20 Things You Somehow Missed In Collateral

In a 2005 interview with Shooting People, writer Stuart Beattie spoke about the unique way he got inspired to come up with Collateral's story. While riding in a cab, a 17-year-old Beattie imagined a killer forming an unexpected connection with a cab driver, with the latter completely unaware of his passenger's murderous tendencies.

The story then became a two-page treatment before eventually taking shape as a first draft during Beattie's time at Oregon State University. Despite going through numerous changes (the most notable being the presence and then the absence of a female African-American cop and a romance), the core idea of the driver/hitman connection stayed till the very end of production.

While the final cut is undeniably a tour de force of storytelling, one cannot help but imagine what the cop-centric story would have shaped up to be.