Collateral (film): Difference between revisions

Collateral
Theatrical poster
Directed by	Michael Mann
Written by	Stuart Beattie
Produced by	Michael Mann Julie Richardson
Starring	Tom Cruise Jamie Foxx Jada Pinkett Smith Mark Ruffalo Peter Berg Bruce McGill
Cinematography	Dion Beebe Paul Cameron
Edited by	Jim Miller Paul Rubell
Music by	James Newton Howard
Distributed by	DreamWorks (United States) Paramount Pictures (Worldwide)
Release date	August 6, 2004 (2004-08-06)
Running time	120 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$65 million
Box office	$217,764,291[1]

Collateral is a 2004 American crime thriller film directed by Michael Mann, from a screenplay written by Stuart Beattie. It stars Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx as a taxi driver who finds himself the hostage of a contract killer and attempts to save both himself and a victim. The film is set in Los Angeles, California.

In an HBO film review, Mann stated that the film takes place on the night of January 24–25, 2004 from 6:30 p.m. to 5:40 a.m.. Foxx's performance was widely praised and he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Plot

Cab driver Max Durocher (Jamie Foxx) drives U.S. Justice Department prosecutor Annie Farrell (Jada Pinkett Smith) to her office where she prepares for a drug indictment case. Annie takes a liking to Max, leaving him her business card. Vincent (Tom Cruise) enters the cab next, giving Max $600 for chauffeuring him to five appointments. As Max waits at the first stop, Vincent enters an apartment complex and shoots drug dealer Ramón Ayala. Ayala unexpectedly falls out of the window directly onto the cab, forcing Vincent to reveal himself as a hitman. He coerces Max to hide the body in the trunk, clean up the car and continue with their arrangement. However, Max is pulled over by police due to damage from Ayala's impact, but just before the officers can investigate, they are summoned to a higher priority call. Vincent then leaves Max tied to the steering wheel in an alley as he murders attorney Sylvester Clarke. Max calls for help from a group passing by, who proceed to rob him and steal Vincent's briefcase, but Vincent returns and kills them.

Vincent then brings Max to a jazz club to drink with club owner Daniel Baker (Barry Shabaka Henley) after it closes. Max witnesses Vincent execute Baker when he incorrectly answers a question about Miles Davis and suffers a panic attack. Vincent then insists Max visit his mother Ida (Irma P. Hall) in the hospital to avoid breaking routine. He pretends to be Max's colleague and develops a rapport with Ida, which upsets Max, who then runs out with the briefcase and tosses it onto the freeway. With his target list destroyed, Vincent forces Max to meet drug lord Felix Reyes-Torrena (Javier Bardem), threatening to murder Max's mother otherwise. Posing as Vincent, Max meets with Felix and successfully acquires a USB flash drive listing the last two targets. Plugging the flash drive into the cab's computer, Vincent and Max acquire the details of the next target, Korean gangster Peter Lim, who is at a nightclub.

Meanwhile, L.A.P.D. detective Ray Fanning (Mark Ruffalo) uncovers the connection between the three victims and reports his finding to FBI special agent Frank Pedrosa (Bruce McGill), who identifies the targets as witnesses in a federal grand jury indicting Felix tomorrow. In retaliation, Felix has hired Vincent to kill all five key witnesses. Pedrosa assembles a force to secure witness Lim and converges on the crowded nightclub simultaneously with Vincent, who in turn is being followed by Felix's men. Vincent manages to execute all of Lim's guards, Felix's hitmen and Lim himself, before exiting the club amidst the chaos. Fanning rescues Max and smuggles him outside, but is killed by Vincent, who beckons Max back into the cab. Following their getaway, the two get into an argument over their lives and Fanning's murder. Max snaps, speeds through the empty streets and deliberately crashes the cab. Vincent takes off on foot before a policeman arrives at the wreck and notices the corpse in the trunk.

Max spots Annie's profile on the cab computer and realizes she is Vincent's final target. He overpowers the policeman and takes Vincent's gun before running to Annie's building and her office. He tries to phone her as the signal cuts off, but manages to get into her office and saves her by shooting Vincent, allowing them to escape. Max and Annie board a metro rail train with Vincent in pursuit. Boxed in and left with no other option, Max makes his last stand. Firing blindly as the train lights flicker, Max mortally wounds Vincent in a shootout while emerging unscathed. Vincent slumps into a seat and dies as he repeats an anecdote heard earlier about a man who died on a train and went unnoticed for six hours. Max and Annie then get off at the next station, in the dawn of a new day.

Cast

Production

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When he was 17, Australian writer Stuart Beattie took a cab home from Sydney airport, and had the idea of a homicidal maniac sitting in the back of a cab with the driver nonchalantly conversing with him, trusting his passenger implicitly. Beattie drafted his idea into a two-page treatment entitled "The Last Domino," then later began writing the screenplay. The original story centered around an African-American female cop who witnesses a hit, and the romance between the cab driver and his then librarian girlfriend. The film has limited resemblance to the original treatment.

Beattie was waiting tables when he ran into friend Julie Richardson, whom he had met on a UCLA Screenwriting Extension course. Richardson had become a producer, and was searching for projects for Edge City, Frank Darabont, Rob Fried and Chuck Russell's company created to make low budget genre movies for HBO. Beattie later pitched her his idea of "The Last Domino." Richardson pitched the idea to Frank Darabont, who brought the team in for a meeting, including Beattie, and set up the project under Edge City. After two drafts, HBO passed on the project. At a general meeting at DreamWorks, with executive Marc Haimes, Beattie mentioned the script. Marc Haimes immediately contacted Richardson, read the script overnight, and DreamWorks put in an offer the following day.

Collateral sat on DreamWorks' development books for three years. Mimi Leder was initially attached to direct, it then passed on to Janusz Kamiński. It wasn't until Russell Crowe became interested in playing Vincent that the project started generating any heat. Crowe brought Michael Mann on board, but the constant delays meant that Crowe left the project. Mann immediately went to Tom Cruise with the idea of him playing the hitman and Adam Sandler as the cabbie.

Beattie wanted the studio to cast Robert De Niro as Max (once again making him a taxi driver, though the exact opposite of Travis Bickle). However, the studio refused, insisting they wanted a younger actor in the role.

Mann chose to use the Viper FilmStream High-Definition Camera to film many of Collateral's scenes, the first such use in a major motion picture. There are many scenes in the film where the use of a digital camera is evident, in particular, scenes where the Los Angeles skyline or landscape is visible in the background. One event of note was the filming of the coyotes running across the road; the low-light capability allowed Mann to spontaneously film the animals that just happened to pass, without having to set up lighting for the shot. Mann had previously used the format for portions of Ali and for his CBS drama Robbery Homicide Division and would later employ the same camera for the filming of Miami Vice.^[2] The sequence in the nightclub was shot in 35 mm.

The film was co-produced by DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures. The former studio would handle North American rights, while the latter held international rights. Upon Paramount's purchase of DreamWorks in 2006, they also acquired the United States/Canadian rights. Paramount Home Entertainment released the film on Blu-ray on March 30, 2010 (the first Region 1 video release that they distributed, previous releases were distributed by Universal Studios).

Music

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Collateral soundtrack was released on August 3, 2004 by Hip-O Records.

Track listing

The soundtrack also features the song "Iguazú" written by Gustavo Santaolalla.

Reception

Critical response

The film received positive reviews, with particular praise going to Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx's performances. On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 86% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 224 reviews.^[3] On Metacritic, the film had an average score of 71 out of 100, based on 41 reviews. Tom Cruise went on to garner critical acclaim, while Foxx got several award nominations.^[4]

Box office

The film opened on August 6, 2004, in 3,188 theaters in the United States and Canada and grossed approximately $24.7 million on its opening weekend, ranking #1 at the box office.^[5] It remained in theaters for 14 weeks and eventually grossed $101,005,703 in the U.S. and Canada. In other countries it grossed a total of $116,758,588 for a total worldwide gross of $217,764,291.^[1]

Richard Roeper placed Collateral as his 10th favorite film of 2004. The film was voted as the 9th best film set in Los Angeles in the last 25 years by a group of Los Angeles Times writers and editors with two criteria: "The movie had to communicate some inherent truth about the L.A. experience, and only one film per director was allowed on the list".^[6]

Accolades

2005 ASCAP Film and Television Music Awards

• Won – Top Box Office Film — James Newton Howard and Antonio Pinto

2005 Academy Awards

• Nominated – Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role — Jamie Foxx
• Nominated – Best Editing — Jim Miller and Paul Rubell

2005 Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films (Saturn Awards)

• Nominated – Best Actor — Tom Cruise
• Nominated – Best Director — Michael Mann
• Nominated – Best Action/Adventure/Thriller Film
• Nominated – Best Writing — Stuart Beattie

2005 American Society of Cinematographers

• Nominated – Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography in Theatrical Releases — Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron

2005 Art Directors Guild

• Nominated – Feature Film – Contemporary Film — David Wasco, Daniel T. Dorrance, Aran Mann, Gerald Sullivan and Christopher Tandon

2005 BAFTA Film Awards

• Won – Best Cinematography — Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron
• Nominated – Best Actor in a Supporting Role — Jamie Foxx
• Nominated – David Lean Award for Direction — Michael Mann
• Nominated – Best Editing — Jim Miller and Paul Rubell
• Nominated – Best Screenplay (Original) — Stuart Beattie
• Nominated – Best Sound — Elliott Koretz, Lee Orloff, Michael Minkler and Myron Nettinga

2005 Black Reel Awards

• Won – Best Supporting Actor — Jamie Foxx
• Nominated – Best Supporting Actress — Jada Pinkett Smith

2005 Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards

• Nominated – Best Supporting Actor — Jamie Foxx
• Nominated – Best Picture

2005 Golden Globe Awards

• Nominated – Best Supporting Actor — Jamie Foxx

2005 MTV Movie Award

• Nominated – Best Villain — Tom Cruise

References

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Collateral.

• Collateral at IMDb
• Collateral at AllMovie
• Collateral at Rotten Tomatoes
• Collateral at Metacritic
• Collateral at Box Office Mojo
• Sight and Sound Interview with Michael Mann