Watch: Michael Mann’s ‘Collateral’ and Sam Mendes’ ‘Skyfall’: How to Build a Scene

For a scene to be truly suspenseful, one must have a sense of the director’s omniscience. What this means is that the viewer must be made to feel on top of, inside, outside, behind, beneath, all over a scene from its beginning to its end, each hairpin plot turn a twist in the viewer’s gut, each moment of respite a breeze on the viewer’s brow. In comparing two key scenes from Michael Mann’s ‘Collateral’ and Sam Mendes’ ‘Skyfall,’ Michael Mclennan shows us how the two directors and cinematographers Dion Beebe and Roger Deakins have placed us inside and outside of the action onscreen simultaneously.