The Dark Side of the Streets

Picture the dapper Phantom of the Opera lurking through the catacombs of the sewers of Paris in Joel Schumacher's latest version, or Marv (Mickey Rourke), the street fighter with a vengeance, tearing up the streets of Frank Miller's and Robert Rodriguez's Sin City. As they stalk their prey, we get to explore the sinister side of their psyche and the streets that supposedly spawned it.

Yet the environments that surround them are as pretend as their characters. These landscapes have been patched together with computer-generated images by a special effects team and the director.

Many directors, however, have refused to settle for the artificial easy way out. They have embraced the real urban sprawl by forcing their actors and actresses to leave the soundstages and experience the potent stenches, the peeled paint, the eroding concrete and decaying steel of the city.

The obvious reason for this is they want their actors to interact with the raw emotions, fears and triumphs of the citizens of these metropolises as if they were extras, using the city streets as their wall-less soundstage.

Moving Pictures talked to two directors to ask them why they took their crews and talent into the rich terrain of everyday Joes and Janes. We learn why Michael Mann and Andrew Davis made their films about the average city folk trying to make a buck amongst the steel of the skyscrapers and the concrete castles of capitalism.

City of Archangels

The first time cabbie Max (Jamie Foxx) and contract killer Vincent (Tom Cruise) meet in Michael Mann's Collateral:

Max: "First time in L.A?"

Vincent: "Nah. I'll tell you the truth; whenever I'm here I can't wait to leave. It's too sprawled out and disconnected, you know. That's me...You like it?"

Max: "It's my home."

Decade after decade, one genre that has drained the glitz and glamour out of Show Business Capital of the World quicker than an E! True Hollywood Story has been film noir. John Huston turned the land of sun and palm trees into a heist planner's dark paradise in 1950's The Asphalt Jungle, and many dreary pulp flicks followed, the freshest in film buffs' minds being Curtis Hanson's 1997 adaptation of James Ellroy's lurking homage to the noir, L.A. Confidential.

Chicago-born helmer Michael Mann, however, has redefined urbania since filming the abrasive 1981 thriller Thief in his hometown with James Caan. He has embraced L.A.-based noir and taken it one step further by adding his signature modern sheen to it. Still quite prevalent are the archangel cops and baddies with God complexes, which he used amply in 1986's Manhunter and TV's popular '80s Miami Vice series. But Mann also takes a story, like the bank heist of Asphalt Jungle, and rids it of its malaise, updating it into 1995's brawny, shiny epic Heat.

Heat's base color is blue, adding depth to the Los Angeles night sky. The lighter color scheme accentuates the vastness of the city's borders, keeping us on the perimeter of its industrial areas.

He continues to use this method in 2004's more personal and provocative Collateral. The key color is brown this time, cleverly using L.A.'s smog layer as an aura or specter that envelops its victims.

"L.A. is a unique city. You have this megapolis of 17 million people, and when it's humid what happens is, all of the sodium vapors of the streetlights bounce up onto the bottom of the cloud layer and it becomes a diffused light. You see this wondrous abandoned landscape with hills and trees and strange lighting patterns. It's a very, very magical place," describes Mann.

Mann shot 90 percent of the film in HD to capture the endlessness of the night that celluloid misses with its light sensitivity. "I'll see a picture on a photograph, or I'll be out in the middle of the night, and I'll say, ‘I have to capture that.' I'll have an emotional response, and I'll feel that emotion relates to the movie," says Mann of his visual choices.

Heat's criminal mastermind Robert DeNiro and Tom Cruise's assassin in Collateral embrace the city's Byzantine qualities. They know every last sanctuary to hide in and every secret passageway and escape route. It is their battleground for the taking.

Mann also reveals the places hiding in L.A.'s claustrophobic epicenter, where Vincent finds the prey he's been paid to take out.

"I began to think of it as less of a cab and more of a drive-in movie, meaning that it's really what you're seeing out the windows," reflects Mann. "Where are we, what's going on outside? Refineries in Wilmington, Koreatown, the architecture of the freeways; I wanted that to be the world that Vincent and Max are moving in."

The coyotes he once watched cross Fairfax Blvd. "like they absolutely owned it" are the distillate of Mann s philosophy of inner-city SoCal existence: For Mann no matter how narcissistic and sprawling the city becomes, its pure nature will always remain untamed, thumbing its nose at progress. 

City of Big Shoulders 

Director John Hughes' fictional, idyllic paradise Shermer, Illinois, was inhabited by suburban archetypes such as Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick), who played hooky in the big city and danced on parade floats. Such a character waved his fist and bitched about being trapped in his parents' upper-crust paradigm, far away from the real streets of the Windy City.

At the same time, native Andrew Davis was getting all urban, exposing the true grit of his Sweet Home Chicago and making films that spoke to the souls of its everyday working-class heroes. Davis filmed true crime stories that showed actual undercover cops (Carson's Ribs and Vienna Italian Beef-eating types) always bringing down baddies who thought they were above the law.

"There is a fabric to the characters and the people. I've used a lot of real Chicagoans in my films, especially the cops. And I think when you use them they don't seem like actors, they seem like the real thing," says Davis.

The city's legendary Mayor Richard J. Daley had outlawed crime films in Chicago during his lengthy tenure (1955-1976). It was an attempt to mask the city's tarnished image of a syndicate battleground. But after Daley died in office, the Illinois Film Office allowed John Landis' production of 1980's The Blues Brothers to rape the façade of the town with cop car chases through malls and army tanks and S.W.A.T.s through Downtown's Richard J. Daley Plaza.

This kicked the door wide open for Davis' brand of inner-city suspense thrillers.

His upbringing was a huge factor in this; he had grown up on Chicago's southeast side, in Stony Island.

"I grew up on the north side [Roger's Park] but moved when I was eight to the south side," recalls Davis. "I noticed movies always missed that certain perspective of a kid growing up in Stony Island, running around on the El all the time and playing in all kinds of places like funeral home parking lots and stuff like that."

Nowadays, he tries to translate those childhood memories and experiences into realistic scenes in his films.

"I try to find locations that have the right taste, smell and flavor. I'm probably one of the few filmmakers who spent a lot of time shooting on the city's southeast side around the steel mills," says Davis of using his old stomping grounds as locations in his films.

"For example, Harrison Ford is on the lam in The Fugitive, and he stays in the basement of the Polish landlady's house. And that location is literally half a block away from the South Chicago YMCA where I went when I was a kid," says Davis.

But even with his roots helping paint the visuals, he knew further research would enrich the authenticity of his stories.

"I spent time talking to policemen and veteran reporters like John ‘Bulldog' Drummond. He told me the story about a dope house, and it triggered an idea that I had about Italians running a drug ring." The film soon spawned into 1985's Chuck Norris vehicle Code of Silence.

This also led to Davis' love affair with some of the city's signature attractions in ways directors never used before, usually for elaborate stunt sequences.

Chuck Norris' Eddie Cusack traversed the top of a speeding elevated train traveling around The Loop in Code of Silence. He also ran a high-speed chase through the tight confines of Lower Wacker Drive.

He went on to make other high-octane flicks in the city, launching the career of a pre-ponytail-era Steven Seagal in 1988's Above the Law using the Milwaukee Avenue and Damen Street area known to locals as Logan Square. Davis also craftily turned the classic Pullman neighborhood into Berlin, Germany, so Sergeant Gene Hackman could chase prisoner Tommy Lee Jones through it in 1989's The Package.

"When I started doing those early action films, there weren't a lot of films that were made that had that kind of grittiness," explains Davis. "The French Connection was something that impressed me, which was Bill Friedkin, who filmed it in New York. I try to use the beauty and the brawn and the scary parts of the city to make you feel like you're in a place that you normally don't get to go. Movies that can take you places where you feel like you're getting insight into other people's lives are more entertaining than being up against the wall of a set.

"There is a quality to the architecture that brings out the history of the city. You find the oldest and the newest right next to each other, so it's very rewarding," insists Davis. "I love going back to Chicago."

When he thinks about shooting future projects in the City of Big Shoulders, Davis is reminded of one of cinema's overseas masters: "Fellini once said, ‘I can never make a film about America, I don't understand America.'"