In 1982, the designer and critic Michael Sorkin wrote of Los Angeles: “LA is probably the most mediated town in America, nearly unviewable save through the fictive scrim of its mythologisers.” The myth has taken many forms: a cultured place of opulence under Hispanic rule; the land of plenty glimpsed by early settlers; the city that tempted the nascent movie business to leave the east coast of the United States for the perfect light and climate of the west.
For Orson Welles, LA was “a bright, guilty place”. For Tom Cruise, in the character of Vincent in Michael Mann’s new film, it is “sprawled out and disconnected”.
Mann is the pre-eminent mythologiser of contemporary LA, the man who brought Welles’s bright, guilty vision to life in Heat, where the shoot-outs were as bloated as the egos of the protagonists. Collateral, his latest, is big news. Tom Cruise’s smiling face stared out of almost every major US film magazine in the run-up to its release, with much being made of Tom going grey, and playing a baddie.
Entertaining as that might be, it misses the point about Collateral. Among the big summer releases in the US, it is in a class of its own: measured, polished, the product of a combination of a major studio and major talent that — for once — means something.
Mann, who was born in Chicago but studied at the London Film School, made his name with the television series Miami Vice and the film Manhunter, an early version of the Hannibal Lecter story. He really made his mark in a creative burst that started in 1992, when he directed The Last of the Mohicans, followed by Heat, The Insider and Ali.
Now he has returned to the scene of Heat, this time with a different crime — exit bank robbers, enter assassin — and a different feel for the city. In Collateral, the clear daylight of Heat is replaced by the soft luminosity of the LA night.
“I wanted to see the colour of night in LA the way that it really is,” Mann says. A neat, intense figure, he talks about the look of his latest film with an almost detached passion. “Our eyes adapt, we start to see things as grey and white that aren’t grey and white. In this film, the lights are all apricot, because all the streetlights here are sodium vapour. That really is the colour of LA.”
Collateral takes place over the course of one night. Vincent, a hit man, arrives in the city to execute five killings before hopping on a plane at 6.30am the next morning; his mode of transport is a taxi driven by Max, played by Jamie Foxx. Vincent and Max are Mann archetypes, cool, calm professionals. While Max can calculate a journey time to the minute, Vincent controls all he surveys, including Max. But once the first killing goes awry — the uncooperative corpse crashes out of a window to land on the roof of the waiting taxi — Vincent’s world starts to unravel.
Mann sets his vision of LA on the roads that sketch an endless grid across the city. Far from sticking to the beautiful cool of the chrome and glass skyscrapers of corporate downtown, he also makes use of the other LA: the seedy streets of Koreatown, the gaudy new money of the Latino neighbourhood of Pico Rivera, the forgotten areas of the south where the belching chimneys of old industry struggle to find a place in the new economy.
Mann uses the location to frame the fragmentation of the forced relationship between Vincent and Max. “I wanted to serve notice way up in front of the film that there’s something confrontationally direct coming. And I wanted to get intimacy that doesn’t belong. So I set it off against the most oppositional environment I could imagine, the most impersonal, unpopulated industrial landscape I could find, the vacant parts of the Wilmington oil fields and refineries.
“All the locations I picked were the product of some kind of story analysis,” he adds. “Nothing’s by accident.” Coming from Mann, an obsessive at the top of his game, this is not a surprise. Collateral is a tight film, every frame telling us something that we need to know.
Mann has moved to a digital camera for Collateral. Unexpectedly, he elicits an almost painterly effect from it. The freeways have the texture of pale brown canvases; the tones of the night sky are otherworldly. The journey through Koreatown, which Max appears unlikely to survive, is, Mann tells me, “a final journey through night in which a man has truly lost his own head space. It’s a moment when a guy is going to enter into some kind of a fatal conflict, and he’s thinking his own thoughts, and hence the drive evolves in neon.”
While Mann’s visual lyricism can burn on to your retinas, his use of sound, music and noise, can make your head throb. In one climactic scene, set high in a skyscraper, a tense chase played out to a pounding beat is interrupted by the serene swoop of a police helicopter passing through the vertiginous towers. The visual jar of the moment is emphasised by a sudden switch to a single, near-silent, sustained high note.
“That was an accident,” Mann says. “We were shooting out of the window and someone says, ‘There’s a helicopter.’ I said, ‘Grab that shot,’ and we grabbed the helicopter going by. With video you can shoot everything any time, almost.
“The thing that was interesting to me, and determined a lot of strategy about the music, is that I was making an entire motion picture out of only the third act. This is the denouement: the finale is at the very beginning of the movie and that’s it.
That, he says, has an effect on the musical and visual rhythm of the film. “Each scene is two or three times its normal size. The conflict in the club is nine minutes long. Every molecule of the film is stretched. I wanted to do a film like this before I even got the Collateral script, a film where events would be seen through a microscope. It’s a miniature, seen large, seen close up.”
Collateral‘s denouement takes place on that most un-LA of things, the public transportation system, specifically the metro lines that serve the less fashionable parts of town. But even that held delights for Mann. “We were on the green line, on the blue line. They’re fabulous, they’re gorgeous. In the station that we ended in, there are fantasised outer-space dioramas embedded in the walls. It is just phenomenal. Some of the best public architecture around. And the trains are great to ride on.”
As Graham Clark noted in his 1988 book The American City, LA is “always hovering on the edge of significance”. But Mann reminds me of one of Vincent’s speeches from the film, heavy with “meaningless cosmos rhetoric” — or, as Max describes it, “Twilight Zone shit”. “The lights of a million stars, millions of galaxies of hundreds of millions of stars, in a speck on one in the blink of time … that’s us, lost in space, who knows, it’s all fucking meaningless.”