A Fare to Remember

In Collateral, the Michael Mann-directed taxi thriller, Tom Cruise plays a hit man without a heart. Can we ever forgive him?

By Fred Schruers
Photographed by Frank Connor

"Let's blow some shit up."

Tom Cruise, issuing that exhortation as he prepares for a glass-shattering night on the downtown Los Angeles set of Michael Mann's Collateral, is displaying his usual zest-but so much else about him, on this January evening, seems different from what we've come to expect.

It starts with the visual-his entrance to the overlit, busy set is like the moment in a nature documentary when a shark shoots into frame. Sure, it's unmistakably Tom Cruise, yet even the veteran grips and gaffers seem to be stealing a second look at this intriguing creature, though they've been at this with him for three months.

This time, Cruise is the bad guy. Not just a self-centered type who will learn better, as he compellingly did in Rain Man and Jerry Maguire. Not the addled self-help guru of Magnolia, though that performance will be mentioned often when Collateral emerges. And not even the neck-biting beast who must live forever in a costume drama that won't, Interview With the Vampire. No, as Mann vouches, in Collateral, "he plays a guy who is a pretty advanced sociopath. He's not a role model." Mann, a maverick his whole career, can't help but laugh at the idea before adding, "But I think you feel for him, and I think you're engaged by him. That's absolutely the intent."

For the moment, Cruise is a friendly cartoon shark, his legendary grin flashing as the company embarks on its last hours of shooting. He's down 20 pounds from what was his (quite literal) fighting weight in The Last Samurai, though you can tell at a glance that 50 push-ups still would be no real challenge for him. As Vincent, the story's contract killer, Cruise has close-cropped hair and a pricey-looking suit that are nearly the same shade of gray. It's black mixed with the brushed aluminum of gun barrels, cell phones, and sleek laptops-not so coincidentally, all tools of Vincent's trade. The suit, a form-fitting wool job with the pockets sewn shut, is described by the ever-precise Mann as the work of "the best tailor in Kowloon"-one of several clues that Vincent, a sometime Special Forces operator who's now a gun (and knife) for hire, lives everywhere and nowhere.

In a few minutes, Cruise will be joined on set by his acting partner, Jamie Foxx, playing the cab driver named Max whose night goes terrifyingly awry when Cruise slides into his backseat. When Cruise and Mann first met to discuss the film, recalls Cruise, "Michael came in and said, 'How about Max?' And I said, 'You know, I'm interested in playing Vincent.' "

Mann, as most directors would, quickly saw the logic-and the challenge: "It's difficult for Tom to access being somebody else; he is one of the most recognizable people on the planet--his profile, his voice. So that was tricky engineering and I tried to design some experiences that would take Tom into having the trade craft that Vincent would have."

Vincent's trade craft is the sort that puts people in the morgue. On the set tonight is a muscular, compact Welsh'man named Mick Gould, a "technical adviser" on the film.He's a been-there, done-thatveteran of Great Britain's Special Air Service who helped Mann create Heat's running gun battle in downtown L.A. For Collateral he trained Cruise in handgun and knife techniques, as well as several ways to kill a man with your bare hands. Cruise found himself at the firing range beside Gould and Mann (an experienced marksman himself). One of Collateral's action sequences, a balls-to-the-wall shoot-out in a Korean nightclub called Fever, involved 700 extras and nine days of shooting as Cruise, in a kaleidoscopic sequence that plays seamlessly, shoots, knifes, and smacks down an array of opponents.

Making the fuse burn all the faster is Vincent's insistence that he'll be out of town by early the next morning. As Mann puts it, "The whole movie takes place within ten hours.It starts at 6:02 and ends at about four in the morning. . . . It was really interesting for me to tell a story that's all happening right now. That sense of immediate insertion into this world was challenging to pull off, given that I wanted to have dimension for these characters-real backgrounds, real lives, even though you may glimpse only fragments of what those are."

Within the suspense, and triggering key parts of it, is the battle of wills between the lead duo. Vincent will induce Max to admit he's been clinging to his dream of starting his own limo service for 12 years, a confession that's matched in restraint-and yet poignancy-by Vincent's muttered backstory, with its glimpses of anger toward an emotionally abusive father. "When we eventually begin to talk," says Foxx, "that's the mechanism Max needs to get out of the situation. Max knows that somewhere there is a string unraveling-'How come you're killing people and still smiling? How numb are you? What's going on inside of you? Nobody ever loved you. . . .' "

Cruise relishes the contradictions: "Tonight Vincent arrives in L.A. and five bodies are going to drop, period. He is an iconic killer, and he knows for himself that what he's doing is correct, and wants to approach this in a professional manner-but then there's things that he doesn't even realize are happening to him, subtly."

Foxx's arrival on set is subdued, though he greets his costar and director warmly. The trio forms a sincere mutual-appreciation society. Foxx, draped in earth-toned clothes, looks studiously meek in Max's rimless glasses. He laughs about the wattage of Mann's approval when a scene's gone well. "There's no dancing in the end zone. If you get a [raised] thumb, you've made it. If you don't get a thumb, you are going to do it again."

The film's long night will be a shift like no other for Max. He begins it by picking up Jada Pinkett Smith's character, Annie Farrell, a federal prosecutor who's preparing for the next day's grand jury session. Her aim is to indict key players in an offshore criminal enterprise involving drugs and murder. The twist is, she'll run afoul of Cruise's Vincent-and desperately need the help of Foxx's Max. Along the way, Max will cross paths with a number of players, including a cop (Mark Ruffalo) and an FBI agent (Bruce McGill) who are on Vincent's trail, and Felix (Javier Bardem), the local boss employed by the people who hired Vincent. What the audience hears in the first reels will have resonance later, and from an early, useful coincidence (Vincent emerges from casing Annie's office building to seek a cab just after Max drops her off there), the film strides purposefully forward.

Tonight's action, according to Walter Parkes, who steered the project, hews to "the Hitchcockian construct" that he and Mann settled on, "playing this for suspense rather than mystery. In the last sequence, all the players, all the pieces, are visible on the table. The audience sees where Jada is, where Tom is, where Jamie is. Rather than going for surprises, you're dealing with the fear of the inevitable tragedy that's unfolding in front of you."

In tonight's key scene, Vincent will fire a series of rounds, and even fling a chair, to obliterate large glass panels that block his way as he stalks about. The scene is late in the shoot with good cause. Even though the glass is made to bust into pebbles, and will actually be broken by tiny explosive squibs, Cruise stands a chance of spraining an ankle or knocking himself silly.

The location is the 16th floor of an office tower in downtown L.A.; the room where Annie will be stalked in near-darkness overlooks the swimming lights of two intertwining freeways. Mann used this building for The Insider, which won him Oscar nominations for both directing and adapting the screenplay. His investing of a seemingly staid story with dramatic impact reinforced his stature as a director capable of mixing the intellectual with the visceral. His Ali (2001) was a noble effort that fell short of its box office and awards goals, and Mann bunkered himself a bit, taking a long look at The Aviator before letting it go to Martin Scorsese, then mounting the smart, short-lived cop drama Robbery Homicide Division.

Meanwhile, DreamWorks Pictures coheads Parkes and Laurie MacDonald had been nurturing Stuart Beattie's Collateral script-a droll if claustrophobic tale in which a Manhattan cabbie picks up a hit man. The script was in development with FrankDarabont for HBObefore DreamWorks exec MarcHaimes touted it to Parkes, who brought Mann aboard. Mann would change the offscreen bad guys to a narco cartel based in Latin America, seeking to avoid indictment by a federal grand jury. The quintet Vincent must rub out includes four witnesses who are to testify at the behest of Pinkett Smith's avid prosecutor. "I didn't change what was brilliant about the screenplay," says Mann. "If you take the screenplay and put it under an X-ray machine, what was great about the screenplay is all Stuart Beattie."

DreamWorks had no shortage of suitors for Collateral, with Russel Crowe hovering for a while and Adam Sandler mentioned as contemplating the driver role. But Mann came with a vision, as Parkes discovered when the two met to chat at Santa Monica's Broadway Deli: "Michael talked about wanting to shoot Los Angeles in ways that it's never been shot before-a multilingual, multiethnic city at night, a very particular evocation."

Mann's notions would be served by a piece of new technology-a high-definition digital camera known as the Viper FilmStream that could reveal rich colors buried deep in shots that would have been murkily black on film stock. Mann's acting duo were to spend much of the time cruising the city streets at night, the cab's windows revealing the seldom-seen world of Los Angeles' funkier neighborhoods after dark. Thus on page 80 of the script comes the side note that perhaps only Mann could have envisioned in such detail: "Korean neon burns into the sodium-lit magenta sky."

The two-hander that the Australian-raised Beattie (who had a story credit on Pirates of the Caribbean) first imagined during a cab ride inSydney evolved as he and Mann sharpened the conflict between the cab driver with a plan for (or is it a fantasy of?) the future, and the assassin with an emotional undertow that takes him back to his unhappy upbringing. As Parkes puts it, "There was a kind of character richness that [Darabont] contributed, and there's texture and depth and a cool factor that comes with Michael's work, but the essential movie existed with great clarity in Stuart's draft."

The combination of script and director readily wonCruise over: "You see the potential of those characters when you start talking to Michael, because of the way he tells a story. As actors, we tend to do our own research, and I always do my own bio. With Michael, he had worked out his vision of the picture, and what he felt about the character. He had pictures of the small town in Indiana where he grew up. The whole visual concept of the characters was his."

"The kick of the piece," says Mann, "is that Vincent, as Tom plays him, is steely, smart, very dry, and very sociopathic. But, and this may be my perverse sense of humor-as Tom plays it dead straight, I think parts of it are hilarious. Vincent rationalizes [his work] with a kind of facile nihilism-that whatever he's doing is meaningless anyway."

The unsentimental streak in the pared-down script, says Parkes, has worked in the film's favor: "It's amazing how if you tear a story down, compressed with truth and logic, without trying to adorn it with great levels of meaning, just how universal and emotional and meaningful it can become.

"I understand from Tom's point of view the challenge of creating a villain who is both memorable and somehow fun to watch for the audience. I think that's what attracted him-that, and there's a kind of attraction that Michael Mann holds for actors which is pretty unique in Hollywood."

At a certain stage Cruise stalks across the frame with a dire warning: "Max! I do this for a living!" Such dialogue makes the last act's fatal tango play both as suspense and as the unfolding of the personality differences at the story's core. Among many actors eager to take the cabbie role, Foxx, who many felt was only a scene or two shy of a supporting-actor nomination for his work as the tragic, poetry-spouting Bundini Brown in Ali, had the inside track. Says Mann, "I think that the work he did is markedly unique and terribly difficult. The flophouse scene in Ali, you don't fake that. You don't learn that in acting school. That's plunging to the depths, the absolute bottom, and you really have to pull that from inside yourself.

"What he does as Max is soulful, and I see this guy who has grown a lot since we did Ali, not in what he can do artistically, because that was 100 percent in Ali and 100 percent here, but his craft has changed-he can access the zone where he's doing great work with a certain facility now."

Says Foxx of reuniting with Mann, "Even though he knows me, it was tough. He said, 'How are you going to play a cab driver?' I said [shrugging], 'I'm a cab driver.' " Mann, famous for giving out fat binders of homework and prepping actors deeply, demurred. "He said, 'No-to play something small, with a lot of layers, make it look small.' He took me through the backstory-a kid that didn't quite get it going, a smart guy who's afraid to fail. He grew up in Ladera Heights, not quite the hood down the street. He's kind of sheltered.' "

Collatera's penultimate set piece is about to unfold on the 16th floor. As the lights are dimmed in the file room where Annie will hide, Vincent hunts her, gun at the ready, even as a breathless Max arrives with a weapon he barely knows how to use. Two .45 caliber handguns bark, and the now wounded and furious Vincent makes his move. With the roar of Vincent's gun, an effects man triggers squibs that shatter the glass in Vincent's path, and Vincent disposes of a last panel with a flung chair. Cruise, ever game, leaps so closely behind the chair that he stomps on it and trips hard, but instantly recovers and sprints on. He's definitely getting a thumb on the first take, and knowing he's done great but reluctant to crow, he exults hoarsely and sotto voce: "Blow some shit up."

All but wrapped for the shoot, Cruise has a moment to reflect on what's implied for his career in playing a figure as darkly obsessive as Vincent. "I never," he says, "think in terms of what other people are going to say. I'm interested in the story and the character. I mean, I started out playing a character in Taps [the trigger-happy David Shawn], and you look at the pictures from Born on the Fourth of July to Interview With a Vampire, Magnolia, Rain Man, all of these different kinds of films-you know, after I finished Top Gun, of course they wanted to do Top Gun 2 and 3. I'm interested in a lot of different kinds of movies, and I'm interested in people and in life, and definitely wanting to work with Michael Mann, and-it's not something I even concern myself with."

Nor is Mann worried. "I think people appreciate what is new. I think they appreciate courageous moves. In Tom's body of work, the stuff that he's done that I like the best-I love Jerry Maguire, and especially in Magnolia, he was great. There's a certain electricity Tom brings, no matter how scarred the persona he plays." Mannsteps aside as crewmen haul snakes of cable, and looks up with a touch of amusement: "I think that if anybody has earned the opportunity to do he wants, it's Tom Cruise. I mean, if he can't do what he wants at this point, when can you?"