Behind the Scenes Collateral Mann 2004 with Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx

The writing background has served me well, I think, in being able to help and work with actors to discover character. Okay, ready, and action. He fell on the cab! I guess he fell from up there. He fell on the cab! You want me to stand up? Yeah, man, ----, the dude fell on my motherfuckin' cab. Oh, you kidding? Should I get away from him? Go home a little bit. On a roll to Mexico? It's 12 hours. It's a mess. So? 58th century, you know? Yeah, South Central, yeah, it's... How long you figure? It's about 17 minutes. Oh, no, no, no, no, man, you get me. We can't do this, man. You drive the cab, I make my rounds. Oh, man, I really ain't trying to piss you off right now, but my job description is not to drive you around so you can kill ****. It's an OPD, dude. How? You're a cabbie. **** your wife. Oh, just please don't do that. That would make it corny, Max. You don't have the **** space. Okay, pick it up and please don't do anything, and then I think you guys are in a hurry to get this... Okay, okay, I got it. To get your thoughts out because these guys, you see the door opening, they're coming this way. One of the things that attracted me to the whole project was the compression of time. One night, 6.04 p.m. to 4.20 a.m. Everything's changing. This is a collision of two lives. All you have been and who you think you might be all collapsed in the events of one night. The movie starts with Vincent arriving to L.A. Here he is, this guy who just looks perfect. Silver fox coming in the airport. More serious deep current that's there within Tom Cruise is something I wanted to see, and particularly as it emerges through the exterior and we rapidly take in the rougher aspects of the character. Michael, he came up with the whole design of the character. The hair, the beard, the suit. His eye is incredible, and it's always about his movie, the story, the characters. Some people happen to people on purpose in order to tell them something about their lives. They sit somewhere and share two or three lines, and you leave and, you know, your life is changed. One of the themes is how people's paths cross, the interesting dynamic of meeting someone that you never thought could affect you in such a substantial way, and a cat. It's a very chance situation. Tom comes down and says, are you busy, are you taken? Jamie's thinking about something else, and Tom starts walking off, and Jamie says, no, wait, wait. To me, that's kind of true to life because it's those little nothing decisions that we make sometimes that can totally change the course of our lives. When Max first meets Vincent, it's who cares? I just saw the woman of my dream. I'm getting married in my mind right now. Michael says, I want you to disconnect so that when you guys do connect, it's like day and night. It's not until the offering of the money that you see them really connect. Michael was so thorough in his history of Vincent that it very much informed where to start with the character. I'd sit down and have meetings with him, and he showed me pictures of where the character came from, and things like that, that's the stuff I usually do as an actor. We spent about 2 or 3 months building up the character of Vincent, what Vincent was doing when he was 2, what Vincent was doing when he was 11. Tom and I had a complete understanding of what Vincent is thinking for every single moment and how it resonates with something in his life growing up in Gary, Indiana with the mother who died and childbirth, delivering him in a series of foster homes, none of which is part of the text of this motion picture. But all of it is apparent in what Tom's doing in the whole of the movie. As an actor, you spend months getting into the zone to a point where you can just be the character. Michael creates that environment, and then as an actor, you just have to be able to keep creating it, creating it, creating it, creating that character. I'm a big believer in whatever the central activity that a character's supposed to do in his life, that an actor should be able to do it to really understand it and understand the character. So I designed a program, and I used somebody that I also used in Heat, Mick Gould. It's important that we look every time. He's SAS, British Special Air Service, and kind of an expert in close quarter combat. With the kind of training he would have had, he has spent 8 to 12 years in Special Forces. Blanks. Because actors use blank guns, then they tend to feel like what happens when it actually goes off, and it's a whole different deal. I mean, once you cock that weapon and there's a live round inside there, and you suddenly put it down your trousers and you go, wow! I mean, you hit somebody right in here, they're down and out. You hit somebody right down in here, they're in deep ----. Yeah, but that guy seemed pretty down to me. And that guy was still twisting. That guy was still twisting around. I saw him reaching for his gun. Gave me one of those cross-eyed looks, you know. Yeah, we were using live ammo. It was great. The training on this, building this character from the ground up, really added a dimension. This is what he does, he just does it. It's an extension of who he is. And for the actor then, when he's on a set and he's firing blanks, he's not firing blanks in his mind, he's firing live ammunition, this is really happening. There's a scene in which 2 people assault Vincent, not realizing who they're assaulting, and Vincent draws and shoots both of these guys. And it's in 1.3 seconds. He had to be from Mr. Nice Guy to the extreme of aggression at the snap of a finger. That's difficult. So it did actually take 3 months to get that flip over. The real value of it is what it does to the actor believing in himself and that projection in a much deeper way into character. It can become very quiet, and we will look at the screen and we will feel that man is totally in command. As an assassin, you must be economical in your moves. The fight scenes were choreographed even months ahead of time, and we just keep working them. Let's make a note that I like it without the punches better, I like it better with the open hand. Yeah. And so everything that Don does in the picture, that's not stunt work, Tom did it all for real. Of course there are no cuts in it. We've been doing it for the last 3 months every morning. We worked with him every day for weeks, and he was always there. He would work out for an hour prior, stretch and warm up, and he was so diligent about if I'm not doing something right, tell me. If his leg was a quarter of an inch off the mark while we're working on a fight sequence, he wants to know. It's everything perfect. It almost is like a dance. Every move has to be balanced. As you go through the scene, he's not focused on these bodyguards and the people he's got to take out. He's got a vision 200 feet away, and he's got to look like it's all automatic response, and he's always in charge of the situation. grunting With Jamie, it was a different thing. Who drives your cab, what kind of people are they, what do they wear, how do they look? The first time I started, so where you from? I was doing this, because you think that's the way you drive the cab. If you drive a cab 12 hours a day, five days a week, year after year after year, you get to be a pretty good driver. You know how to pass people on the right, you know how to turn. It's kind of the basics of race car training, and we just did that, except with a crowned Vic out at Willow Springs Racetrack. So we go out, and we race, and I'm like, why are we racing? He says, I want you to have the feel of the cab to where it's natural, to where it's not active. When it came to the stunts, he wanted me to be comfortable with the car going fast and how it moves and how it turns and everything like that. That's his method. We had a great time at the track. At the same time, we got a little bit of the DNA for the character man. I drove a cab. My brother drove a cab. My grandfather, Sam Mann, started a small cab company. I've grown up around the cab business and the independence of cab drivers. One Sunday morning, the guy said, oh, man, I'd give $100 for a beer. I drove him to some gas station and he came out with a six-pack and says, can I have $600, please? He gave it to me. You start out early in the morning, you drive the car, and you get your money. That's a good thing I'm going to say. I don't drive daytime. The people are looser, they're nicer, and you can see trouble. You can see trouble better at night. There was one guy who was really about being the best cab driver he could be. That was his Super Bowl, that was his Final Four, that was his championship game. And when I got in the car with him, he said, Jamie, I'll tell you what, I love driving this cab. Uh-oh, you see that? We almost caught one. I said, what are you talking about? Somebody kind of pulled out to the intersection. You got to watch out for those guys. Those guys will ruin this industry. I'm serious. And when he broke it down, it made sense that when people do get in my cab finally in L.A., I want them to feel like that they had a great experience. We went through everything with Michael in order to get to Max. There's all this information that I download and I sift from it with what I need, and then my thing was, I'm simply a cab driver. I'm simply this guy. There's nothing special to me at all. There's nothing exciting about my life. So that was the thing, strip all of it back, just be the sitting on the dock of the bay in that cab. Jamie's acquisition of character has to do with doing stand-up comedy. I got to represent, man! They're looking at me like, come on, Pop. laughing Nothing to do with Stanislavski. He has to come and do it in living color. And so he uses mimicry as a means to get to a very truthful place. And action. Jamie can watch how you walk or watch how you speak for 5 minutes, and then he'll do exactly what I watched you do 5 minutes ago. That is really part of having that actor's eye, of being able to observe people. You just see him getting into that character and bring that character to life. Because he's a comedian, he had this preconceived idea that this is a guy that thinks everything is silly and fun and da-da-da-da. There's a lot more to Jamie Foxx. I always like to just sit back and listen to him talk. We meet her in the beginning. She has to make an extremely strong impression on us because we're not going to see her again until very much later. I gave it up. I gave up years ago and I'm just doing all that. And then after the first day, the first day... Once you go back to that little, like what you do, you probably never really explain to anybody the duality of I'm afraid and I can't wait to get in the ring. I was really surprised at how thorough the auditioning process was and I really enjoyed it. I was like, wow, that's what I'm talking about. He spent like an hour and a half with me and really worked me, which I feel should happen, to squeeze out every bit of creative juice that an artist has. I mean, I don't know, if you want to start an investigation of a Fortune 500 company or argue a cab route or something. He then had me go spend a day with a couple that he felt would be Annie's parents. Right, so that I could understand the background that Annie comes from. And then I spent a couple of days with a prosecuting attorney and just watched how she handles herself in the courtroom, why she wears a shirt versus pants, how much makeup is she wearing, is this a woman who works out? I don't care if you are a character that just says, stop! And that's it, that's your only line. He is going to give you the reason why you said stop, where you're coming from before you said stop, what the psychological background of this person is that would motivate this person to say stop. If you're going to work with Michael Mann, you have got to be on point. Period. I spent hours in training with the guns. I don't ever shoot my gun in this movie, but I'm a crack marksman now. Sometimes people might think that's going a little overboard. Me, as an actress, I know. This is what acting is supposed to be about. No director knows how any other director works. So I've never really been on a set. I have no idea how anybody else makes a motion picture. I have a predetermined idea of the way the scene ought to be and the way this character ought to be manifesting himself in the scene. I'll see a picture, a photograph, I'll be out in the middle of the night and I'll see something and I say, I've got to capture that. I'll have an emotional response to it. I'll feel that that emotion relates to this movie. So what's the world of the motion picture? And when it's humid, what happens is that all the sodium vapor streetlights in this megalopolis of 17 million people bounces up onto the bottom of the cloud layer and it becomes a diffused light. You see this wondrous abandoned landscape with hills and trees and strange lighting patterns. It's a very, very magical place and I wanted that to be the world that Vincent and Max are moving in. So then how much of that do we see? And the answer is not a lot in film. And that's why I moved into shooting about 90% of the picture in high def to see into the night. That moment with the coyotes, I loved it in the script. It's one sentence, you know, the coyotes and I thought, what is he going to do with this? And then when you see that scene, that moment, it just had a poetry and a hypnotic quality. Michael definitely knows LA. I mean, he took me places. Jamie and I, we'd be sitting in the car, you know, hanging out going, how did he find this place? How did he get it? Where are we right now? I told Mike, I said, man, man, I'm, you know, I'm from the ghetto. You're not from the ghetto. I know the ghetto. You want me to show you some ghetto? He would take you to places where even I was like, man, lock the doors, man. Where, man, what is this? Just the opening shot, when you look at that cab driving out and you see the big paintings on the walls. It's beautiful. He's interested in things like that and has a way to use it in a movie and it can make it part of the story. I share the same passion that Michael Mann does. He loves LA. We're shooting a lot in downtown Los Angeles. That is a reoccurring visual theme in the movie is the downtown skyline. What the hell? The way Michael likes to work, he picks the perfect back alley, the perfect back of the building, the perfect building, the perfect entrance. We drop a body on the car from about three stories up. It was done with a dummy that was wired into the car and the effects crew did a fantastic job of rigging it so that the head has to hit the windshield in a certain spot and smash the windshield. We need to keep a car like that exactly as it was when we did the stunt from that moment on. We keep this car, which we affectionately call car number three, as our hero car for that. It is true that we have seventeen versions of our hero taxi and all of these taxis, the insides are all identical. The entire inside is actually covered with a fabric that is a Velcro accepting fabric and the whole car is wired so that the right key light exists. And this is the same stuff that's the backing in a cell phone but it was custom built to be just the right color and temperature of light that our director of photography wanted. This can bend and be placed just about anywhere in the cab because of the Velcro throughout the cab. This is what we call cab number nine. We've obviously removed the motor and it has a flat towing system here and air suspension in the front and air suspension in the rear so that when we place an entire camera crew and all the HD cameras and everything in the engine compartment and it gives us the ability to shoot directly through the windshield and into the back of the taxi. One of the things that's challenging about this show is obviously how do you move around and do interesting things within the taxi which is why we built what we call the Popemobiles. They sort of picked up the name Popemobile because of the superstructure around them reminiscent of the vehicle that Pope John Paul travels in. There are three Popemobiles one for shooting from the passenger side, one for shooting from the driver's side, and one for shooting from the front. It's a very, very important set to Michael. The cab, the logo of the cab, how the cab is lit inside, the colors of the cab. There's a cab company here that has kind of those colors. It's kind of a strange lipstick orange and what's strange about it is that the color takes one kind of a sheen under sodium vapor light which is very yellow and looks completely different under mercury vapor. Michael wanted to have the orange taxi essentially get the sheen of almost a bluish lipstick. We rehearsed that car flip. The way Michael saw it in his head was he wanted to go across the intersection in front of the Staples Center, get into parked cars and turn over and get on its top. Most of them land back on their wheels. He wanted it upside down. So we went out and tested it and that's exactly the way we shot it on the night. I would change nothing. Everything that I would... I want to abort it. You abort it. I think for about 50 feet from there it's going to be kind of hard to abort. So you can see where the lens hit it. That camera went to air flex zone. Michael feels that for the reality of capturing the car as it was truly crashed, he wants to actually utilize the cars that were crashed for the rest of the scene post car crash. It is a big challenge for us. Working with a car that's been through this kind of an accident is very difficult. The frames are bent, the roof is caved in and a lot of modification has been made for safety. We're going to install a full interior of the taxi. The divider, the seats, all the meters and equipment as well as add a fair amount of structural support so that when we have Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx in there it doesn't squash down on itself. It was great because we were shooting in high depth so usually in film you have to stop after a few takes. That can be very difficult. Michael, he thinks like an actor. So he knows I want longer runs and he's looking at the way that he shot it in the lighting so we could have long takes and just explore the scene. That works for acting because instead of a ten minute magazine that's always in the middle of a great take, they start running out of film and you have to interrupt the process. We just bang a one hour tape in and we can roll for 55 minutes. Yeah, that hurts. That hurts because Michael Mann can take some takes. Because you know, you usually wait an hour out, tape rolled out. When you're working for Michael Mann, you're like I want to go in there and kick ass tonight and really do a great job and show Michael what a professional I am and I really know my stuff. Ready and action! You're 75 takes into a two page scene on a phone by yourself and you start going crazy. You lose your ----. We are waiting on that thumb. You know how he does that little when he does that? Let's move on. If you don't get that it's like oh man, we're waiting on the thumbs, we've been here all night. Can we get a thumb? And once he does this then everything is cool. Cut! He winds out any preconceived idea of what you think a scene should sound like look like, be acted like until all you have left is just what is sort of happening in the moment. It was just connected to what was going on in the scene and no thought or performance. He has a way to just strip the actor away and get to the truth of the material. Doing it over and over again is giving a lot of room in that performance to choose 50 great moments. Everybody knows that Michael Mann is like a school in a sense. Oh you got accepted? You got in? You're going to Michael Mann University? Wow! What type of grade did you get? It makes you go home and get your homework done. And then you feel like every single day you pass the test. When all these executives are home sleeping or partying or doing everything they do, they know in the back of their mind that Michael Mann is working. It's going to be great. You want me to drive off? We ended at 9 o'clock this morning. Good. He's like, I want to keep shooting. And this was after I don't know, he's probably been working 18 hours at that point. Ready and 3, 2, 1 He fell on his head. Max is raising issues that actually resonate with parts of Vincent's life that the text doesn't deal with, but Tom and I understand. So sometimes we would have to take many takes to get that extra nuance, but there's an additional reaction there. And that additional reaction may be designed to pose a question, which is going to get answered later, like what's going on with this guy? Why doesn't he kill Max? You know, you see this relationship and this bond. Even Vincent cannot articulate the effect that Max has had on him. You know, seeing his mother, seeing the family that he never had. He's falling apart in the movie, really. One of the most, just purely enjoyable voyages you go on, for me, is to find what the music's voice is. I love working with orchestras, particularly when you can get an orchestra to sound not the way orchestras conventionally sound. It works for me when I feel that's Vincent. I'm hearing something musically and it is Vincent. The climax of the movie, which normally would take 4 to 7 minutes, is expanded to take more like 17 to 20 minutes. And our big objective was to not reach our dramatic climax too early. Vincent finds himself in the presence of a real adversary, in the form of this bumbling cab driver who's never fired a handgun in his life because Max has seen into Vincent. He has truly seen Vincent for who Vincent is.