Michael Mann on ‘Collateral’ at 20: One Cab and One Night with Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx

In the early 2000s, director Michael Mann was coming off four hugely ambitious films — “The Last of the Mohicans,” “ Heat ,” “The Insider,” and “Ali” — and thinking about what to do next. He spent over a year working with John Logan on a Howard Hughes script that Martin Scorsese would ultimately direct as “The Aviator,” but its similarities to “Ali” made him wary of embarking on another epic.

TIFF 2024 Primetime Lineup Includes World Premiere of Tomas Alfredson's 'Faithless' Series Adaptation

“It was an internal conflict,” Mann said on IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “In Ali’s case, it was about Ali determining his identity. ‘Who shall I be? Who shall I represent to the world?’ The quest he’s on is very similar to the Howard Hughes story.”

Luckily, another script came Mann’s way that was not only different from “Ali” but also from anything he’d done before. Stuart Beattie’s “Collateral” had the kind of intense conflict, rich characters, and profound philosophical inquiry that Mann loved, but within a compressed time frame — a single night in an American city focused on two characters — that offered both new pleasures and challenges after the director’s years spent working in the epic form. The story of a cab driver (Jamie Foxx) who picks up an assassin (Tom Cruise) and is then forced at gunpoint to chauffeur him from one job to another, it’s as stripped-down as “Ali” was expansive — and that was exactly the point.

“The attractiveness of ‘Collateral’ was quite intense,” Mann said. “To go from doing larger-scale narratives to this story taking place within 12 hours with all the refractions that are happening within the facets of the story to push the metaphor to absurdity…that was the appeal. Imagine doing one wardrobe change for an entire movie! You could just concentrate on the intensity of what’s going on in those 12 hours and the interrelationship of the two characters. The compression of the narrative meant that I could do a deep dive into the intensity of these two characters relating to each other within the confines of one taxi cab in one night in one place.”

“Collateral” turns 20 this month (an occasion Paramount is commemorating with a new anniversary-edition 4K release), and to say it has stood the test of time is an understatement. The core conflicts and themes established by Beattie’s screenplay — a screenplay Mann considered flawless in its structure — remain compelling and provocative, and Mann’s visual expression of the movie’s moral questions is beautiful and haunting. After utilizing digital cinematography in portions of “Ali,” Mann chose to go high-definition for all the night exteriors in “Collateral” to achieve a depth of field and clarity impossible on celluloid. The result was a completely new way of looking at Los Angeles and a striking foreshadowing of the even bolder experimentation to come in “Miami Vice” two years later.

If “Collateral” represented a new visual approach for Mann — and for American movies in general, as it was the first wide-release digital movie aiming more for realism than the artifice of fantasy films like George Lucas’ 2002 HD groundbreaker “Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones” — it nevertheless continued the core principles defining the director’s work since his debut with the 1979 TV movie “The Jericho Mile.” Chief among these was Mann’s insistence that the actors learn the tradecraft of their characters to create a muscle memory they could employ on camera.

NatGeo's 'Sugarcane' Reveals Catholic School Horrors Against Canada's First Nation Population

“I want them to be able to do it for real,” Mann said. “There’s somebody I work with named Mick Gould, who used to be in charge of close quarter combat training for the British SAS. He did the majority of the training we did on ‘Heat,’ which was done under draconian safety circumstances at the L.A. County Sheriff’s ranges, but it’s all done with live ammunition.”

By the time Cruise finished working with Gould, he could do all the things that defined his character as an expert marksman. “When an actor has those skill sets, then they’re just reflexive. And we, as brilliant animals who perceive more than we are even conscious of perceiving, react to the truth of the presentation. It feels authentic because he really can do that.”

To that end, Mann — who drove a cab himself while working his way through college — and Jamie Foxx went out on shifts with cab drivers so that Foxx could acquire the necessary skills. “We would get fares and explain to the fare what we were doing, and hanging around Jamie made it all hilarious and a lot of fun.”

One of the most remarkable things about “Collateral” is its use of Los Angeles locations. As in “Heat,” Mann somehow finds places in the most filmed city on Earth that have never been seen on screen — or that register differently even if they have appeared in other films. For Mann, the location scouting process is all driven, like every other facet of the filmmaking, by what the script is trying to express. Speaking of the office building where the climax takes place, Mann said, “It starts as a narrative idea, and then I go find the location which can deliver that. What is the scariest environment you can imagine? It’s not only when you can’t see somebody, but there are multiple reflections, and half-reflections. Are they really there, or are they someplace else?”

While the settings were, as Mann put it, “basically dramatic ideas — they’re not location ideas,” he was also looking to capture something textural about the city of Los Angeles at night. “It’s attractive and appealing and sensuous,” Mann said. “There’s something surreal about it, and it suggests a certain kind of transitory state. That was the other appeal of doing a film that only took place at night in L.A. — I was very interested in the power of that.”