When Tom Cruise went psycho: Inside Collateral, the most intense movie of his career
Whenever film fans discuss their favourite Michael Mann pictures, the usual picks come up quickly. Heat, of course; Last of the Mohicans, for those who like to see their bloodshed tempered with period costumes and a love story; Manhunter, for the Hannibal Lecter connoisseurs; and The Insider, who prefer Mann without the bloodshed.
Yet the one that tends to get overlooked, undeservedly, is his peerless LA-set crime thriller Collateral, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this month. It is one of those films that is so full of greatness that it’s almost impossible to list its highlights. But its most interesting aspect is the casting-against-type of a silver-haired Tom Cruise as Vincent, a methodical contract killer who spends a night committing a series of murders-for-hire, reluctantly aided and abetted by Jamie Foxx’s cab driver Max. There’s also the small matter of a cameo by none other than Jason Statham.
The idea behind the film came from an experience of the screenwriter Stuart Beattie, who was a 17-year old in Sydney taking the cab home. He was having an amicable chat with the driver when what he called the “bizarre sicko thought” occurred to him. “Man, I could be some homicidal maniac sitting back here,” he recalled. “And here we are talking like best mates and you’ve got your back to me”. The idea stuck, and he wrote several drafts of the screenplay, which at one point was intended to be an HBO series, but HBO eventually passed. It was a blessing in disguise, as the film’s intense claustrophobia and mounting tension would only have been dispelled by being spread out over multiple episodes.
As luck would have it, Dreamworks Pictures came across the screenplay and were impressed by it. But then they sat on it. “It basically sat on their shelf for about three years while they were trying to find the right director and two leads,” Beattie recalled. “And it went through every incarnation you can imagine.” For the role of Vincent, Beattie had originally thought that it should be someone English, saying “I wanted a foreigner in the city, to explain the whole thing of ‘Why do I need a cab?’ He doesn’t know his way around. Like a Ralph Fiennes or someone like that.”
Fiennes would undeniably have been inspired, chilly casting, but the first A-list actor who was interested was none other than Russell Crowe, then coming off both Gladiator and The Insider. Crowe – who would later play a similar role in the excellent western 3:10 To Yuma, also scripted by Beattie – interested his Insider director Mann in the project and spent six months in negotiations, only to drop out.
The film seemed doomed – but there were two strokes of luck in the offing. Mann had been considering directing The Aviator, but he found the smaller nature of Collateral more intriguing. He recalled, “What attracted me to Collateral was the opportunity to do the exact opposite [of The Aviator]: a microcosm; 12 hours; one night; no wardrobe changes; two people; small lives; inside a cab; a small time frame viewed large. I very much admired the hard, gem-like construction of Stuart Beattie’s screenplay.”
It also offered him the chance to develop his interest in filming Los Angeles with digital cameras. He said, “One of the first images I had in my head was guys stalking each other as near-silhouettes against the city at night. That could not have been shot on film; the aesthetic does not exist in the photochemical realm – it only exists in high-def video.” Collateral was the first film to use the Viper FilmStream camera, which subsequently became ubiquitous in digital cinema; as so often, Mann proved himself an innovator.
The other fortunate development was in the casting of Vincent. Cruise, then 42, who was between Mission: Impossible films, had been looking for a challenging role that would be his first out-and-out villain, as well as the first picture he made in which his character died at the end. Beattie was thrilled by this idea: “I’ve always thought there was a great opportunity for [Cruise] to play a bad guy, because he does that righteous intensity thing so well. So I’ve always thought it would be great if that righteous intensity was ‘I’m going to kill you’, for no other reason than I’ve been paid to.”
Mann echoed this enthusiasm. He said: “I saw Tom as all steely, and the visual for that was silver hair and a tight grey suit. The man he’s playing is erudite, well read, and [his] sociopathy is total. With Tom, you don’t get what you hear from a lot of movie stars, which is ‘Don’t move me out of my range.’”
With one of Hollywood’s hottest leading men on board, the next casting decision was that of Max, the reluctant taxi driver. Beattie originally wanted Robert de Niro for the part, reasoning that the role was the anti-Travis Bickle and a nice nod to de Niro’s iconic role in Taxi Driver, but the studio wanted a younger (and more bankable) actor. Adam Sandler signed on but then dropped out to make James L Brooks’s Spanglish, and was replaced by Jamie Foxx, whom Mann had already worked with in Ali. The excellent supporting cast included Mark Ruffalo, Jada Pinkett Smith and, in one of his earliest Hollywood roles, Javier Bardem in an unforgettable cameo as a Mexican drug lord.
Mann, always a stickler for detail, put his lead actors through intensive boot camp in preparation. Foxx had it easiest, being sent out anonymously to work as a cab driver for several weeks so that he could understand the tedium and occasional danger that Max would have faced. But for Cruise – always an actor committed to going further in preparation than most of his peers – there were two kinds of training. The first was the relatively mundane, in making Vincent a character who could blend into any situation anonymously. Mann commented, “the preparation involved all kinds of crazy stuff in pre-production – acquiring the skill sets he would need to be this man. We had him stalking various members of the crew for weeks, in secret, learning their habits, and then picking the moment. This person would be coming out of a gym at 7am and feel somebody slap something on his back – and it would be Tom, who had just put a Post-it on their back. In our virtual world, that was a confirmed kill.”
Yet the second was something of a Mann speciality, in that Cruise had to learn how to have the split-second reflexes of a trained killer. Having already put de Niro and Al Pacino through their paces in one of cinema’s most realistic ever shoot-outs in Heat – choreographed by Andy McNab, it is now used as a training tool at Sandhurst and for the US marines alike – Mann sent Cruise to former SAS operative Mick Gould and SWAT team member Chic Daniel for full-scale immersion in Special Forces training.
Over months of preparation, Cruise was brought up to the same standard as a Special Forces soldier with a few tours of duty under his belt, and every aspect of this paid off handsomely in the finished film. In the largest-scale action scene, when Vincent kills multiple hitmen and bodyguards in a crowded nightclub, Cruise’s familiarity with firearms was now such that he could shoot multiple rounds and reload without blinking, in addition to hacking and stabbing his way through various bystanders.
Its methodical violence anticipates the first John Wick film by a decade. Mann described the scene as being a particular challenge to shoot. “I had a floor plan the size of a large dining room table and plotted out every single actor’s move and camera position. The choreography of that action, with customers freaking out as Tom shoots the guys after him – there were 600 Korean extras kept in a state of hysteria 12 hours a day. We were all wiped, but they were terrific.”
When the film was released in early August in the United States, it received overwhelmingly positive reviews, with praise for both Cruise and Foxx’s performances and for Mann’s kinetic direction. A box office hit, earning $220 million on a budget of $65 million, it received Oscar nominations for Best Editing and for Foxx, and Mann was named Best Director by the National Board of Review.
Watched today, Collateral is an intoxicatingly exciting and surprisingly funny thriller, helped by the perfectly timed badinage between the two leads. (When a horrified Max observes, after the first murder, “You killed him!”, Vincent punctiliously corrects him: “No, I shot him. Bullets and the fall killed him.”)
It’s not perfect, though. The final twenty minutes embraces Hollywood damsel-in-peril cliché, as Max must try and save Pinkett Smith’s attorney, Vincent’s last target, from him, and the generic closing shoot-out short-changes Cruise’s assassin. Still, the final, haunting image, of the dead Vincent sitting unheeded on the LA subway, echoing a remark of his earlier – “A guy gets on the MTA here in L.A. and dies. Think anybody will notice?” – is the perfect encapsulation of Mann’s theme of urban isolation.
And what of that Jason Statham cameo? In the film’s opening scene, Vincent literally bumps into an anonymous Englishman – Statham, naturally – who exchanges briefcases with him and tells him to “Enjoy LA”. Statham was already an established actor by the time the film was made, and although he is credited solely as Airport Man, there has been a consistent belief online that he is, in fact, playing his character Frank Martin from the Transporter films – a mysterious ex-Special Forces operative who will transport anything or anyone for the right fee, no questions asked.
Although Mann and Statham have never confirmed or denied this, the Transporter director Louis Leterrier appeared to suggest that Statham’s gun-for-hire could star in his own cinematic universe. He noted, “He’ll just be a cameo in other people’s movies – in Michael Mann’s movies.” Screenwriter Beattie all-but-confirmed this tantalising connection on a podcast. “[It’s] absolutely Frank Martin of Transporter. Yes, it’s canon. Same world… the studio will never admit to that, but in my head, absolutely it’s him.”
Collateral, then, has got it all. A silver-haired and lethal Cruise, arguably Foxx’s best performance to date and an iconic 30-second appearance by The Stath. Seriously: what else could an action film lover want?
