“One Day You’ll Wake Up and You’ll Discover It Never Happened:” Collateral and Michael Mann’s Digital Existentialism

In honor of its 20th anniversary this month, Chris Forrester dives into the Michael Mann thriller Collateral, the first film to really foreground the digital style that has defined the filmmaker’s career since.

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While for the majority of filmgoers, the transition from film to digital might have meant little more than the capacity to see Avatar (Cameron, 2009) in eye-popping 3D or the dawn of an age when popular cinema looks as textured and appealing as wet cement, the turn of the millennium was a small revolution for the medium — the most major shift in its technologies and their potential formal applications since the advent of sound or color. As the Hollywood mainstream was leveraging digital cinema’s potential for effects extravaganzas like Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (Lucas, 2002) and King Kong (Jackson, 2005), a cohort of international filmmakers was braving the new frontier of digital filmmaking’s visual and technical potential in search of a new kind of cinema. Among them were Agnès Varda (The Gleaners and I, 2000), Lars von Trier (Dancer in the Dark, 2000), Spike Lee (Bamboozled, 2000), Pedro Costa (In Vanda’s Room, 2000), David Lynch (Inland Empire, 2006), and, yes, Michael Mann (Collateral, 2004). Fresh off of a two-decade run that alternated three of the finest American crime films ever made with three always interesting but variably successful forays into other narrative modes (supernatural horror, historical epic, legal drama), Michael Mann began his twenty-first century with a pair of films that would come to redefine his cinema and perhaps also the potential of the entire medium: 2001’s Ali and 2004’s Collateral, which turns 20 years old this month.

The films that defined this watershed moment in film auteurism are a variable bunch, spanning genre, scope, scale, and even the bounds between fact and fiction, but a few recurring characteristics do help unite them as artistically related around their common format. Where prior, shooting on film had been an artistic default by virtue of being the only option and after, digital would come to occupy much the same function (a default, if not the only option), here the (im)materiality of the thing was a key focal point, and the more inspired filmmakers working digitally displayed a degree of interest in the aesthetic qualities and potentials of their cinema. Films like Colossal Youth (Costa, 2006) and Inland Empire mine a quality of surreality from the muddy, lo-fi look of digital video, while Spike Lee and Michael Mann’s turn-of-the-millennium exercises in multiformat filmmaking contrast that smeariness against the vivid texture of celluloid. Early digital cameras were significantly smaller, more portable, and better able to shoot mass quantities of footage without substantial cost than their film-based counterparts, and so for filmmakers like Varda and Costa, new avenues in artistic process and relationships to subject emerged, while for von Trier and Mann, the digital camera’s mobility conjured new possibility for image-making and shot planning. In Cachè (2005) and New Rose Hotel (1998), Michael Haneke and Abel Ferrara use the visual qualities of the digital image to comment on surveillance. 

For Michael Mann, whose cinema had long married a diligent, journalistic narrative basis with romantic formalisms that abstract reality into vibrant genre expression, the advent of digital cinema offered profound new horizons, his first steps toward which came in a smattering of bravura images of Ali, largely shot in velvety 35mm but occasionally punctuated by grainy nighttime video whose textural singularities seem to be beckoning their director toward the future in real time. Of particular note here are the same qualities that would come to define Mann’s 2000s-and-onwards digital filmmaking: the camera’s mobility (as in an early nighttime tracking shot), the camera’s depth of field and hazy beauty (which add a strange romance to the love scene between Muhammad and Sonji), and its propensity for capturing low-light environments with a vivid naturalism (emblematized in a nighttime roof shot, and then exploded into a career-defining visual motif in each subsequent Mann film).

Collateral, then, is Mann’s big step into the future, the film with which he fully embraced a new kind of image-making and its potential to not only complement his existing stylistic palette but redefine his entire approach as a filmmaker. The script is efficient, if conceptually forgettable (a paper equivalent of its writer, whose big break at this point was a story credit for DIsney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl): a run-all-night action thriller about a driven dreamer of a cabbie (Jamie Foxx) who picks up a hitman (Tom Cruise, cast semi-interestingly against type) and is forced to shuttle him through the Los Angeles night from target to target. Even for Mann, whose typical mode of operation is to elevate material of sometimes less-than-substantial quality (Manhunter, The Keep) by virtue of God-given talent as a stylist, Collateral’s screenplay is a bare-bones basis across which Mann maps the contours of a new style.

Using the capacity of digital video to capture night time footage with minimal (if any) lighting schemes, Mann shoots Collateral with a defined sense of adventurousness — if the practicality of easier, and more realistic, night shoots is the basic motivator for working digitally, then he proves himself open to the aesthetic possibilities it invites and apt to wield them for all their expressive power. Collateral is defined by the look and feel of urban nighttime, an environment that here appears decidedly uncinematic — or nontraditionally cinematic — in thrilling ways: cars whiz by on the freeways, lit by one another’s headlights; clouds become hazy brushstrokes of orange against a starless, light-polluted sky; the inky black of night is replaced by the dim glow of a thousand streetlight bulbs; digital noise becomes a new kind of film grain; the camera swoops and glides around its subjects with unexpected ease, capturing them amidst their surroundings in gorgeous deep focus compositions. The effect is one of strange immediacy, created by the comparatively realistic look of digital cinematography over celluloid’s chemical beauty and compounded by Mann’s romantic formalisms.

In addition to a different mode of capturing images, the digital camera is smaller, more mobile, able to record substantially more video at a fraction of the cost of celluloid, and so offers the perfect tool for experimentation: new capacities and plenty of room for error. By 2004, many filmmakers had begun to test its waters, but the particular thrill of Collateral is beholding a $65-million film that looks and moves unlike any before it. Alongside his cinematographer Dion Beebe (whose singular eye for urban textures was on display in the year prior’s In the Cut), Mann began to develop a language of swooning romance and digital abstraction ecstatically unlike that of comparably budgeted blockbusters, punctuating his trademark brand of zen pulp thrillers with ravishing formal grace notes.

And moreover, this mode of digital abstraction is, for Mann, a perfect harmonization of style and image. Mann’s approach is one defined equally by rigorous research and vivid stylization — in Thief (1981) and Heat (1995) it’s the studied portrait of jewel burglars and career criminals reshaped into emotionally expressive genre cinema by synth scores and spry camerawork, and in The Insider (1999) and Ali the biographical basis made visually singular by increasingly stylized images and subjective editing styles — and in Collateral the very image becomes an embodiment of it. As with Mann’s diligently factual narrative bases, the comparative realness of digital video to its celluloid counterparts is similarly reshaped by his approach into stylish impressionism. Night, particularly (a recurring figure in Mann’s crime films), represents this well: even as his digital cinematography captures nocturnal Los Angeles with vivid realism, Mann and Beebe leverage that realism more for interesting visual texture than straightforward veracity.

As much as it’s a film about a cabbie held hostage by a silver-haired gunman, Collateral is also a (magnificent) film about the camera and its relationship to scope and subject. Here, in the midst of a genre generally ripe for journeymen and poets alike, is a film that feels nearly avant-garde in its visual approach, whose language morphs action and thrills into sensorial brushstrokes and wields the digital camera as a new tool in the filmmaker’s arsenal rather than a replacement or alternative to celluloid. Mann would follow Collateral with three increasingly formalist digital works — Miami Vice (2006), Public Enemies (2009), Blackhat (2016) — that continued to push his style toward sensual, existential, and even romantic extremes, experimenting further with digital noise, camera proximity and movement, and eventually completing the third of them entirely digitally. Where a number of other filmmakers who initially turned to digital filmmaking for its unique textures and experimental potential eventually embraced it more straightforwardly, Mann’s cinema continued to probe its singular potential (to increasingly polarizing ends). For all the fame of his towering crime epics, Heat and Thief particularly, Mann’s work in digital filmmaking seems in hindsight like his greatest triumph: a contribution less to any specific genre than to cinema as a whole.