Spielberg, Michael Mann? They are as different as people are different. Better to talk just about Michael. Editing with two teams, seven days a week. He’s a hard worker. No bullshit. I’m used to creating bios for the characters I play, but with respect to ‘Vincent’, Michael was already way ahead of me. He sat me down and handed me a tremendous amount of research - all of which helped me to understand what Vincent is about and how Michael sees him. Where Vincent came from, what’s important to him. It’s great for an actor - Michael really invites you in.” – Tom Cruise.]
Text : One Man’s Next MIllenium : 2004-2006
That’s an excellent question if you are a cab driver, like the hero of Collateral (2004), and an even better one if you happen to be Michael Mann.
After Ali, Mann spent the better part of two years developing The Aviator, a film about Howard Hughes written by John Logan. “I had every reason to want to do it,” says Mann. Yet he felt restless before the prospect of yet another story restricted by actual people and events. “I wanted to project my imagination without those boundaries. I wanted to do a story that took place in L.A., at night.” These hopes coincided with The Last Domino by Stuart Beattie, a taut, largely two-character thriller about a cab driver held hostage one night to the demonic charm and bloody agenda of a hired killer in his back seat.
Dreamworks renamed the script Collateral and it attracted other directors (Mimi Leder, Janusz Kaminski) before finding its way to Mann. “What any good director looks for is a structure, “ he says. “And Beattie’s was impeccable – the collisions between the characters had a a highly poetic symmetry and intensity. That said, the characters needed to be recreated from molecules that were more real. You can’t just have a generic hit man show up. There’s no such thing. You have to ask, “Where does such a guy come from? What would have been his background?” In so asking, and researching, Mann shifted the story to L.A. (its original setting was New York), but otherwise transformed the script’s internal organs, maintaining unchanged Beattie’s program of colliding events, mistaken identities and confrontations, “but modifying the characters and where they came from, to work towards sharper, fresher, more authentic actions.”
He and Tom Cruise explored the possibility of having him play the terrorized cab driver, but it was quickly apparent to both that the assassin was the wilder choice. Mann fitted Cruise with a silvery grey wig, for a steely, prematurely aged aspect, and a detailed biographical dossier. Cruise went through extensive firearms training with Mick Gould, a former operative with the British SAS, who had advised on Heat.
Mann then cycled Cruise through all the steps that would precede a killing.
“Surveillance of a target’s behavioural patterns : ‘At eight-thirty every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, he goes to the gym.’ Where is the best place to hit him? Access and egress – how are you getting in? How are you getting out? How are you making sure you’re not being seen getting in and getting out? What’s your backup escape route?”
As Cruise told Taschen: “They had a guy in the production office (cont.)
[Top left caption : “I used to drive a cab. I don’t have many great cab stories, but my grandfather did. He had a substantial company before the Depression, a smaller one afterwards. He was a kind of a known character. When I was a kid, whenever we got into a cab, my dad would ask the driver if they had known my grandfather. They’d turn around and say, “You mean Sam Mann?” “
[Bottom photo : On the set of “Collateral” (2004)
Jamie Foxx, Tom Cruise, and Michael Mann rehearsing the scene when Vincent buys flowers for Max’s mother. ]
…”that was my target. I planned it. Scouted it. Chose the location, the exit route and backups. The idea was for me to learn what these guys have to put together, to get in and get out as quickly as possible. At the time, they were doing building construction where the production offices were, so I dressed up as one of the workers, got inside and stuck a Post-It note to this guy’s back. Then got out.”
Cruise’s victim only found out what happened when the actor made a second, more public visit to the production office, and introduced himself. “But it was too late, then, “ Cruise laughs.
Mann admired Jamie Foxx, especially after working with him on Ali, and cast him as the cab driver. Foxx relished the inevitable immersion. “Michael is a detail man. And he does not stop. I would be amazed on Ali, when we would still be going after 14 or 18 hours.” Foxx spent time in-depth with cab drivers, while Mark Ruffalo, as the detective tracking Vincent, did the same with an undercover LAPD officer. Jada Pinkett-Smith, playing Annie, a U.S. criminal attorney Max picks up in the first scene ( and who later turns up on Vincent’s hit list) pursued her ‘character acquistion’ with the help of an Assistant U.S. Attorney who was a woman, as well as a retired Xerox executive, Bernard Kinsey and his wife, Shirley, who matched Mann’s idea of Annie’s parents.
Portions of Ali had been filmed effectively on high-definition video. Mann pushed the experiment to new levels on Collateral. For months prior to shooting, he and specialized crews tested and modified a variety of the latest cameras. They favoured the Thompson ‘Viper’, which records directly to a hard drive instead of tape or film. More traditional film and video systems were employed for the sequence set in the Fever nightclub, because film allowed for fast- and slow-motion ideal for the shoot ‘em-up that transpires there. The Viper’s appeal was its sensitivity to nocturnal light, and skyscapes. (In the HD portions of Ali, one can make out whole banks of clouds in the night sky, and so it is in Collateral.) Says Mann: “I wanted ‘night’ to be three-dimensional.”
From the instant Vincent (Tom Cruise) bumps into a stranger at LAX, we are in a world of masked motives. Is this a victim, about to be killed? No, it appears he and Vincent have accidentally switched suitcases. Will this be a thriller about a switched suitcase? No. That is another red herring, gradually buried as the story of Vincent and Max takes precedence. All the same, this lightly menacing two-step has a retrospective logic. The ‘wrong’ suitcase provides Vincent with his weapons, and his dossiers on his victims-to-be.
Our first look at Max (Jamie Foxx) is a likewise telling statement on the world he inhabits. Computer screens, video screens, panes of glass, 57 varieties of noise overload his senses at the central-dispatch garage. When he sits behind the wheel of his cab, however, there is bliss-filled silence. The taxi is Max’s world away from the world. As he drives a bickering couple through downtown, he tunes them out by contemplating a picture postcard he keeps of a tropical island. (He wants to start a limousine service called ‘Island Limo’.) As with Frank’s collage in Thief, Max’s dreams are on ready display. And, like Frank before him, he spontaneously shares these dreams with a woman, Annie (Jada Pinkett-Smith), the high-powered lawyer whose quiet melancholy so touches him that he gives her the card, as a goad toward thinking ‘vacation’. He has already impressed her by delivering her to her destination ahead of schedule. She gives him her card. As she ascends the tall escalator in the glass tower where she works nights, Vincent, descending opposite, eyes her. It is easy to misread his predatory stare as one of a would-be seducer, but as the story comes full circle this look makes even more logical and terrible sense : Vincent is planning his final target of the night.
[ Top right caption : Still from ‘Collateral’ (2004)
Max (Jamie Foxx) is a cab driver who is coerced into driving Vincent through Los Angeles to carry out five killings. Max runs away with Vincent’s work-ups and destroys them. As a result, Max will become even more, not less, enmeshed in Vincent’s actions. ]
After bantering with Max, Vincent is as impressed as Annie was with his driving and flashes an impressive wad of hundred-dollar bills, to hire Max for the night. He also tries to draw Max out about his dreams of a limo company, as Annie did, but with less luck. This is revealing of Max’s character. He does not just open up to anybody. It also determines an important aspect of the coming story, which is that it will not be a homoerotic buddy-nightmare, in the manner of, say, Strangers On A Train (1951). There is to be no sense of Vincent or Max psychologically completing each other. They may each plant a finger on one another’s weak spots as the need arises, but that is purely in the interest of survival. For something goes badly wrong at the first stop they make: Vincent’s intended victim refuses to cooperate in his own execution and flies out a window. His dead body lands smack atop Max’s cab. With this very big cat now out of the bag, Max becomes Vincent’s hostage, his ‘collateral’ (his guarantee against failure). Vincent is forced to play charmer, devil, Nietzschean philosopher to keep Max calm in his corner. (”We’re into Plan B. We gotta adapt. Darwin. I Ching. Shit Happens.”) He even plays the role of competitive elder brother, insisting they visit Max’s ailing mother. This is a hilarious digression, in which we see Cruise as his most multi-layered. He has to force Max to buy flowers : “She carried you in her womb, “ he says with shocked solemnity.
[ Picture inset captions on the two spread : Above : On the set of “Collateral” (2004) In America, Jamie Foxx is also well-known as a comedian as well as an actor. Here Jada Pinkett-Smith and Michael Mann enjoy Foxx’s repartee.]
[ Top insert : Still from “Collateral” (2004)
Vincent’s final victim is Assistant U.S. Attorney Annie Farrell ( Jada Pinkett-Smith, center in shadows), a prosecutor. Max desperately tries to save her. ]
[Still from “Collateral” (2004)
Vincent is a sociopath. Behind the groomed appearance and facile chat, there is a great hollowness to him. ]
Lower caption : “I believe man is basically good. That he can do some pretty horrible things. I really wanted to explore that in this character. “ – Tom Cruise
[Sidebar captions : Above image : Still from “Collateral” (2004)
Right : (Still from “Collateral” (2004)
The prey is trapped. The train has stopped momentarily. Escape is denied because Vincent covers the platform. ]
“I work with the actors in rehearsals in my office , and I work with the actors in a full-blown rehearsal and then I would video tape. I don’t tape it on video to review it. I tape it on video to go through the experience of directing.”
Is he kidding? Later, when shifting circumstances oblige Vincent to seek out his employer, a drug lord named Felix (Javier Bardem), he forces Max to do the talking, even pretend to be him. (Vincent has a firm policy against meeting his employers, and he is not about to violate it now.) The only way Max can survive the ensuing interrogation is to spout his captor’s blather with even uglier intensity. “We gotta adapt. Darwin. I Ching. Shit Happens.” (Jamie Foxx is as much in his comic element here as Cruise was back in at the hospital.)
Unfortunately, the federal agents surveilling Felix’s nightclub deduce Max is the hitman they are after, and make plans to gun him down accordingly. The only voice of sanity is Fanning (Mark Ruffalo), an L.A. cop for whom bodies have been piling up all night as Vincent crosses town. He is convinced Max is hostage to a professional killer seated where their surveillance cameras cannot see. The Federal agents regard Fanning as if he is spouting about UFOs and conspiracy theories. This is a tidy, grim irony : the authorities have so much information they have lost touch with reality.
As Vincent, Max, the Feds, and Fanning converge on the Fever nightclub, Mann’s detailed shot-list gives a strong sense of his thought process : ‘ALIVE, EVERYTHING FROM NOTHING…VACANT NIGHTTOWN CIRCUMSTANCES, CONTEXT.’ Of a shot of Vincent : ‘COOL, UNFLUSTERED. Good commander, tactician. No panic, no time to waste.’
Regarding an aerial shot looking straight down the freeway : ‘Silent. MOBY mood to anticipate what’s coming.’ As the Feds vest up and cock weapons in their speeding vehicle : ‘To threaten unawares Vincent hunters are hunting him. Potentialize them with props. Weapons. Arouse our anticipation of WAR TO COME.’ When two coyotes cross the street in downtown L.A., prompting Max and Vincent to stop : ‘Predators abound in Nighttown…Induce introspection, interlude. Each into his own headspace, pre-combat. Coyotes : We are immaterial to them.’
This last is an offbeat yet fitting touch. Coyotes are a form of wildlife that have adapted against all odds to the urban sprawl of Los Angeles. To live in the city is to encounter them frequently, if unexpectedly, exactly as Mann conjures them here.
Photo caption : Still from “Collateral” (2004)
The killer takes aim. He is a reflection, smoke and mirrors, elusive and slippery. He is a grey ghost, haunting the primary colours of Los Angeles.
Lower right caption : “I immerse myself in a film the way an actor locates himself in a character.” – Michael Mann.
Yet the detail is as poetic as it is realistic : There are two of them, and one seems reluctant to follow the other. Is this an echo of VIncent and Max, on their rounds? Or are they, given that Max is indifferent to them while Vincent reacts in fascinated silence, a deeper comment on Vincent alone? Of the many layers to Tom Cruise’s performance, his wolfish intensity and stealth make a strong impression, yet having these creatures manifest before his eyes holds up a mirror to his humanity, too. On reflection, after the story has played out, the hesitant second coyote feels more like a comment on Vincent’s own dividedness.
Max, by contrast, is a man undivided, and that is his one edge. He may evade his life by escaping into never-to-be-fulfilled daydreams, as Vincent accuses – fantasizing for years about starting a limo company, only to do nothing about it. He may be too impulse-averse to call that gorgeous lawyer, Annie. But in these defects, especially as embodied by the comic and sweet-natured Foxx, he is a straightforward Everyman. For all that he has a mother who tries his patience, and any number of temperamental drawbacks, Max is a good custodian of his own privacy. There are parts to him even Vincent cannot reach, and once Max recovers a bit of his old equilibrium during this long night, he plays this card to his increasing advantage. The climax of Collateral is an agile series of shootouts, turnabouts, chases, escapes and showdowns. It moves through the tower where Annie works ( all those glass surfaces coming imaginatively into play), hurtles onto the L.A. Metro (glass surfaces, gliding planes, sliding doors) and culminates in a moment of hauntingly quiet, honest confrontation between the two adversaries. Yet what is more exciting is that these twists and turns, which could have been boringly formulaic in lesser hands, here are character driven.
When Collateral was screened for Taschen, Mann posed an interesting question when the lights came up : “Does it seem to you that Vincent is coming apart even before he gets into Max’s cab?” No, and yes. The single anomaly in Vincent’s behaviour, the one moment that caused this writer to rethink everything he had done, comes shockingly (and rightly) in the film’s middle, when he kills a man in a jazz club. He has made it clear he loves music. He lingers over the corpse for an anguished instant, and uncharacteristic ‘reconsideration’, in Mann’s phrase, his cool persona momentarily flaking apart.
Upper caption : “People who don’t understand the extent to which a responsible director in command of his medium is an auteur, or ought to be an auteur, are people who don’t know much about film-making. I can change the meaning of a scene with the smallest stroke. On the other hand, a journeyman approaching cinema as merely filming theatre is merely an interpreter.” — Michael Mann
To throw the question back to Mann : “What does Vincent know about his own internal crisis? And when does he know it?”
“I don’t know. That’s a really good question. I don’t know that Vincent is aware he’s in trouble. He’s affected by what’s happening to him in Max’s cab without being self-conscious or analytical about it. But, Vincent experiences animosity when Max calls him a sociopath – he feels the impact of that judgement. He shouldn’t – the Vincent of the film’s beginning didn’t give a shit what Max thought or said as long as he drove the cab. But now he does, though he’s not consciously aware of it.
That’s why he psychologically assaults Max to fry him, to mentally assassinate him, when he correctly condemns him for being evasive of all confrontation, and Max, rather than being crushed, acknowledges that Vincent is right. Instead of crushing Max, Vincent’s attack illuminates him, and that’s the poetic irony of that whole long scene, to the point where Max turns Vincent’s nihilism on its head. Max has always had in him the potential to rebel, from the get-go.
“We constructed a deep, specific background on Vincent, “ says Mann. “He’s somebody with a definite psychological disability. What he tells Max about himself is true. His mother died when he was too young to remember, and his father beat him. So, you figure, by the time he’s 14 or 15, he’s developed this terrible aggression – a dissociative dysfunction. Yet he’s still able to feel a glimmer, at least, of a different emotional state of being. A sense memory from when he was like a year and a half. And that’s all it can be, is ‘a sense’. The sense of a positive feeling that’s not here now. And that would be enough of a catalyst to impel him, to project himself forward through his aggression, to fulfill the image of whatever fantasy-hero that would have been his inner protector when he was being abused, by going into Special Forces. Yet even in that context, he would be disabled by his dissociative dysfunction. If he were being commanded by somebody who had the same kind of combat experience he had, and he respected them, he would have no problem. But if it were somebody who outranked him but didn’t measure up the way he measured up to himself, he’d be insubordinate. And he wouldn’t last. He’d have to seek work in ‘the private sector’. Read the right newspapers, and you know there’s been a huge movement of this kind since the collapse of the Soviet Union. There are all kinds of offshore narco-trafficking cartels, the dark side of globalization. They’re hiring guys like Vincent, as well as counter-intel, computer scientists, financial services, money laundering, all that good stuff. So when I think along the line of Vincent’s life, or any character’s life, I ask first if he or she has been searching for anything. I ask, what is it that impelled them along this course?
After Collateral, Mann lost no time choosing Miami Vice as his next project. What attracted him to the original teleplay in 1984 – the reality of life undercover – he finds no less compelling in our new ‘globalized’ millenium.
‘The Miami of the 1980s, that twilight zone built on coke-fuelled cash flow, is over, ‘ he writes in the opening pages of his screenplay. As referenced so lucidly in Collateral, the New Underworld Order is ‘Multi-commodity. From anywhere to anywhere.’ Drugs, weapons, pirated software, counterfeit pharmaceuticals, even human beings are all routinely trafficked and sold, across international boundaries. The story moves quickly beyond Miami, the northern banking capital of South America, as Mann shows, and deep into a hemispheric crime vortex whose hub is the “Tri-border area” – where Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina meet.
Photo captions : Above : On the set of “Collateral” (2004)
Jamie Foxx, Jada Pinkett-Smith, Tom Cruise and Michael Mann relax while filming the final scene.
Opposite top : Still from “Collateral” (2004)
Vincent destroys an electrical junction box to plunge Annie’s office into darkness. He is single-minded in his actions. His job is to kill people. It is what he does. But as the story progresses through the night, deep undercurrents emerge and he makes choices that will lead to his own destruction.
Opposite Bottom : Still from “Collateral” (2004)
In the discussion between Vincent and Max, it becomes clear that Vincent is the ultimate proactive man but he has no objective, no outcome goal to his actions. Max has dreams but he is inhibited, a procrastinator. By the end of the film, Vincent has agented Max’s liberation.
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