Michael Mann Peers Into the Digital Night: The Director and His Team Reflect on the Look of ‘Collateral’ and ‘Miami Vice’
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By 2014, digital cinematography had become ubiquitous. A bankrupted Kodak was on the verge of closing its doors, and the conversation surrounding digital technology was how it could emulate the photochemical process of shooting on celluloid (a topic still up for debate today) while promising filmmakers greater flexibility, control, and ease of use.
Only a decade earlier, tech companies were still a few years away from building a professional camera designed for Hollywood movie production. There had been independent films shot with inexpensive prosumer DV cameras that were blown up to 35mm film stock, and George Lucas leaned on Sony to accelerate the development of a camera he could utilize for the next stage of his CGI world-building in “Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones” (2002), but studio filmmakers and the studios themselves had seen little to motivate them to consider switching.
The digital image was seen as being too hyper-real, the dynamic range so limited it made shooting bright daylight exteriors near impossible, and the sensor chips were still so small compared to 35mm negative that the depth of field felt seemingly endless. In Hollywood’s mind in 2004, when director Michael Mann released “Collateral,” there was nothing cinematic about digital.
What made the pioneering use of digital cinematography in “Collateral” so unique — and why it, along with Mann’s 2006 reimagining of “Miami Vice” have emerged as modern classics rather than footnotes in the technical history of motion pictures — is that Mann wasn’t trying to emulate the photochemical process of shooting on celluloid. He was drawn to what was unique about the new medium, embracing a distinctly digital aesthetic. And his script for “Collateral,” a dramatic thriller about a hit man (Tom Cruise) taking an L.A. cab driver (Jamie Foxx) hostage, was the perfect vehicle for the experiment.
No one had ever seen a movie that looked like “Collateral,” which utilized a digital camera to peer deep into Los Angeles night. Cinematographer Paul Cameron remembered Cruise’s first day on set for a test shoot. The star was slightly dumbfounded as he stared at a monitor — in and of itself something shockingly new for filmmakers — of a shot of Foxx standing next to his cab, the camera aimed down an alley with the cityscape in the background.
“Looking into downtown, you could see the depth of the original tests in the monitor,” said Cameron. “Tom looked at that for the first time, and I remember him looking at me, ‘That’s the movie?’ and I’m like, ‘That’s exactly what the movie is going to feel like,’ and he said, “For real?’ and I was like, ‘For real.’”
It was an image that couldn’t be replicated on film. According to Cameron and Dion Beebe, who would later replace Cameron on the shoot, even shooting with newer high-speed film stocks would require lighting rows of city blocks just to make the buildings visible — an impracticality that, if even realized, wouldn’t produce the results Mann was chasing.
“Even if you could get the exposure, you couldn’t shoot that on film,” Mann told IndieWire. “Everything’s visible, and you would never get that because you’d be working at an F2 stop [the camera’s aperture wide open to allow in maximum light], and you’d have a very shallow depth of field.”
Traditional movie lighting worked against Mann’s vision for “Collateral,” which spawned from his experimentations with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki on a handful of digital shots of night-time exteriors on “Ali” (2001).
“What I analyzed afterwards [on ‘Ali’] was that it was feeling real, because the theatrical lighting that we all do — and it’s brilliant when it’s Storaro’s shooting ‘The Conformist,’ right? Or Caravaggio in his paintings — but the subtraction of that made it have an authenticity that I thought was startling,” said Mann. “And so that was the ambition for ‘Collateral’ throughout, we had to work tremendously hard, [it was] very difficult to do it.”
Cameron’s marching orders in trying to R&D how to shoot “Collateral” were clear: When Foxx and Cruise were in the cab, they couldn’t look lit. It should feel as if the city itself was the only light source. Inspired by the first backlit movie posters he saw at a bus stop in Japan, Cameron started to research how to create a bulb-less light made of phosphor paper panels he could strategically stick along the inside of the cab, which produced a shadowless light that felt as if it was emanating from the city. For Mann, there was something poetic about Los Angeles at night that spoke to him, especially how the city looks in the late spring and early summer months when the marine layer hovers overhead.
“There’s a whole cloud bank at about 1,200 feet, and then the sodium vapor lamps, which were mostly what was around in [2004, before being replaced by LEDs in recent years], bounce off the bottom of those clouds. It’s as if you’re in England in November or December at about four in the afternoon,” said Mann. “It’s both attractive and appealing and sensuous. There’s also something surreal about it, and it suggests a certain kind of transitory state to everything. It captured both something quite beautiful, but also something very transient about our circumstances living in this city and living life.”
Mann is known for extensive and demanding preparation, and during the exhaustive 18-hour prep days on “Collateral” he and Cameron would scout the city at night in search of settings that would best allow them to capture this feeling at the heart of the film. Each man carried his first digital still cameras: Mann had one of the early Canon digital SLRs, Cameron, a 16KB Casio point-and-shoot the size of a credit card. With their consumer cameras, Cameron and Mann were able to get images they’d never been able to achieve in their combined decades of shooting in Los Angeles on film, yet what they were capturing was something Angelenos experienced every night.
As the two men exchanged digital stills and studied test footage — utilizing seemingly every film and digital camera available — back on a 2K projector in Mann’s office, Cameron recalled how different the conversations were with Mann compared to every other movie he had worked on.
“In the past, you talk about color, light, composition, referring to paintings or how to photograph a city or location a certain way, but this was how to really dig out the reality of the city,” said Cameron. “There was no set intention on ‘Collateral’ to shoot it digitally, but the reality was how would we get this experience that our eye was capturing at night.”
On “Ali,” Mann and Lubeski brought a Sony F-900 with them on evening exteriors to experiment with, and one shot — Muhammad Ali (Will Smith) on a rooftop in Chicago, as riots following Martin Luther King’s assassination filled the streets in the background — which made it into the final film left a lasting impact on Mann.
“There was a truth-telling style to the way images are shot in high def,” said Mann of the rooftop experiment. “It was stunning; it was Will Smith and the believability of that urban landscape with his reaction in front of it.”
It is the ultimate Michael Mann shot: The widescreen image tight on a character reeling to keep his composure in the midst of swirling drama. For the director, whose hallmark was placing the audience in the middle of a scene’s intensity, what digital brought to the composition was a depth and vivid realism of the world surrounding the character. Beebe sees the seeds of what Mann was reaching for with digital in his 1990s films, in particular “The Insider” (1999).
“The pursuit of that immediacy, that presence that he brings to cinema, in my eyes he introduced a whole way of doing that in ‘The Insider” with camera placement, the camera literally in the nape of the neck of the protagonist,” said Beebe.
In “The Insider,” each step whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) takes toward revealing the truth about the multi-billionaire tobacco industry puts his family life at risk — a pressure Mann makes tangible for the audience in these tight widescreen images of Crowe as his character’s world collapses around him.
“As an audience, you’re sitting in that place where you can feel the eye of the person and what it does is create this incredible level of discomfort in the viewer. You’re just in this sort of point of view with this semi-peripheral vision with half the frame buried into the face of the the character,” said Beebe. “I think when he took that into the digital format, because of the extra depth of these small chip cameras, suddenly became you’re watching the actor, and you’re looking deep in terms of what they’re seeing, what’s coming towards them — you’re trying to look into that peripheral space because you know shit is coming. And I think it just elevated that point of view, which is one of Michael’s many gifts to the industry and lasting legacies in terms of storytelling.”
These tension-filled digital compositions accompany “Collateral,” as Max (Foxx) tries to navigate the cunning and ruthless killer in his back seat as he is forced to drive.
The concept of a film shot largely in a car, lit by the natural light of the city (and some phosphorus paper), elicits the image of the type of run-and-gun, light-on-its-feet production that digital camera companies had promised filmmakers. But nothing could be further from reality.
“There was some marketing genius who got behind digital cameras when they first started out because the whole conversation was it’s quicker, it’s easier, it’s instant, no processing of negative, all of this sort of dialogue around the ease of use, the sensitivity to light,” said Beebe. “And the truth was, in those early days, it was some of those things, but it was literally a science project more than anything. These were not cameras built for cinema, they were broadcast cameras not designed for the sort of requirements that we have on set.”
The Thompson ViperCam and the Sony F-900 were not robust — on “Miami Vice” there would be 12 cameras in various stages of repair or disrepair circulating in order to keep three cameras working. Made to sit on a massive tripod in on a broadcast stage, they weren’t properly balanced for movie use. The early chips lacked the dynamic range to handle contrast in highlights, and in the darkness, it was a constant experiment to figure out where the signal-to-noise ratio needed to be to avoid a level of digital artifacts that would be unacceptable for a Hollywood movies with two big stars. Cameron spent months testing and doing R&D, building a first-class tech team to support what would be a near-constant state of problem-solving.
“The idea of shooting a film, especially a film of this caliber, digitally on the Sony was absurd,” said Cameron. “It was just, ‘You can’t do that.’”
The biggest problem would be how to record the footage. There had been recent advances in new-to-market equipment that allowed recording to hard drives.
“We did massive testing with the hard drives, and everything was great, and then we had an experience where we shot, and when we sent in the material, they couldn’t get the information off the hard drive,” said Cameron. “So the studio went ballistic and was like, ‘There’s just no way we can we can let you guys do this.’”
The compromise was the production would record to hard drives as well as SRW tape. And unlike today, verifying the digital footage was equally cumbersome and tension-filled.
“We recorded everything two or three times on decks that we carried with us,” said Beebe. “So we were backing up, two or three times.”
The result was the cameras had to be tethered to a massive camera car, nicknamed “the mothership,” which housed the multiple decks and hard drives, massive monitors for one of the first DIT stations, technicians, and a generator because the power consumption far exceeded what was normally required. The mothership was so heavy that the back wheels hung down like a low rider. Hearing Mann, Cameron, and Beebe describe the shoot, it sounds as tense as one of Mann’s films, with frayed nerves as the filmmakers were constantly anticipating the next shoe to fall.
“The first two weeks of shooting I had this recurring nightmare that the film didn’t really exist,” said Mann. “I’m out there spending all the studio’s money shooting something that is some form of conceptual art — it only exists in my imagination because there is nothing tangible.”
The digital cameras were anything but mobile. Tethered to the mothership, ironically, the production would actually switch to shooting on 35mm film cameras when Mann wanted freedom of movement, like the scene inside the club with elaborately staged action involving dozens of extras.
The technical limitation would become even more cumbersome for Beebe on “Miami Vice.” Building off the night-time exterior work of “Collateral,” Mann was drawn to wanting that same hyper-reality and depth, but this time in the bright, water-filled daylight exteriors of Miami. Right from his early tests out on the boat in Long Beach with Mann, Beebe could foresee the massive challenges.
“I hated the idea of dragging this digital system around the world, trying to shoot on boats with a tethered camera, and all of the stuff that we had was terrifying,” said Beebe. “It’s probably still the most difficult movie I’ve ever made.”
Not only did Beebe have to contend with making the mothership mobile, “Miami Vice” was playing into the Viper and Sony’s weaknesses. The digital cameras thrived in the low end of exposure on “Collateral,” but it lacked the beautiful fall off of film in the highlights, and its extremely limited dynamic range made shooting in the contrast of Miami’s hard sunlight near impossible. Beebe’s team would have to flood the foreground of scenes with light, to lessen the contrast.
“We were blasting light. I remember a 100K soft sun would be our fill light when on the water,” said Beebe. “Otherwise, in order to see the sun hitting the water, everyone would be in silhouette.”
Beebe admits there were plenty of times he questioned straying from the comfort of shooting 35mm film, as all the tricks he learned, and mastery he’d developed flew out the window.
“It was challenging as hell, but also exciting when you got in the theater (to screen dailies) and saw some of the results, and started to recognize that this new aesthetic sort of emerging,” said Beebe.
On “Miami Vice,” Mann wanted to try taking the hyper-reality of “Collateral” and mix it with more impressionistic filmmaking strokes. Beebe would bring more of a chiaroscuro approach, building contrast and drama into the lighting design, compared to the softer, more indirect approach in “Collateral.” And whereas “Collateral” leaned into the color of Los Angeles at night, “Miami Vice” was reaching for something of a more controlled palette of artifice. A vibrant use of color mixed with darkness, that moved away from the TV franchise’s use of pastels.
Taken in total, “Miami Vice” was Mann expanding upon and pushing further into a digital aesthetic, creating a more modern look and edge that tested what the medium could do. Critics largely rejected the film, in part because of how it looked. In the years that followed, digital cinematography would become more refined, sensors started to mirror the size of 35mm and 65mm film negative, and tools became more malleable and better able to mirror a “filmic” look.
At IndieWire, when we interview modern digital cinematographers about their latest project, inevitably, the conversation turns to how they added film grain, mirrored a particular film stock, and created an image more in line with Hollywood’s classic celluloid roots. With the large format cameras being more prevalent, we’re going through a shallow depth of field trend at the moment — even “cinematic” mode on our iPhones is essentially nothing more than extremely shallow depth of field.
It’s against this backdrop that Mann’s “Collateral” and “Miami Vice” don’t look like early precursors of the digital revolution to come, but rather a brief moment when a pioneering filmmaker reached for what they could be.
Additional reporting by Jim Hemphill.
