..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Man's, man's, man's, Mann's world

Michael Mann's hard men are dying to be softies.

And some will die trying. To consider a couple of his more recent movies, Heat and The Insider, aside from a relentless sense of style and gesture, what prize LA Weekly columnist John Powers has called "lavish precision," Mann makes movies about the modern man who's encased and encoded by his profession.

Collateral may be Mann's finest film. It's a cool, gleaming tale of professionalism, destiny and the necessity of change and transformation. Tom Cruise, silver-haired in a silver-suit, seldom smiles is Vincent, a contract killer who hires reluctant cabbie Max (Jamie Foxx) for the night, with the expected complications along the way. The entire picture is exactingly measured, with a lovely scene at the start setting up Max's life and dreams when Annie, a fare who's a federal attorney (Jada Pinkett Smith), draws him out.

The 61-year-old writer-director is as notorious for reticence in describing his process as he is for his laser-like insistence on research. While Lynn Hirschberg noted in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, "Mann tends to shrug off any mention of his sense of style," she still tries to make the case that Mann "created the dominant male aesthetic of the last 20 years."

But sometimes Mann can't help himself, speaking quickly and confidently in his wise-guy Chicago accent and cadences. Of Cruise's shantung silk body armor, he notes, "It's not really a disguise, but it's anonymous. That's what he wants to achieve. If somebody actually witnesses him and the police ask for a description, what are they going to say? 'Look, [he's] a kind of middle-aged, middle-height guy in a kind of a middle-gray suit and a white shirt, it kind of describes anybody and nobody. That's what you need to meet the verisimilitude of a guy like Vincent. Part of his tradecraft would be to be anonymous, denying specificity if someone tried to describe him."

Stuart Beattie's original script (with at least one uncredited rewrite by Frank Darabont) was handed to Mann after other directors had worked on it. Mann says that after the historical characters of Ali and The Insider, he'd wanted to return to the present day and to his adopted metropolis. "The idea of shooting an intense film like this in L.A. at night precedes the Collateral screenplay. I had this appetite for doing a film exactly like this. I got two screenplays, both set in New York, and both I moved to L.A."

There was no chance of shooting elsewhere, and not only because of the landscape he wanted to refashion. "There was not any question of us not shooting here. California and L.A. have gotta compete with Canada. There should not be runaway productions. It hurts all of us, it hurts the film crews, the craft people we work with. Production should be staying here," he says.

Mann claims he thinks in psychology and story, not in genre, exploring Vincent as damaged goods, or "rough trade in a good suit." "We don't see this as an action film. To me, it's a drama it's extreme as it can be. In this one night, wherever these guys have been, whatever their expectations and dreams are for the future, if they even have 'em, everything is going to change. They will not be the same people after tonight they were before tonight."

Of the sweet tension between Smith and Foxx in the seemingly leisurely opening sequence, Mann observes, "It's a tricky piece of narrative engineering. You meet them in the front [of the movie] and you have to care about, you have to remember her, you have to remember Jada, she has to make such an impression on Max and us that she has to be alive to you all the way to the other end of the picture. You have to make a very strong impression about two people who just happen to meet and have the intimacy that's only possible amongst total strangers who know that they're never going to see each other again."

Mann's own most-peculiar taxi story goes like this: "I was in a cab in New York. Guy said, 'Where are you going?' I say, 'I'm going to the hotel,' he found out I was going to get married the next day. He says, 'Why do you want to do that? Why do you want to get married?' He asks me a whole bunch of questions, he turned the meter off. And said, 'Let's go for a ride in the park.'" This was the woman you're married to now? "No, the one before my wife," Mann says, laughing.

The script's conflicts are elemental and pared down. "What we intended to do was to pose a question, not come to a conclusion: Is there something after we've established Vincent as a professional and immaculate in his process, is there something wrong with this guy tonight? I didn't want to answer it, but I wanted the question posed, leading to the very end of the film. It started with this kind of paroxysm of regret after he shoots [a colorful character]. What was that? Then there's more unexplained things. There's sibling rivalry! Why does he deviate to get into a sibling rivalry with max for the affections of Max's mother? It goes on from there to story about his father. By the time that Max is seeing beyond the end of the gun and really seeing into Vincent for the very first time after the [film's major setpiece, which is a] shootout at Fever, the Korean club, he starts to see Vincent as damaged goods. Now Tom is able to play being [affected] by what Max is saying, and Max finishes by saying, 'Why haven't you killed me yet?' That's a really big question. You start to feel, this one night, Vincent, who is the antagonist, the mover of all these events, that maybe there is something happening with him. Perhaps he's cracking up inside there."

There are similarities to Alain Delon's unsmiling, trained sociopath in Jean-Pierre Melville's steely masterpiece of psychological detachment, Le Samourai. There's also a neat parallel in style to a trick underrated action director Joseph H. Lewis mastered in noir classics like The Big Combo and Gun Crazy: what happens when two characters face the audience rather than each other in an unbroken take?

"If you view [shooting in a cab] as limitation, that's the wrong way to do it," Mann observes. "You have to deal with it as an opportunity. They're both facing the camera, but whenever we elect to, the man in the back seat can have his own thoughts that can play across his face. The other guy's not necessarily seeing him. So he can have two communications, one to the driver. Tom can have reactions to Jamie, but Tom can have reactions, particularly in his first scene when Jamie says that he's starting a limo company, how long you been driving this cab, he says twelve years. Tom raises his eyebrow at one point and Jamie doesn't see it. You can only do that when you have both people facing in the same direction, not facing each other."

Most of the film was shot with a new high-definition video system. "Motion picture film could not see the world that these characters inhabit. It can't see into the night. The environments, where there's a red desert of depopulated refineries just at the moment when Max and Vincent become personal for the first time. Film can't see that stuff. [Digital technology is] a very painterly medium. You can manipulate it a lot as well as being able to see into the night. [There's a] crime scene, you're seeing two miles away, downtown, little American flag on top of the building. It's not just the seeing, though. It lends itself to taking atmosphere and building landscapes and pushing them into a mood and affect a scene and affect the way you feel about these characters."

Mann adds quickly, "It's all story-driven," realizing he'd said "painterly" only a couple words before. "L.A. is unique in that sense. It provides us with those places, the landscape of dreams. But it's yesterday's dreams, somebody's idea in 1958 of what's the sci-fi apartment building of the future, and then it became a Hispanic neighborhood and now it's a Korean neighborhood and coyotes are walking through it. That's L.A."

August 7 , 2004

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