Night vision

By Steven Rosen

Los Angeles - Although it isn't featured on the somberly urgent, pulsating score, the theme song for Michael Mann's new film, "Collateral," could be "I Love L.A."

But not the L.A. of sun-drenched dreamers, Beach Boys songs, and movie-star blonds that Randy Newman affectionately and immortally sang about. "Collateral," set entirely in the City of Angels, captures a far different place.

It's a big metropolis with a high-rise downtown skyline that lights up the night for miles and miles. But those lights - a veritable urban aurora borealis - illuminate the dense clutter, gritty architecture and piled-high signage of the surrounding neighborhoods.

And in those neighborhoods, as the night deepens, the streets and alleyways can be eerily quiet, while the ethnic nightclubs and hospitals are their own busy little worlds.

Sunny Malibu it's not - although there are some quick glimpses of palm trees in this film. But Mann finds his L.A. just as fascinating nonetheless. "It's an underused city, underused in film dramas," he says, speaking in a hotel room here with the quick, slightly jaded nonchalance of a man who resists analyzing what comes instinctively to him. "There are many fascinating things about Los Angeles - places and areas to shoot (films) in that people haven't shot at. It's got a lot of great places to discover."

At 61, the gray-haired Mann looks like a conservative and slightly imperious professional - maybe a doctor peering over his gold-rimmed spectacles to read your lab reports. He is clad in a black shirt and gray slacks, making him appear all the more cautious.

Yet Mann has been a risk-taker ever since his "Miami Vice" TV series defined modern Miami and changed television with its flashy, fast cuts and incessant rock soundtrack. As a filmmaker, he has ranged widely - from "Thief," his debut set in the contemporary Chicago underworld, to "Last of the Mohicans," an 18th-century adventure tale.

But he has especially excelled at tough, contemporary stories about men in conflict, "Manhunter," "Heat," "The Insider" and "Ali." And he can do violence with brutal realism, as "Collateral" shows.

It turns out he is, too, a risk-taker in his attitudes about L.A. He knows the city - its northern-Mexican discos, Vietnamese markets and black barber shops - far better than most Angelenos. And he wanted to show that city in a different way than he did in "Heat."

"Collateral" is his chance. Unfolding within a single night, the movie features Tom Cruise as a ruthless yet philosophical contract killer who hijacks Jamie Foxx's cab.

"I knew I wanted to shoot a movie at night - an intense drama happening in a short time frame - in Los Angeles," he says. "I was actually looking for a screenplay that would allow me to do that. There were two, and 'Collateral' was the better of the two."

Screenwriter Stuart Beattie, who previously had written "Joey," about a boy's friendship with a kangaroo, originally had set "Collateral" in New York. But Mann changed it to L.A. "It turned me on," he said of making that geographic switch.

Perhaps because he grew up in Chicago, home to architecture for the ages by giants like Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, Mann has an eye for what makes cities different. In "Collateral's" production notes, he comments that L.A. is where "coyotes roam the streets as if the layer of civilization is new and temporary."

To underscore that message, there's a moment in the film where Max stops his cab as a coyote passes by. Also, some of the people in "Collateral" - like the thugs who try to rob Foxx while he's tied to his steering wheel - are feral creatures in their own right. And Cruise's gray-haired, stubble-whiskered killer is a form of animal, himself - although an exceedingly handsome and dapper one.

Perhaps what's newest about "Collateral's" vision of L.A. is that it sees downtown as a towering presence with a dominating verticality - a place where people work and live. "I think it's a relatively new phenomenon that there's a lot of stuff down there," Mann says of downtown L.A.

When seen in the distance in "Collateral," L.A.'s brilliant night lights recall Manhattan or Paris. Mann uses breathtaking aerial shots to highlight that view. Most striking is a shot of a struggling Cruise and Foxx sprawled horizontally on a freeway's pedestrian overpass as the city shines behind them.

To capture that, Mann and his cinematographers Dion Beebe ("Chicago") and Paul Cameron ("Man on Fire") shot roughly 80 percent of the movie on a specially modified high-definition digital-video camera. (It has been transferred to film for theatrical projection.)

"You could not record it on motion-picture film - it would not be there," Mann explains of the city as he sees it. "I doubt I'd have made this movie if there wasn't digital, because there would be nothing to photograph. I'd have a bunch of darkness outside the windows of the cab, instead of this mobile landscape moving around.

"And every time I shot the distance, the best I'd have gotten would be defocused circles of color or something," he says. "You wouldn't have seen anything. You wouldn't have seen with clarity and focus all these buildings of downtown from 2 miles away."

Mann says the city speaks to him in "emotional Technicolor" when he looks around and sees the layers upon layers of development. "That means I'm looking at it and saying, 'I could use that' to make an audience feel a certain way," he says.

"I don't know if it is or isn't appealing - it's stuff that's thematic," he says. "Listen, it's the language of images. To make a motion picture, I have people moving through a world and I manipulate the space they're moving through to modify how you feel about them and feel about the space.

"I'm a maker of scenes."

(This story originally ran in the Denver Post on 8/8/04)