Tom Cruise is renowned for his intense training for stunts that wow on the big screen, but his movie Collateral taught him and director Michael Mann that even the most meticulous preparation can all be for naught. Collateral is an excellent and underrated entry in the filmographies of Cruise and costar Jamie Foxx, and one of the few in which Cruise plays a straight-up villain. In Collateral, Cruise’s hitman, Vincent, hires Foxx’s cabbie, Max, to drive him around Los Angeles from job to job. As the story unfolds, leading to Collateral‘s cathartic ending, Michael Mann’s trademark tension increases.

Also a trademark of Michael Mann movies is the occasional surreal scene that’s loaded with symbolism, even among the action and high stakes, which often unfold at night in moody, beautifully lit shots set to standout tracks. Few modern directors do crime movies with the panache and layered meaning of Mann, his films falling under the umbrella of the thinking person’s thriller. Still, even a director who plans out his movies as meticulously as Mann can’t plan for every hiccup, as Collateral proved.

Collateral’s Coyote Scene Explained

It’s A Surreal & Symbolic Moment

In Collateral, there’s a slightly strange but beautiful scene when Jamie Foxx’s everyman hero is driving around Tom Cruise’s villain through the streets of Los Angeles at night. As they approach an intersection, a pair of coyotes cross the city street in front of them, turning to look at the car. The men silently watch the coyotes cross as the sound of Chris Cornell’s inimitable voice singing “Shadow on the Sun” kicks in.

It’s a seemingly surreal moment, but anyone who has lived in Los Angeles will tell you it’s not out of the ordinary to see coyotes roaming the city. In fact, it’s a moment taken straight from Mann’s own life, as he said in an interview this past October. “It’s about one in the morning, driving north on Fairfax up into the hills, at the intersection of Fairfax and Santa Monica,” he recalled, “and these two coyotes walk across the intersection, like it’s still all wilderness, and they own it. And it was just the attitude of it that stuck with me.” (via Empire Magazine)

The moment symbolizes different things for different people. Some might interpret it as Vincent, the predator, silently stalking through the city undetected and taking his prey, and Max, the prey, being driven by his survival instincts and desire to live. Others might see the adaptable scavenger nature of coyotes as representative of them surviving any way they can, just as Vincent and Max are trying to survive in their own ways. Either way, it’s a memorable moment in Collateral that almost didn’t happen.

The Coyote Scene Took 2 Months To Get Seconds of Footage

Coyotes Refuse To Be Tamed

That brief scene in Collateral turned out to be one of the most difficult to execute, not because the shot itself was particularly challenging, but because of the nature of coyotes. As it turns out, training coyotes is a far cry from training dogs. The original plan was to train the coyotes to simply cross the street, a seemingly easy enough task. However, Mann, Cruise, and the rest of the crew quickly learned that coyotes are gonna do what coyotes are gonna do.

Mann, Cruise, and the rest of the crew quickly learned that coyotes are gonna do what coyotes are gonna do.

“We tried to train those coyotes for two months,” he laughed, before explaining that they eventually gave up. “Finally, we put them on a wire and collar, ran them across, and then visually took the wire out. You can’t train coyotes. That was a big lesson.” In the end, the coyotes were on the screen for less than 20 seconds in Collateral, 20 seconds that cost two whole months of preparation and training that still went right down the drain. In a way, it’s fitting. The coyotes represented untamed nature and primal instinct; in the end, even Michael Mann and Tom Cruise couldn’t tame them. Nature always wins.