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CRUISER
Tom Cruise as Vincent: “rough trade in a good suit,” says
director Michael Mann.
collateral
MICHAEL MANN’S NEW FILM COLLATERAL IS IN HIS TRADEMARK STYLE, FEATURING A MYTHIC COMING TOGETHER OF TWO LIVES - THOSE OF JAMIE FOXX’S CAB DRIVER AND TOM CRUISE’S HITMAN - AT A MOMENT OF CRISIS FOR BOTH OF THEM. AFTER YOU’VE SEEN IT, SAYS HAL HAYES, LA WILL NEVER LOOK THE SAME AGAIN.
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For director Michael Mann, cities are mythical places. In Heat (1995), Los Angeles was as much a part of the story - and of the action - as were stars Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. In the trend-setting TV series Miami Vice, which Mann launched and executive produced, the showcase city of the Sunshine State became a place of mauves and dusty pinks where epic battles were waged which were only distantly related to the investigation of crime. Now, in his latest film, Collateral, Mann returns to Los Angeles and, using new digital technology, shows it in a way that it has rarely, if ever, been seen before.
Or rather, in Collateral, the City of Angels is the way it actually looks in real life, especially during the hours between dusk and dawn, rather than the way we see it in the movies. That, above all, was Mann’s reason for going with the Viper FilmStream and Sony CineAlta digital high-definition cameras rather than using standard 35mm.
“Film doesn’t record what our eyes can see at night,” he explains. “That’s why I moved into shooting digital video in high - to see into the night, to see everything the naked eye can see and more. You see this moody landscape with hills and trees and strange light patterns. I wanted that to be the world that Vincent and Max are moving through.”
Vincent (Tom Cruise) and Max (Jamie Foxx) are the two central characters in Mann’s new film: a hitman and a cab driver thrown together by circumstance between 6 o’clock in the evening and 4 o’clock in the morning, taking a trip which, more than in any other of Mann’s films, fuses character and action. It’s a world that admirers of the director will be familiar with from Thief, in which James Caan lived through another eerily lit and dangerous night in Long Beach, just south of LA; and from Heat, whose climax at the end of a runway at LAX gets a nodding reference in the new film.
Max has been driving a cab for 12 years, but still sustains himself with the belief that he is only doing this to make money while he builds his real business: a limo-hire company. This, though, is as much of a dream as the postcard of a tropical island which he carries behind his sun-visor.
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