Collateral Information

Collateral is a 2004 American crime thriller film directed by Michael Mann from a screenplay written by Stuart Beattie, and starring Tom Cruise as a contract killer and Jamie Foxx as a taxi driver who finds himself his hostage. The film is set in Los Angeles, California, and the supporting cast includes Jada Pinkett Smith and Mark Ruffalo. Foxx and Cruise's performances were widely praised, with Foxx being nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Plot

In January 2004, 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, LAPD 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 a bitter argument over their lives and Fanning's murder. Max openly calls out Vincent for being a sociopath, while Vincent derides Max for being too passive with his life. 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

• Tom Cruise as Vincent, a former special operator and professional hitman hired by middlemen to kill four witnesses and a prosecutor. Russell Crowe was considered for the role.
• Jamie Foxx as Max Durocher, a taxi driver whom Vincent employs to drive him to the locations of the hits. Adam Sandler was considered for the role.
• Jada Pinkett Smith as Annie Farrell, the lawyer prosecuting Felix Reyes-Torrena.
• Mark Ruffalo as Ray Fanning, an LAPD detective on the tail of Vincent and Max.
• Peter Berg as Richard Weidner, Fanning's partner.
• Bruce McGill as Frank Pedrosa, an FBI agent staking out Felix Reyes-Torrena's club.
• Irma P. Hall as Ida Durocher, Max's mother.
• Barry Shabaka Henley as Daniel Baker, a jazz club owner and one of the witnesses.
• Richard T. Jones as traffic cop #1
• Klea Scott as Zee, one of Pedrosa's team members.
• Bodhi Elfman as young professional man
• Debi Mazar as young professional woman
• Javier Bardem as Felix Reyes-Torrena, a Mexican cartel drug lord who hires Vincent
• Emilio Rivera as Paco, one of Felix's bodyguards and hitmen.
• Jamie McBride as traffic cop #2
• Thomas Rosales, Jr. as Ramon Ayala, a low-level player in the exotic substances business and one of the witnesses.
• Inmo as Peter Lim, the owner of the club Fever and one of the witnesses.
• Jason Statham as airport man
• Angelo Tiffe as Sylvester Clarke, a former criminal attorney who represented Ramone and one of the witnesses.

Production

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 Kami"?ski. 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 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. The sequence in the nightclub was shot in 35 mm.

Music

The 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. 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 received several award nominations. 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".

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. 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.

Awards

Awards
Award	Category	Recipient(s)	Outcome
Academy Awards	Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor	Jamie Foxx
	Academy Award for Best Film Editing	Jim Miller and Paul Rubell
ASCAP Film and Television Music Awards	Top Box Office Film	James Newton Howard and Antonio Pinto
American Society of Cinematographers	Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography in Theatrical Releases	Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron
Art Directors Guild	Feature Film " Contemporary Film	David Wasco, Daniel T. Dorrance, Aran Mann, Gerald Sullivan and Christopher Tandon
BAFTA Award	Best Cinematography	Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron
	Best Actor in a Supporting Role	Jamie Foxx
	David Lean Award for Direction	Michael Mann
	Best Editing	Jim Miller and Paul Rubell
	Best Original Screenplay	Stuart Beattie
	Best Sound	Elliott Koretz, Lee Orloff, Michael Minkler and Myron Nettinga
Broadcast Film Critics Association	Best Supporting Actor	Jamie Foxx
	Best Film	-
Black Reel Awards	Best Supporting Actor	Jamie Foxx
	Best Supporting Actress	Jada Pinkett Smith
Golden Globe Awards	Best Supporting Actor	Jamie Foxx
MTV Movie Awards	Best Villain	Tom Cruise
Saturn Award	Best Actor	Tom Cruise
	Best Director	Michael Mann
	Best Action or Adventure Film	-
	Best Writing	Stuart Beattie