There are some interesting choices for Cruise here, for while hit man Vincent is undeniably a heartless killer, there is a mark of moral ambiguity about him: does he regret the things he’s done, is he going to quit, will he allow Max [Jamie Foxx’s], the cab driver he’s taken hostage, to live through the night?

Michael Mann's direction of writer Stuart Beattie's multifaceted script makes an interesting journey for the two characters, locked in a struggle for control over the lives of Vincent’s contract marks, and the lives of the two men themselves. They travel through a bleak nighttime cityscape together, prowling the streets of the ‘other’ Los Angeles one doesn’t often see on the big screen. This is the LA that chokes little asthmatic kids with smog, the LA of the folks who work all night in hotels they can never afford to stay in, the LA of a man who drives a night taxi, caught in a limbo of daydreams, streetlights, and freeways.

That the film is shot digitally is an interesting choice, giving it a documentary feel at times…though the parched, stark cinematography can be distracting from what is otherwise an engaging tale of the hunter and the hunted.

Foxx acquits himself with distinction against Cruise’s polished performance; not once does he overplay the work-a-day-joe-ness that makes Max the cab driver such a believable character. At the same time, there’s not a hint of his comedic background evident in his finely honed dramatic performance.

Below, the cast discusses working with Michael Mann, and the preparations they made for the flick.

Q: The visual style of this movie is very dark and urban, and the digital images give it a very flattened, almost documentary feel. Why did you choose digital as a medium to tell this story?

Mann: I beg to differ with you there. [Laughs] I wouldn’t call it bleak at all. That’s LA. LA is a huge Technicolor landscape of old dreams layered onto these new ethnic groups and moving in and taking over neighborhoods, and Koreatown, and all that. It’s a very colorful space, and you can use that in those parts of the story.

Q: Why did you choose digital specifically?

Mann: Because I can see into night with digital, and I could not with film. The night becomes the world that these two men are going to travel through, it’s the world that Jada’s going to stay up all night in. Like the scene with Jada in the office, when the lights go out, you could not begin to shoot that scene with motion picture film. You have to conceive something completely different because you simply can not see that stuff.

Cruise: When we were shooting, there were times where I actually couldn’t see my mark. I was asking Michael, ‘Is this going to work?’, and Michael says, ‘I don’t know, I’ll tell you at eight in the morning when I look at the print.’ [Laughs]

Q: How did Jamie Foxx get involved in the project, and what was your relationship with Tom Cruise like? The two of you have a very intimate chemistry together.

Foxx: I had met Tom before, when I read for JERRY MCGUIRE. I didn’t quite get that. [Laughs] I did a joke about that on stage, after Cuba had done such a great job, and I always said that if I ever got that chance again…when Michael Mann called, and said, ‘Do you want to work with Tom Cruise, I said, ‘I don’t care if we’re singing show tunes, I’m in there.’ Once we got there, my sense was that here’s a cat who’s at the top of the food chain, and there’s nobody bigger in movies, and he was still cool and genuine. [Cruise and Mann] both ended up at my birthday part…and you know, at my birthday party, there’s some brothers in there no social security numbers and such [laughs] and they couldn’t believe it when Tom walked in. Those kinds of things helped our relationship on screen, because we were around each other so much. It wasn’t just the funny stuff, it was Jada hanging out, and all of us hanging out and talking and sharing stuff about politics and private stuff, and we needed that because it was an intense shoot.

Q: What was the biggest challenge for you?

Foxx: Michael Mann called me and asked me, ‘Can you play a cab driver?’ And I said, ‘C’mon Michael. I do my thing, and he said, ‘Can you not do your thing? Can you be simple? Can you be indecisive? Can you be a person who has to get up, go to work, and have nothing good, or nothing bad happen, and just go home?’ That was the challenge on the acting side for me. I wanted to say, ‘Well, black people do it like this, Michael.’ And he’d say, ‘I’m not talking about that. I’m just talking about this character.’ He stripped it all down. When people say Michael Mann’s acting school…that’s what it really was. Working on your chops…you have no choice. For me, it’s like this: I shoot a great jump shot in my back yard. If I were to go to the Staples Center and shoot my jump shot the same way, I’m going to be successful. For me, this is the Staples Center, this is the championship, and I’m just perfecting that jumper.

Q: How did you prepare for this role?

Cruise: I have a process I go through where I go through and develop a backstory for the character. With Micheal, it was great, because we were just running parallel lines. He came in and I just worked with him. You read the script, you sit down with the director, and you’re working with Michael Mann, he just has great command over storytelling. He understands ever aspect of filmmaking. What you want to do is pose questions. You set up ideas for yourself, and you reach toward that. You don’t know how it’s going to turn out. Discovering the moments where Vincent fractures…that creative environment has a great focus. It’s exciting to be part of. It has a momentum, and you’re moving towards something. We went into the backstory. I had to learn new weapons. I’d never fired a live round out of a gun before, and the fighting sequences. It doesn’t stop when you start shooting. Michael came up with the look of the character, and you just keep evolving the character.

Q: Did you meet an actual killer to do research on your character?

Cruise: No. I guess you can meet them, but I didn’t. I worked with an ex-British Special Forces guy, Nick Gould. He trained me. There were different exercises that Michael came up with, like me dressing up as a delivery guy and delivering mail, and I did the things this character would do, except I didn’t kill anyone. [Laughs]

Q: Jaime, your preparation involved doing a lot of ride-alongs in cabs?

Foxx: I asked a lot of the drivers, because LA isn’t a cab city, New York is a cab city, so we had to talk about why they weren’t driving a limo or a town car or an SUV, and these guys had a lot of fractures in their personality to explain why. One guy was really gung ho, he told me, ‘Jamie, you see these cotton balls on my console, and I use these cotton balls and some alcohol and rub my neck, because I don’t want my customers to see that I have a dirty neck.’ But he was really sincere about driving a cab, and then later, you find out that he’d lost his wife a few years back, and that for him to leave his cab, you know, he might not be able to function. The opposite side of it, there was this African cat, Dominique. He found out all the people that had DUI’s, and he built accounts and clients from that list. He’d go pick up these people on the weekends, they were mostly girls, and we’d get to the club, and he says, ‘Do you mind if I go get the girls in the club?’ And I said, ‘No, go ahead.’ So he leaves me in the cab. And there are people walking past the cab, and they see me in the cab, and they’re saying, ‘Jamie Foxx has really fallen off, when he’s driving a cab.’

Mann: Then we had this guy, he was really normal, he’d been a computer engineer during the dot com bust, and he went nuts, and he said, ‘You know, if that guy tried to hold me up, this is what I’d do to him…’

Foxx: I said, Michael, we’re in the wrong cab right now. He hadn’t been driving a cab that long. He didn’t know how to get on the freeways! And then, he starts talking about, ‘If I’m a cab driver and this guy comes at me, I’d rip his eyes out, I’d rip his ass apart.’ And I said, we have to get out of this cab.

Sporting a strong cast, COLLATERAL offers a character driven urban tale that could be considered counter-programming for summer blockbuster-itis. See it if you’re looking for some story to go with your popcorn.

COLLATERAL opened wide on August 6.

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