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I start with a question, as a filmmaker and a storyteller,
how should this story tell itself?
Because there's different strategies that are available.
And what attracted me to Stuart Beattie's screenplay
was the notion that it all happens in a very short time frame,
meaning that it's like the third act of a traditional drama
and you're making a whole motion picture about only the third act.
Yeah, I'm fine, mate. Don't worry about it.
One of the big reasons I wanted to make the film
was that we're seeing fractions, or fractals...
We're seeing a fraction that represents the whole,
and only what you need to know is what you're seeing.
And it doesn't go backward in time
or give you exposition about other parts of their lives.
They don't really talk about themselves that much.
So, in the beginning, I wanted to enter this scene,
or enter these activities, with kind of a torn edge.
So we just see Vincent in LAX.
We hear a plane land, Vincent's in LAX.
He meets somebody who's foreign,
and that's all you need to know is that he's foreign.
He's got a South London, working-class accent.
This accidental bumping into each other, you realize,
if I've done my job correctly, is not really accidental.
It's premeditated, and a briefcase has been exchanged,
so that whatever it is that Vincent's here to do,
you know only the few things you need to know,
which is that there was a premeditated plan to it,
it's secretive, and it involves people from foreign places.
And then we enter the domain of Max, but we don't know what it is.
First, there's abstract pieces of things, and then we realize
those abstract pieces of things are, in fact, cars,
and that the cars are cabs and that there's drivers waiting to go on a shift.
And what I'm trying to direct the attention to
is that Max is very obsessive about making this environment
of the interior of his cab clean and perfect.
And that he has a picture that has some significance to him,
'cause he very carefully mounts it on his visor,
and that he closes out chaos, makes chaos go away.
This mural that we put outside the cab
comes from Estrada Courts, which is in East LA,
and there's a spectacular tradition in Los Angeles of mural painting
that's Hispanic, derives from Mexico.
And this is-- It was painted in '74.
The painter's anonymous, and he never finished it.
The vaquero doesn't have a head,
and for some reason that I can't put my finger on,
it just really felt like it fit into the vision
of here's Max launching out of the cab depot
onto the streets of Los Angeles in late afternoon,
on a shift that probably began about 4:00.
Cab driver described to me as folks who get in the back seat
are kind of like a radio with a random Wonder Bar.
You never know what station you're gonna land on,
and so you never know who's gonna wind up in the back seat.
There's a lot of aerial shots in the picture,
and they're shot with a Wescam mount, which is amazingly steady.
This is a gas station just off the Santa Monica Freeway
after the sun has set,
and the light in LA has this amazing red quality,
red-yellow quality to it.
And the mural of the products for sale in the tienda
is taken off a tienda in East LA.
The fractions of LA and how diverse LA is,
and diverse not in-- I grew up in Chicago.
Not in a Chicago or East Coast or New York way,
but diverse in a Pac-Rim, Hispanic, Los Angeles way
are part of the intent of this, of again, the opening of the film,
Max's world, and the world of Los Angeles.
Now, this guy here, his real name, the actor's name is Manny Urrego,
and he was a limo driver.
In working out every detail,
the most important details of Max's life as a cab driver
and the work we did in preproduction with Jamie,
one of the key things we did was make complete
Max's business plan for having a limo company.
And consequently, Manny provided spreadsheets,
a whole business plan,
complete with depreciation, overheads, salaries.
Annie is played by Jada Pinkett Smith, who I worked with in All'.
When Jada gets in the cab...
This is one of the first sequences we shot,
and we were using the Sony F900 high-definition video camera.
If we were shooting film, you wouldn't see any definition
of the images behind them.
And you wouldn't have this feeling of the low light levels
that make me feel that we're actually in a cab.
The 110 turns into a parking lot around USC.
But once you get to La Brea north of Santa Monica, then it's jammed.
The 110 north of the 10,
you get people driving to Pasadena, and they drive slow.
Yeah, they do, but what I do is I get off on Grand, and then I...
The picture was originally written for New York City.
And my interest in shooting a motion picture that took place at night
in Los Angeles in a compressed period of time
predates my getting my hands on the Collateral script,
which was given to me by Walter Parkes at DreamWorks.
And it's written by Stuart Beattie. It's an excellent script,
but it was written about the Russian Mafia and New York City.
And my interest was immediately to transpose all of that
into not just LA as a location,
but LA with its unique, diverse population.
And the way it seems to be organized,
where there are almost, like, sites or domains...
that you travel to.
The ethnic richness and the sense of place in LA
is not immediately apparent off the freeways.
You have to go to it.
What you were was right. I was wrong.
Max.
And then in putting together the film, again, as the storyteller,
the first thing I'm looking for is, who are these people?
Who is Max? Who is Vincent? Who are these characters?
I do. I used to play in high school.
What's their history? Where did Vincent come from?
How did Vincent get made into the Vincent who shows up in LA,
late afternoon...
on this one day?
Where did Max come from?
Some of the answers to this that, as the director,
that I build in building the characters...
and in working with the actors in preproduction,
and in forming the character of Vincent with Tom
and Max with Jamie had to do with...
their histories, where they came from.
In fact, the backstory of Tom and the film
was that in the offshore world of narco-trafficking cartels...
they have the budgets to buy the best, and they do.
Particularly since the end of the Cold War went on,
that labor market has become available.
People who are ex-KGB, ex-Stasi, as well as Brits and Americans
from Special Forces, Israelis.
And these cartels also have the best of computer technicians,
signal-intercept capabilities to run sophisticated counter-intel,
as well as attorneys and private investigators
to discover if there's any operations against them,
or whether or not there's a Department of Justice investigation
or a DEA investigation
or any indictments pending against them in the United States.
And that's exactly what's happened here.
There's the dark pinstripe suit.
Elegant, not too flashy. That rules out advertising.
The group that's hired Vincent has found out
that there are pending indictments and that an assistant US attorney,
played by Jada, is, in fact, about to indict,
in a grand jury hearing that's supposed to begin tomorrow morning, certain figures.
And they have had private investigators working,
and they've discovered the identities of five key witnesses,
and have spent the last three or four months
working up an operation to kill these witnesses.
And tonight's the night.
Max and Annie, who have just met in this cab,
Max doesn't even know she's a prosecutor yet,
are completely unaware of this.
I wanted to form characters who were absolute strangers to each other
and constituted opposites to each other in every conceivable way that I could,
because they're about to be thrown together into this cab.
One of the big things that appealed to me about this film
is to tell a story the way this story tells itself,
which is that since we're only in these ten hours,
we're only seeing a small fraction of a whole life.
And since we're only in the ten hours, the challenge is,
can I design those fractions so that they become glimpses,
that you kind of sense the person?
To do that, one has to invent the history of Vincent,
the history of Max,
and then choose those details to put into the ten hours of tonight.
The way Max dresses
or the kind of self-deceptive attitude he has when he talks about a limo company.
The film doesn't do what a life experience of these ten hours also would not do,
which is to have exposition or to travel backwards in time
via flashbacks or any of those other devices,
but instead just to keep us immediate into this present,
and yet to have a greater degree of knowingness about their lives.
I think the case sucks,
my exhibits aren't in order, I'm not prepared enough,
people are gonna find out that I don't know...
Max is averse to impulsive action.
He has planned to perfection this business plan,
in which he's gonna set up a limo company. He's been doing it for 12 years.
Now, one of the hardest things for an actor to play is indecision.
That in-between state that means that... That's exactly what Max is.
He's a man who has big dreams and has realized none of them.
So for Jamie to play this,
it means that he must generate the object of Max's desire,
really experience it and feel it,
and then invent what impedes him from actualizing it
so that he exists in that kind of twilight zone
of potential and frustration.
And in this case, it all becomes personified by Annie,
with whom he has this stunning rapport,
as played out by Jada and Jamie right here.
How often?
A dozen times a day.
My favorite spot.
Maldives Island.
It's my own private getaway.
Things get heavy for me, I take five minutes out,
and I just go there.
And I just concentrate on absolutely nothing.
-Here. Take it. -No. Icouldn't do that.
Take it. Because you need it a lot more than I do.
And it'll help you. I guarantee it.
But he can't bring himself to actually ask her out,
and the way Jamie plays it and the way Jada plays it,
I, for one, feel Jamie melt when Jada's eyes look up
at the moment that just passed.
Thanks, Max.
There's this kind of instant regret at his having failed himself.
And then as she's leaving,
she realizes she has no way to ever have contact with this guy again.
She could take cabs in LA for the next 15 years
and might not run into him.
So she responds to her impulse
and she gives him her card, and then the contact is made.
Hey.
Feeling that she's just been in this cab with this man
who has other plans in life beyond driving a cab
but just understood her and was so generous
about giving up something that's his because he recognized she needed it.
And it's kind of the rapport and intimacy
that can be struck up only between strangers,
because you believe there's no consequence,
'cause you're never gonna see each other again,
so you can be open.
Vincent is somebody who is decisive and who's embraced force
as a way of controlling his environment, as a way of--
And I don't think Vincent is actually actively aware of this,
but as a way of controlling the environment
so that bad things don't happen to him.
He, consequently, is somebody who can be improvisational.
He's highly trained, he takes action, he has opinions.
Max is exactly the opposite.
Vincent chooses public transportation, and the thought behind that
is the same thought that's behind Vincent's suit.
It serves two purposes.
One is to be indistinguishable, to be anonymous,
so that if somebody witnesses Vincent...
do an illegal act and are later questioned by the police
and they're trying to describe him, well, he's a guy with gray hair,
kind of average-sized, gray suit, white shirt, there's nothing there.
So that choice is,
in the first instance, simply really good tradecraft,
to be inconspicuous by being anonymous.
And that's one of the reasons that he also picks public transportation.
In his mind, and according to his plan for tonight,
the cab driver who's driving him around
will not, in fact, know what he's doing at each of the stops he has to make.
This is an interesting shot.
I'm gonna digress here because, again,
this is something only possible with high-definition video.
It became a whole strategy about how to see the world
that Vincent and Max are gonna traverse this night.
I viewed the first scene between Max and Vincent in the cab as casting.
Vincent is being provocative intentionally,
saying things about Los Angeles-- nobody knows each other--
To see what Max's reaction is gonna be.
And if Max was aggressively defensive, Vincent might just have changed cabs.
And when Tom and I were working in preproduction,
I thought that it was likely that Vincent, in fact,
had a cab that took him from the airport,
and he didn't like that cab driver for whatever reason,
and so he switched out when he went to reconnoiter Annie's building,
and that Max is, in fact, his second cab of the night.
Vincent would've been one of these guys
who would've been recruited in the private sector.
He probably lives offshore.
He has a domicile that's maybe in Uttahorn Province in Thailand
or Songkhla in Thailand, some place where...
A Buddhist country where people leave everybody else alone a lot.
Max comes from a middle-class family, Ladera Heights in Los Angeles,
and he has a plan, a business plan to set up a limo company,
so that driving a cab is only temporary. It's only a means to an end.
We're about to find out that temporary's been about 12 years.
I'm not in this for the long haul. I'm just filling in, you know.
Just temporary while I'm getting some things shaped up.
This is just temporary.
-How long you been driving? -Twelve years.
Really?
The other aspect about Vincent's appearance is,
again, in building the character
and how to make these two characters be oppositional,
what Vincent's chosen to wear, it tells us things.
I believe that audiences are much brighter than they are aware of.
There's a lot of information they take in on a feeling level.
There's a cut to his suit that says perhaps it was custom-tailored,
but not in Milan or London or New York.
In my mind, it was in Kowloon.
The thing about his hair, the scars on his hands,
scars on his face...
In effect, he's kind of rough trade in a good suit,
prematurely gray, kind of a steely aspect to him.
Those are design issues that are designed to tell us,
tell the audience, tell you things about who he is on a feeling level,
not on anything that is didactic or spoken to you.
It was tricky to arrive to some of these looks
and some of these issues because...
And this was also the challenge of the film
that made it very exciting for me to do it and want to do it,
which is that when you compress the time frame of a narrative,
and it's down to under two hours,
and you're just in one locale for one night,
it also means there's gonna be one suit and one wardrobe change,
so everything becomes inordinately important.
It's kind of like driving a race car,
where a small input in steering has a very radical effect.
So the slightest change, because it's cumulative,
becomes a big deal.
Now, this location is an alley off of... In Pica-Union.
That's Downtown Los Angeles in the background.
It's about two miles away.
You couldn't see this, again, without using digital video.
The building Vincent's walking up in is at 1839 South Union.
When you're working on a film doing preproduction,
you find yourself moving through different neighborhoods
as you're looking for your locations,
and you often times get glimpses into lives and people's residences,
and you see fragments of working folks and their conditions.
And sometimes these fragments can speak about
a whole life or a whole existence that's not really part of the story,
yet it is really part of the environment.
And I find that very powerful,
and sometimes I'll try to build that into the environment
as something that maybe is glimpsed in passing,
and maybe something that we don't take in except on kind of a sensory level.
And so it's a small detail, but the idea of these two guys in this room,
with a line that they run across the room
where they hang their six or seven good shirts
that they brought up from Mexico,
that was a particularly unique facet of something we saw,
and so I reproduced it here.
Oh, no! Shit! Fuck!
The local gang, which is the 18th Street gang,
provided the graffiti which is on the walls here.
Damn it!
My man, you all right?
Shit. Fuck.
Vincent did not expect Ramone to fall out the window.
That's an accident.
His first instinct is to look around him to see if he's picked up any surveillance.
Has anybody... Are the neighbors looking out the window?
Has somebody dialed 911? Are the police coming in?
You killed him?
No, Ishot him. Bullets and the fall killed him.
And this is ironic here.
Fuck this, man.
-Red light, Max. -Hold on.
And Tom's ironic timing, I think, is both subtle and masterful.
And in analyzing it, how irony is achieved
is by Tom playing it as if he's as oblivious
to what's self-evident as Max is.
Max says, "You killed him." Tom's response is,
"No, I shot him. The bullets and the fall killed him."
And I'm an admirer of Billy Wilder, who used irony a lot,
kind of a Berliner wit from Weimar.
And so I spent a lot of time studying Cary Grant's work in From' Page
in preparation for Vincent's use of irony, his droll wit, and his facile nihilism.
And so there's a kind of homage to Billy Wilder
way back in the preparation I did
for these aspects of Tom's character, and then Tom just nails it.
Jamie's comedic timing is spectacular just as it was in the last scene.
He doesn't need any help from anybody.
But I think underlying that is actually his native talent as an actor.
Hey, why don't you just take the cab?
-Take the cab? -Yeah, you take it.
I'll chill. I'll just chill.
They don't even know who's driving these things half the time anyway.
They never check or anything. Okay? So just take it.
You, me. ..
-You promise not to tell anybody, right? -Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Jamie trained not as a comedian, he trained as a musician.
And then when he wasn't getting work as a musician,
he saw people getting work doing stand-up comedy,
so he acted like a stand-up comic.
Whatever the origins were, his timing and gestures
and attitude and hesitation and stuttering...
Just experiencing it, it's great,
and if you look at it analytically, it all hits in a certain perfect rhythm.
Here's Mark Ruffalo, the fine, fine actor, playing Fanning
to a piece of score by Tom Rothrock called "Ro||in' and Crumblin',"
kind of a blues concréte thing.
I had Ruffalo spend a lot of time with a guy named Q,
who's an undercover narc in LA.
And we borrowed liberally from Q's appearance,
in the way he holsters his gun and the way he has these little clips
that hold the magazines on his belt, designed to be--
If you just look at him, you don't realize he's carrying.
And if you saw Q, you would never guess that he was, in fact, a detective
by both his carriage and attitude, as well as by his appearance.
Ramona.
This apartment is in, really, the same building,
and the decor in this apartment is, in fact, what's there in real life.
It was one of those places where you happen upon it
and it's so evocative of a mood,
of a kind of working-class Hispanic apartment
in this section of the city.
It's so representative of that,
that other than putting in a big-screen television,
we changed nothing.
So the fish tank, and on the opposite wall that we're looking at right now,
this backlit, strange aqua art object of a ship is also...
Belongs to the guys, two guys, who actually live here.
What this launches is the sub-story of a quest by Fanning,
who has very solid procedure, an unorthodox appearance
belying a very orthodox and sound procedure.
And it's gonna lead Fanning to be the only man who's gonna realize that,
A, witnesses are being killed
and B, that Vincent is not in fact, Max, but in fact is Vincent.
He'll be the sole person who has what happened here correctly
as the events of the night unfold.
We're now entering a long scene, and what's interesting to...
What may or may not be interesting to people who aspire to direct
or want to know how films are made is that...
for myself, I have to know exactly what a scene is trying to do,
and I believe that I should be able to distill that
into one simple set of words called "the action."
And in this case, it's, "What is Vincent doing?
What does Vincent want?"
And it usually has to be expressed in the infinitive,
and it is that Vincent...
It is "to manage." Vincent needs to manage Max.
Why?
No, no, no. Hold on, man.
Now, there's many other layers
and many other things that are happening here.
Max has just experienced a dead body.
He's never seen this kind of violence before.
If there was an adrenaline rush that kept him functioning in the alley,
now that he's driving, the adrenaline's worn off.
He's on the precipice of falling into shock
or going into a fugue state.
I mean it'. / mean it'.
I'm not up for this.
-Okay, you're stressed. -Yes, I am.
You're stressed. I understand that.
Now, you just keep breathing and eta y calm.
So one of the things he's doing
is throwing out some really provocative thoughts
that are also part of Vincent's themes,
but nevertheless, they're being used to provoke Max.
And that's keeping Max sharp.
Vincent's saying that, "What difference does it make if one fat guy falls?
There's six billion people on the planet, Max, what are you worried about?"
We're into plan B. You still breathing?
We gotta make the best of it. Improvise. Adapt to the environment.
Darwin. Shit happens. I Ching. Whatever, man. We gotta r0// with it.
I Ching. What are you talking about, man? You threw a man out of a window.
I didn't throw him. He fell.
Well, what did he do to you?
What?
He's giving him justifications using everything from social Darwinism
to the lCh/ng to advise Max in a therapeutic way,
how Max ought to think about the events that have just happened.
And Max is confounded.
By being confounded, he's also preoccupied.
And, in fact, he is still driving
'cause Vincent, from his point of view, has a number of jobs to do.
He's got to watch out for... See if they picked up surveillance.
So you'll see him throw looks from time to time out the side of the car.
Secondly, he's working on his PC, because he has to go to target number two.
And number three, he's got to keep Max functioning.
I off one fat Angeleno, and you throw a hissy fit.
Man, I don't know any Rwandans.
You don't know the guy in the trunk either.
Man.
Okay, if it makes you feel any better, he was a criminal
involved in a continuing criminal enterprise.
And what he does next is put Max into this impossible situation,
that Max has to talk his way out of a ticket,
or Vincent is gonna kill both of these two cops.
- Gel rid of them. -How?
You're a cabbie. Talk yourself out of a ticket.
Just, please, man, don't do anything.
Then don't let me get cornered. You don't have the trunk space.
The officer on the left is played by Jamie McBride,
who is, in fact, an actual LAPD officer.
He's ex-CRASH unit.
I've used him as an actor before in Robbeq/ Homicide Division.
And the actor on the right is an extremely fine actor
named Richard T. Jones who's a regular on Judging Amy,
which stars Amy Brenneman, who I worked with in Heal'.
But getting back to Jamie McBride,
it's really interesting for a director to work with people
who have some native ability to act.
The most difficult thing for them to do, by the way,
is to play a character that's close to them in life.
It's much more easy, for example, for Jamie McBride
to be playing a villain than for him to be playing a cop.
But in working with them, it would be a mistake for me
to expect them to have the kind of technique
that comes from years and years of training.
As a director, I have to find the means,
maybe through subtle suggestion or whatever,
to help Jamie McBride lose himself in the moment of what he's doing,
because it'll be really good and spontaneous only the one time.
And what Jamie McBride is doing here is not playing, he's doing.
And even though it's something as routine as a traffic stop,
nevertheless, there's a 120-man film crew all around Jamie McBride,
and for him to be unselfconscious about that process is the objective.
And to just do what he, in fact, does at a normal traffic stop.
You can see how good Richard T. Jones is there.
I've had people ask me if both these guys were, in fact, real LAPD.
Get out the cab. Open the trunk. Come on.
Step out. You, too, sir. Please.
This is Rampart Division dispatch. Shots fired at 83rd and Hoover.
All available Precinct 26 units respond. Over.
-Hey, partner, we gotta roll. -Roger. En route.
Go straight to the garage. Have a nice night, sir.
There's a certain fatalistic attitude that Jamie has as he sits back in the cab,
as if he's just been condemned
to get back behind the wheel and be in his seat and ride this cab.
This is an alley right off of Wilshire Boulevard
on the edge of Koreatown.
A lot of Max's character is built around this inability to confront
and the evasion and avoidance of doing what, in fact, he wants to do.
And that's when there's... We have the impulses to do things in life.
We want to do things.
We enact them or chart a course that takes us to a certain outcome,
a certain goal.
And Max has these things, and he has a lot of latent power as an individual.
But it all exists behind a wall of repression that he can't break through.
That's Lenny. Just dispatch.
And one of the interesting constructions of the picture,
viewed as the big picture,
is the collision of these two guys in this situation...
Don't blow it.
Yeah, Lenny, what's up? It's me.
...in which, at the end,
Vincent actually becomes an agent for the liberation, in a way, of Max
and enables Max to manifest his individuality and, in fact, act.
Do I care what, where or why? You're paying.
It was an accident. You're not liable.
It was an accident. I'm not liable.
And reciprocally, Max, towards the end of the film,
provides us and Vincent with an illumination into Vincent.
There's a moment in time, later in the film,
when Max sees beyond the end of Vincent's gun
and sees Vincent for who Vincent is, which is damaged goods.
And at that point in the film, Max's judgment to Vincent
is devastating to Vincent, and he's truly impacted upon.
The Teflon coating, the impervious armor
that Vincent, in this part of the film has, is gone.
And one of the designs in the evolution of his character,
of Vincent's character, through the film that I hoped to get
was the glimpse of fractures in Vincent's armor,
the realization that he's not this machine-like presence,
that, in fact, there's something wrong with Vincent tonight.
And it begins in the scene that happens later
with the paroxysm of remorse
that Vincent does after he shoots somebody named Daniel.
And some other small subtleties
that I designed into our understanding of Vincent's character,
hoping to try and communicate those to an audience almost subliminally,
almost things that you sense about him
without even being aware that you're sensing them.
And that sensing lays a foundation for actual overt reactions
when Vincent has them much, much later in the film.
That's all working backwards from the end about the necessity,
I believe, to know the man,
to have characters that are three-dimensional,
meaning that he can commit heinous acts
and is responsible for his actions,
and there should be consequences to those actions.
At the same time, you glimpse something wounded
behind those actions
and come to whatever conclusion you would like to come to.
One of those conclusions might be that, given different circumstances,
Vincent might have been somebody else in life.
Understanding Vincent doesn't let him off the hook.
Even having positive emotional feelings for him
does not let Vincent off the hook
for the judgment that we render upon his actions.
Because I believe that you're responsible for what you do,
and your intent is something that we all maybe sympathize with,
but that's got nothing to do with responsibility for your actions.
But it's dimensional to have both be there.
That's what makes characters fascinating to me,
and I wanted to try and fuel that.
Soto do that, I built backwards towards the front of the film
the sense that there's something going on with Vincent that we...
That he's not just machine-like.
Tom trained for about three months with live ammunition,
under extremely rigorous, safe conditions,
on the LA County Sheriff's combat shooting ranges.
And Tom had not fired live rounds through a handgun before,
so for him it was a new experience.
And it's a whole different deal when you're doing it for real
than when you're firing blanks.
Do I look like I'm kidding you?
The true lethal potential of a firearm-- and your managing of it--
Becomes a very strong dynamic in a performance,
particularly when your skills--
And Tom is extraordinarily skilled at everything athletic that he tries,
particularly when the skills become so schooled in him
that they become truly second nature.
Thanks, for real.
But the real sign of how integrated Tom was able to become
with the skills that Vincent, in fact, would have,
is the expression that's on Vincent's face
after he shoots these guys and when he's holstering his gun.
He's not thinking about holstering the gun. He can do that in his sleep.
And immediately after he's fired that last round,
his attention gets focused on Wilshire Boulevard,
down at the end of the alley.
"Is anybody coming at us from there?
Did anybody hear these gunshots? What's Max doing?"
He immediately switches over to the next task,
and that's absolutely perfect craft.
And it's exactly what somebody who had a lot of trigger time,
who had been in the kinds of conflicts in various places in the world
that we imagine Vincent had been in, that's exactly what he'd be doing.
He wouldn't be worrying about how he holsters his gun.
So that is a beautiful little movement,
and it's a testament to the commitment of Tom
to the work of turning himself into Vincent
and having deeper and deeper understandings,
as well as acquiring all the physical skills.
There's no cutting in it, and Tom draws and fires five rounds in 1.4 seconds.
And we did that on the range.
And we did that with dummies and with plates and stuff
and with live ammunition. And it's hard.
As well as a lot of close-quarter combat,
a lot of hand-to-hand combat
of a very brutal, short, efficient nature.
Not martial arts.
And all the other tradecraft that Vincent would have,
a lot of which doesn't even appear in the text of the film.
But it's a whole package,
and it had to do with reconnoitering each of these people.
But the deeper work that goes into this kind of thing is, in fact,
how did Vincent become Vincent?
And Tom and I did a lot of work in trying to understand
where this guy came from.
If he was in a foster home for part of his time,
if he had an institutionalized childhood
and he was back in the public school system at age 11,
that would have been sometime in the '70s.
He would have been dressed very awkwardly.
He would've probably been ostracized 'cause he'd have looked odd,
and the kind of brutality of, you know, preteens and early adolescence.
We postulated an alcoholic, abusive father
who was culturally very progressive.
He was probably part of Ed Sadlowski's Steelworkers Local in Gary.
He was a Vietnam veteran.
He had friends who were African-American on the South Side of Chicago.
The Checkerboard Lounge is 30 minutes away on the Calumet Skyway.
So the father, probably in the '60s and early '70s,
was probably an aficionado of jazz.
There was a great jazz scene on the South Side of Chicago,
Modern Jazz Quartet.
But it's almost as if the father blamed the son, i.e., Vincent,
for what happened to the mother,
and the father drank as Gary was being reduced into...
You know, it looked like Dresden at the end of the Second World War.
The father never tutored the boy in jazz,
but the boy extolled the virtue of knowing about jazz
'cause he heard his father talk about jazz, not to him but to other people.
And that's why he knew about jazz.
And that's why he learned about jazz.
His father-- Vincent's father-- never tutored Vincent about jazz
because he had rejected his son and ignored him.
It was something that got constructed as backstory
in the work I did with Tom during preproduction
and understanding every aspect of the character, of who Vincent was,
much more than appears in the text of the film.
So that the fractions of Vincent-ness that we have in the text of the film,
within these ten hours, could resonate with the totality of a life
the same as they would with anybody you met, you know.
We all bring our whole history with us into any moment of the present.
Cabbie drove around all night, killed three people,
-then put the gun to his head. -Yeah, the guy flipped out. So what?
So that Oakland PD detective, what's-his-name, he never bought it.
Cabbie had no criminal record, no history of mental illness.
This is my pal, Pete Berg, who's an extremely talented director,
as well as being a fine actor, playing Weidner,
who's Fanning's careerist partner on this crime scene.
And we segue to a jazz club.
And this is Barry Shabaka Henley,
who also played Herbert Muhammad in All'.
Max doesn't like jazz,
and I got the idea that Max didn't like jazz
because Muhammad Ali doesn't like jazz,
and Muhammad Ali doesn't like blues. Muhammad Ali only likes soul.
I never learned to listen to jazz.
It's off melody. Behind the notes. Not what's expected.
-Improvising, like tonight. -Like tonight?
But Vincent knows all about jazz and has just explained it.
And in a way, that's kind of related.
And that is not a direct metaphor for what's happening in the film,
but it's very closely associated.
It's almost an analogue, rather than a metaphor, about improvisation,
about having a theme, having a structure,
but then being able to improvise.
Most people, ten years from now,
same job, same place, same routine, everything the same.
Just keeping it safe over and over and over.
Ten years from now.
Man, you don't know where you'll be ten minutes from now.
Do you?
And so, Vincent here is starting to verbalize the themes that are...
He sees into Max. He really reads Max.
That's part of Vincent's job, that's part of his craft-- is to read Max.
So Vincent already knows all that we know about Max,
which is that Max is not improvisational.
And he also knows that Max is along on a ride
in which Max has no idea what's gonna happen to him ten minutes from now.
So it's really the first articulation
of two of the central themes each of these guys personify.
They're in opposition to each other.
The music that we just heard is "Spanish Key" by Miles Davis.
We cut down the 17-minute length, which is on Bitches Brew,
to a little over three-and-a-half minutes.
July 22nd, 1964. Who you think walks through that door?
Bye, baby.
Miles Davis. That's right.
And Shabaka, playing the character of Daniel,
relates an incident in which Miles Davis
came to South Central after recording at Columbia
and sat in on a session
in one of the great jazz clubs that came out of South Central.
This is after the flowering of West Coast bebop,
which, in part, came out of graduates
of Jefferson High School in Los Angeles.
Dexter Gordon, Lester Young.
Just a whole slew of jazz musicians came out of it,
and then they were very much part of that scene in the '50s,
along with other West Coast jazz regulars,
which would have included, say, Charlie Mingus, Wardell Gray,
Thelonious Monk, Chet Baker, like that.
"Take your silly bitch with you."
The anecdote that Daniel is relating here
is an actual event from Miles Davis's life.
Miles Davis played a guest-starring role
in two episodes I did on two television series.
He played a character for me on Miami Vice
and a more profound role in one episode of Crime Story,
in which we were telling the story as a two-parter of the Moulin Rouge,
which was an African-American casino in segregated Las Vegas.
He played in that one as well. And so I had some contact with him.
-Did you? - No.?
The anecdote that's related here is interesting,
because it talks about
the violent reaction that you will have
if you're somebody whose concentration is so totally focused.
Daniel talks about Miles's head is in a musical head space, you know.
His reaction to being pulled out of it was fierce.
And that is what you feel when you are concentrated,
if you're an actor concentrating on a scene
while they're resetting lights and somebody disturbs you.
It's a violence. And it's not personal,
but it comes from high, high order of focus and concentration.
And the irritation sometimes almost is in direct proportion
to your ability to focus.
And there's nothing I can imagine requiring focus more
than doing the art that Miles Davis did, so...
Afraid so.
Man, just when I thought you were a cool guy.
I am a cool guy, with a job I contracted to do.
Come on, Vincent, give the dude a pass.
I'm working here.
There's a stillness to the depth
of which Torn is into the moment,
in this particular scene right now, that always I admire.
He is so economically, completely in the moment.
I'll ask a question.
- What question ? -A jazz question.
Now, you get it right, we roll.
You disappear tonight.
If! walk out of here tonight,
I will go so far away, it'll be just like I was dead.
He knows what he's gonna do.
He just has that sideways glance to see if the waitress,
who he heard leave, has, in fact, left.
And she has.
This is where, I think, great acting resides.
There's a pure economy of motion.
There's immobility when there should be immobility.
You don't program this kind of work. It's there or it's not there.
Where did Miles learn music?
I know everything there is to know about Miles.
Then let's have it.
Music school. He got into music school, right?
His father was a dentist, East St. Louis.
Invested in agriculture, made plenty of money.
He sent Miles to Juilliard School of Music,
New York, 1945.
Man.
Dropped out of Juilliard after less than a year.
Tracked down Charlie Parker on 52nd Street,
who mentored him for the next three years.
And there's a paroxysm of regret.
That's the first anomaly to the perfect, machine-like presentation
we've had from Vincent.
And it's designed to be an anomaly.
It's designed to be a deviation
from the way we have seen him up to this moment.
And Max can't take it and wanders off on this broken course
without much navigation.
And the way he walks across the sidewalk.
He heads towards the parking meter, then to the left.
And Vincent, who has repressed regret and is right back in business,
back on the case, reminds Max he's not playing.
Max provokes a theme. "If you were playing him,
what would you have done if he'd gotten the answer right?"
And I wanted that question to remain unanswered.
I want it posed but not answered.
So I then interrupt it with Lenny the dispatcher, who returns.
Now, the voice of Lenny is the voice of Michael Waxman,
who was my first assistant director.
He's a dear friend, and we've done many movies together, so...
He just was reading these lines so that we could shoot them,
'cause Lenny was always to be off-camera.
He was always to be off screen. So we were gonna find a voice later on.
We tried to cast some other voices, but we couldn't find a voice
that was as wonderfully kind of annoying as Michael's voice, in fact, can be.
"Why didn't he show?" "Are you all right?" "Where are you?"
Show for what?
This is another use of high-definition video.
I wanted to see the world that they're moving through,
and this is nothing you would see in normal motion picture film.
You can see the clouds in the sky behind Vincent,
and you also are able to see the colonnade of trees behind Max
disappearing in the distance.
You normally wouldn't be able to see any of that.
I'm not taking you to see my mother.
Since when was any of this negotiable?
Two paces ahead, one to the left.
Now Vincent is about to deliver a second anomaly.
The first was the regret that he felt.
It became kind of a paroxysm, and then he repressed.
And the second one is gonna be right now.
When he says to Max,
"She carried you in her womb for nine months,"
as if there's a special consciousness
of the significance of mothers that Vincent possesses.
This sentiment will continue in the scene with Ida
and provoke almost a sibling rivalry for the affections of Ida
between Vincent and Ida's son Max, which Vincent wins.
We're gonna find out later on that Vincent never had a mother.
It's an accumulation of small anomalies
to indicate that something subterranean is going on with Vincent...
that something is fracturing with this man.
And the coincidence,
which is part of the wonderful structure of the piece.
Stuart Beattie's narrative construction is unchanged.
It's as if you take a screenplay and throw it in an X-ray or an MRI,
and you see the underlying engineering of it.
And that's what's so brilliant about what Stuart Beattie did.
These two vectors of Fanning going some place--
We don't know where it is. We're gonna find out later he's going to the morgue.
So it's as if the hospital is Martin Luther King,
which would also have the morgue in it.
And Max and Vincent going to visit Max's mother,
'cause Max does this nightly.
I got caught up at work.
Why couldn't you call me on the telephone?
I'm lying here wondering if something terrible happened to you.
I brought you flowers.
-What am I gonna do with flowers? -Cheer up.
How?
By worrying that you spend money on stuff that's just gonna wilt and die?
He has a complex relationship with his mother.
One can almost imagine that there's three older brothers
whose wives have made them move out of Los Angeles
to Houston some place to get away from the mother.
Why didn't you tell me we had company?
What's your name? Sorry. My son is rude.
No harm done, ma'am.
Now she says to Vincent, "They're beautiful."
They're beautiful.
And Vincent's struck by that.
And Jamie's playing in this scene...
Well, Max?
...of betrayal is, I think, profound.
And then Vincent is charmed and gets seductive.
I'm very happy to meet you, Mrs. Durocher.
Oh, just call me Ida.
Ida. I was with Max when he got the call.
And you came all the way over here to see me?
-It's nothing, ma'am. - Tell my son.
But the hurt in Jamie's eyes...
I just thought he just did a wonderful job right here.
And then the picture... Another thing I liked about this picture,
one of the reasons I did it, is that it had a multiplicity of forms,
of different kinds of narrative all contained in the same picture.
And this becomes ordinary sitcom.
Do what?
Don't talk about me like I'm not right here in the room here.
What's he saying?
He says he's standing right here, in the room here.
Yes, you are.
-He's sensitive. -I know.
-But I'm sure you're very proud of him. -Of course I'm proud.
Irma Hall started as a schoolteacher in rural Texas,
from a town that's next door to the town of 8,000 people
that Jamie Foxx grew up in.
And so they were comparing notes when we were shooting here this day,
and they both knew some of the same officials in the school system.
And Jamie went to graduate from his high school after studying--
Being both on the football team and studying piano--
And got a scholarship into university in classical piano.
Visit again?
This is the first time Max is gonna manifest an impulsive act
that is completely irrational, which is to steal Vincent's briefcase.
And run where? Do what with it?
It's an illogical, irrational act.
But it's provoked by Vincent winning the affection of Max's mother.
Max!
And this puts us out of the hospital and across a footbridge...
over the 5 Freeway in a neighborhood known as City Terrace.
It's just east of downtown, and what we're looking at right now
is westbound on the 5 towards downtown LA in the distance.
This is a very hotly-contested turf between two gangs
on opposite sides of the freeway,
and so, this night, we had elaborate security precautions.
Don't!
The question that gets asked later in the film...
in the scene after the shoot-out at Fever,
actually relates to this moment in time.
It's when Max says to Vincent, "And why haven't you killed me yet?"
Because by everything we know about Vincent,
that's exactly what should happen right now.
All of my prep was in there. You are screwing with my work.
And we start to wonder...
And it's a question whose origin is in this moment
and in the continuing relationship that starts to become
almost the relationship of two brothers who are violently quarreling,
but nevertheless two brothers.
Although Vincent will, in a kind of schizoid way,
have those relations with Max,
but then he'll go back to being on the job.
The question is...
what is Vincent seeking from Max? What does Vincent want from Max?
Why, as they get closer and strike a rapport
and begin to talk about things familiar and then from familiar to intimate...
What's going on? And it's something that I hoped, and do hope,
is occurring subtly within the audience almost subconsciously.
I'd prefer it to be they're not actually aware that this question's being asked,
but that it produces a state of openness
to wondering what's gonna happen with these two men.
Because the wondering what's gonna happen is actually not
whether or not Max is gonna live or die or Vincent's gonna live or die.
It's about, what is this relationship?
-Hello. -Hey, it's Fanning.
I'm still down here at the morgue at Sisters of Charity.
Those John Does didn't pan out,
but you're never gonna guess who I got here in the meat locker.
- Who? -Sylvester Clarke.
Criminal attorney turned lawyer-criminal.
Including Ramone, who he represented, who's still missing.
The both of whom are in the exotic-substances business together.
There's something going on...
Fanning has linked the victims together,
so we have a situation in which Fanning, that is, the LAPD,
knows there's linkage among victims.
Meanwhile, we cut back to Max and Vincent.
And this is the first time Vincent will digress with Max into familiarity,
as if these are two guys in a bar
who've known each other for a couple of months.
And they're talking about their father. And Max talks about his mother.
I'm not the one lying to my mother.
She hears what she wants to hear. I don't disillusion her.
Yeah, right. Maybe she hears what you tell her.
Whatever! tell her is never good enough anyway.
It's always been that way.
This is a design by which this subtext of the two men impacting on each other
actually begins to take over and start to drive the story.
And for it to do that, it has to begin early on,
where you start to see there's certain anomalies in Vincent's behavior.
Where he's not the machine-like presence he was at the beginning of the film,
but that there's deviations that are happening.
So you get the sense something else is going on with this guy tonight.
What happened to your father?
Hated everything I did.
Got drunk, heat me up. Foster homes. Went back with him. Like that.
Now, this is the truth, but Vincent doesn't play it for truth.
I killed him.
I was 12.
I'm kidding.
And, again, this is a moment that I think,
I believe, that Tom just absolutely hits a very difficult thing to nail...
which is that Vincent is brilliant...
and he knows how easily shocked is petit bourgeois Max
and that he says things to absolutely horrify and appall Max.
And when Max delivers the reaction,
Vincent laughs it off and says he's kidding.
And now they're talking about Island Limos
and the rationalizations Max has about why it hasn't been started yet.
It's not just simply get the car and put asses in the seats.
Why not?
Because Island Limos is more than filet' a ride.
It's like a club experience. Cool groove.
Don't want it to end.
So Max has evolved and refined this ideation
of this exalted, ephemeral state of riding in a limo, in Island Limos,
to such an elevated experience
that it's not only impractical, it's never gonna happen.
And all this was shot in the refineries of Wilmington,
which is near the Port of Los Angeles.
In Wilmington, there are clubs like this.
Why anybody would want to locate a club there, I don't know.
The El Rodeo disco that the following scene is shot in
is not in, actually, Wilmington.
It's in Pico Rivera, and we did nothing to this place.
Go in, ask for Felix. He's expecting you.
-Felix. - Yeah.
- What does he look like ? -/ don't know. I've never met' him.
Who is he?
And the difficulty in scenes like this sometimes--
And in which Jamie does a wonderful job--
İs to maintain,
sometimes three months after the beginning of principal photography,
that pure line of exactly his character,
of what the character's circumstances are.
Because the night, in fiction, is only two hours old,
and the circumstances are that he's being asked to do
some preposterously outrageous, difficult task,
which is to go into this club and pretend that he's Vincent
and impersonate Vincent.
I can't do this.
-I can't. -What are you talking about?
Sure you can, man. Come on. Hey. Hey.
Look, man, if I do this, I'm just gonna end up getting other people killed.
Out of options, Max.
And the perplexed confusion, as Jamie--
As Max has to try and process a task of which he's completely incapable.
Those circumstances, keeping those alive
and keeping those present after you've been playing Max--
And we shoot all the scenes out of order anyway,
so it may be, you know, two months later, not two hours into the evening--
İs what Jamie's achieving here and what he's able to do.
And it's an innocent look in his eyes as he turns and looks at Vincent.
We're about to see Klea Scott,
who was a regular on Robbery Homicide Division.
She's a fine actress who trained
at the North Carolina School of Performing Arts.
And Bruce McGill, who I've worked with a couple of times.
He was terrific playing the attorney, Ron Motley, in The Insider
and did a well-remembered episode of Miami Vice
called "Out Where the Buses Don't Run."
Mark the time.
What you're seeing is exactly what appears,
including the security guards in the front
who are the real security guards at the real El Rodeo.
And really nice performances,
particularly by this guy, Cosme,
who's gonna be the guy on the left with the bald head.
And most everybody in the place are regulars.
It's a nortefio disco. The people are from northern Mexico.
The music has got a heavy polka influence.
And we substituted Calexico and a couple of other bands.
I'm Vincent.
And Max doesn't know what he's getting into.
COPY-
One of the things that intrigued me about Stuart Beattie's script
was the way the story lines intersect.
They're held in a very disciplined way, discrete, each in its own channel.
And we're about to see two of them collide
as the shadowy, silhouetted figures we established
coming into the FBI surveillance
are, in fact, revealed to be Fanning and Weidner,
who have information that is specifically-- is and only is--
That there's a linkage between victims.
Not who the victims are or how they network together
or who's responsible for killing them.
Whafis up ? Why do you wanna know about our case ?
-Any unusual activity tonight? -Like what?
The! relates f0 a murder or a series of murders
in Wilshire Central or West Hollywood?
All quiet on the western front.
And somebody told Pedrosa, played by Bruce McGi||,
to cooperate with these guys and talk to them,
and he's totally reluctant to and is stiffing them.
- Your interest in our case ? -Well, our interest--
We got a situation. Two bodies.
Could be a coincidence, could n02' be a coincidence.
It doesn't look like one. We got an attorney and his client--
Roofs all beat to shit.
-Can you zoom in on this, please? -On What?
On that.
But Fanning spotted the cab and noticed it was the cab
described in the alley behind Ramone's...
and launches them on a voyage of discovery
that's gonna result in the convergence of these two vectors.
And what's nice about Beattie's script is the way,
once we know the vectors are going to converge, he leaps ahead.
And the next time we go back to the surveillance location,
Beattie leaps ahead to the convergence already happened
and just takes us right into the important part of it,
which is the conclusion.
And there's a great poster for LA's famous Que Buena radio.
And El Rodeo on the interior is black-lit,
and these are the actual murals on their walls.
And these are some of the actual security guards there.
A couple other of these guys playing security guards
are some folks we got on a work-release program
from LA County Jail.
Here's Javier Bardem playing Felix, and it's a case of a brilliant actor
who invests himself totally in a role even though it was two days' shooting.
Javier is Spanish, and he spent two or three weeks
learning how to speak English with a Mexican,
as opposed to a Spanish, accent.
- What are the two names .7 - Ramona Ayala and Clarke.
Are you telling me Ramone Ayala and Clarke were murdered tonight?
-Both killed? -Sylvester Clarke for sure.
- Ramona, I don't know. - / go! another DOA.
Daniel Baker out of South Central, Leimert Park.
And the two story tracks between the LAPD and the FBI have converged,
and now their information is actually revealed to us,
'cause we have not known, up to this point,
who these people are who are being killed,
which is very unusual when you think about it.
We're engaged in a picture in which Vincent is killing people,
and he's taken captive Max, who's compelled to go along with him.
I lost my stuff.
And we don't know
why the people who are being killed are being killed.
They're obviously crimes of dispassion. Vincent is indifferent.
And we're gonna discover later that Vincent isn't even sure
why they're being killed.
So the way the information is marshaled,
the way it's moved around and where it's revealed
is fascinating to me,
and it enhances, for me, the sense of immediacy.
Because when you are immediately in the moment of something--
You don't know the backstory, you don't know the context,
you don't know everything about where people came from--
You're just occupied with the "right now" of it.
And that's what appealed to me about doing this film was that,
could I make a motion picture in which I can engage the audience
in the "right now" of it without a lot of history,
without a lot of exposition, so that it kind of, in a way,
almost simulates our experience of the present
when we're put in a context we don't know.
We don't know the circumstance. We don't know exactly where we are.
The landscape may be somewhat foreign to us.
And so we have less answers than we have answers.
And as the impressions impact upon us,
one after the other, in sequence,
some of that experience, that's what I wanted to...
That's what attracted me to tell this story, because it did that.
It had that immediacy to it. I found that very exciting.
And Pedro would come every night to check them out.
And the people, the little kids that were misbehaving,
that were not saying their prayers...
The degree of difficulty of this scene for an actor is rather high,
because what Jamie has to do is he has to pull off that he is Max
and he, playing Max, has to have Max play that Max is Vincent,
and with believability,
so that you believe that it's credible enough for Felix to buy.
And that's hard to do.
Behind all that, and why this is pivotal in the realization of Max's character,
it has to do with this massive compression of Max's life to this single point,
this single fine point in time
in which Max believes he's gonna die.
I think...
And there's the moment of truth for Max.
I think you should tell the guy behind me...
to put that gun down.
What did you say?
I said I think you should tell the guy behind me to put his gun away
before I take it' and beat' his bitch ass I0 death with it'.
I picked up a tail.
- Federal? -I don't know. You tell me.
And faced with mortality, what emerges is,
in fact, the power, the skill, the improvisational ability
to speak his mind, to take action.
It's okay that it manifests itself in mimicry. He's imitating Vincent.
And that's okay, 'cause that's actually how our learning process--
As human beings, that's how we learn.
We mimic something, and then we make it our own.
But, hey, shit happens.
Gotta roll with it. Adapt.
Darwin. I Ching.
Has--
The fat man. The penthouse guy. The jazz man.
And that's exactly what the idea of this was.
But he had to have that experience
as his jumping-off point, as a catalyst of "he's gonna die."
And it comes from Felix telling this anecdote
he probably just made up about Black Peter.
...when have I not?
Say it's Vincent.
I'm Vincent.
Say it's Vincent.
I'm Vincent.
Say it's Vincent.
I'm Vincent.
-Say it's Vincent. - Vincent?
- Thafis what I'm hearing. -|'m Vincent.
Felix is surrounded by a ring of security people around him,
and he is also surrounded by sharply-pointed plants,
and it was-- I wasn't happy with the set,
and we couldn't really change anything on the walls,
and so we just improvised and brought in a bunch of plants.
And by the way, as a token of my appreciation,
I would like to offer you a discount.
For all my services, 25%.
- Very generous. -Hell, make if 35.
This is an interesting scene to me in terms of audience reactions,
because for some reason, some audiences get
that Max is offering Felix a big discount
on Vincent's fees,
that he's giving away a whole bunch of Vincent's money.
And some audiences think this is actually hilarious.
And for some reason, other audiences, it just goes right past them
and it doesn't get any kind of a reaction.
The color right here is just something that happened.
Just the composition, the light. This is actually shot on film, this piece.
And we just managed to preserve it.
What's happened here was very challenging for me
from a storytelling point of view, or actually the plot point of view.
Because the information deficit that each discrete track had--
İ.e., the FBI knew nothing,
the LAPD knew that bodies were dropping and they were linked,
and then, also, we're about to generate Paco and Rubio--
Have all come together in the FBI surveillance scene.
And the FBI and the LAPD now know
that the bodies are dropping, are all linked together
and that, in fact, they're the FBI's witnesses
who were about to come forward in a federal grand jury
that's supposed to be convening tomorrow.
Locate our witness, Peter Lim.
This was an abandoned Kmart, and it was the largest--
I think it was the largest Kmart in America,
and it was transformed into this set by a very talented art director.
It was a very long night.
And we wound up working very fast, and it was very late in the night.
And sometimes when you do that, there's a real tremendous intensity.
And if you could keep that on a roll, you get some of the best work because,
as an actor and also as a director, it's just happening so fast,
there's a certain spontaneous intensity to it.
And Mark Ruffalo, particularly, I believe, really shined in this.
The guy who walked out of there looks like this guy.
'Cause he picked a cabdriver who looks like him.
- Yeah, I don't know. -/ do. Zee ?
We see private-sector security companies hiring out to cartels
in Colombia, Russia, Mexico,
hiring ex-Special Forces, Stasi, ex-KGB, like that, all the time.
What's happening is that Klea Scott is identifying for us
the origins of Vincent.
The FBI are poised as kind of unguided missiles
or misguided missiles,
because they now have identified, because of Vincent's ploy,
that they believe Max to be Vincent.
There is something else going on.
Ray, there's nothing else going on.
Fanning is skeptical.
It's their bail. it's their game. There's nothing in it for us.
-There's nothing in it for you. -That's right.
It's late. I'm going home. You know what time it is?
This is Tom Rothrock's cue.
Most of the composing is done by James Newton Howard,
who did excellent work,
particularly a very, very difficult piece towards the end of the film,
which is alternately orchestral and percussion.
But this particular piece is composed by Rothrock,
whose strength is this kind of blues mode, which you're hearing right here.
He also did the cue that opens the movie.
And I view music as telling different parts of the story.
So sometimes just as you have multiple characters,
you should have different,
slightly different perspectives on the music all fitting into a plan
about how the story ought to tell itself.
Sheila is on with the wife- She thinks he's at Fever.
There's four story tracks all heading to a disco named Fever.
Max and Vincent are heading there.
And there's kind of a sense of destiny's gonna get worked out
in this confrontation, and there's a prelude,
in which something I found fascinating was to happen.
Copy that.
Vincent changes registers again,
and I wanted Vincent to just elevate without any transition
into a state of mind in which he was speaking to Max
as if they were brothers or if they were pals
who've known each other for 15 years, and they're in a bar
and Vincent's just saying this most casual thing,
"Hey, why aren't you gonna ask that girl out?"
-You gonna call her? - Who?
Your lady friend, the one who gave you her business card.
I don't know.
-Maybe, maybe not. - What?
Pick up the phone.
With a familiarity that's schizophrenic,
that has no basis at all in the circumstances
that Vincent has, in fact, imposed upon Max.
It's a step aside from reality into a parallel reality,
the reality that's going on in Vincent's mind,
which is also the subtext of the film.
That Vincent's, in fact, cracking up.
That subtext is gonna wind up hijacking the whole of the story
and drive us to the end.
And after he asks this question, each man kind of retreats
into the solitude of his own self-awareness.
And what they see is something that I witnessed a couple of times in LA.
I was driving a babysitter home and saw three coyotes
who were just walking diagonally across the intersection
of Fairfax and Sunset Boulevard.
They seemed to have an attitude like they still owned it,
this was still their real estate.
And this civilized layer called the City of Los Angeles,
which has only been here for 80 years was, in fact, something temporary.
Maybe here, maybe gone tomorrow.
And each man thinking his own thoughts
as he's heading into what may be mortal combat.
When I heard this song by Audioslave
and the Chris Cornell vocal, "Shadow on the Sun,"
I knew I wanted it for this moment in the film.
As they travel through the neon shopping malls of Koreatown,
the advantage of the video shooting in high-def
is the ability to see these distant landscapes and trees against the sky,
almost as if we're in some kind of a dark afternoon.
There he is. Hit it.
The club is a club-- The real name of the club is Bliss.
It's on 6th in Wilshire Central in Koreatown.
We renamed it Fever.
And we actually enter the real location,
and we duplicated the decor on a set that we built
that had to be seven times as large.
Seven or eight times as large as the actual club
to fit the 800 or 900 Korean extras we brought in.
Table towards the back is where he hangs.
What's happening is that all the discrete story lines
are heading towards a collision, and we, the audience, are aware of it.
Vincent, the hunter, is not aware that he's, in fact, being hunted.
The challenge of shooting it, and the excitement about shooting it,
was to set up each character
moving through this field of 800 dancers
in a way so that we were with each group as they're moving through it
and knowing where we are at the same time and keeping all three stories alive.
The music is Ready Steady Go by Paul Oakenfold.
It's a great piece. It was perfect for this scene.
But to make it be less familiar, we translated Ready Steady Go into Korean,
so what they're saying in Korean is "Ready, steady, go."
Koreatown has the largest population of Koreans outside of Seoul.
And as a community, it's particularly vibrant and unified
and has a great depth of culture,
which is kind of typical of Los Angeles and ethnic communities in Los Angeles,
where there seems to be a lot less assimilation.
So that in going to a Korean club, you're gonna see music videos from Seoul.
You're not gonna see music videos from MTV.
The way I thought about this whole scene, in terms of scene analysis,
like, how does the scene work internally?
Is that-- It's a conflict between our characters, Max and Vincent,
and then also Pedrosa when we're tracking with Pedrosa.
And what he's in conflict with is, in fact, chaos.
And it's the chaos that Vincent has to work against
to achieve his objective.
Which is, of course, completely pathological,
which is to murder a Korean gangster named Peter Lim.
A lot of the close-quarter combat that Vincent is doing, again,
took three to four months of training.
And we did a much broader variety of it than what we're seeing here.
But Torn was very fast and very strong, very skilled with this.
And the instructor I used is Mick Gould, who was one of the two instructors I had
for all the close-quarter combat that we did.
And the other guy was Andy McNab,
who was also the author of a book called Bravo Two Zero,
which is highly recommended reading on the First Iraq War,
that he was in and was captured by the Iraqis.
Lim has an outer ring of protection,
which is exactly the way security would behave.
There's Lim. Second booth from the left. Get him out of here.
And then he's got some closer people around him.
There were two classes of security, one with bodyguards-- trained bodyguards--
And then some Korean gangsters who didn't speak English.
And why they don't speak English is something that's gonna be...
Freeze, Vincent! FBI!
...seen in a moment.
Get your hands in the air! Get your hands in the air, Vincent!
The Korean gangsters behind Lim now mistake the FBI,
who are, in fact, coming to bring Lim to safety.
They mistake it as an assault on Lim.
They don't speak English.
Pedrosa gets shot.
That instantly initiates panic and chaos,
and now Vincent is not just having to move through a field of dancers
to get closer to Lim.
He now has to move through, in fact, a gunfight and the chaos and the panic
and a mob stampeding to get away.
We had an admirable group of Korean extras recruited from Koreatown,
from UCLA, from all kinds of places,
who managed to work themselves up into a state of panic
for about 12 to 14 hours a day for about five days straight.
Vincent, in reality, would be really focused on what's happening.
Almost like a fugue state.
And then it's gonna get interrupted by a threat to Max.
And as Vincent deals with it,
I wanted Tom to have-- and he absolutely has--
A kind of look on his face, almost as if he's irritated
because Max has been so inconsiderate
to allow himself to have his life jeopardized
and Vincent's had to intervene to save him.
The only guy who is headed right,
because he, in fact, has really proper procedure
as a detective and investigator, is Fanning.
And he's finally been able to rescue Max.
Hold on. Hold on. I'm Detective Fanning.
I'm Max! I'm Max!
I'm a goddamn cabdriver, man!
He sets up the unexpected.
Vincent, right here in this scene, is disarmed,
and it's actually his weakest moment in the film.
He rises to the occasion and continues doing what he does.
But the point was that Vincent had a moment of confusion.
And it's one of the other subtle glimpses
into what's going on below the surface of Vincent's activity.
And in my mind, and this is strictly from the director's perspective,
meaning that the audience didn't necessarily
get impacted upon these things.
In my mind, it was that--
It's almost as if Vincent's 11 years old for an instant,
for a fraction of a second,
and he's confused by bad things that are happening to him.
And he responds by reassembling his perspective in reacting
and acting out with violent aggression.
Now, the audience may or may not only get a moment of weakness from him,
but it was fundamental to me
in my understanding of Vincent's history and his character
that this, in fact, is something that's repeated into his life.
Go! Drive! Drive!
Now, what Jamie was supposed to do was--
His door was open, and he was supposed to be...
so distracted by the seemingly eternal...
situation he finds himself in--
Meaning that regardless of what happens,
he winds up back behind the wheel on the seat of that cab--
That he just accelerated forward without closing the door,
and the door is to bang into the parked car.
That didn't happen. The door closed, and Jamie just headed for the car.
We're into something called Scene 86,
and it's the big, pivotal scene in the construction of the story.
Max has been changed by a number of things that happen,
starting with the compression of his life, facing death in the form of Felix.
My direction to Jamie for that scene was that,
"You have to feel like you're gonna die. You're gonna die right now."
And Max manifested individual action for the first time,
which was always there. It had been latent instead of manifest.
And in the scene with Felix, it took the form of actually mimicking Vincent's style
when he talks about lCh/ng, Darwin.
But between then, with Felix, and right now, Max is changed.
And right now, Max sees beyond the end of Vincent's gun
to the man who is there.
Vincent's repeating a pattern,
and he again delivers the kind of facile nihilism
about the purposelessness of the cosmos.
Nothing means anything, so what difference does it make
how many bodies are dropped tonight?
This is the third time we've heard this from Vincent,
and so there's almost a kind of a self-directed cynicism.
He calls it crap.
-You full of shit. -All that crap. I'm full of shit?
You're a monument of it. You even bullshitted yourself.
"All I am is taking out the garbage, killing bad people."
-Well, that's what you said. -You believed me?
But this time, Max doesn't buy it. And Max sees through it.
How do I know? You know?
They all got that...
"witness for the prosecution" look to me.
Probably some major federal indictment of somebody
who majorly does not wanna get indicted.
So that's the reason?
That's the why. There's no reason.
There's no good reason, there's no bad reason to live or to die.
Then what are you?
Indifferent.
Every film seems to have its pivotal scenes,
and this is the pivotal scene of this motion picture.
Max, for the first time, is seeing beyond the end of the gun
and is seeing Vincent for who Vincent is, which is damaged goods.
He experiences a feeling of an understanding for Vincent,
and he struggles to put it into words.
What's with you?
As in?
And that struggle is something
I very much wanted Jamie to live through.
And that is Vincent's sociopathy,
that even if you put a gun to his head and told Vincent,
"I'll shoot you unless you can tell me what somebody over there's feeling,"
Vincent can't do it. He isn't capable of empathy.
He's literally incapable of it, as if he were handicapped.
I think you're low, my brother. Way low.
Like, what were you? One of those institutionalized-raised guys?
So Max renders a negative judgment on Vincent.
He says, "You are low, my brother. Way |ow."
Vincent is actually not impervious.
He's not the Teflon man we saw landing at LAX.
He's injured by this.
And he assaults Max reactively.
And it's very personal, and his intent is to devastate Max
with a prediction of the purposelessness of what Max's life will be,
almost as if Vincent is the Ghost of Christmas Future,
and telling him that Max's evasion is chronic
and he'll never achieve any of his dreams.
It's all turned around on you.
It never will. Suddenly you are old.
Didn't happen.
And it never will, because you were never gonna do it anyway.
You'll push it into memory, then zone out in your Barcalounger,
being hypnotized by daytime TV for the rest of your life.
Don't you talk to me about murder.
All it ever took was a down payment on a Lincoln Town Car.
Or that girl. You can't even call that girl.
What the fuck are you still doing driving a cab?
In this scene right here, I can't fail
but to have a director's appreciation for actors.
'Cause fine acting is fine acting,
and it's not something directors really do,
except notable exceptions like John Huston.
But we have the highest-- At least I have the highest regard for it
because it is that projection out onto the end of the limb
or on the wire without a net.
It's, you know, going to that ineffable place...
where you're simultaneously in control and completely uncontrolled,
living, breathing and being in the moment.
And I think that's what Jamie Foxx and Tom Cruise are doing right here.
And it never ceases to be marvelous to me.
But you know what? New news.
It doesn't matter anwvay. What does it matter anyway?
We're all insignificant out here in this big-ass nowhere.
Twilight Zone shit.
Max has taken what Vincent said earlier and stood it on its head,
which is to say that if existence has no inherent meaning,
and it's meaningless, then, in fact, the individual is free
to put meaning into his life by his actions.
And Max takes action.
What does it matter? It don't, so fuck it. Fix it.
What do we got to lose anwvay, right?
-Slow down. -Why? You gonna shoot me?
You gonna pull the trigger and kill us?
Max rebels, and he's about to destroy
what, in fact, has imprisoned him for the last 12 years.
Well, shoot my ass, then. Shoot me.
-Slow down! -You're right.
You know what, Vincent?
Go fuck yourself.
In flipping the cab, I designed the shot
and how many times I wanted the cab to flip and how I wanted it to end up.
And the physics of it are pretty interesting.
You weight the cab in certain parts,
and you lift the back of the cab with kind of an air mortar.
And you just actually run the left front of the cab into a piece of concrete,
and physics do the rest.
Joel Kramer, the stunt coordinator, and the stuntmen who worked on this
are pretty much able to dump the cab exactly where we want,
and we went out to an abandoned airstrip
and set up this course with exactly the right distances.
And the cab dropped where it was supposed to that day,
and it also dropped where it was supposed to this day.
There were about nine cameras there, but the key camera is the last one...
the camera in which the cab actually comes to a stop
after it lifts the front end of this Pontiac.
And this is take one. They just hit it, and they nailed it.
I reviewed it on the monitors,
and because of the higher contrast on the monitors,
it made it seem as if the crash was actually more kinetic than it was.
And I thought it was too violent.
So we reshot it, I think, two more times.
Didn't need any of it. The first take,
with the multiple cameras, is the one we used.
Okay. Don '1' warty about the cab. They'll gez' you a new one.
This is Bob Deamer. Bob Deamer is an officer in the LAPD.
And I've gone on a number of ride-alongs with him,
in which we've had various adventures.
And contrary to his appearance here, he's a very tough cop.
Put your hands up.
Put your hands up. Face the cab. Get down on your knees.
-Go ahead and arrest me. -Put your hands on top of your head.
-Take me to jail. LA County jail's great. -Don't move!
Put your hands behind your head.
Jamie's so weary of life with Vincent
that being taken to LA County Jail sounds like a good idea.
1-L-20, I need a backup on a 187 suspect.
This begins a music cue by James Newton Howard
that's going to alternate between orchestral,
with the horns and low strings--
Meaning cellos, violas,
double bass--
And a horn section and percussion.
And it begins here, and it's an extremely long cue.
Goes for almost 16 or 17 minutes, taken in total.
It was written and composed as a unified cue.
And that was some of the fascinating dynamics
of the construction of this narrative for those of us who made the film.
Because it's immediate and because it takes place in ten hours,
that means you examine smaller pieces of time
under a very powerful microscope, which means that events
which normally, in a normal film, might occupy two and a half minutes,
in this film occupy five minutes,
because we examine them much more closely.
And so, consequently, music cues that would be two or three minutes,
which are more conventional, become five- and six-minute cues.
Or, in this case, a long cue becomes a hugely long cue.
Come on!
The visualization that you're seeing in some of these shots of Jamie
on the rooftop are interesting, because they would not be possible
with motion-picture film. Those buildings are not lit.
There's, I think, one parking-structure light
that's on Jamie, and that's about it.
Come on. Come on. Pick up.
If I had shot on 35-millimeter motion-picture film,
I would have had to use a lot of very powerful lights,
and then it wouldn't have had a realistic look.
It would have looked like it was, in fact, lit.
So it was...
Cityscapes like this are one of the key reasons
I wanted to shoot in high-def video,
because it revealed the whole world of the city at night.
US Attorney's Office.
-Annie./ -Yes.
It's Max. Max, the cabdriver.
That's also apparent in the scene when Vincent kicks in the door,
and you're seeing the detail of the exterior and the depth of field.
Meaning things in the foreground are in focus
and things in the deep background are also in focus,
including the distant lights.
He's coming to kill you!
He was scoping out the building when I dropped you off--
Okay, Max, if this is supposed to be some type of joke, it's not funny.
Ifis n01' a joke. Annie, listen to me, please.
Felix hired him. Okay? Or people that Felix worked for.
Felix Reyes-Torrena. How do you know about my case?
I don't understand what's going on.
All I know is that he's already killed witnesses. He's coming to kill you.
When I dropped you off, I don't know how, but he ended up in my cab.
Annie.
Listen. All I want you to do...
Here's more of the lights that we're seeing
only as a courtesy of high-definition video.
-I don't understand what's going on. -Annie, listen.
-Max. -Please listen.
This shot would also have been impossible in motion-picture film.
Max would either be not exposed at all,
and/or he would not be able to carry the focus.
Get out of the building. Annie.
This rooftop that Max is on was a very, very difficult--
Probably the most difficult location for us to get permission
to shoot on in the city,
because it's controlled by the Secret Service.
And they use it to park vehicles on from time to time,
and they don't want anybody even remotely near the rooftop.
And it took a lot of convincing
and us willing to work under mass restrictions,
meaning we shot all of Max's work in about two hours.
That's the only way we were able to get permission to be on this rooftop.
It's the only exposed rooftop quite like it
in downtown Los Angeles, which was why I needed it.
Max?
Shit.
-Max. -He knows you're up there. Just...
I can't hear you. Hello?
Annie. Annie, listen to me.
Shit.
Annie. Annie!
Shit.
The drums were originally heard in Mozambique.
In Maputo, Mozambique on Al/Z
When I heard them in Maputo, I recorded them,
and then we got Ghanaian drummers, who happened to be in Los Angeles,
to go into the third level of my parking garage.
It's got a lot of echo in it.
And we repeated the drumming pattern I had heard in East Africa
with drummers who were mostly from West Africa.
We call them Ghanaian drums.
In fact, they're Mozambican drums, if you like.
And we sampled those.
We also repeated it and did them mostly live.
911. Operator.
Yes- Listen, there is a man in my building, and he is--
Hello?
This scene, without being able to use digital video,
would not even have been able to have been written, much less shot,
because you wouldn't even conceive
of a scene in which characters are moving around with no lights.
And, in fact, it's only their silhouettes against the city lights
and a little bit of bounce that's coming from the city lights themselves
that enables you to see them.
It just would've been physically impossible to capture it.
The cameras are seeing more than the naked eye.
When we finished some of these shots and I said, "Cut,"
everybody had to stay where they were until the lights were turned on
so that people didn't trip and fall and hurt themselves.
Max grew up in Ladera Heights,
which is a very middle-class section of Los Angeles.
And he's never been exposed to street violence, really, in his life,
except what he might have seen as a cab driver.
So he doesn't know how to shoot an H&K .45.
In doing some of the research about what Vincent would've done
if he walked in a strange building,
he would have, first of all,
acclimated himself to the ambient noise of the building.
Buildings heat up during the day when the sun's out.
At night, they cool off and they contract,
and thousands of contractions throughout the entire structure
give the building noise.
And if you're quiet in a building and you listen, you could listen to it.
And the point is that what Vincent would've been doing,
and what he does here, is that he stops and he listens.
And he gets the ambient noise that's supposed to be there.
Because what he's really listening for, once he understands what the ambient noise
that's supposed to be there is, are the anomalous noises.
And the anomalous noises are the sounds of his prey,
and that's Annie.
And all he's doing when he's static here is, in fact, listening.
And he's just almost kind of like a bat, and he's listening for the sound.
What he hears are her stockings... scraping against the carpet
and her palms scraping against the carpet,
and that's how he locates her.
Let her go.
Max?
Why? What are you gonna do about it?
Come on.
Max!
It wasn't planned that Vincent fall over the chair,
but, when he did, it's one of those accidents that I love.
I love it when something happens that's unexpected.
It's kind of an anomaly.
He said his name is Vincent.
I sometimes ask myself,
what are the characteristics of an event or an activity
that are gonna make it simulate something real
or feel to me as if it's real?
And it's the things that don't go exactly according to plan.
I tend to be attracted to them.
I was attracted to this location
among all the different MTA subway stations in Los Angeles
particularly because of the amount of steel.
I like the sense that they're running into some place metallic,
almost like a metallic tube.
LA's got a pretty beautiful subway and public-transportation system.
And when it travels on the surface and hits some of the train stops,
many of them are one-off -- they're individually architected.
Wait, wait. Wait. Wait.
Vincent is enraged. He's impossibly formidable.
Max surprised Vincent and actually pulled the trigger,
something that Vincent thought Max incapable of doing.
In his clumsy way, Max has been improvisational,
which brings it back to a theme that's actually defined
in Stuart Beattie's script.
In the jazz club, when Vincent talks about improvisation...
and Max is acquiring...
certain characteristics through the agency now,
not at the advice of Vincent but via his conflict with him.
Shit.
I didn't desire to ameliorate in any way Vincent's intent.
Vincent intends to kill Annie.
And it was something that I questioned one or two times
and came to the conclusion it has to be what happens.
This is a spectacular MTA station right above--
Right amongst a conjunction of three freeways.
It's the Harbor station.
Shit.
This is not a visual effect. This is shot practically,
as are all these other shots of pulling out of the Harbor station.
There are some shots that are gonna be coming up
in which I chose to shoot green screen,
meaning that I wanted to be able to customize the backgrounds
that were outside the windows.
Like right here.
And the reason for it was because I wanted the graphic pattern
of particularly those rectangles of light, which are from parking structures,
and I wanted them to occur right at this moment.
Max has closed his eyes and simply pulled the trigger,
expecting to die after he's forced himself,
impelled himself to confront Vincent.
There was a direction here, the particular attitude
for Vincent to have as he sat down.
And the direction was to be irritated,
as if he was being irritated at something pedestrian.
And he's irritated at the absurd outcome of this gunfight,
at the whole of this night.
Particularly about the gunfight.
If Max hadn't closed his eyes and just fired chaotically, he'd be dead.
We're almost...
at the next stop.
Hey, Max.
A guy gets on the MTA here in LA and dies.
Think anybody will notice?
Vincent's ironically repeated the same line,
an anecdote about, "A guy gets on the MTA, dies.
Think anybody will notice?"
But it's not a rhetorical question.
Vincent is asking,
"Will anybody note that once upon a time I was here?"
And he's sincere.
All of Vincent's life, who he's been, and all of Max's life,
it's all been collapsed into this one moment,
into the events of this one night.
And the night's over.