Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx: Building "Collateral"

The new crime action thriller Collateral stars "good guy" Tom Cruise as a stone cold killer and "funny dude" Jamie Foxx as a sweet guy with some heavy dramatic chops. Wazzup here? We asked the two stars what it was like to play totally against "type", about their friendship, future plans and some gnarly cab rides of their own. The two actors obviously have launched a great mutual admiration society. Tom, in black and gray-stripe shirt, looked hot and businesslike when we spoke with the guys in L.A. Jamie, wearing t-shirt under long-sleeved shirt, looked a bit more laid back.

Tom told us that he loved his older, steel gray look in the film and when  the time comes that he really has gray hair, he'll 'go all the way with no worries'. Collateral is directed by "Miami Vice's" Michael Mann who really knows how to present a gritty nighttime L.A. (coyotes just cross the street in front of Jamie's cab!). Tom is a killer for hire who selects cabbie Jamie as his driver for an all night killing assignment. We thought we'd start things off by asking "killer" and "cabbie" a question about some "lighter" cab experiences:

TeenHollywood: What is the craziest taxi ride experience for both of you?

Jamie: Tijuana. I went to college in San Diego and we would go to Tijuana because it was cheaper for college kids to go. They have no rules.  You can put as many people as you want in a cab. On two wheels, we flew all the way to the club.

Tom: Mine is just New York. I was dropping this girl off and for some reason (the driver) decided to race another cabbie at 4 in the morning. I said, can you get there quickly and he just took off, ripping through red lights. It was fun. I gave him a good tip

TeenHollywood: Tom, is your career planned? How did you decide to play a killer?

Tom: There is no great plan. Michael sent this to me and it was "do you think it'll work?" "I don't know". I read or develop something because I'm interested in it and like it. I wanted to play Ali but Will got there first. (laughter).

TeenHollywood: So how did you prepare for the role?

Tom: I have a process I go through and I'll work on a character, develop  a backstory for the character. On this I just worked with Michael Mann. There's a great momentum. You're moving toward something. He'd work on the backstory with me. I had to work on the weapons. I'd never fired a live round before and I worked on the fighting sequences for months and months. Michael came up with the look for the character. I worked with an ex British Special Forces guy Nick Gould who trained me. We'd do exercises, like I dressed up as a UPS guy and delivered mail, except didn't kill anybody. (laughter)

TeenHollywood: Vincent the killer is sooo different from you though.

Tom: Yeah. He's the anti-thesis of who I am. You look at the choices  he makes in life. Everybody has a different moral code. The things that concern him are anti-social and aren't the same as those that concern a social personality. One of the keys is that when people are doing things, they do believe that they are right, they justify as to why it's okay. That's all part of creating the backstory of Vincent. I like taking on challenges. This is a great character, no question.

TeenHollywood: The whole movie depends on a great relationship between the killer and cabbie. How did you guys develop that?

Tom: Michael was saying we needed someone with great presence for Max. When Jamie came in it was just there, palpable. You could see the dynamic. It was exciting. It was there for us immediately. As it went on and we were hanging out, we just talked.

Jamie: I'd met Tom before.

Tom: You beat me at basketball.

Jamie: That was a celeb basketball game but I'd read for Jerry Maguire and I didn't get it (laughs). I was really nervous when I first met Tom. We were talking and I said 'well I have two homes'. I asked him 'where do you live' and he said 'Rome' and I went 'Rome Street or...' Let me get the hell out of here.

Tom: (laughs) We were talking then. I heard about your grandmother and your music.

Jamie: But when Michael Mann called and said 'do you want to work with Tom Cruise?"  I said 'I don't care if we're singing show tunes or ABC's, I'm in there'. Once we got there my sense was here's this cat that's at the top of the food chain. Nobody's bigger in movies and he was still cool, still genuine. We shared stuff. He ended up at my birthday party. There were some elements there where you needed security and people were two-waying people, 'yo, The Last Samurai is at Jamie Foxx's party. Get down here!' The stuff on screen just happened because we were around each other so much. Hanging out and sharing stuff about politics, private stuff. We needed that. It was an intense shoot.

TeenHollywood: It gets so "real" between the two characters. Like they are, in a weird way, becoming friends.

Jamie: It's not just killing and me running away from him (Tom). When we start talking, I'm getting at him, 'what about you and your father?' and he's "look at you. You can't call that girl (Jada Pinkett Smith's character).  You can't even pick up the phone and call that girl'. I have a friend who has been doing music for 17 years but has never finished a song. He'll play me fragments of songs on my answering machine. 'Foxx, you can't tell me I'm not better than Babyface'. Well, yeah but get the song to me and we'll see. But he never did it. It's like Max (Jamie's cabbie character who wants to run a limo service) has never finished a song. He's written a thousand verses but no hooks. Here's a person who comes out of nowhere and says 'finish the damn song" in a sense. Those were the things we were coming up with.

TeenHollywood: Jamie, this is some dramatic stuff. Where did that come from in you?

Jamie:  Michael Mann asked me if I could play a cab driver and I said 'well, I do my thing'. And he said 'well, can you not do your thing? Can you be simple, indecisive, boring, a person who just gets up and goes to work?' That was a serious challenge for me, stripping it all down.

Tom: Here's the thing about the kind of talent Jamie has: talent is talent. You look at Foxx. You talk about him as a standup comedian. Before that, he's a classically trained musician. He's a singer. He's a songwriter. You should hear his music. His ability at comedy to create characters and have insight into people and he makes jokes about it but it shows his unique insight into people. And you see that he's a comedic actor. And it's not just that he's played dramatic roles before this. He's carrying the movie here with Collateral with the humanity. It's a very difficult role. I think talent is talent.

TeenHollywood: Tom, would you like to shape talent? Do you want to direct?

Tom: I've been offered things. One day I'd like to try it. At this point I'm just enjoying producing and acting.

TeenHollywood: Jamie, how did you prepare for your role as an L.A. cabbie?

Jamie: Michael put me with cabbies. In L.A., it's not a cab city.  New York is a cab city. In L.A., it's 'why aren't you driving a town car or SUV or a limo?' I lot of these guys have fractures in their personalities to say the least. One guy was.. 'Jamie, I notice you see the cotton balls in my console. I use those cotton balls and get alcohol on it and rub my neck. I don't want my customers seeing that I have a dirty neck'. Okaaaay. He was really sincere and we found out he had lost his wife and was stuck there.

TeenHollywood: That's heavy and sad. Was there a funny cabbie?

Jamie: Yeah. I had this African cab driver Dominique. He found out all the people who had DUI's and built accounts for the weekend. They want to go out but can't drive so he'd go pick up all these, mostly girls. I was riding with him and he's 'Jamie, you don't mind if I pick up....'  I'm like 'whatever' so we went to the club. He leaves me in the cab and people are walking past on the street and lookin' at Jamie Foxx in the cab and going 'Foxx done fell off. He's taking cabs now'. So it was me finding the pulse of who that cab driver was. Then there was the guy who didn't know how to get on any of the freeways. Then there was the guy telling me how to play the role 'if a guy came at me with a gun, I'd rip his eyes out'. I'm like 'dude, we need to get out of this cab! This guy's gonna rob us or something'.

Tom: We had a bunch of cabs made, different kinds that were supposed to be tested for sound so that I could hear Jamie, he could hear me, so we could talk in a very relaxed natural way. I say supposed to, because the first time...

Jamie: Did you fall asleep? I fell asleep a lot when we first started because the big motor that was driving us- -

Tom: Oh yeah, the fumes. The fumes were hitting you right in the face.  A couple of times, I'd say, "What? What did you say? Foxx, did you say your line? Did you say it?"

TeenHollywood: It's a pretty serious film. Anything funny happen on set? We heard that Jamie crashed a Mercedes.

Jamie: I made a mistake. It wasn't on purpose. Michael told me to drive past...

Tom: He was just gonna take off the side view mirrors of a couple of the cars...

Jamie: And Tom was like...'What about safety, Jamie? Just make sure everything's safe.' I'm like, 'I got this.' And I go head first into this Mercedes and he is in the back seat. About a billion dollars of man goin' up and down and Michael Mann I'm sure is goin' nuts.

TeenHollywood: So Tom, what have you been doing and what's coming up for you?

Tom: I have been busy.  Busy hangin' out with my kids, releasing Collateral. I have got the Cameron Crowe picture that we are producing, Elizabethtown with Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst and Susan Sarandon, that's going really well. And just working on things. Working on "Mission" and a few other pictures. I haven't had a break yet. I will. I will take time. But I haven't gone on vacation yet. But I am having a good time. Life is actually very good.

TeenHollywood: Jamie, there is a lot of Oscar buzz about how good you are playing Ray Charles in your next film. What was it like playing a legend?

Jamie: Well you know, a lot of people say "Don't jinx it. Don't say Oscar." I say "Hey, say it!" And the only reason I say that is if you are playing basketball for the Lakers or whatever team, you want to go to the championship, and if you look at the Oscars, that would be what you consider the championship. I am the one of the luckiest guys in the world.  It feels good when people are acknowledging you. I hosted the ESPYs and Tom Cruise showed up and Denzel was there and Sharon Stone, all these people are kind of noticing. At the end of the day it's not about how many awards you won. It's the moments and the marks you leave. And the admiration from the people that you have been looking at for however many years comin' up in your career. So that's what makes it good for me. I'm just going to keep riding it, and then if any of these movies can get those acknowledgements, that's great. As far as Ray Charles is concerned, Ray Charles got a chance to view the movie in his own way before he passed away. So people should know that. And his is a story not too hard to tell because Ray Charles is a great man.

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Lynn Barker is a Hollywood-based entertainment journalist and produced screenwriter.