I sat down with my screenplay class to dissect the opening story beats in Collateral. I noticed something for the first time: How much of the Cruise character is developed outside of the actor himself. He is literally a study in contrasts. It starts with the Jason Statham meet up at the very beginning. Where Cruise is hairy (facial and head), Statham is bald and very reserved. Even the British accent builds a contrast between him and Cruise, which, given everything we know about Statham as an archetype, is meant to tell the viewer something.
The contrast continues when you look at the female lead (Jada Pinkett-Smith). She is dark skinned with eyes lightened around the edges to an almost white color. Cruise is pale with sunglasses. These two characters are meant to contrast each other–a fact already established by the initial in-car conversations that both have with Jamie Foxx.
Cruise is the Antagonist in the film, and he is designed to play off both the female and male leads as a larger-than-life individual whose presence far outstrips his minimal size. He and Foxx toy openly with the idea of control as they enter the driver/passenger dynamic but also throughout the conversation with jabs and queries about the life of Foxx outside of the cab company–information he was forced to give Cruise but willingly offered to Pinkett-Smith.
The first twenty minutes of the film represents roughly six pages of actual dialogue, which means that a lot of this character creation is purely driven by the visual aspects of the film as well as the diegetic and especially non-diegetic elements (which frequently are the same sounds moved in and out of the story world) as a way to create POV.
This Darabont/Mann production represents for me a small explosion of wonder in film and I am grateful to be able to use it in a class.