Michael Mann - Cinema and Television: Interviews, 1980-2012 9780748693559

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MICHAEL MANN CINEMA AND TELEVISION

MICHAEL MANN CINEMA AND TELEVISION Interviews 1980–2012

Edited by Steven Sanders and R. Barton Palmer

© editorial matter and organisation Steven Sanders and R. Barton Palmer, 2014 © the chapters their several authors, 2014 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10/12.5 pt Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9354 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9355 9 (webready PDF) The right of the contributors to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements

Introduction: Michael Mann in His Interviews Steven Sanders

  1.  Four Minute Mile Julian Fox

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 2. Castle Keep 32 Harlan Kennedy  3. Of Vice and Mann Art Harris

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 4. Manhunter: An Interview with Michael Mann Alain Charlot and Marc Toullec

47

  5. Michael Mann: Hollywood Writer–Director–Producer Graham Fuller

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  6. Mann and His Movies Jonathan Romney

57

  7. All the Corporations’ Men Michael Sragow

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  8. Smoking Gun Stuart Husband

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  9. “Ali Likes the Film a Lot. He’s Seen it Six Times” Xan Brooks

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10. Paint it Black Mark Olsen

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contents

11. Mann Among Men Michael Sragow

85

12. L.A. Belongs to the Coyotes Leif Kramp

91

13. Michael Mann Interview John Maguire

95

14. A Mann’s Man’s World Scott Foundas

101

15. Number One with a Bullet John Patterson

109

16. The Study of Mann F.X. Feeney

117

Chronology 130 Filmography 132 Publisher’s Acknowledgments 139 Index 141

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

 3.1  Miami Vice pilot “Brother’s Keeper” (1984). L. to r., Ricardo Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas), Sonny Crockett (Don Johnson). 40  3.2 Miami Vice, “Heart of Darkness” (1984). Undercover FBI agent Arthur Lawson (Ed O’Neill). 42  3.3 Miami Vice, “Lend Me an Ear” (1987). Electronics surveillance expert Steve Duddy (John Glover). 44  4.1 Manhunter (1986). Former FBI investigator Will Graham (William Petersen). 48  4.2 Manhunter. A menacing serial killer, Francis Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan). 49  6.1 Thief (1981). R. to l., high-line thief Frank (James Caan), mob thug Attaglia (Tom Signorelli). 56  7.1 The Insider (1999). L. to r., CBS journalist Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer), 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino). 62  8.1 The Insider. Former tobacco company scientist Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) takes the stand. 72 10.1 Collateral (2004). Hit-man Vincent (Tom Cruise) comes to L.A. 82 10.2 Collateral. Vincent (Tom Cruise) survives a shoot-out at a Koreatown nightclub. 83 11.1 Thief (1981). L. to r., Jessie (Tuesday Weld) and Frank (James Caan) establish a relationship. 86 11.2 Heat (1995). Armored car take-down by Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) and his crew in L.A. 89 12.1 Heat. Robbery-homicide detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) and his crew. L. to r., Ted Levine, Wes Studi, Mykelti Williamson, Al Pacino. 90 12.2 Collateral (2004). Max (Jamie Foxx) and Vincent (Tom Cruise) in Max’s cab on an L.A. freeway. 93 vii

list of illustrations

13.1 Miami Vice pilot, “Brother’s Keeper” (1984). Sonny Crockett (Don Johnson) on South Beach. 96 14.1 Heat (1995). The coffee shop scene. Criminal Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro). “A guy told me one time don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” 108 14.2 Heat. The coffee shop scene. Robbery-homicide detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino). “I spend all my time chasing guys like you around the block. . . . I don’t know how to do anything else. . . . I don’t much want to either.” 108 15.1 Public Enemies (2009). John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) is taken into custody. 110 15.2 Public Enemies. John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) smirks as the audience in the movie theater is told, “He may be sitting amongst you.” 111 16.1 Heat (1995). L. to r., Eady (Amy Brenneman), Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro). 116 16.2 The Last of the Mohicans (1992). L. to r., Chingachgook (Russell Means), Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis). 119 16.3 Miami Vice (2006). A thousand broken diamonds of light glisten on the surface of the Atlantic Ocean and Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) momentarily forgets his life of stealthy, feral danger. 120

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors thank the various publications and individuals who have given us permission to reprint the interviews in this volume. We thank Zachary Snow for his tireless effort and thoughtful correspondence with the various copyright holders throughout the process of acquiring these permissions, and Greta Tasedan for her assistance in this process. Christeen Clemens was enormously helpful to us in our work on the manuscript and especially in the preparation of the photo illustrations. We also thank Ingo Stelte, who assisted R. Barton Palmer in the translation of the interview with Leif Kramp, originally published in German. The development of this volume quickly became a team project. We are grateful to Gillian Leslie, Michelle Houston, Jenny Peebles, and James Dale at Edinburgh University Press for their interest in the project, as well as their encouragement, editorial judgment, and prompt and always helpful communications. Wendy Lee provided both meticulous attention to detail and probing inquiry in her copy-editing of the typescript, for which we are grateful. The striking cover design, utilizing an image from Heat, is by Paul Smith. It was a pleasure working with all these professionals, who embraced the project with so much energy and enthusiasm.

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INTRODUCTION: MICHAEL MANN IN HIS INTERVIEWS Steven Sanders

In 1995, Graham Fuller wrote that “Mann alone, among American auteurs, has spanned both mediums [feature films and television] and maintained a consistent, urgent voice.”1 Michael Mann Cinema and Television: Interviews 1980–2012 collects for the first time Mann’s discussions of the work in film and television that has earned him critical acclaim and a worldwide following. Spanning the entire career to date of the award-winning screenwriter–­director– producer, the volume brings together sixteen incisive interviews by an international roster of critics, commentators, journalists, and film and television insiders, making it the definitive collection of Mann’s own assessment of his cinema and television career. The interviews elicit some of his most revealing comments on his work ethic, methods, and style. He describes some of the things in his work in film and television of which he is most proud. He explains why Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) had such a profound effect on him. And he rebuts the criticism that his films are burdened by excessive style. Throughout, Mann discusses themes such as crime, locale, and developing technologies in cinema. In some of the interviews Mann comments on his seemingly existentialist ideas. Others focus on his stylistics of evil and horror, and his depiction of the corporatization of crime. Still others discuss his creation of a new noir that brings together the themes of professionalism, crime, vice, and redemption in the megalopolises of Los Angeles and Miami, and the evolution of a wholly new model of criminal trafficking on a global scale. The interviews are arranged chronologically from 1980 to 2012, and encompass Mann’s work from his Emmy Award-winning telefilm The Jericho 1

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Mile (1979) to his most recent directorial venture, the pilot episode of the HBO series Luck (2011–12). The interviews originally appeared in publications in the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany, and typically focus on discussions of one or more of Mann’s ten feature films: Thief (1981), The Keep (1983), Manhunter (1986), The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Heat (1995), The Insider (1999), Ali (2001), Collateral (2004), Miami Vice (2006), and Public Enemies (2009). A few of the selections are more broadly conceived as profile pieces and many touch on the television series Miami Vice (1984–9). Given the comparatively few interviews Mann has given, not every film, topic, or theme has been taken up with equal thoroughness. For example, very little discussion of Mann’s work in the documentary format or, for that matter, his work in television pre-dating Miami Vice will be found in the interviews. The same can be said for Mann’s short films, including Insurrection (1968), the 8-minute experimental film Jaunpuri (1971), which received awards at film festivals in Cannes, Barcelona, Melbourne, and Sydney, and 17 Days Down the Line (1972). To compensate for this absence, we have included a lengthy interview with Julian Fox, in which Mann discusses his made-for-TV film, The Jericho Mile. The international interest in Mann’s work, and especially his reception in Europe, is well represented by the inclusion of interviews originating in periodicals from Great Britain, France, and Germany, where the focus has been largely on Mann’s aesthetics, casting choices, and the challenges and rewards of location shooting in Los Angeles. The inevitable result of reprinting interviews largely in unedited form is some repetition. A few factual errors have been removed and some grammatical mistakes silently corrected. Many of the pre-interview set-ups, most of the explanatory notes, and all the photographs that accompanied the original interviews have been eliminated. Film and television show titles have been italicized throughout, and, where needed, brief explanatory identifications have been placed in the text in brackets. I Michael Mann has been called “the world’s foremost action auteur,”2 the “last of the great thriller directors,”3 and “one of the most breathtaking cinematic stylists of his era.”4 When Jonathan Romney refers to Mann’s “documentarist’s eye for the world,” he quickly adds “although with a hallucinatory twist” to indicate a kind of fever that inflects Mann’s visual style and flair for action. As prominent as location, architecture, color, and sound design are in his work, Mann’s cinema is also filled with themes and ideas: the corporatization of crime and its global outreach; alienation and corruption, both external to and within law enforcement, politics, and media; professionalism and integrity; and the struggle for authenticity. These characteristics suggest some ways in which Mann’s work both reflects and has shaped contemporary film 2

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culture and bear witness to his distinctive approach to film. An accomplished storyteller and nonpareil visual artist, Mann prefers to write (or co-write) his own scripts, direct, and produce, making him an unusually versatile triple threat in Hollywood. His films, as well as the series he has executive-produced for network television, are familiar to filmgoers worldwide. The interviews in this volume elicit Mann’s characteristic candor on such topics as his working methods, themes, artistic ambitions, and the apparent ease with which he moves from feature films to television and back again. He discusses the crime genre, his enthusiasm for filming on location in L.A., and what it is like to direct stars such as Tom Cruise, Daniel Day-Lewis, Johnny Depp, Robert De Niro, and Al Pacino. Mann’s work has taken a variety of formats and forms, from documentaries to biopics, from period interpretations of classic literature to urban crime films, from location-based television series about vice and corruption in Miami, Chicago, and Las Vegas to socially conscious examinations of corporate misconduct to television advertisements for Mercedes-Benz and the Ferrari California. Perhaps because his work is so varied and unpredictable, with new projects constantly in development, critics and commentators who would take the full measure of his contributions to cinema and television have their work cut out for them. II A conversation with Michael Mann confirms one journalist’s account of the writer–director–producer as “a Renaissance man,” whose references display the filmmaker’s wide range of knowledge and interests, from art history in discussions of Manhunter, to eighteenth-century fighting manuals in connection with The Last of the Mohicans, to the technology of high-definition (HD) digital video that he has used to stunning but by no means universally praised effect in Collateral, the Miami Vice feature film, and Public Enemies. Mann is closely identified with the television series Miami Vice5 and he is responsible for, as Graham Fuller calls it, “an entire sub-genre of intensely modern, drugrelated TV police dramas,” including not only Miami Vice and Crime Story (1986–8), but also L.A. Takedown (1989) and Robbery Homicide Division (2002–3). His ability to fuse the conventions of the urban-crime genre with elements of art-cinema innovation helps to explain the fascination that audiences, film critics, and scholars have with his work. In the course of his career, Mann has written, directed, and produced feature films, written scripts for television, and co-scripted and directed an Emmy Award-winning telefilm, The Jericho Mile. The made-for-TV film, long regarded as “Hollywood’s stepchild,” has been said to have come of age with Mann’s Mile.6 It had a theatrical release in Europe and provides a point of departure for Mann’s serious early encounter with men in existential crisis. It is, in fact, an encounter that functions as a kind of through-line in his work in cinema, as Thief, Heat, The 3

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Insider, and Collateral clearly illustrate. His feature films include a serial-killer thriller (Manhunter) that introduced the filmgoing public to the character Hannibal Lektor – later to be seen in two non-Mann films, Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991) and Hannibal (Ridley Scott, 2001); a Gothic horror film (The Keep); an existential crime drama (Thief); and a fast-paced heist drama (Heat), the latter two with extraordinary set pieces where Mann’s penchant for choreographed violence is fully in evidence. He has co-written a multiple Academy Award-nominated docudrama about big tobacco and television journalism based on a true story (The Insider), an eighteenth-century epic (The Last of the Mohicans), and a celebrity biopic (Ali). This last, called “a fine, underrated biopic” by Scott Foundas in “A Mann’s Man’s World” and Mann’s “least interesting film, smothered in impersonation and evasion,” by David Thomson in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, came with its own set of controversies and quarrels. Mann discusses the film in his interview with Xan Brooks in this volume. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1965 and taking an M.A. at the London International Film School, Mann remained in London and worked on documentaries and TV commercials, and as an assistant production supervisor for 20th Century Fox. Some of his material on the Paris student riots of 1968 appeared on the NBC news program First Tuesday because he could get closer to the radical leaders than the people at NBC could. Returning to the U.S., he found work in television, and a brief look at the arc of his television career and his most prominent credits is indicative of someone whose production methods, thematic preoccupations, and style have always been cinematic. Mann wrote scripts for Police Story (1973–7), Police Woman (1974–8), and Starsky & Hutch (1975–9). In 1978 he wrote the pilot for Vega$ (1978–81) but departed from the Spelling studio-produced show shortly afterwards. In 1984 he took the helm as executive producer of Miami Vice, the series that, according to David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, was the first hour drama that “cared about the visuals” and changed the way crime drama for television looked and sounded.7 Richard T. Jameson, of Film Comment, put the point succinctly: “It’s hard to forebear saying, every five minutes or so, ‘I can’t believe this was shot for television!’ ”8 Popular attitudes toward Mann are skewed by this high-concept television series. Perhaps because film and television critics and journalists have typically emphasized Mann’s style, a word he disdains in the discussion of his work, he famously told Jonathan Romney that “Style just gets you seven minutes of attention,” and went on to explain that one of the satisfactions of executiveproducing Miami Vice was that it gave him the opportunity “to make a movie once a week.”9 Mann has said that what attracted him to the Miami Vice project was Anthony Yerkovich’s script for the pilot. In it, Mann found not only a reflection of the cultural and political reality of the 1980s, but also the thematic and technical elements that he had already brought to feature filmmaking with Thief and would utilize in his subsequent films. This was reason 4

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enough to convince him that the show would give him scope to explore serious issues in a way that would lend itself to popular appeal. In the end, if one were to ask Mann what was important about Miami Vice, he would say, as he did in an interview with John Hiscock, that it was not the pastels, the music, or the wardrobe but rather the powerful stories and strong emotions surrounding people who do undercover work in that Casablanca-on-Biscayne Bay.10 He is especially proud of the episode of Miami Vice titled “Stone’s War,” about which he had this to say in 2012: The thing about this series now is that the reality of what the show did in, I would say, its first two and a half years is much different than the image of the show that’s entered the popular imagination, of what colors peoples’ memories of it: the pastel clothes, the flamingos in the opening credits, Elvis [the alligator] as Don Johnson’s pet. If you look at the first two seasons, there are some very strong, timely, serious stories being told. The decline in quality after that I ascribe completely as being my own fault; I wasn’t there nearly as much, I was getting into doing Manhunter, I was distracted. But go back and look at an episode like “Stone’s War” – it’s almost shocking to see now: It was Contragate with music by Jackson Browne [“Lives in the Balance”], about a CIA operation to get money and drugs out of Nicaragua to finance the [Iran–Contra] war. G. Gordon Liddy was a guest star.11 Mann’s engagement with serious cultural and political issues reflected, refracted, and ultimately reimagined in Miami Vice, extended beyond specific incidents, though the example Mann gives is certainly apposite, and others could be cited. Increasingly during the 1980s, what was taken to be the polarizing ideology of Reaganism prompted powerful responses in the form of episodes that probed its political underpinnings and impact. For example, “Back in the World” and “Stone’s War” connect the drug-dealing activities of a former Vietnam War officer and U.S. involvement in covert support of the Contras, respectively. “The Savage” (a.k.a. “Duty and Honor”) purports to expose the willingness of a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) official to use a psychotic ex-military figure to assassinate left-of-center and communist political leaders and diplomats around the world, and “Baseballs of Death” depicts the propensity of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to circumvent the embargo on arms to Chile. This critique is subsequently staged on a very broad front, as in the series finale, “Freefall,” which indicts the entire apparatus of federal law enforcement for its complicity with a corrupt foreign policy. The politics of Miami Vice thus encompassed not only the characterization of metropolitan Miami as a violent city with its drug trafficking and arms dealing. It also reaffirmed its foreign and alienating character and implied U.S. military adventures and revelations of intrigue and malfeasance at the highest levels of government. These in turn supported the narrative that it was less a 5

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matter of the failure of law enforcement to stop the flow of illegal drugs into the United States and more a matter of being unable to alter the political ideology that made it possible. Themes of global trafficking and political conspiracy can be found throughout the series. “No Exit,” an early episode from the first season, suggests that law enforcement’s war on drugs in fact consolidates the power of the South American drug cartels because it was planned that way. And the link between drug trafficking and corporate interests is again forged in the second-season two-hour opener, when Crockett and Tubbs are told in no uncertain terms by a New York City banking executive that there is no way he and his colleagues in the financial community are going to let the South American governments default on their massive loans, even if that means turning a blind eye to their largest cash crop, cocaine. This critique is made explicit in the series finale, where it is brought home to Crockett and Tubbs that conspiracy and hegemony are the real engines of U.S. foreign policy. As they grasp the scope of the government’s complicity with a Latin American dictator and the drug cartels, they come to understand the dimensions of a corruption they cannot combat. In a gesture of defiance and disgust, they toss their badges to the ground. This gave such episodes their relevance to their own time and their cultural and political trenchancy in ours. It is thus ironic that the series so often has been dismissed as affirming a “Reaganesque” free market ideology of law and order and conspicuous consumption.12 Episodes of Miami Vice also could be effective, even prescient, in dramatizing the underlying cultural dislocations and anomie of the 1980s. “God’s Work” engages with AIDS, treating it seriously and sensitively, and without airbrushing its problematic status in the eighties. Other episodes deal with subjects such as incest (“Junk Love”), prostitution (“Rites of Passage”), pornography (“Death and the Lady”), and rape (“Bought and Paid For,” “Hell Hath No Fury”). There are also hard-hitting episodes of existential and psychological import. “Shadow in the Dark” recapitulates the storyline of Manhunter in several significant respects and self-reflexively denotes its own narrative processes as Crockett tries to hold on to his identity while simultaneously entering the mental life of a bizarre cat burglar. In “Out Where the Buses Don’t Run,” a former vice detective’s past haunts him and enters his present as he obsessively seeks the drug kingpin who disappeared after charges against him were dismissed, failing to accept that he murdered the criminal long ago. In “Death and the Lady,” an avant-garde filmmaker, who is accused of murdering an actress during the making of a snuff flick, taunts Crockett, defying him by introducing him to alternative models, each of whom bears a startling resemblance to the actress he is accused of killing in his film. Two years into the five-year run of the show, Mann signed on to executiveproduce Crime Story (NBC, 1986–8), a project often described as a twentytwo-hour feature film for television, and one that would engage Mann’s deepest cinematic ambitions. As he tells Jonathan Romney, “I approach execu6

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tive producing on television the same way I approach directing a film – it’s about artistic expression” – an appraisal of the creative and power relations on television that suggests successful television series are produced as much as they are directed. Just as Miami Vice is noteworthy for its visual and sonic realization, showcasing a tropical deco palette and eighties New Wave music, Crime Story vividly recreates its sixties-era sensibility. The master narrative of Crime Story is a Manichean one of the struggle between the forces of law and order and the forces of criminal darkness, the former represented by Chicago police detective, Lieutenant Mike Torello (Dennis Farina), the latter in the person of Ray Luca (Anthony Denison), a low-level Chicago thug. As Luca works his way up through the organized crime subculture, his ruthlessness and uncompromising approach earn him the attention of mob bosses and the undying enmity of Torello. When Luca moves to Las Vegas, Torello and his team, now a Major Crime Unit, have the sole mission to set up surveillance on Luca with the objective of putting him out of business once and for all. But time and again, Torello and his task force are bested by Luca. On one level, Crime Story hews rather closely to reassuringly conventional American values. In a contest between good and evil, the former prevails, at least in the sense that criminal violence is shown to have enormous personal and social costs. On this viewing, Crime Story has not surrendered its commitment to American values: not everyone is a criminal sociopath like Ray Luca, not all human relationships are marked by exploitation and betrayal, not all institutions are corrupt. But on another level, Crime Story is deeply subversive, in the way the foundational rules and systemic practices that give shape to American institutions and values are exposed as being nothing more than disguised expressions of criminal and governmental power, often operating in collusion. This critique, as much as anything else, gives Crime Story its unique purchase on late eighties developments in crime television.13 Crime Story restages classic film noir’s conventions and preoccupations with the foundations of capitalism and government power as a means of exposing the dark and corrupt side of the U.S., depicted as an imperialist state with ambitions of empire. It is thus tempting to imagine the censorious reception that the show must have had in the executive boardrooms at NBC in order to explain why the series was canceled at the end of its second season, but in 2012 Mann offered a different explanation: Well, what happened there was that we were being financed by New Line. And their book value plummeted. And Tartikoff [Brandon Tartikoff, head of the Entertainment Division at NBC] said, “I have difficulty renewing a third season, I don’t know if New Line is even going to be around.” And I think their share price went down to something like $1.18 a share or something. So it was a financial crisis that kind of did us in more than anything.14 7

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III Mann’s directorial methods and the satisfaction he finds in filmmaking are touched on in nearly every interview. In the early interview with Harlan Kennedy on the set of Mann’s critical and commercial debacle, The Keep, Mann says that despite the film being “very scary, very horrifying,” the idea that it could be made as a horror genre film did not appeal to him. Instead, Mann calls it “a fairy tale for our times,” invoking Bruno Bettelheim’s book, The Uses of Enchantment to explain how the film is a complex moral fable. Art Harris prefers to describe the film as “a $6 million Grand Guignol fantasy” featuring Nazis and Ghostbuster-type special effects, though he quips that no one remembers that The Keep was a $6 million commercial failure “now that Vice is hotter than a Miami sidewalk.” Mann tells Kennedy that, “Once I’ve written the screenplay I’ve finished the movie.” This is not a bit of Hitchcockian braggadocio, for Mann means that this gives him “a complete evocation of it on paper.” Since he constantly rewrites dialogue before he shoots, sometimes giving actors new pages of script moments before the day’s shoot, “it’s a whole new film again when I start shooting.” Of the importance of the cinema experience, Mann tells Kennedy that he is not interested in making small and precious films that are characteristic of what he calls “passive” filmmaking. Rather, he wants to bombard, seduce, and manipulate an audience’s feelings with themes in order to achieve “a penetration of psychological realities,” and this is linked to the idea that, in a culture where people can watch moving pictures for hours and hours on end in a single day, there has to be some motivation for them to go to the cinema. Mann’s solution is to make films that allow people “to have a different order of experience.” When Alain Charlot and Marc Toullec inquire about the failure of The Keep, Mann tells them that this did not prevent NBC from picking up Miami Vice. He points out that, given the way things work in Hollywood, a director can follow a successful film with a few unsuccessful ones and still find producers who want his work, as they did with his script for Manhunter. The most interesting thing Mann tells Charlot and Toullec may be that Will Graham (William Petersen), the detective in Manhunter, “is perfectly aware that monsters like Dollarhyde [the serial killer Graham is tracking down and will kill] do not come from Mars. We are the ones who have ‘made’ them, society has done the job.” This view appears to be in tension with the existentialist emphasis Mann places on individual responsibility throughout his work and is therefore worthy of further investigation. Mann has traveled extensively throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America, and this has removed any inhibition he might have had about shooting on location. He tells Art Harris that, “One of the best passports in the world is the film business.” Already in 1980 he had crossed the Thai border into Burma, traveling to places where, he tells Harris, people would kill you for 8

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your shoes. Harris dryly notes, “No one bothered him.” When Mann directed the Miami Vice feature film, he shot in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, Punta del Este, Uruguay, and Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic. The location shoot in the Dominican Republic was, according to Kim Masters, enough to send Jamie Foxx back to the U.S. prematurely, and Masters’s account gives perhaps the best illustration of Mann’s willingness to work in exotic and often dangerous locales: When the production moved to a relatively upscale area, a local man – a police officer – approached the set, got into a quarrel with a guard (one supplied by the Dominican military), and allegedly pulled a gun. The man was shot and wounded. . . . But immediately after that incident, Foxx and his entourage packed up and left for good.15 Among film critics and historians, Mann is widely considered a director of genre films and, in the words of Steven Rybin, one of the few directors working in Hollywood who deserves to be called a genre stylist.16 Rybin connects the “existential angst and affect” in Mann’s work to his generally progressive political outlook – one inflected by “Mann’s melancholy regarding the possibilities of human agency in the desolate landscapes of late capitalism.”17 The ubiquity of existential crises in Mann’s films leads Scott Foundas to call them “existential urban tragedies.” Existential motifs are so pervasive in Mann’s films that their presence seems no accident. To the extent that Mann has offered insights into the meaning of his films, or his characters’ predicaments, one senses a filmmaker strongly moved by the ideas of freedom, authenticity, and existential choice, whose protagonists, from James Caan’s thief (Thief) to Al Pacino’s cop and Robert De Niro’s criminal (Heat) to Tom Cruise’s hit man (Collateral), are often rootless and alienated, seeking to escape from or contend with predicaments that test the depth of their commitment. But a commitment to what? Not to relationships, as the films above make clear. Perhaps it is to what Nietzsche calls “giving style to one’s character, a great and rare art,” especially if this is construed in the existentialist sense of choosing freely and living authentically. Both Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre are insistent on drawing attention to the irreducibly human (as opposed to any sort of divine) grounding of our decision-making. Sartre famously said that “existentialism is a humanism,” and we might say as well, adverting to the predicaments of so many of Mann’s protagonists, that existentialism is a pluralism, since a plurality of irreducible values vie for their choices and they must make those choices alone, unguided by a divine creator, and ultimately responsible for what they choose.18 Given his television work on Police Story, Police Woman, Starsky & Hutch, Miami Vice, Crime Story, and Robbery Homicide Division, and his feature films Thief, Manhunter, Collateral, and Miami Vice, it may come as a surprise to learn that Mann does not consider Heat a genre film. It is “human drama,” 9

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he tells Jonathan Romney, a view he repeats in connection with Collateral. “It is about the human experience,” he informs Ian Nathan. “It is about the confrontations you find yourself in collapsed down to this night. All of what Vincent told himself of his life, his whole view of his existence. In that sense it is about existential matters.”19 (In 1992 he said to Graham Fuller that “It’s just an accident” that most of his films prior to The Last of the Mohicans have been in the crime genre.) The “human element” in Heat, Collateral, and other Mann films, which might otherwise be dismissed as “mere” genre films, is borne out by his elaborate preparation. He states in several interviews that the characters in Heat, Thief, and Miami Vice, for example, had to be absolutely authentic. He accomplished this by means of research, interviews, and intimate, firsthand knowledge. In this way, he tells Romney, his films are “not made up of ideas I arbitrarily conceive in isolation.” In connection with this point, Mann describes to Fuller how, in Heat, the initially discrete crime story “fuses with the personal stories in the fateful and sometimes doom-laden decisions each person has to make,” a characterization that might well be applied to many of Mann’s films, especially Thief and Public Enemies. Indeed, already in his interview on the making of The Jericho Mile, Mann tells Julian Fox that many of the inmates of Folsom prison, where the telefilm was shot, don’t relate to life when they hit the street. . . . They get some idea of some job they were going to pull down. Their methodology is six years out of date. I mean, their methodology is in Starsky & Hutch re-runs! You couldn’t hold up an ice cream man or a milkman with what they think they have to do.20 By the time Mann got around to making Public Enemies, thirty years later, he was still applying what he had learned at Folsom. As film critic David Denby points out, for all John Dillinger’s (Johnny Depp) boasting about how smart he is and how he will never get caught, he is clueless. After serving nearly nine years in prison, he goes on a crime spree until he is killed by a combination of police and FBI agents fourteen months later. He never recognizes that his way is no longer the way of the new crime syndicates.21 This, too, is a Mann theme: the obsolescence of the independent criminal who lives by his own rules and the growing corporatization of criminal activity, as personified by Robert Prosky’s mobster, Leo, in Thief and by Leo’s twenty-first century counterpart, the global trafficking jefe Montoya (Luis Tosar) in the Miami Vice feature film. IV In a detailed response to Michael Sragow’s queries about the challenges actors have to face in his films, three comments by Mann are particularly revealing of both the director and the man. First, he is intensely interested in his protagonists’ motivations. To help his actors get inside their skins he devotes months 10

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to preparation in what are, in effect, training exercises where his actors work with local police, federal agents, and even criminals if they can assist the actor in developing an understanding of the character in order to portray him or her authentically. Mann is well known for using former criminals as consultants and casting police detectives in his films. He has launched the television and film careers of John Santucci, a convicted high-line thief from Chicago, and Dennis Farina, a former police detective who starred in Crime Story and had major roles in Get Shorty (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1995) and television’s Law and Order. Second, Mann is highly guarded about what details he is willing to share with the public about the pre-production preparation of his actors. He tells Sragow that “Some of this stuff, it’s just not right to be public about. It’s how we work, it’s what we do.” Third, he is quick to offer praise and insight into moments where his actors have thoroughly inhabited the roles they are playing or risen to the occasion of an especially difficult challenge. To the extent that he may have been disappointed with a performance or an actor’s preparation or attitude, Mann has kept this close to the vest. Mann has a singular cinematic style that can be attributed, at least in part, to a passion for cinema generally, and enough artistic ambition, professional skill, and personal charisma to tap the talent of his highly resourceful and accomplished collaborators such as editor Dov Hoenig and cinematographer Dion Beebe. He tells interviewers that his cinematographers and camera operators are innovators in hand-held, and now HD, photography. The latter is the newest item in Mann’s visual storytelling toolbox, but the lessons of other innovators, from Kubrick to Altman to French New Wave filmmakers, have not been lost on him. Documentary elements can be found throughout Mann’s films owing to his keen interest in establishing a sense of authenticity in even his most conspicuous fictions, to say nothing of his fact-based films, The Insider, Ali, and Public Enemies. A key theme of The Insider, one of Mann’s most accomplished films, is the representation of persons and events in the mass media. As Mann has indicated in interviews with both Michael Sragow and Stuart Husband, his adaptation (with Eric Roth) of the real-life story of tobacco scientist and whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand (played by Russell Crowe), was fraught with all the risks that come with selection, interpretation, and emphasis inherent in the storytelling enterprise. In an anecdote reported by Jeffrey Ressner and William Tynan in Time magazine, Mann recalls being asked by Mike Wallace to make changes to an early draft of The Insider that portrayed him as looking less committed to journalistic ethics than Wallace saw himself. “His language is very acute,” Mann told Time. “Stunningly funny and smart and ironic. He gave this long speech. I told him I’d have to use it in the film!” Mann then proceeded to do so in a scene where Wallace (played by Christopher Plummer) offers a sarcastic rebuff to his one-time protégé Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino): “Oh, how fortunate I am to have Lowell Bergman’s moral tutelage to point me down the shining path, to show me the way!”22 11

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One can often recognize a Mann film after the first few minutes of screen time because his films bring together so many disparate elements – the crime genre, aspects of the documentary, a wide repertoire of shots and camera movements, exquisite sensitivity to color and sound – in such fruitful ways that what might appear as mere eclecticism in the work of a lesser filmmaker emerges in his films as a coherent whole. Mann has typically worked within the mainstream Hollywood system, and while he implicitly rejects the star casting approach to filmmaking, this has not prevented him from hiring the likes of Tom Cruise – cast against type and eerily convincing in Collateral – Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Russell Crowe, Will Smith, and Jamie Foxx, the latter three nominated for Academy Awards in their films for Mann. He has been criticized for failing to give women the prominence he awards to his overwhelmingly male protagonists, but Mann praises the work of Diane Venora, Ashley Judd, and Gong Li in these interviews and dismisses the criticism that he does not create female characters who have equity with male characters in the storylines. He tells Leif Kramp that in Heat, for example, he “was more concerned with the relationships between [the characters played by] Val Kilmer and Ashley Judd, Robert De Niro and Amy Brenneman, and Al Pacino and Diane Venora, than with the action-scenes.”23 The word used most frequently to describe Mann is “perfectionist,” a fact that Graham Fuller mentions in his interview to explain why Mann had directed only five feature films between 1981 and 1995. (Fuller notes that Mann was also executive producer of two major television series during this time, referring to Miami Vice and Crime Story. Mann also executive-produced Band of the Hand, the pilot for a network television series that did not materialize. Band was given a theatrical release on April 11, 1986, and it is this feature, presumably, that Charlot and Toullec refer to as “the very beautiful and quite strange release” in their interview.) A similar set of statistics can be assembled for the years since 1995, during which Mann has directed only Ali, Collateral, Miami Vice, Public Enemies, and Cyber (2014), and executiveproduced the short-lived TV series Robbery Homicide Division (CBS, 2002) and co–executive-produced Luck (HBO, 2012), whose pilot he directed. Mann’s reflections on the clash of cultures in The Last of the Mohicans is indicative of his awareness of “how cultures, mores and values are relative to each other.” His effort to show this, he tells Fuller, was one of the most difficult things to communicate in the film, for while the massacre of women and children outside of Fort William Henry was certainly a savage event, “there was nothing savage or culturally primitive about the northeast woodlands Indians.” Mann provides a thumbnail sketch of the political and economic arrangements of the Iroquoian confederacy that support his understanding and deep respect for the native peoples he depicts in his film. In these interviews, Mann does not give many indications of sources of influence or models of emulation. The interviewers, for the most part, seem more intent on emphasizing Mann’s status as an auteur than to probe him 12

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about precursors. However, Mann tells Harlan Kennedy that he is influenced by who he likes, and he names Stanley Kubrick, Alain Resnais, and Andrei Tarkovsky. Elsewhere, he tells Julian Fox that Kubrick, Dziga Vertov, and Sergei Eisenstein are formative influences.24 He explains the connection to Kubrick in some detail in his interview with Scott Foundas. Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) convinced Mann that he did not have to choose between commercial success and art-cinema sensibility. The film “said to my whole generation of filmmakers that you could make an individual statement of high integrity and have that film be successfully seen by a mass audience all at the same time.” But the Kubrick legacy does not end there. From the famed director of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) one can also see the model of what Timothy Schary has called Mann’s “Kubrickian perfectionism,” the near-obsessive emphasis on research and preparation and the working out of detail.25 It may be illuminating to conclude this introduction with Michael Mann’s own list of Top Ten films, compiled for Sight and Sound in 2012: Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925), Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), Avatar (James Cameron, 2009), Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964), Biutiful (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2010), My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946), The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928), Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980), and The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969).26 It remains for readers themselves to reflect on whether (and if so, how) Mann’s own films compare with those on this list, beyond observing that each seems to be an exemplar of directorial style. Shunned word, if you are Mann, because it is much misused in discussion of his work, but here the word is intended in its Mannian sense as a vehicle for meaning.27 Notes  1. Graham Fuller, “Michael Mann – Hollywood Writer–Director–Producer,” Interview, December (1995).   2. Stuart Husband, “Smoking Gun,” The Guardian (London), January 21 (2000).   3. James Mottram, “Last of the Great Thriller Directors,” The Independent (London), February 20 (2000).   4. Scott Foundas, “A Mann’s Man’s World,” L.A. Weekly, July 26 (2006).   5. Some reference works list 1990 as the final year of the Miami Vice series because an episode about child sex abuse was broadcast in July 1990 on the USA Network. But the finale had already been aired in May 1989 on NBC, so I prefer to use that date to mark the end of the last season.   6. Julian Fox, “Four Minute Mile: Michael Mann Interviewed,” Films and Filming, 26:4, January (1980): pp. 19–25. See Kirk Honeycutt, “Made-for-TV Films – Hollywood’s Stepchild Comes of Age,” New York Times, August 19 (1979), p. D1.  7. David Chase, interview at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/julydec01/chase_8-8.html (accessed January 27, 2014).   8. Richard T. Jameson, “Men Over Miami,” Film Comment, April (1985): pp. 66–7.

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  9. The political thrillers of the early 1970s, such as The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974) and The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974), whose protagonists – Gene Hackman and Warren Beatty, respectively – are suspicious to the point of paranoia, are precursors of “Lend Me an Ear,” an episode broadcast during the show’s third season. 10. John Hiscock, “‘So You Think I’m Aggressive? Good,’ ” The Daily Telegraph (London), July 21 (2006). 11. Ken Tucker, “The Michael Mann Interview, Part 1: His Life and Work in Television, from ‘Starsky and Hutch’ to ‘Miami Vice’ to ‘Luck,’ ” January 21 (2012), at watching-tv.ew.com/2012/01/21/Michael-mann-interview-luck-hbo/ (accessed June 6, 2012). 12. David Buxton, From the Avengers to Miami Vice: Form and Ideology in Television Series (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 142. 13. For a fuller discussion of this claim, see my “An Introduction to the Philosophy of TV Noir,” The Philosophy of TV Noir, ed. Steven M. Sanders and Aeon J. Skoble (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008): pp. 1–29. 14. Ken Tucker, “The Michael Mann Interview, Part 2: His Work in TV: ‘Crime Story,’ ‘Robbery Homicide Division,’ ‘Luck,’ and Mann’s favorite current TV shows,” January 28 (2012), at watching-tv.ew.com/2012/01/28/Michael-manncrime-story-robbery-homicide-division-luck (accessed June 7, 2012). 15. Kim Masters, “Fleeing the Scene,” Slate, posted July 13 (2006), at www.slate.com/ articles/news-and-politics/hollywood/2006/07/fleeing-the-scene.3.html (accessed October 6, 2012). 16. Steven Rybin, The Cinema of Michael Mann (Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2007), pp. 3–4. 17. Rybin, The Cinema of Michael Mann, pp. 193, 114. 18. In this connection, see R. Barton Palmer, “Awakened to Chaos: Outsiders in The Jericho Mile and Thief,” and Steven Sanders, “Existential Mann,” both in The Philosophy of Michael Mann, ed. Steven Sanders, Aeon J. Skoble, and R. Barton Palmer (Lexington, KT: University Press of Kentucky, 2014). 19. Ian Nathan, “Born to Break the Rules,” The Times (London), September 16 (2004). Features; Screen; 15 (accessed March 24, 2013). 20. Fox, “Four Minute Mile: Michael Mann Interviewed,” p. 23. 21. David Denby, “Tommy Guns and Toys,” New Yorker, August 6 and 13 (2009). 22. “Truth & Consequences: The Insider Poses Tough Questions about Credibility and Integrity, Both On the Screen and Off,” Time, 154.18, November 1 (1999): p.  92. Mike Wallace’s version of the events recounted in this paragraph can be found in his Academy of Achievement interview at www.achievement.org/autodoc/ page/wal2int-5 (accessed August 19, 2008). 23. Leif Kramp, “L.A. Belongs to the Coyotes,” trans. Ingo Stelte, Spiegel Online (2004). 24. Fox, “Four Minute Mile,” p. 20. 25. Timothy Schary, “Which Way is Up,” Sight & Sound, 16: 9, September (2006): pp. 14–18. 26. Tom Shone, “Michael Mann’s Top Ten List,” tomshone.blogspot.com/2012/08/ michael-manns-top-ten-list.html (accessed August 20, 2012). 27. Barton Palmer, Christeen Clemens, and Aeon Skoble were enthusiastic participants in many discussions of the themes with which this introduction deals. For additional contributions to my understanding of Mann’s work, I also thank Murray Pomerance, Steven Rybin, David Sterritt, Mark Wildermuth, and Alan Woolfolk.

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FOUR MINUTE MILE1 Julian Fox

The Jericho Mile is Michael Mann’s first directorial feature. A raw, wellobserved and humane story set in Folsom State Penitentiary, it was originally made for American television, where it won Mann and his co-director Patrick J. Nolan an Emmy for Best Dramatic Screenplay. “After that first showing [says Mann], there was an enormous public response. To give you an example. I was in a supermarket in Los Angeles a few days afterwards and these kids were playing around there and saying things like ‘Stop goin’ up in my face!’ and ‘Man, you’re goin’ up in my face!’ and all that prison slang, just like in the movie. It seemed to strike a chord with people of all ages and walks of life. Now, ABC were going to put it out again, but decided they’d release it theatrically instead. That took a lot of courage. They were giving up around $700,000 a minute in advertising, that’s about seven minutes an hour! But I knew exactly what the movie was going to do. I’d been prepared for it, shot it in 35mm and everything, shooting it just like a cinema feature. It had really taken off after that first TV screening, and audiences have been marvellous.” The film is the story of Rain Murphy (Peter Strauss), a lifer with a talent for track running. He is spotted by the editor of the prison newspaper as a possible contender for the US Olympics team. A professional coach is brought in to train him and the runner’s progress from introspective isolationist to prison mascot is ranged against a vivid, invariably brutal background of racial and religious rivalries, organised crime and even murder, within the walls of From Films and Filming, 26:4 (1980), pp. 19–25.

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the jail. The murder of Murphy’s only friend, R.C. Stiles (Richard Lawson), a likeable black who has fallen foul of the prison’s drug king, Dr D (Brian Dennehy), brings the hatreds between white and black abruptly into the open. Murphy is caught in the crossfire, but triumphs over all obstacles, until faced with the biggest hurdle of all, the Olympic Selection Board. The Board, funded with private money, is jealous of its image and gives Murphy a rough time. The ending of the film is ironic and Murphy’s final demonstration of skill can be interpreted as either triumph or failure. The film is arguably the most powerful we have yet seen about the problems of long-term inmates, the Jericho of the title referring to the symbolic tumbling of the walls as Murphy is offered an albeit temporary freedom from the grinding sameness of prison routine. It could be said that the film also represents Mann’s own Walls of Jericho since it has well and truly launched him as a feature director after a successful career writing for filmed television. Mann was born and bred in inner-city Chicago, took an English Literature BA at the University of Wisconsin and graduated from the London Film School in 1967. His first project was an NBC documentary on the Paris student riots of May 1968 called Insurrection. His entry into fiction films lay through the now familiar route of commercials and documentaries, both in London and the US, including, in 1970, a short abstract film, Jaunpuri, which won prizes at the Cannes, Melbourne, Sydney and Barcelona Film Festivals. Moving to Los Angeles in 1972, he became involved in series television and Straight Time, starring Dustin Hoffman. “The producer of that was Tim Zinnemann, son of Fred. He’s producing a movie for his own production company, HUKA, called Long Riders, which Walter Hill is directing right now and he was kidding around before – he’s a very cynical guy – and he said he was going to call it Son of Fred Inc. Tim also produced The Jericho Mile and he knows Eddie Bunker very well, as I do, the guy who wrote No Beast So Fierce, so that was a great help with this actual interest we had in the whole prison idea.” A couple of meetings with Mann in early November revealed him as an illuminating conversationalist with wide-ranging interests and a sharp sense of his own value. His talk is an invigorating mixture of literary references, psychophilosophical jargonese and underworld slang. It is obvious that The Jericho Walls and its vernacular have rubbed off on him and future projects involving locations as far-reaching as Macao, Thailand and Indonesia have obviously caught his imagination. Mann’s ability as a director, I would say, is to take basically street-bound situations and give them a powerful charge of heightened reality. He also has the knack, not given to all directors of street-influenced movies, of making the quieter moments tell: one sequence, in particular, where Murphy, getting his strength up for the forthcoming Olympic trial, is given portions of their daily ration by his fellow convicts. Mann makes of the scene an infinitely touching comment on the enforced camaraderie of the prison milieu. Just the right 16

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side of sentimental, one shudders to think of some other directors one could mention milking such a scene unmercifully. Mann slips it by casually as a neat contrast with the underlying tensions of the rest. Without shattering any of the established concepts of narrative story-telling, Mann has the ability to jolt us with the unexpectedness of his execution. I would say, for all his assimilation of a currently abrasive social scene, especially in the light of increasing political disenchantment, he is nearer in spirit to Huston and early Jules Dassin than to such terse urban commentators as Hellman and the aforementioned Walter Hills. But his own admitted influences are sparer, more ascetic: “Stanley Kubrick. Eisenstein. Dziga Vertov. And ‘Kino Eye’. I mean, that’s really my limitation. So my approach to films tends to be structural, formal, abstract . . .” And humanist? And humanist. Yeah. Well, that shows in the movie. The Jericho Mile, I thought, was terrific, very involving. How did it come about? I’d been interested in making a movie set in a prison and managed to get inside Folsom, which is a maximum security jail, in California. This just emphasised, crystallised what I wanted to do. So we looked around for something that we could use. They’d had this script, The Jericho Mile, lying around on a shelf at ABC for around ten years! It was based, loosely, on a real story about a guy in prison that just used to run. But that was only the starting point. Patrick Nolan, the writer, is a Catholic and teaches at Villa Nova, and that influence came over very strongly in the original screenplay. It was neo-realist, very spare and symbolic. We got together and tailored the story to emphasise the street thing, using what I’d already learned about the inside. I saw it as a quintessence of racial and religious groups – White, Black and Chicano – which were all in some kind of continuous conflict. I also read the sports pages of the prison newspaper and they just knocked me out! I mean, here they had photographs of these guys doing their thing and they were in various corners of the yard – some were lifting weights, some were running around, playing football and so on. These guys who knew where they belonged and knew that their job inside, punching out licence plates, was just a waste of time, and no sort of training for the world outside. The language and attitudes, I thought, were extraordinarily well observed. The dialogue, especially between Murphy and his black friend, Stiles, seemed to me to have a rhythmic life of its own – present reality heightened by a stylised yet slangy vernacular. Eugene O’Neill or Thornton Wilder, maybe? One of the things that attracts me to any story of that kind is the richness of the dialogue. A lot of that stuff in The Jericho Mile was, in fact, decoded. First of all, those guys are very adept at describing states of mind because they’re actually playing a mind game. When you’re in a maximum security pen with heavy duty, recidivist criminals of the kind you have in that place – guys who 17

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under any political system will be in jail, they’ll be in jail in Cuba, they’ll be in jail in South Africa – well, those guys are for the most part psychopaths. They’ve been conditioned by the time they’re eighteen to what they’ll be the rest of their lives and the damage was already done at the time when they were pure victims, when they were six, seven, eight or nine. So it was too late to do anything about who and what they are. In a place like this, these guys are incredibly adept and the first thing that strikes you is the resilience of human intelligence. These guys are wily sons of bitches. I mean, they are sharp. They can play games with you that are brilliant! That’s because most other tools of expression are taken away from them. They don’t have cars, they don’t have any broads, they don’t have good-looking wives or houses, everything gets refined down to their existence there in the jail. So how you talk, your attitude, your speech, the way you sit, the way you crease your cuffs, all those are very important totems and expressions of who and what you are and your status in the jail. It’s a very complex system and they’re experts at conveying attitudes and reading attitudes, Consequently they have phrases to describe psychological states like “Comin’ up in my face” and “You comin’ up into my face?” And that means something. “Put down this thing”, “Lay down”. There’s one scene where Cotton Crown, played by Roger Mosley, says to the Dude (Peter Strauss): “Where’s Stiles?”, and the Dude says: “Transferred down from cue. Some sucker tried to turn him out. Stiles waffed ’em.” And there’s “nickel attitudes”, “beef” and “transferred out and here”. That doesn’t mean anything to anybody unless you’re familiar with the vernacular. Did they try to put you on? I mean, you being a film crew suddenly finding yourselves among a bunch of convicts. They did everything. I mean, everything. They tried to scare us, intimidate us, befriend us, seduce us and at the end it got very tense and very threatening. That convict population is highly organised and connected and one guy in one joint like San Quentin knows what’s going on in Folsom and somebody on the street knows what’s happened here. The heroin trade in the whole of East LA is controlled from inside a prison! From inside they have enough clout to control what’s happening on the street! Which comprises all the killings that are involved in East LA and Dallas, and the reason they do it is because so many people on the street are going to wind up going back in the joint that they know what’s gonna happen. Dr D, the drug king, he seemed to be one of the least courageous characters in the film and it was amazing that he’d got into that position of power. Dr D is a manipulator and the specific psychology behind the character is interesting. He is a guy whose nihilism and devaluation of his own worth to himself has reached an obstinate, absurd Jean Genet kind of point. To demonstrate how outrageous the universe, the cosmos is, this guy would say “You wanna see something outrageous? I’ll kill you and spill your guts right on the sidewalk. Wanna see something more outrageous? I’ll do it to myself. I mean, 18

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I don’t care. Let’s go down. Fine.” I mean, everything, the universe is a joke, everything is humorous. What happens in prison classically is that devaluation of self. You have to not care about your body any more. It’s a “fuck me” attitude. Because if you don’t care about your body any more, if you don’t care about your corporal entity, then you can summon up the rage to be dangerous. You can aggress out very easily. And it’s a wilful, psychotic state that these guys get into and that’s what makes them very dangerous and once you’ve been around those kind of people you can pick them out of a crowd like that. There’s a kind of electric aura around them. It’s the guy who, if you get into a fight in a bar says, “You better kill me.” And you gotta believe it because no matter what you do, nothing will stop him. He’ll go through walls to get at you. That’s what Dr D is, except he’s also brilliant and he’s a manipulator and everything’s funny and everything’s a great cosmic joke. But a lot of his physical power in the rest of the prison is through the people who attach themselves to him. Because he seems to be the kind of a man who, if it came to the crunch – as it does with the breaking of the picket line when he’s trying to prevent the other convicts laying the track for Murphy to run on – that he doesn’t have a tremendous amount of courage in himself. That’s right. He’s a political animal. Plus he controls pruno and pruno is what they call white alcohol or bootleg liquor and you can make it out of anything. Out of ketchup, prunes – that’s where the name pruno comes from – or any kind of fruit. And one week before we got there, they busted a still that had been built inside a fire extinguisher! And everything we characterised about a complete, covert, political economy, like a many nations state, just simply exists. There’s nothing fabricated. You know, when you mentioned the use of language, it’s all real language and yet I manipulated it around, so you do have that kind of poetical quality about it. And I’m attracted to that. What sort of problems had you anticipated? Did they turn out better or worse than you’d feared? You mean, among the convicts? Well, the first day or two we were there we were just “pussies from Hollywood” – that’s exactly what they said! – “Look here, man, pussies from Hollywood!” And there was a big problem. What we had to do was to figure out ways of designing the production to avert a couple of distinct possibilities. One was a major race or gang war amongst the convict population, which would have had us thrown out of the prison, not being able to return. We never would have been able to finish the movie. I couldn’t get my convict actors out, I couldn’t duplicate the sets, and so in that sense ABC really shot craps with us. Second was that somebody on the crew or the cast or Peter Strauss would get stabbed or killed or attacked. Given the fact that at Folsom, 30 per cent of the people in there are doing what they call “day and night”, which is life without the possibility of parole, the idea of stabbing Peter Strauss, that’s very attractive You get three or five years in isolation – these guys can do “a nickel” standing on their head – and for the rest of their life 19

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they have this carte blanche reputation they’ve just accrued. It’s that “I’m the guy who waffed that movie actor, Peter Strauss!” I mean, that’s terrific currency, you know? I found it remarkable that you were allowed in to make a movie in the first place. Presumably the authorities saw the script beforehand? I mean, it couldn’t happen here. Not a movie that really told it how it is. They’d be forced to simulate the locations and so on. Well, this was the first time they had let anybody shoot inside Folsom. That is, shoot a whole movie. The warden is a Gerry Brown appointee and they are, on the whole, excellent! Bureaucrats in California are, on the whole, pretty good and Gerry Brown appointees are even more enlightened than most. And they’re not soft, middle-class folk. This guy is a working-class ex-trucker from Bakersfield who went back to college, and when we came in he had his cowboy boots up on the desk and he looks like Johnny Cash and he says: “What y’all gonna do for mah men?” And we say, “Well, we’ll build ’em a track and leave ’em a track and we got 20,000 dollars on the budget for everyone to spend on them, plus we’re gonna put them to work and hire them and pay them the same as I’d pay actors in Los Angeles, both the speaking parts and the extras.” The Guild minimum, that’s about 700 dollars a week. Yeah, well, they normally only get paid 12 cents an hour for making licence plates! So it’s a diversion, it keeps them occupied. There’s a lot of reasons why he let us in. It’s an odd sort of prison. From the outside it looks like a Disney castle. It’s in a very picturesque setting. That’s right. Now you remember over there that part of the prison where the guy’s lifting weights? And that rock wall behind him? Well, that whole hillside was a granite quarry and what they did is, they took about five thousand convicts in 1880 to a piece of rock, chained together, and said, “Start quarrying the granite and build your own prison, that when you’ve finished we’re gonna imprison you in.” And that’s where Folsom came from! So the old buildings, the old sections were all made out of this granite. It was a hard film to shoot, it was frightening. Things happened that you didn’t expect Expected things didn’t occur. We were able to design our way around 60 per cent of the problems. We didn’t have anybody in our crew stabbed. We shot for twenty-one days and in the last ten days there were ten stabbings. The stabbings went down every day, right around us. One day there were two stabbings and a man was shot from one of the gun towers as he tried to run for the fence. For no reason except to get himself shot. And so there was a lot of violence all around us. The convicts treated us with disdain before we started shooting. After the track was built I had Peter kinda tool it out, real slow, just once. And Peter’s over here doing it and these guys are looking at him. They’re so cool to look at this effete Hollywood stuff, right? And then I had him put on the spikes and go around the track a second time. Really all out. And he tore the hell out of it! One real fast lap. “Say, that guy can run!” 20

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And the whole thing suddenly turned around and we had a credibility. All from that one fast lap that Peter did. It helps the film enormously, the fact that you’ve got an actor who can actually do or appear to do what he’s supposed to be doing in the story. And he can. Peter trained for three months under Jim Bush, who’s one of the top three or four track coaches in the States. He’s the head coach at UCLA and Peter worked three days a week with him and ran every day and got really fast. He got just under a five-minute mile on his own. He was in great shape! It’s a beautiful performance, quite surprising. Because over here what we’ve seen is the clean-cut image of him. The Kennedy Clone? Rich Man, Poor Man, you mean? Yes. One’s initial reaction before seeing the film, knowing a little of what it’s about, is trying to imagine him in the role of a working-class boy, a convict, and so on. That’s what I thought. Len Hill at ABC said, “Peter Strauss”. I said “Peter Strauss!” Peter Strauss is forty years old, and has got grey hair and everything . . . and he said, “No, no. Meet him.” And we met and it was an auspicious meeting. I mean, he was terrific. I can’t imagine having a better working relationship with an actor as he and I enjoyed. We seem to have the same approach towards work, we’re both pretty coldblooded about ourselves in relation to our craft, we both work hard, we’re both disciplined, we both believe in preparation. And the amazing thing about him is his ability to keep his concentration. We’d be up at six and get there, say, seven or eight in the morning, take an hour to clear through custody until we can go down in the yard. We had logistical problems on this movie that were a nightmare. A nightmare. And that’s before you can even start shooting! Yeah. Before you can start shooting. I’d shoot from nine to five. No overtime. No nothing. Whistle blows at five o’clock, you’re out! Bingo. Every time I hear convicts outcounted from the main population, that’s another delay. The guards would have to stop at certain times of the day to count. So let’s say I have seventeen guys out, I also have five guards who are just standing with us there, watching seventeen guys. They stop at 3.30 to do the body count. Now, prison guards are not known by their outstanding IQs, right? One guy says, “What ya got?” “I got sixteen.” “What ya got?” “I got eighteen.” “What ya got?” “I got seventeen.” “Well, better count them again.” I’m tied with three camera crews standing around trying to finish the sequence and these here guys can’t count. Five guys can’t count to seventeen! But, on one day, Peter comes in the morning and there’s problems and he has an attitude that he’s gonna need for a scene that we’re not gonna be able to shoot until four in the afternoon, and I know he’ll have the attitude because he and I will have talked about it and we’ll have rehearsed it. And one day, I’m standing there and two guys show up, standing next to me, and another guy’s crossing the yard over there and I know something’s about to go down because one of these guys, a man named Robbie the Robot Sales who looks 21

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like a nouveau riche Chicano stockbroker that’s made it – light grey, coiffured hair, prematurely grey, he’s in his early thirties – this guy, nine months earlier, had cut somebody’s heart out and left it on the pulpit of the chapel! – and I knew something was about to go down because of these two guys being next to me – they were making themselves conspicuous by their presence, because we always say the guards in the gun towers have their eyes on us. Now, sure enough, some guys walked back over there, two guys come up behind him and hit him. Stab him eighteen times and kill him. And the guy’s gutted like a fish, the whole crew’s stomachs are down by their ankles. And Peter’s fine, the same as always. This happened at noon, it’s another day in Folsom! And about four o’clock there’s a misty look in his eye, he’s kinda defocused and he’s keeping that concentration or at four o’clock he’ll lose it. So he’s an incredibly highly conditioned, highly trained, highly disciplined actor who works very, very hard. I could say there was no pique, no emotional, aristocratic, demanding, childish behaviour. A completely mature talent. It was delightful working with him. And all the actors were incredible. I can’t really describe the tensions of that place, you have to live it, not just see the movie, to understand what it’s like to walk in there in the morning. We got pretty used to it, but the first day somebody walked in it would really freak them out. I had a second assistant director, a really hard-bitten guy, a veteran of all the movies in Hollywood. He shows up, takes one look round, vomits, faints, falls down. We drag him out and send him back to Los Angeles. Next, people go home for the weekend, decide they can’t face coming back, stay at home. I mean, it was so . . . you know? My feeling is that you only have to visit somebody in prison and you wonder if they’re going to let you out! It has that kind of an aura, doesn’t it? The door shutting inexorably behind you? Yeah. There are one or two actors one knows in the film, like Ed Lauter and Geoffrey Lewis, one’s seen them in Clint Eastwood–Burt Reynolds kind of things, but one of the great compliments one can pay the film is that in the end I didn’t know who were the actors and who were the convicts. I cast the convicts, the blacks as well as the whites, first I knew who the actors would be but, by preparation, a week before we started shooting, I selected the convicts I was going to use, told them they would constitute a gang and I brought the white actors in. I brought them in separately – Brian Dennehy and a couple of the other guys – and introduced them to Terry Dawson and his convicts. What I was hoping would happen was that they would really identify with them and they’d become a little group. In other words, I made the fiction of the movie into the reality of the work situation and, in fact, when the white actors would show up for the day, they would go and hang out where the white guys would hang out. The black actors, Roger Mosley, Ji-Tu Cumbuka, they’d hit the yard, they would hang out with their crew of black actors. Whether they were working or not. And when Miguel Piñero hit the yard – he plays Rubio the Chicano – he’d go hang out with his 22

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pals. And whether we were shooting or not – say I was working with Peter, running over here – I’d look over there, and I’d see the blacks with the blacks, the whites with the whites, and so on. And there’s a lot of Pirandelloesque things that went on in this movie and one of them was the fact of strong identification. Now, for the actors, this is incredible – what a marvellous turn-on! You’re playing a convict: a convict doesn’t just sit down like we do. He has his portion of a bench and he sits in a certain attitude. If he grabs a bottle, there’s a way that he holds that bottle, just like the way his pants are creased, everything has meaning. For an actor to hang out with these guys and pick up on this stuff, well this was part of the enriching process that the actors were just automatically able to deliver when it came to do their stuff on the screen. Plus, I had very bright actors. And the uptightness of the place that you felt at times – I assumed that it would make the actors skittish, whereas my crew, being solid working-class and middleclass veterans, would be okay. But it was just the reverse. The actors sublimated totally into the convict population and sublimated into their work and that’s how they evaded the tension. The crew went nuts, like a bunch of old ladies! I mean, you came home to the hotel at the end of the night’s shooting and you had some guy who didn’t like his room and he started bitching about it. Completely out of proportion. It was a neurotic display; he was alleviating the tension of the day inside there. With all the stabbings and killings that used to go on – I don’t mean in the story but in real life – there must have been some kind of reaction from the authorities. Yet in the film – for instance, the murder of Stiles – there wasn’t even a token investigation of the killing. Was that usual? Yeah. I mean, if they could find the guy who stabbed him they’d prosecute him. They’d add more time to his service. But if they can’t they can’t. That was as true to real life as to the film. All those guys just drop their weapons and run away. All the weapons we used in the film were rubber models made from real weapons that had been used in stabbings and killings and were then thrown away. They’d been borrowed from the prison. They didn’t know who it was, there was just the body. Nobody amongst the prison population is going to say “boo” to anyone. And that’s exactly what happened. The irony of it is that one of the guys who “stabbed” Stiles, the man with the swastika tattoo on his stomach – and it said “White Power” because his real name is Steven White! – he was that character. Except that the character magnified his real personality and when the film was over he magnified the character’s personality. Now he’s jumped a whole magnitude! Before he was an aggressive guy, he used to have a reputation of coming up into people’s faces, right? But he kept it fairly under check. He kept going at his film role until four weeks after we wrapped and were out of prison. He kept coming up into people’s faces and three Mexicans just took him out. Whap! He’s dead. They killed him. And that’s again part of the funny thing about the movie. The movie talks about racism breaking down at certain points and people abandoning their narrow vertical categories – all 23

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the Chicanos hanging together, all the black hanging together, all the whites hanging together. They recognised a kind of common interest, having one of their people out there to run. It became the united front, labour brigade and militia, right? And that’s the story. That’s not real. It’s a story. Yet because those real convicts were working in that story, it had, in fact, happened in their lives. So, after we’d finished shooting, the blacks who had been standing next to the whites started talking to each other and they were guys who hadn’t talked to each other for ten years! Never said one word to each other. And they’re kind of rampant, you know? And Wilmore Thomas, the biggest black in the movie – the guy with the bald head? – comes up to me afterwards and says, “You know, man, I seen this dude for ten years and I never talked to him before, and now I’m talking to him. That’s pretty good. That’s what the movie’s about, isn’t it? You know what I mean?” And so there’s a lot of that mirror reflection in the film. It was interesting. Murphy has a life sentence. You said he’d been in about ten years. Surely with a more enlightened attitude to the particular crime he’d committed – there were mitigating circumstances, when he was a kid – would you not have thought that his case might have been reviewed at some later date? No. I don’t know. I can’t really project in legal terms, in judicial terms. Whether it happened to him, if his case had been reviewed, I don’t know. But the nature of the man is such that he would have said, “Number One: I did it, I belong here.” And you can read for that an attitude of “I wanna be here.” And he’s a guy who has built walls around himself. I mean, he’s got a prison around himself that he’s built, that he’s in, and that’s within the larger prison of Folsom. And that’s the man. That’s the character. And that’s what it means, the phrase “to do your own time” . . . “I’m doing my own time.” You also have to be strong to do your own time. And he’s strong. “To do your own time” as opposed to joining one of the prison gangs and having that backing. To keep yourself from being homosexually abused. To keep yourself from being forced to buy cigarettes on your credit with the commissary and then give them to somebody else. Because if you don’t, they’ll kill you. You need backing to avoid that kind of physical and economic abuse. Like somebody will make you go to work forty hours a week and then take all your money. And you have to do this or you’ll die. I mean, it’s that simple. And you’ll avoid it if you join one of the prison gangs – and there’s basically only three – or be strong enough to “do your own time”. Murphy’s strong enough because he’s kind of a nutter. He runs around in circles. They leave those guys alone. They’re somehow a little bit edgy about those kind of guys, anyway; that’s what this character is. He is self-condemned more than the legal system has condemned him. So he wouldn’t, in fact, seem to have any of his sentence reversed. He’s there because of what he did, and he wants to be there. That’s his life. And all he does is run to get to that point where his adrenalin dries out and then he goes to some kind of place where it’s quiet. And that’s it. 24

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He’s still, to my mind, a winner at the end because even though he hasn’t actually run in the Olympic Games, he has remained true to himself. By telling the selection board to go to hell. I was surprised that he hadn’t been briefed beforehand with the sort of questions that they might ask him, like “Do you regret this crime?” and so on. They just thought it was going to be a routine publicity. That’s number one. Number two, I don’t see him as winning in the end. What I tried to construct was a neat comment. I tried to get the best of both worlds in the terms of what’s the audience gonna feel at the end of the movie? I wanted to get two things. One, I wanted the emotional release, I wanted the audience to emotionally identify with the man who’s just had a victory. At the same time I wanted to counterpoint that with a defeat on a thematic level. So he’s high. But he lost. Because what he’s just done when that other guy’s hand comes over his shoulder and he joins the mass of men is that he is not “doing his own time” any more. He was in a better position in the front of the movie than he is at the end of the movie. He’s abandoned the protective wall within which he lived. He had expectations, which then became false expectations and, after the loss of the mood of the golden oaks and all that jazz, he’s wound up making the same kind of outrageous, nihilistic gestures that they all do. He’s joined the mass. He’s joined the prison gang. Everything is back the way it was at the beginning of the movie. Guys are getting their hair corn-rolled, guys are playing handball, the black guys aren’t fucking with the whites, aren’t fucking with the Chicanos. And it’s back the way it was. Murphy was able to “do his own time”, but not any more. Now he’s part of it. So he loses. So do all the convicts lose. Everybody loses in the end in a funny sort of way. But he remains true to himself up to that point, because he just told the board to go to hell. You know – “I did what I did” – I mean, he’s still, at least in that way, the individual. He’s still the individual, but any one of those guys in that yard would have said the same thing to the Board. It’s like the guy in this Miami courtroom – in the TV programme – who gets sentenced to life without possibility of parole and he thinks it’s far out: “Wait’ll the guys in the joint hear that that judge sentenced me!” That’s his sole thought. Not the feeling of being removed from everything meaningful about life and in being sent to this weird place, but that. The bravado. The vanity. A couple of things. One is that Alcatraz was a Federal joint. And secondly. the Eastwood film takes place in the mid-’sixties and the code on dress regulations, which applies only to the outside, was relaxed in California a couple of years ago. In British prisons you can wear your hair any length and grow beards and so on, and have pin-ups on the walls. But they still wear uniforms . . . Federal prisons are always much softer a rap than State prisons. They’re stricter on the external stuff, dress and things like that. They’re a preferable place to do time. Conditions are best in Federal joints, better in State and worst 25

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in local. The worst to do time is LA County Jail, Cook County in Chicago. Folsom is pretty good because you have a stable kind of a population. All of them there are such a bunch of hard asses that they’re used to doing time. They can do a “nickel or a dime” standing on their head. You get to a place like San Quentin, where you get a guy who’s got a ten-year sentence and he’s never really been in prison before, and he goes berserk. So, even though the game is a dangerous game, it’s a game with predictable rules. You know when you’ve committed an infraction, accidentally or not. You know when you have to watch out that somebody’s not going to stick a knife in your back because of something you did. So it is noble in Folsom and that makes Folsom preferable to Quentin. Folsom is harder time than Alcatraz because it’s not a Federal joint. Also, in Folsom they will shoot you as soon as look at you – I’m talking about the guards – the guards can’t control the convict population en masse on the ground. I mean, five guards are not gonna wade into ten convicts. You saw what those guys are like! Nobody’s gonna take that chance. I had a terrible thought, Michael, watching it all. I thought, whatever these guys have done to get in there, there are members of the audience who’re going to be relieved that they’re still locked up. Which is an unavoidable thought. No matter how liberal one is about such things, because there doesn’t seem to be, as I think you said the other night, there doesn’t seem to be any real attempt at rehabilitation. Just stamping out number plates and things like that. Sure. Rehabilitation with the majority of the convict population of Folsom is really not a relevant issue. Humanisation is. The more you keep somebody human, the more they’re forced to relate to objective reality. The kind of objective reality that exists beyond the prison walls. The more they’re forced to relate to what it is that they’re missing, the less chance that they’re going to go out and do something stupid and come right back in. And the only way that that happens is when people are treated as human beings. If you deprive them of things they’re used to, you force them into fantasies and they relate to the games of life and not life itself. They don’t relate to life when they hit the street. Now a classic example of this is sex. They have all that airbrush Penthouse gynaecology all over the walls and it’s perfection. And they masturbate to sexual perfection. After five years of that they hit the street. They see their wife or some girl or prostitute or anybody – she’s got a mole, she’s got a bruise, she has odour. You know, we may call it perfume, to them it’s odour! Then big trouble. It’s a horrendous experience for them. Horrendous. And it’s not as preferable as fantasy and masturbating to perfection. That’s the sexual line. The same thing happens with what they thought they were going to do, what they were going to pull down when they got out. They get some idea of some job they were going to pull down. Their methodology is six years out of date. I mean, their methodology is in Starsky & Hutch re-runs! You couldn’t hold up an ice cream man or a milkman with what they think they have to do. They screw up. And, after a while, they relate to being in prison as a constant and being outside on parole as “a run”, a temporary state. 26

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So you hear a guy say he’d “a good nine month run”, a good nine months outside, before he’s screwed up and back inside he comes. And that’s what happens. So rehabilitation with recidivist criminals is really almost an irrelevant term. But, as far as my own attitude about criminality goes – if someone is convicted and he’s in prison for life, without possibility of parole, I would give him everything. I’d say, “Man, let him have this suite here at the Savoy.” I mean, I don’t want him on the street, but I would enrich his life in as many positive ways as possible. Because it is the dehumanisation that bruises a guy and when he gets out after six months he winds up slaughtering women and children. The severity of the punishment has ceased to be a deterrent at that point. What made you decide to train at the London Film School? Because I didn’t like the approach at UCLA. And some of the others. The quality of the Film School itself varied in indirect proportion to the state of the British film industry. The worse the British film industry was, the better the Film School was! I mean, we had a great lighting cameraman teaching there because he couldn’t get a job. Nobody was making any movies. When I went there I made some very close friends. There were a lot of Americans. I didn’t want to go to New York. I didn’t like USC or UCLA. The design behind their programme. I read a lot of film theory and studied that and film history before I came over here. So I knew pretty well what I wanted to do, I just knew nothing at all about the technology of it. I wanted to learn everything I could about the technology. I came away being able to draw a circuit diagram of Nagras and knew exactly what happened when a photon hit an emulsion on film stock. Whatever good that did me! And I saw a lot of movies. Did you try to make any amateur movies before, when you were at Wisconsin? When I was an undergraduate I made a movie called Dead Birds. Dead Birds! Black-and-white, 8mm. A poetic fantasy of . . . dead birds! And my brother walking through the woods at night. As a matter of fact, when I left London it got lost. Too bad. How did the Paris riots film come about? I wanted to do it. I contacted NBC but they normally didn’t allow anybody other than house NBC crews to do their documentaries. Except that we – myself and a man called Elio Zarmati – had some contacts among the Leftists in Paris, and since they wouldn’t talk to any of the American pig networks but would talk to us, we had something to extract agreements from NBC out of. So we interviewed Alain Krivine, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, mostly JCR people. Through the late ’sixties, the ’seventies, in retrospect, I wouldn’t have traded my experiences in Europe for anything. However, I also regret that I wasn’t in Vietnam and I regret I wasn’t in the States. It was such a key time and I’m a big believer in injecting oneself into experiences. The kind of research I do has a lot to do with injecting myself into a milieu and knowing it, the vernacular of it, the feeling of the place, the history and the main players. 27

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Do you deliberately put yourself into situations, in the Hemingway manner? Induced experiences for the purpose of later writing and so on? Not for later writing. I always do it in the context of something that I’m working on right now. So, if I’m doing a movie on contraband, in South East Asia, I’ll spend some time in very exotic places with some very exotic people, like Northern Thailand, way away from Chiang Mai and any other known town. And that’s what I did for Triad, which I’m preparing for Paramount. It deals with Chinese criminal societies in Macao and Hong Kong, as well as Thailand. I’m also developing LA 49, with Richard Gere as a sports writer in 1949 Los Angeles. Then there’s a script I want to do for Universal called Dirty Laundry, about Cuban expatriates in Miami and ‘laundering’ of dirty money, and another Eastern project, Missing in Action. That’s for UA and it’s about smuggling in the Straits of Indonesia. So you have to go to those places and look them over and that’s how you get credibility. I wrote a script at Paramount called Tex-Mex, about the Texas-Mexican border. A lot of it takes place in the [. . .] red light districts, and it also has to do with the Mexican heroin trade and I’ll spend time on that border and get into some very bizarre places. Whatever skill I have as a documentarian is for absorbing things and also wiring situations. Like the World in Action crews would operate. These guys go anywhere and they know how to wire things and make them safe, to extend themselves further at greater risk, moving ahead of themselves. That’s something that’s egotistically very satisfying. It’s also challenging. The motivations are not really mercenary. The motivations are that. I like it. It’s like dance. It’s exciting. But you’re prepared to work in the studio if it has to be? Yeah. That’s great, too. But to get through the initial research . . . it’s enriching, incredibly rich. There’s no way to imagine the perspective of, say, an American who had been born in an exotic place like Bali, because his grandfather was a missionary and walked into Bali and his father was born there and he was born there and he grows up speaking Balinese and didn’t learn English until he was twelve. And you meet this guy. And he speaks English as well as you or I do, but you get beneath the patina of the social graces at first meeting and you find somebody who is basically Balinese in his thinking. Added to which there’s his cosmology, his attitude to politics, his philosophy, which is essentially Buddhist. You find out more and more that his perspective of what’s going on around him is so alien. And there’s no way to have that experience he has without being there and living with those people. Or being in settlement houses in Hong Kong or moving through factories filled with labouring seven- and eight-year-old children. There’s no way to really perceive what that is. Or to recreate the tragedy of it or the flip side of that, unless you’ve been there and you’ve seen all that stuff. And in terms of intuiting the rhythms and patterns, the tones, the colours and the actualities, well that only comes with experience. As much as a Method actor will inject himself into a character who may be fifty. But to portray a man of fifty, he has to know what 28

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the guy was thinking when he was eleven! What was it like for this dude to go through puberty? What great tragedies befell this kid when he was twentyfour? What expectations did he have that he lied to himself about? Sublimated when he was twenty-eight and are now emerging finally at the age of fifty-six? A good actor has to know these things when he’s portraying a fifty-six-year-old man. To the same extent that an actor does that, in a similar way I like to get myself into the milieu of my movie. And it’s not a person, it’s a matrix of culture, philosophy, politics, religion, taste, food, clothes, sex . . . it’s the whole fabric of that thrust, of a society, a moment in time. Thief, which I’ll be making for UA with Jimmy Caan, is about a professional career criminal who has a very bourgeois life – the last thing he is is George Segal in black, coming in off the rooftops! And that’s a special world. This particular film takes place in Chicago and there’s only about five crews of top-flight, top-drawer professional thieves in the United States. And they get offered all the best scores. Like the film business, you know? You’re offered twenty times more stuff than you can do when you’re hot, right? And it’s exactly the same situation with these guys. And their attitudes about their families, about their wives, about their children, about their culture are very low-profile. They’re very professional guys and their origins, where they come from, their value system, their parents . . . that whole thing is a milieu you have to get into. You go to Denver, you go to Vegas, you go to Chicago. You spend time, you go to see somebody and you go into their house – it’s a very inexpensive 40,000 dollar track house – you walk into the kitchen, there’s about 50,000 dollars’ worth of marble in the kitchen! The wife has got eleven ermine and mink coats in the closet that her husband won’t let her wear outside, she has to wear them in the house. And everything’s low-profile. The guy drives a Pinto, but there’s more dollar values worth of radio equipment in the Pinto than the Pinto costs! How did you get established in America? I went back to the US in 1972 and directed a documentary called 17 Days Down the Line, a story about a Newsweek correspondent rediscovering his native land after five years abroad. Very much like myself. I worked for a time as a production executive at 20th Fox and eventually formed my own company. I discovered that a newcomer needs to put together his own package, so I started writing material for my own projects and other film-makers. You got into feature movies through television. But it was filmed television, things like Starsky & Hutch and Police Story. Yes. It was all filmed. None of it’s taped. I did several mini-series and pilots, and created the Vegas series for ABC. Also several theatrical film-writing credits like The Last Public Enemy for Harold Hecht. And these led to The Jericho Mile and the one I’ve just been researching in the Far East. Hong Kong. Or Triad, as it’s now called. The problem with Starsky & Hutch – we’ve just shown the final episode over here – is that because of the violence of the first series, they then took all 29

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the violence out. It became sort of buddy-buddy, very cosy. But you were there right from the beginning? Yes. I wrote three of the first six episodes that were ever televised, and the show was an immediate hit off the ratings in that first year. Which made me a very attractive commodity. And so I did what one does – it’s the standard thing. I was proud of those scripts I wrote for that show, which got horribly diluted by the production. The shooting of the scripts didn’t enhance them, I didn’t like the way those movies were produced. You had six days to shoot a whole episode. Cut the budgets, cut this, cut that, no time for anything. Incredibly frustrating. I did the three episodes there and went to Police Story. Starsky & Hutch is mainstream and a little bit mundane, even though at the time there were elements in it that were not. Those guys, at least for an American audience, were counter-culture heroes. That’s number one. Number two – something that’s not appreciated here is that, when it came out in ’75, a lot of those shows were really tongue-in-cheek and were parodies of things. Cal Worthington is a big car dealer in Southern California and he rides on the wings of bi-planes and is often seen sitting on a tiger, crossing the front of his used cars. He’s a character, with a big cowboy hat, a big tall guy. I wrote an episode based on him. So a lot of it’s parody. A lot of it’s satirical in ways that are highly regional to Southern California. So if you’re not familiar with California and the States, you don’t pick up a lot on it either. I went from there, doing Police Story, which was, at the time, the best show on American television. It was an anthology. It was produced by Liam O’Brien, and Ed Waters worked on it and Sid Kaelis. And Liam O’Brien was an old New York Writer, a fabulous guy. He wrote Trapeze and a bunch of other stories. A playwright, part of the Algonquin Round Table, Dorothy Parker kind of circuit, a great raconteur. A politically active guy in the ’thirties, fabulous, a great drinker, a terrific guy. And so that was a whole different ball game. The scripts were sacrosanct. The best writers in television were writing that show. Each episode was based on a real event with real people. And so you sit and talk with the policemen who lived through an event – this is where some of the training I was talking about came in – and you asked them for some story. “Well, you know, it’s my third wife . . .” “What happened?” “Well, you know, we didn’t work out.” “Why didn’t it work out?” You’re getting no personal dialogue. I had to break him down, get him very emotional. It was his last marriage. He thought this one’s gonna work. It didn’t work. The rigours of the job have ruined this man’s personal life, he’s three years away from retirement, he’s scared to death of what he’s gonna do and he’s afraid he’s gonna become a suicide. Or there’s a story about a girl who’s driving down a highway. Some guy for kicks just took a shot at the car, hit the girl in the head. She’s in hospital, a bullet in her brain. She’s a vegetable. This guy meantime, this cop, his wife has just left him with their kid. And he goes and spends time at night, talking to this girl, who can’t hear him. And after a while he just keeps talking to her and he starts telling her about his boyhood in 30

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Tennessee and catching fish with his father. Some time later, this guy’s getting seriously, psychologically disturbed, going to see this girl and telling her things. And, finally, when they apprehend the guy who fired the shot, he says, “Wait a minute, I gotta go tell . . .” “Where are you going?” And this party says, “I gotta go tell Marisa.” And his pal says, “Are you fucking crazy? I mean, she can’t hear you, man!” And here’s this police man who’s gotta go talk! True story. The whole of it’s true. So the wealth of dealing with tactile, documentary reality and finding form and changing things and manipulating it around into dramatic structures is fascinating. There were guys writing on that show, well after they were gunrunning up the side of TV, guys including myself who would be paid seven and eight times the amount of money per hour to write movies for television or pilots or theatrical feature films. Liam O’Brien came back and wrote an episode for a fifth of his usual fee, because the money was secondary to the kind of class things they had there. Guys like Eric Bercovici who wrote Hell in the Pacific, Arthur Keane – I forget all the names – myself . . . there were a number of guys who would go back and write that show, and it was a terrific show. Four years. And Joe Wambaugh who Wrote Choirboys and Onion Field was the creator of Police Story, so he was there fighting the good fight, too. So it was a rare occurrence in episodic television. They weren’t all great, don’t get me wrong. One out of three is noteworthy. Two out of three, they’re there, they’re not bad, they’re pretty good. Nice attitude, nice scene breakdown. One out of two is special. It won three Emmys, three years in a row, for one thing and another. It was fascinating. Great experience.

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CASTLE KEEP1 Harlan Kennedy

Has Michael Mann gone Gothic? Deep in the granite depths of a Transylvanian castle, something terrifying stirs. It is none other than the transmogrifying remains of F. Paul Wilson’s best-selling shock-horror novel The Keep, now coming to life as a $6-million grand guignol fantasy. Mann, the writer–director of Thief and (for TV) The Jericho Mile, has set out to transform Wilson’s potboiler about vampires versus the Third Reich into a multi-layer allegory. And now, after a six-month delay due to the death of special effects wizard Wally Veevers, The Keep is ready to go as one of Paramount’s big releases this Christmas. I met Mann amid the towering sets of the castle’s interior at Shepperton Studios, London. Black stone walls beetle ceilingward; shafts of eerie blue light rake the sound stage; and charred human remains, victims of the omnivorous monster at the movie’s centre, are uggily [sic] discernible in nooks and crannies. This is the Keep – or at least its studio-built interior. For location shooting, a giant slate quarry in Wales has been used, where a specially built Rumanian village nestles inside the striated cliff-walls, one of which doubles as the majestic castle entrance. Mann insists that the movie is not just your common-or-gargoyle horror pic but a fairy tale for our times. And he will forcefully wave a copy of Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment at you if you look quizzical. (It’s best to wave back.) Bettelheim explained how fairy tales were complex moral fables salutary for adults and children alike. He insisted (and so does Mann) From Film Comment, 19:6 (1983), pp. 16–19.

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that unlike myths, which are built around clearly identified heroes and usually given a tragic ending, fairy tales are universal, generalized, and energetically moralistic. They also favor the happy ending. Says Bettelheim: “The myth is pessimistic while the fairy tale is optimistic, no matter how terrifyingly serious some of the story may be.” And terror, claims Mann, crowds The Keep. Its most notable nasty is a metamorphosing monster called Molasar with a need for consuming human essence by destroying human life. Into this creature’s domain stumble such tasty quarries as Jürgen Prochnow (Nazi officer), Dr. Ian McKellen (Jewish historian sprung from Dachau to investigate the ogre), Alberta Watson (McKellen’s daughter), and Scott Glenn as Glaeken Trismegistus, destiny’s chosen antagonist to Molasar. –H.K. HK: I take it that The Keep is not Alien Meets the Wehrmacht. You’re trying to do something else? You’re not just vulgarizing Nazism and turning it into the stuff of catchpenny horror flicks? MM: No! The answer to that is a categorical no. The idea of making this film within the genre of horror films appealed to me not at all. It also did not appeal to Paramount. That doesn’t mean the movie isn’t scary. It’s very scary, very horrifying, and it’s also very erotic in parts. But what it is overall is very dreamy, very magical, and intensely emotional. It has the passions that happen in dreams sometimes when you’re grabbed in the middle of a dream and yanked into places you either want to get out of or you never want to leave. HK: But you tend to wake up. MM: In this movie – if it works – you don’t wake up. You’re swept away and you stay swept away. So it’s very much a magical, dream-like, fairy-tale reality. HK: There is a book called The Keep by F. Paul Wilson. Was that your starting point? MM: No. The starting point really preceded the book. I’d just done a street movie, Thief. A very stylized street movie but nevertheless stylized realism. You can make it wet, you can make it dry, but you’re still on “street.” And I had a need, a big desire, to do something almost similar to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, where I could deal with something that was non-realistic and create the reality. There is an effect in the film whereby Molasar accrues to himself particles of matter from living organisms. Now what is the logic of that? What does it look like? How does it happen? What’s the sound of it? I mean, that’s a real turn-on, to fantasize what these things are going to be like. So you’re way out there. And you have to be consistent. You’re not rendering objective reality, you’re making up reality. 33

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HK: But in this fairy tale we find the Nazi Wehrmacht – men dressed in totemic black uniforms with swastikas – things we can recognize and which set up a response. MM: Actually only about one-fifth of the film is involved with the Wehrmacht and the character of the Captain played by Jürgen Prochnow. The film revolves around a character called Glaeken Trismegistus, who wakes up after a deep sleep in a transient, merchant-marine setting some place in Greece in 1941. The movie revolves around him and his conflict, which seems to be fated, with a character called Roderick Molasar. The end of the conflict seems to fate him toward destruction. He may destroy Molasar or Molasar may destroy him, but in either case Glaeken Trismegistus must go to the Keep. And in the course of coming to the keep to confront Molasar, he has a romance with Eva, whose father is a Medieval historian named Dr. Cuza, very quick, very smart. At a moment in history when he is powerless – a Socialist Jew in Fascist Romania – Cuza is offered the potential to ally himself with immense power. For him it’s a deliverance. And as a bonus he also gets rejuvenated. So he’s seduced into attaching himself to this power in the Keep. HK: And Molasar comes to life by taking the power, the souls, of the Wehrmacht Nazis. MM: What happens is that after the second time you’ve seen him, Molasar changes. And he seems to change after people are killed. After he kills things. It’s almost as if he accrues to himself their matter. Not their souls; he doesn’t suck their blood. It’s a thing unexplained, his transformation is seen visually. He evolves through three different stages in the movie. He gets more and more complete. He starts as a cloud of imploding particles, then he evolves a nervous system, then he evolves a skeleton and musculature, and at the third state he’s complete. And then it’s a bit ironic when he’s complete, because there’s a great resemblance to Glaeken Trismegistus. HK: Is he evil personified? MM: No. Well, yes he is. Yes, Evil Personified. But what is evil? HK: Try Satan? Or Lucifer? MM: Yes, but think about that. Satan in Paradise Lost is the most exciting character in the book. He’s rebellious, he’s independent, he doesn’t like authority. If you think about it, Satan could almost be played by John Wayne. I mean the Reaganite, independent, individualist spirit. It’s all bullshit, but that’s the cultural myth that the appeal taps into.

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HK: Is Glaeken Trismegistus the alter ego of Molasar? Is he the good side? MM: No, he’s not. I tried to find a more surreal logic to the characters; so that there’s nothing Satanic about Molasar. He’s just sheer power, and the appeal of power, and the worship of power, a belief in power, a seduction of power. And Molasar is very, very deceptive. When we first meet him, we too believe that he is absolute salvation. And it’s all a con. Now when Glaeken shows up, the first thing he does is seduce Eva Cuza. So my intent in designing those characters was to make them not black-and-white. I put in things that are not normally considered to be good into Glaeken and qualities that are not evil into Molasar. HK: Why did you choose these names? You wrote the script. MM: The script was taken from a book, which we’ve talked about; but I did give Glaeken his last name, which he didn’t have in the book. And I couldn’t find a better name than Trismegistus. HK: There’s something about Trismegistus that rings a bell. MM: It’s the Greek for “harvest.” HK: Of course! Now once the script was written, did you change many details? MM: Yes. Once I’ve written the screenplay I’ve finished the movie, in the sense that I have a complete evocation of it on paper. Then it’s a whole new film again when I start shooting. It doesn’t change that much, but now the words are plastic, flexible. So I’m constantly rewriting bits of dialogue before I shoot, which drives the actors really crazy. Then two days before we shoot it they get new pages. Then the day before, they get more new pages. And then when I get them on stage I say, “You know the dialogue – yeah, well, forget it, I want to make a small change.” HK: How important to you is the use of the wide screen? MM: Very. It’s important to me for two reasons. One, because this is an expressionistic movie that intends to sweep its audience away – be very big, to have them transport themselves into this dream-reality so that they’re in those landscapes, there with the characters. You can’t sweep people away in 1:85 and mono. Also, I’m just not interested in “passive” filmmaking, in a film that’s precious and small and where it’s up to the audience to bring themselves to the movie. I want to bombard an audience – a very active, aggressive type of seduction. I want to manipulate an audience’s feelings for the same reasons that composers write symphonies. 35

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HK: What are your feelings about ultimately seeing this big-screen film on television and video-cassette, with the sides chopped off? Are you pushing your compositions toward the middle of the screen? MM: No. Whatever happens to it when it goes out on television or video, that’s the breaks. I can’t do anything about that. But I can do everything about the cinema experience which, for me, is obviously primary. So the shots are composed for the big screen and the film is designed to be effective for theater audiences. And if it does that job, then it’s going to also do well on TV HK: With bits chopped off. MM: Yeah. But commercial reasons aside, I’m interested in the theatrical experience, not in the small-screen experience. HK: Of course The Keep isn’t just a film with human heads, it’s got special effects as well. Since there are a lot of pyrotechnics and elaborate technical challenges in the movie, are you storyboarding? MM: I storyboarded everything. Then I threw it all away. When you get on the set and the light is doing something different and better than you thought, you start moving your actors – and there goes the storyboard right out the window. In this picture we used arc lamps that date from the Twenties and Thirties to get a certain kind of hard blue shaft of light coming through all the openings in the Keep. And it usually comes from behind people and makes shafts across them, creating a kind of Albert Speer–Mussolini monumental quality. You make a film during a year of your life. You grow and you change. And if you’re lucky, the film has increased in magnitude. By then, the effect you thought of a year ago can seem pretty thin. So there goes the storyboard again. There are two poles in the movie: the village and the Keep. And whatever is happening in the village is completely different from what’s going on in the Keep. So everything in the village is very bright, very white. It’s got a basic innocence – with enough realistic textures like dirt to make it believable – and a slightly sinister overtone, which comes in the shape of the crosses. Rooftops are never symmetrical, they’re always twisted a little bit. Basically we exposed for shadows, and let the highlights bum out everything for it to be sunlit and brilliant inside the village. Then when things start going bad it’s still sunlit, and things happen in a very scary, overexposed way. In the Keep everything is very dark. We exposed for the highlights and let all the shadows go. Instead of a flood or a wash of light, there are very defined shafts of light. It’s only in those shafts that we can see things. The lighting was designed in a very integral way, very closely between myself, Alex Thompson [the cinematographer], and John Box [the production designer].

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HK: We’re living in an age where there are nuclear factors contending and the planet is in jeopardy. So is this film an escape from or a confrontation with that reality? MM: It’s both, I think. It’s a reality that’s not part of everybody’s everyday reality; it’s a dream. You bet it’s an escape. The whole movie is one huge dilation of space and time into a dream reality, so it’s a huge escape. But in dreams there are a lot of hidden themes. With the themes, and how they affect an audience, I attempt to make the film very meaningful. Not meaningful in a two-dimensional way like a message. You know, “Those guys’ politics bad: these guys’ politics good.” Nothing as specific as that, but rather a penetration of psychological realities. HK: How do you think audiences will feel after seeing your film? Disturbed, frightened? Will they be thinking? MM: If the film works, they’ll come out emotionally exhausted. The film is uplifting in the end, the way it turns out. But then the next day the audience will start thinking about it and say, “Whoa!” The best work in Thief was immediate in that sense, in that people would come out either loving it or hating it. And some loved it and hated it at the same time. A friend of mine called and said, “The film was fabulous, I just hated it.” When I asked why, he said, “Because I like to feel that I control my destiny, I control my life, and the film made me think that I didn’t.” As far as I’m concerned, that meant the film just hit a home run with the bases loaded. The Keep is less immediate than that, but emotionally deeper because it tries to get at the way you think and feel in the way dreams work. HK: A Jungian interpretation or a Freudian? MM: Freudian. But not a slavish, doctrinaire, mechanistic approach. Any mechanistic application like that is not artistic, and a dead end. HK: You’re using the music of Tangerine Dream for the film. Why? MM: Because we have a terrific relationship. I think their work on Thief was very successful. This music is very different. This is much more melodic, there are different influences. We’re using Thomas Tallis, we’re using a lot of choirs processed through a vocoder. I’ve got in my brain maybe seven or eight hours of their music. HK: The cinema seems to be bringing forth or giving birth to a new trend: myths, fables, fairy tales. Why?

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MM: In the Thirties and Forties people saw a movie once or twice a week. Now people see moving pictures six hours a day. So what’s the motivation to go to the cinema? It has to be a different order of experience. Otherwise stay home and watch the idiot box. Cinema has to be more experimental, it has to transport people away, it has to provide them with a suspension of disbelief, a feeling they’ve been swept up into another reality they can’t get when they’re bigger than the image. If there is a single trend right now, I think it’s to people making very emotional films. Even hardcore Marxists like the Taviani Brothers are making very emotional films. Their film The Night of the Shooting Stars is a very political film, but it’s political about emotions. It’s simple and poetic, yet it’s a cleavage right through modern man in a strange way. HK: What other films or filmmakers have impressed you or influenced you? MM: You’re influenced by who you like. I like Kubrick, I like Resnais immensely. I like Tarkovsky, although there’s very little in Tarkovsky I’d want to do myself. In fact I fell asleep through half of Solaris, but I still love it. And Stalker. He has a Russian, suffering nerve of pace that it’s hard to relate to, but you can’t help being impressed and moved by what you see. HK: Do you want to produce films? MM: Yes, because there are more pictures I would like to see made than I can make or want to make. A case in point is a screenplay I wrote called Heat, which I love. As a writer, I really want to see this picture made. But as a director I don’t want to touch it.

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OF VICE AND MANN1 Art Harris

It is 2 a.m., time for a man to be murdered beneath a magnolia. Normally, one shot, and it would be over. Boom. Next? But a short, trim man in snappy blue pants with a red stripe and gray designer sweatshirt orders a test kill. If someone’s going to die, he wants to make sure you’ll “see the muzzle flash.” Out comes a man with a gun. Bang. Perfect. He nods for the execution to proceed . . . But wait! Something’s amiss. He jumps up, runs his hands through the victim’s limp hair, musses it, summons the hairdresser: Fluff it before he dies. “Most directors tell you what they want and let you do it,” sighs the exasperated French coiffeuse. “But he wants to touch everything – even down to fixing knots on ties and collars of people who aren’t acting in his movie. He’s a perfectionist. It can make life difficult.” “Everyone off the sidewalk!” orders Michael Mann, 42, executive producer and chief stylistic overseer of TV’s Miami Vice, this night stalking Atlanta as writer–director of Red Dragon [released in 1986 as Manhunter], an $11 million suspense thriller about a serial killer. Suddenly, he spies a dewy windshield on the killer’s van. “No, it’s not all right,” he says. “Someone clean it.” Someone does. Fast. He may be short, but they call him “Sir.” “He knows exactly what he wants,” shrugs executive producer Bernie Williams. “He does his homework. He tells you six weeks before he gets there: From The Washington Post, October 16 (1985), B1.

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Figure 3.1  Miami Vice pilot “Brother’s Keeper” (1984). L. to r., Ricardo Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas), Sonny Crockett (Don Johnson).

‘Get me three cars with Illinois plates.’ He’s very efficient and very demanding. But you make good pictures by being demanding.” Michael Mann’s fetish for detail has made the writer–director–producer one of the hottest triple threats in Hollywood today and Miami Vice a hit. Millions tune in to his bubbling Pop Cop bouillabaisse of sex, drugs, glitz, ritz, machine guns and rock ‘n’ roll. As the hippest cop show on TV, Miami Vice spins its contemporary morality plays via staccato storytelling, heavy on glances, short on words, mood-setting pop rock and high-gloss color composition. Some critics call this just another New Look formula, just a pink flamingo away from Hill Street Blues. But others say it’s taken TV off the assembly line, drawing such motion picture heavies as directors William Friedkin and John Milius to flirt with pilots for the once-scorned tube. Mann is the man behind it all, a benevolent dictator, proud that his “American Casablanca” is flying so high it can hum along on autopilot. As a producer, Mann’s tastes are spawning imitators galore and changing the face of prime-time TV. He likes to oversee every aspect of Vice from script to final edit. That means handpicking actors’ shoes (Italian slip-ons), their suits (Armani or Versace, $800 off the rack, worn over T-shirts), the pulsating rock music (Glenn Frey, Chaka Khan, Melle Mel), the colors (South Florida’s chic pink and key lime pie green, no “earth tones,” please). 40

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He keeps in touch with Miami by phone, but leaves the daily producing to John Nicolella, along with such decrees as No Cops Drive Clunkers. Undercover cop Crockett, played by Don Johnson, zips around in no less than a black Ferrari Daytona, not unlike Mann himself, who whips down from his Mediterranean-style villa in the Hollywood Hills in a Ferrari 308 GTS. It’s black, too. Why not trademark red? “I don’t like red,” he says. In his films, too, he looks at each frame like a painter. Color is crucial “to create mood and atmosphere,” he says. For Red Dragon, based on Thomas Harris’ novel, it’s silver and green to invent a modern, techy look. In Vice, it’s pastels to “evoke the heat. We didn’t pick pastels so people could say how smart things looked; pastels vibrate.” But why did Mr. Style park a boring white Chevette beside a baby blue Mustang and a yellow Corvette during a kidnap scene in Atlanta? Just a little color chemistry to spark canned heat on film. “White makes it burn a little,” he says, borrowing that trick from an obscure 19th-century British painter whose works he discovered as a struggling filmmaker in London. “You find these things and they rattle around until you find a way to use them.” Voilà, a 35 share slugging it out head to head against Dallas, which won the last ratings battle by a slim Nielsen point. And now Mann has parlayed his high style into an action-adventure movie deal with Tri-Star, another possible cop show with NBC and Red Dragon, which earlier this month moved to Washington for six days of shooting at FBI headquarters, the U.S. Customs building and a parking lot on 14th Street. In the beginning, there was The Memo. “MTV cops,” scribbled Brandon Tartikoff, NBC Entertainment president, in a note to himself. And High Concept was born. Tartikoff pitched it to a Universal executive, who summoned writer Anthony Yerkovich, 34, a veteran of Hill Street Blues. Yerkovich came up with a rough draft for a pilot about vice cops in Miami evoking South Florida’s samba of Latin refugees, drugs and murder. But what producer could pull it together? Universal called Mann’s agent, Jeff Berg of ICM. Might Mann be interested? “What the hell do I want to go back into TV for?” shrugged Mann. He’d made his mark with Jericho Mile, a 1979 ABC-TV prison drama about a lifer who yearns to run in the Olympics. That won him an Emmy and spawned almost two dozen feature film offers. “At least read the script,” said Berg. He read it. He flipped. “I said, ‘This is great, man,’ ” he recalls, giddy from the flashback. “’This is terrific.’ You get seduced by content. If I’d been directing it, or if I’d written it, I’d have been filled with doubts. But given the fact somebody else was directing and somebody else wrote it, I could be objective. And my instincts told me, ‘This thing is gonna go.’ ” “It was vivacious, audacious, irreverent. It was something I’d been interested 41

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Figure 3.2  Miami Vice, “Heart of Darkness” (1984). Undercover FBI agent Arthur Lawson (Ed O’Neill).

in doing for a long time: pump a contemporary rock and roll sensibility into a policier genre. So I said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’ ” Miami was ripe: riddled with Latin expatriates flush with flight capital, Colombian dopers stalking each other with Mach-10 submachine guns, a never-ending battle by undercover cops against bad guys. Real life was a script. Naturally, city boosters balked at exposing real Miami crime on prime time: they feared scaring tourists away. “Their attitude was absurdly provincial,” says Mann. “They wanted some goody-goody, boring show no one would watch. That would have really made people stay away. It was like saying Kojak keeps people away from New York.” Curiously, the same officials now rave that Vice has boosted tourism. How is that possible? Try exotic opening credits of machine guns, horse-racing, pink flamingos, bikini-clad women, speedboats, Art Deco hotels. Miami never looked better. “We changed the image of Miami,” says Mann. “We took its cultural essence, falsified what it looked like with selective art direction and put it on TV. Now Miami is trying to make itself look like the Miami on the show. It’s trying to conform reality to our fiction.” Local cops love it, too, including the one who pulled over Mann’s metallic green Mercedes 500 SEC on Biscayne Boulevard. “Where you going in such a hurry?” 42

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“The production office.” “You with Miami Vice?” “Yeah. I’m the executive producer.” “Wow or something similar! I got a great story for ya.” “So he starts telling me this story about a detective who got so frustrated busting dope dealers who fled the country that he kidnapped a few to make some money and killed one. “I already had Glenn Frey’s music for the ‘Smuggler’s Blues’ episode, but no story. Then I got stopped by the cop and he gave me the story.” He forgot to write the ticket. “No, I won’t tell you how fast I was going,” says Mann. At least one Big Dealer has come through for Vice, too. Mann calls him “Ralph, a retired businessman.” He wandered into a Miami nightclub at 3 a.m. with eight bodyguards. Mann was hunkered down at a table with director Rob Cohen when he spied the entourage. Ralph looked mean. “The guy would be terrific for the show,” said Mann, making introductions. Rob Cohen, his director, sat speechless. “You mean we can use real people?” “Sure,” said Mann. “Then I say, ‘Hey, Ralph, you want to be in Miami Vice?’ And given Ralph’s normal line of work, he doesn’t suffer from inhibition. He’s Cuban. He says, ‘Shu, mang.’ That’s, ‘Mang,’ m-a-n-g. ‘Ah can do any-ting. I am the prince of Mi-Jami.’ We’ve gotten used to writing Cuban phonetics.” Cohen auditioned him the next day; he joined the Screen Actors Guild and appeared as a villain. “He was great!” laughs Mann, who rarely gets hustled for such parts by star-struck dopers. “They’re not exactly impressed with TV. It’s a lark. They don’t need the money. Ralph spends more on lunch than he made doing that one episode. He’s about 30, worth seven figures.” He’s hardly a household word like actors Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, a.k.a. detectives Crockett and Tubbs. They were accidents waiting to happen. “We didn’t plan on reading them together,” he recalls. “For the auditions, they were paired with other people. They’d just met in the hall and there was electricity. They were the ones who suggested they read together.” Crockett was supposed to be the ex-football player who’d gotten a divorce, drove a Ferrari and had a pet gator named Elvis. “A kind of hip, mid-thirties, New South, informal kind of guy who looked like he grabbed stuff from the closet and just threw it on, even if it did happen to be coordinated pretty well,” says Mann. “With a dry wit and slow delivery.” For Tubbs, he wanted a “sharp, fast-talking New Yorker. But I wanted the southerner to have more liberal attitudes, jumping with opposites. We were looking for chemistry and that doesn’t happen until you see it.” Watching them rehearse in a jammed studio were Mann, Tartikoff, Universal TV executive Terry McCluggage and others. “We’d gone through 43

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Figure 3.3  Miami Vice, “Lend Me an Ear” (1987). Electronics surveillance expert Steve Duddy (John Glover).

about 100  people, then they started working together and everybody knew, ‘That’s it.’ ” Mann is a curiosity: a driven, intense chain-smoker, no wasted motion; an intellect Romanesque in profile, with dark hair lapping at his collar. A benevolent dictator on location, some call him “the Godfather.” The cocky, toughtalk dialect of, say, a Chicago jewel thief, masks a Renaissance man who can talk art, fashion, literature, pop music, you name it, with a passion. Back home, he rarely takes power lunches at the Polo Lounge or Ma Maison. “You just don’t see him hanging out there,” says Paul Bloch, his Hollywood PR man. “He gets up at 6 a.m., takes care of his wife and kids and goes off to work.” He lives with his second wife, Summer – a painter – and four children, and changes the color of his living room every six months. Fine art may hang from his wall, but he’s drawn to life’s naked underbelly, an action junkie always flirting with the edge. Five years back, he slipped across the northern Thai border into Burma to research a screenplay about the Golden Triangle. He consorted with hill tribes, opium warlords, exiled Chinese Kuomintang army men, watched the DEA and the CIA fight their private drug wars. He sailed with pirates who fish by day and prey on boat people by night. He survived a Malaysian brothel town he likens to “Dodge City” where “people will kill you for your shoes.” No one bothered him. “One of the best passports in the world is the film business,” he shrugs. The elder of two sons born to a Chicago grocer, Mann grew up scrappy, in 44

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a lower-middle-class neighborhood around Humboldt Park. He was the tough Jewish kid who learned how to fight young and ever since has been drawn to gritty street sagas. He would never have made American Graffiti. He graduated from high school in 1962, then went on to the University of Wisconsin. He wanted to escape Chicago. “It was flat and boring,” he says. At Wisconsin, he majored in English literature, stumbled upon a course in film history and began watching German Expressionists, silent films. He was enthralled with filmmakers like Eisenstein and Stanley Kubrick. “He’d just come out with Strangelove. It was wild, irreverent. I got excited and said, ‘I’ve got do this.’ ” He wound up in London at the International Film School with Americans nervous over Vietnam and Portuguese students fretful about tours in Angola or Mozambique. He kept in touch with his draft board by post card. Then he got the letter. “Dear Michael . . . You have asthma, so we’ll classify you 1-Y.” Home free, he found work as a production gofer for 20th Century Fox, then quit to scrounge commercials. One for Buffalo Doormats paid the rent, then came a documentary on the 1968 student riots in Paris for NBC. He directed “an abstract little art film” called Juanpuri that won the Jury Prize at Cannes. But his career was going nowhere fast. Globe-trotting commercials paid the rent, taking him to Majorca, Morocco, the Caribbean. “I was living a swinging London life style,” he told Film Comment. “Then I got a divorce and made a 90-degree turn in my life.” He canned commercials, aiming to “make movies about characters that interested me.” Homesick for the “pace and aggression of American life,” he landed in Hollywood in 1971, “starved” for two years, and learned how to write action and gritty dialogue. He had a knack for creating believable mobsters and cops. Then came The Break: work as assistant story editor on Starsky & Hutch. Two weeks later, he was fired – until Aaron Spelling read a Mann script the writer handed in while walking out the door. “All of a sudden they wanted to hire me back and make me associate producer,” he laughs. But he kept writing for hire. There was the pilot for Vega$, several episodes of Police Story and Jericho Mile (four Emmys). For the critically acclaimed Thief, he hung out with Chicago cops, fences and thieves. “These were not the kind of guys who burglarize your house,” he says, admiration in his voice. “They consider somebody who steals jewelry a junk score. These were high-line pros, extremely disciplined. They might spend 40 to 50 grand just developing a score, get ready to take it down, then one thing is out of place and they’ll just walk away, write off the whole thing. And they can’t deduct it as a business expense.” But The Keep, a $6 million Grand Guignol fantasy for Paramount featuring Nazis and ghosts, was a commercial flop. It boasted eerie Ghostbuster-style special effects, but had “some failings,” he concedes. But no one remembers that now that Vice is hotter than a Miami sidewalk. 45

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He’s got poetic license: to cast a Chicago jewel thief he met as a cop, to spend upward of an unprecedented $1.3 million per TV episode, to have fun. So what’s the secret? What’s the formula? “Anything I like,” he says, racing back to the set.

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MANHUNTER: AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL MANN1 Alain Charlot and Marc Toullec

After The Keep flopped, Michael Mann disappeared from the big screen to immerse himself in television production. Miami Vice and now Crime Story. Nothing very satisfying. His role in the very beautiful, quite strange release, Band of the Hand, no doubt went beyond the relatively simple tasks required of executive producers. A personality. Critics’ Award at the last Cognac Film Festival, Manhunter oscillates between fantasy and the whodunit. Everything in it seems out of order, out of sequence, spaced out, out of time, colorless in the extreme. In your films, there is customarily a juxtaposition of reality with nightmare. Could you shed some more light on this constant interchange? Right. Some of my characters live out nightmares that are quite real. For example, Peter Strauss in The Jericho Mile and the title character in Thief. Both of them try to escape by dreaming impossible dreams. My other characters find themselves in surreal nightmares. For them the solution is to get their feet back on solid ground. Like Scott Glenn in The Keep, Will Graham, the detective in Manhunter, finds himself trapped, stuck to some degree in madness and nightmare. It bores me to present the events of the story in a realist style. My approach instead is to conceptualize the elements of the plot, taking into consideration the various torments of the human spirit. My aim is to exteriorize the spiritual in the Expressionist manner, and this always leads me to reject realism. From Cinefantastique, May (1987), pp. 37–9.

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Figure 4.1  Manhunter (1986). Former FBI investigator Will Graham (William Petersen).

You would have been able, adapting Red Dragon, to simply make a detective story. Of course, but then I would have really been in the shit. What drew me to the story was its connection to the essence of evil, which emerges in the process of dehumanization that leads a simple human being with no exceptional past to become a killer capable of the most terrible atrocities. And when the victims cease being human beings, they become morsels . . . bits of matter. I want to understand just what this is all about, and also something about dangerous psychopaths, as well as the influence of social context on the behavior of individuals, such as fascism, genocide. This was the theme I explored in The Keep, whose action is set during the Second World War. It’s for this same reason that you reveal to the audience the identity of the killer. We are put on both sides of the divide, on the side of the detective and on that of the maniac. And there is a rough balance between them. Right. And in addition this reinforces the dramatic intensity of the film. Moreover, Thomas Harris’s novel gains its power from exploiting this same complex perspective. Will Graham must, in order to trap the psychopath, become similar, at least in his thinking, to the man he’s tracking. He brings himself down to that man’s level, anticipating his reactions, thinking the same way he does. However, it was not my intention to play on the ambiguity of Graham’s actions. He cannot be the killer, as becomes clear in the supermarket sequence where he speaks to his son. He has to sink to the level 48

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Figure 4.2  Manhunter. A menacing serial killer, Francis Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan).

of the horrific, of the murderer, but only psychologically. This troubles him greatly. Let’s grant that he cannot be the killer; nevertheless he could become a psychopath himself simply through his proximity to evil. No, I think not. Even bringing down Francis Dollarhyde, the killer, distresses him. Killing in general seems horrible to him. Graham is a grown-up. He’s perfectly aware that monsters like Dollarhyde didn’t come here from Mars; we’re the ones that made them, society made them. Battering an infant or young child is all that’s needed to create a monster. Research on serial killers proves that most of them while young have been abused by their parents. When you meditate on that, you feel some sympathy or pity for them (just as Graham does for Dollarhyde), but, at the same time, you react by eliminating such monsters in the most ruthless way possible. This is why Graham says to Dollarhyde when the two are face to face that he will send him to Hell without a moment’s hesitation. Most people see such situations in a simpler way. There’s a killer to eliminate, someone who is truly horrible, the hero ought to hate him and, in the end, serve as his executioner. One represents evil. The other the force of virtue. But Graham is an intelligent adult who understands the real world. He mourns for the creature that Dollarhyde has become, and he is ready at the same time to throw himself through the window in order to put an end to him. The film’s initial title was Red Dragon. Why was it changed to Manhunter, which is, let’s admit it, completely banal.

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Red Dragon is the title of Thomas Harris’s novel. But even so it was changed so that prospective viewers would not think this was a kung fu movie. Can you tell us a little bit about the differences between novel and film? I was fascinated by the Harris novel, which is, beyond any comparison, the most original and captivating crime novel I have ever read. I simply adore the book. Most journalists saw in the title some kind of references to Oriental culture. Not true. Red Dragon refers to a painting, a watercolor by William Blake that dates from 1813. And it is not about the kind of oriental dragon you see in tattoos, but, instead, an Irish dragon. Did you cut scenes from Manhunter? We saw some stills showing Dollarhyde covered with tattoos. But there isn’t anything like that in the film itself. Nothing was cut out. These photos you’ve seen come from the United States and should never have been sent to you. The American distributor screwed up in doing that. They are scenes that seemed pointless to us. Another shows Stephen Lang fried to a crisp and sitting in a wheelchair. Some idiots in Los Angeles sent along these proofs without even checking them out. The score is very expressive indeed, so much so that parts of it seem to have been composed prior to shooting. True to a certain extent. The music for the Reds sequence was composed in post-production. Where did you come upon the actor who plays Dr. Lekter? He is really impressive. He’s phenomenal actually. Brian Cox is a Scottish actor. He was appearing in New York in an Irish play called Rat in the Skull, and that’s where I discovered him. How did you manage to convince a television network to pick up Miami Vice when The Keep was such a resounding failure at the box office? An American director can do a successful film and then put out another one that does less well, then even a third that does even worse. In short, there are no rules, and just because The Keep did not do well no one was going to slam the door in my face. Things just don’t happen that way. The week that The Keep opened, I was already working on the script for Manhunter. The producers came to me for the project.

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The Keep suffered from the person responsible for special effects leaving the project before it was completed. That’s right, the person who was in charge of optical effects. So I did them myself, 260 shots in all. The Keep got an especially bad reception in the US. People there never figured out what I was trying to say.

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MICHAEL MANN: HOLLYWOOD WRITER–DIRECTOR–PRODUCER1 Graham Fuller

Writer–director–producer Michael Mann is one of Hollywood’s singular visionaries – an arbiter of modernist film style and a student of frenetic masculine endeavor. Mann is such a perfectionist that in fourteen years he has directed only five features: Thief (1981), The Keep (1983), Manhunter (1986), The Last of the Mohicans (1992), and Heat, which opens this month. During that time, of course, he has also staged two big, important TV series, Miami Vice (1984–9) and Crime Story (1986–8). Mann alone among American auteurs has spanned both mediums and maintained a consistent, urgent voice. Following The Last of the Mohicans, his bloody epic of the eighteenthcentury New York wilderness, Heat returns Mann to the more familiar turf of the concrete jungle. Filmed on eighty-plus locations in and around Los Angeles, the movie is a heist drama pairing robber Robert De Niro and detective Al Pacino as unstoppable force and immovable object. Knowing Mann, whose films recognize the primacy and pragmatism of violence in the American landscape, it is also likely to be a ferocious paean to city-seared humanity. GRAHAM FULLER: You’ve said in the past that it was accidental that you’d mostly made films in the urban-crime genre. So why have you returned to it after stepping outside it with The Last of the Mohicans? MICHAEL MANN: Heat is a drama, not a genre piece. What excited me about the screenplay was the way it penetrated into the lives of the ­characters. 1

From Interview, December 1 (1995).

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We meet Neil McCauley [Robert De Niro] and his crew members, Chris Shiherlis [Val Kilmer] and Michael Cerrito [Tom Sizemore]. Then we come to know Chris’s and Michael’s wives, and in the case of Chris’s, Charlene [Ashley Judd], we meet her lover [Hank Azaria]. The crime story/detective story is initially discrete, then it fuses with the personal stories in the fateful and sometimes doom-laden decisions each person has to make. GF: There’s something desperate about the domestic plight of most of these characters. Is their dysfunction a result of being criminals and cops? MM: In some it is; in others it isn’t. Mostly, it’s based on who they are as people. In writing the story, I wanted to polarize each of these situations to make each as different from the other as possible. I wanted to make the life of each character in each relationship as authentic as it could be. For example, Michael Cheritto, at one point, was slamming some serious drugs, went through methadone treatment, and has a jacket [police file] two inches thick. Now, he is a well-organized sociopath who has a functioning, healthy, nuclear family with two little girls, but he doesn’t care about your little girl or anyone else’s. At one point, he uses a child as a shield. It’s an infamous act. GF: Does Heat have antecedents in myth? MM: No, in life. One of the antecedents for Vincent Hanna, the detective played by Al Pacino, is Chuck Adamson – an old friend of mine who coauthored the Crime Story pilot, which Abel Ferrara directed. Chuck hunted down and killed the real Neil McCauley, in Chicago, in 1963. Another is a guy I can’t really talk about, who’s bright, intuitive, and driven, and runs large operations against drug cartels in foreign countries. He’s a singularly focused individual and much of the core of Hanna’s character comes from him. GF: It seems to me that men who live these kinds of lives, whatever side of the law they’re on, have a different relationship to their existence than the rest of us do. MM: It’s intense and elevated. But so is Andre Agassi’s, Michael Jordan’s, and Yo-Yo Ma’s. What drives Hanna is being out there on the street, where he derives this very intense, elevated experience. As his wife, Justine [Diane Venora], says, “You don’t live with me, you live among the remains of dead people. You sift through the detritus for the signs of passing, for the scent of your prey, and you hunt them down. That’s the only thing you’re fucking committed to. The rest is the mess you leave on your way through.” I’ve talked to people who do this kind of work. I’d ask them, “When things are really stressed-out, when you’re right in the middle of it, what’s the intimate experience?” I’d get answers like, “You feel a tremendous self-confidence. You’re 53

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making decisions at lightning speed, and you know as you make each decision that it’s right. You’re immaculate. You’re in the groove.” Is Hanna motivated by some moral objective “to protect and serve”? That’s what’s written on the side of police cars in L.A. Sure, he intakes the tragedy of human loss. He’s not emotionally incomplete. But he’s motivated by the cognitive, visceral high of hunting. GF: Do you depict Hanna and McCauley as secret sharers or doppelgangers? MM: Nothing so well ordered. They’re not different sides of the same coin, but there’s a rapport between them that has to do with the solitary nature of each man’s intelligence. Neither’s present life is determined by external circumstances. They are not men who have aspirations or ambitions, move into middle age and rationalize that they will do the things they wanted to do in the future, and then end up at sixty years old realizing there is no more future, and then rationalize away what’s undone and unfulfilled. That’s not who these men are. They’re self-aware. There’s a design to everything Hanna does and everything McCauley does. Being that inner-directed, though, brings a certain solitariness, which makes them the only two men like this in the universe of the motion picture. GF: Is their relationship similar in any way to Mike Torello and Ray Luca’s in Crime Story? MM: No, because Torello had obsessive hatred for Luca. GF: Heat doesn’t take sides or moralize about who’s good or who’s bad. MM: One of the ex-convicts we talked to during the research period described how, no matter how pathological someone doing life in Folsom without the possibility of parole might be, there’s one day every two months at three in the morning when [the lifer] wakes up and says to himself, like a ten- or twelveyear-old boy, “How did I fuck my life up this bad? How did I end up like this?” The point is, everybody has emotions, regrets, expectations. People don’t walk around as a personification of moral conclusions. They walk around with the package of who they are. That’s real. It’s also very dramatic. GF: Will the film satisfy our need for moral order? MM: Maybe, but that’s not the film’s concern. Certainly, there’s a system of payback. McCauley is not an archetypal ex-convict, who steals mindlessly until he gets busted back. This guy is methodical and good at what he does. He’s going to accumulate a certain amount of capital, and then he’s going to boogie. He has a doctrine of having no attachments, nothing in his life he can’t 54

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walk out on in thirty seconds flat. But he meets a woman [Amy Brenneman], and he meets her too early. A crisis occurs for him. He has to abandon his doctrine because leaving without this woman isn’t possible for him. So, then, he’s out there with the rest of us, in the realm where emotions become complex and motivation isn’t simple. It makes him vulnerable to impulse, which he wasn’t before. So in that sense, there’s a system operating that will pay you back in negative ways, but it’s not a moral one. GF: You’d written the Heat script over a long period. What new life did it take on when you came to film it? MM: A whole new life. It’s Los Angeles in the ’90s, a complex megalopolis of fifteen million and fairly unexplored territory. We spent months and months in research. Ashley Judd, who plays Charlene, sat down and talked to various women who are, or were, married to criminals in prison. Some of these women had been hooking at truck stops, doing twenty tricks a night when they were seventeen years old. Others are middle-aged, middle-class, smart, well dressed, well spoken, and married to guys who are doing three to five in San Quentin. Bob [De Niro] spent time with thieves and convicts. We went very deeply into their inner feelings. These are people from Fresno, Sacramento, the Bay Area. Regionally and culturally, the picture is very West Coast. This is not a New York or Chicago movie. GF: What specifically inspired you about shooting Heat on the streets of L.A.? MM: As interesting as I found L.A. before I shot the film, I find it even more exciting now. Because of the way it’s laid out, lots of people move through selfimposed cultural ghettos that track through different parts of the city’s topography. When you’re shooting in Wilmington in South Central, L.A.’s a very different place than when you’re shooting in the Alps; it’s like the East L.A. version of Beirut. Lots of preconceptions about L.A. turn out to be false. The reality – the Mexican–black–Cambodian neighborhoods, the culture of South Central – is much more interesting. It’s a culturally complex, c­ommercial– industrial conurbation, and that’s what turned me on.

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Figure 6.1  Thief (1981). R. to l., high-line thief Frank (James Caan), mob thug Attaglia (Tom Signorelli).

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MANN AND HIS MOVIES1 Jonathan Romney

Michael Mann’s heroes are single-minded, to say the least. The athlete in his 1979 prison movie The Jericho Mile just runs, and when he’s not running, sits in his empty cell, flexing. Someone asks him what he’s into. “I am into nothing,” he snarls, “that’s how I do my time.” Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter – Mann’s 1986 precursor to The Silence of the Lambs – doesn’t even run, just sits and snarls. And James Caan, as the larcenous hero of Thief, turns down an offer from the mob, spitting out: “I am Joe the Boss of my own body.” Caan actually looks strangely like Mann in that film, so is the director an existentially focused hard case in the same league? You have to wonder. His office promises that he’ll call me for a phone interview as soon as he gets up – usually around 5.30am. Mann has long been known as one of the hardcore hustlers of American film and TV, a hungry aspirant to the Kubrick class of control freak. For several years he overlorded, as executive producer, the massively successful Miami Vice, a cop series notorious for its stylistic overload, for its wholesale promotion of sunsets, pastels and AOR rock soundtracks. But he’s only intermittently been taken seriously as a film director. Most people became aware of him with Manhunter, not so much a serial killer thriller as a near-abstract fantasia in modernist interiors. He finally won widespread acclaim, for ambition as much as achievement, with his mammoth treatment of the American wilderness epic The Last of the Mohicans (1992). But the film which finally has even previous detractors muttering about greatness is Heat, this year’s sprawling heist saga. From The Guardian (London), April 18 (1996), Features, p. 10.

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Heat figures in this weekend’s Mann retrospective at the National Film Theatre, along with his director’s cut of Manhunter, and sample episodes of Miami Vice and his other long-running cop series Crime Story. What it doesn’t feature is a late eighties TV movie called LA Takeover, a dry run for Heat based on a script Mann has had ticking ever since 1980. Mann has often refuted accusations of being a stylist – “Style just gets you seven minutes of attention,” he has said – but surely it’s the style that makes the difference between LA Takeover’s flimsy wham-bam and the monolithic presence of its cinema variant? “Not style – I’d call it the form,” Mann says. “The earlier version was a fraction of the original screenplay – it’s a very superficial dress rehearsal. It was shot in 19 days – on Heat, we had 12 days just shooting the bank robbery.” Mann has said he likes to immerse himself in a film the way actors do in their roles; so it’s hardly surprising that Heat stars those past masters of immersion, De Niro and Pacino. Heat has been largely sold on the thrill factor of seeing these two icons – together! at last! – in one film, but Mann slyly avoids having them visible in the same shot. Their already famous coffee-shop tete-a-tete is a tennis match of cross-cutting. “A lot of people thought I never had them in the same room at once. I can’t believe that – why wouldn’t you have them in the same room? The most interesting thing is not to interfere with great acting – you put the camera in front of the guy’s face and make the background as neutral as possible.” The big difference between Heat and most other contemporary US crime movies is that it takes its subject absolutely seriously. “I don’t like films derived from other films. I can’t understand why someone would want to Xerox a Xerox.” “It’s not a genre piece, but human drama. The people are real. One thing that interests me in a film is the preparation – there’s no value in authenticity for its own sake, but as a resource I find it fascinating. Ashley Judd’s character in the film comes from time spent with seven or eight women like that character – 21 with a kid, she has to survive turning tricks in truck stops. It’s not made up of ideas I arbitrarily conceive in isolation.” The Last of the Mohicans notwithstanding, Mann is Hollywood’s foremost urbanist – Thief was the last major film to celebrate Chicago as a crime capital and, as an essay in city cinema, Heat’s vision of LA as a desolate continent may end up being as much studied as Blade Runner was in the eighties. “I wanted a sense of a variegated city with lots of different zones and perspectives. It’s very much a three-dimensional city even though people think of it as flat. There’s a lot of helicopters, radio traffic, microwave signals, cellular phone signals – a whole complexity that doesn’t have to do with steel and brick buildings. We used the underbelly, the lower depths area, LA Harbour. People there tend to live in a self-imposed cultural ghetto.” Mann’s films have in common this desire to veer off the straight track and head for the real, even if the result isn’t always realistic so much as larger than 58

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life. For The Jericho Mile, he shot inside Folsom Prison, using cons and guards as actors. Thief was grounded in the minutiae of underworld hard graft; when a robbery was pulled after shooting ended, there were suspicions that crew members were responsible. Born in Chicago in 1943, Mann never had much time for films until he took a film option at college for easy points. “It was exposure at exactly the right time – a double bill of Pabst and Murnau. I had the absolutely instantaneous realization – I must do this.” He chose to learn his craft at the London International Film School, and spent several years struggling as a documentarist. It seems he still has a documentarist’s eye for the world, although with a hallucinatory twist. “I’m in a bar and hear a peculiar turn of phrase with street poetry to it – it’s how your brain works, editorial selection. You’re driving down the freeway – all of a sudden, you see a strange tree in a whole community of refineries and trailer parks. Suddenly you get a flash of these trees around a twenties southern Californian farming community in a now impersonal part of South Central LA – that’s the way imagination works.” It’s not easy to see how that documentary fervour led him to Miami Vice, a series that seems to have as little to do with reality as any TV cop show. In fact, Mann’s route through the echelons of TV crime led from his early involvement with Starsky & Hutch, which means he has been responsible for some of TV’s most heinously dressed detectives. Whatever the charges of excessive slickness, Mann insists that the programme at its best was tougher than is often remembered. “It was really liberating because we got to make a movie once a week. I’m very proud of the first two years: the content was really out there. But after a couple of years, I don’t have the temperament to carry on, I lose interest.” Mann only ever directed one episode of the show, but his role as executive producer, he explains, is TV’s closest equivalent to the director’s role: “The director just turns up for that episode. I approach executive producing on television the same way I approach directing a film – it’s about artistic expression.” It was on Miami Vice that Mann’s reputation as an obsessive controller of detail was consolidated. The Napoleon myth ballooned with the rigorous outdoor shoot of The Last of the Mohicans, a project rife with disputes over difficult conditions. Mann talks about the experience like a no-nonsense scoutmaster. “It was a litmus test – there were a few people who just didn’t belong there. For the vast majority, it was one of the most oft-quoted experiences of their life. When we were making Heat, someone complained that some terrain we were on was a little rough. Everyone who’d been on The Last of the Mohicans just laughed. On that film, we were carting equipment on our shoulders up 400-foot cliff edges, just for the location scouting.” Mann talks about Miami Vice as “an adventure, a high-risk proposition. It’s either real exciting or real bad, there’s no middle ground.” That makes a fair motto for his career, which does indeed run the course – from Heat and Thief 59

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to The Keep, a misfired experiment in metaphysical horror. But as much as anyone in Hollywood now, he’s taking on high-risk propositions, and without the usual recourse to effects-heavy teenage kicks. On the evidence of Heat, he could become Joe the Boss of his own genre.

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ALL THE CORPORATIONS’ MEN1 Michael Sragow

“Do you remember De Niro in Heat?” asks Michael Mann. That 1995 crime spectacle was the last Mann movie to reach theaters before his latest, The Insider, which starts out as an exposé of the cigarette industry, expands to debunk broadcast news and lays bare the existential anguish of white-collar America. Mann co-wrote The Insider (with Eric Roth) as well as directing and co-producing it – but now he’s busy diverting attention from himself. “Think of De Niro,” he repeats. “Gray!” he explains with comical exasperation, waving at his neutral-colored Los Angeles office walls. “That’s what I aspire to – gray!” This is Mann-talk for keeping the personal out of interviews. Mann doesn’t want to speak about his non-working life. He feels abashed every time he does. So he invokes the character De Niro played in Heat: a master thief who lives in Spartan elegance and keeps off-the-job attachments to a minimum. De Niro’s goal is to have nothing that would prevent him from disappearing in 30 seconds. Mann’s goal is to say nothing that would distract potential viewers from staying hooked to his new movie for two hours and 32 minutes. He needn’t worry. I’ve been a Mann fan since his TV film The Jericho Mile in 1979, and I think The Insider is Mann at his peak. It’s that rarity in movies: a realistic spellbinder, head-clearing and hypnotic. It’s not merely a docudrama about Big Tobacco, Big Television and a whistle-blower who upends both. The Insider is a docutragedy about men who face, too late, that they are bigger than the jobs corporate America lets them do. It’s a ravaging account From Salon.com, http://www.salon.com/1999/11/04/mann_2/

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Figure 7.1  The Insider (1999). L. to r., CBS journalist Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer), 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino).

of the hell their business dealings wreak on their bonds with friends and family. And it gives “maturity” a good name. In his best stuff for movies (Thief, The Last of the Mohicans) and for episodic television (Miami Vice and Crime Story), Mann has been an iconoclast and a creator of icons. Using bold audiovisual strokes and veracious observations to tear down simplistic urban or frontier fables, he has erected more complex, modern and seductive mythologies in their stead. Now his furious compassion burns away any patina of fantasy. In The Insider, Mann’s two lead characters – Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), the fired head of research and development for the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation, and Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino), the segment producer who nudges Wigand into telling all for 60 Minutes – are knights in dented armor. Wigand is tortured from the start: a perfectionist researcher who went to work for a tobacco giant and couldn’t live with his moral compromise. Bergman’s disillusionment is waiting to happen. A socially conscious, gogetting journalist, he studied with Herbert Marcuse and wrote for Ramparts before enlisting at CBS and teaming up with Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer). Bergman prides himself on protecting his sources, but he can’t save Wigand from a media stoning. What’s already roused controversy is the movie’s double-edged topicality. It doesn’t just detail the cigarette companies’ awareness and exploitation of their product’s addictive powers. It also dramatizes how CBS News caved in when the network’s general counsel suggested that Brown & Williamson could end up owning the network if 60 Minutes aired Wallace’s interview with Wigand. (Wigand signed a confidentiality agreement as part of his severance deal; CBS 62

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feared being sued for “tortious interference” – encouraging Wigand to break his contract with B&W.) Wallace and 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt have groused about their depiction in the script. But the only network figures for whom the film displays no sympathy are the general counsel herself (Ellen Kaden, here called Helen Caperelli and played by Gina Gershon) and the president of CBS News (Eric Ober, here called Eric Kluster and played by Stephen Tobolowsky). The travails of upper-middle-class life and corporate careers are often fodder for movie comedy. The Insider approaches them without condescension or preconceptions; this film knows that the loss of medical benefits is a weapon as lethal as a knife or gun. Wigand’s struggle to preserve his good name and his kids’ future becomes as palpable as the quest of any action hero. But Wigand is an inaction hero – paralyzed by powerful forces, dependent on the kindness of strangers. And, despite some advance press reports, Bergman emerges as a complicated protagonist, not a bloodied-but-unbowed journalistic saint. He’s bloodied, he’s bowed, but he’s strong enough to change his life. Mann speaks in a Chicago accent, in a kind of elongated staccato; his disdain for personal revelation is reflected in his language. He likes to use words like “atonal,” which are usually linked to more abstract arts like music or graphic design. Even in idle chatter about the visual sophistication of MTV-weaned audiences, he describes their ability to pick up “distonic little vibes.” But I do have one personal story. In 1981, the late Jonathan Benair, a screenwriter and voice actor deservedly renowned for his wit, discovered he was living in an apartment that Mann had once occupied, a block away from Canter’s Delicatessen in L.A.’s Fairfax district. Not long afterward, Benair asked his favorite Canter’s waitress why she’d left her post for a few days. “Oh, there was this writer,” she said. “He used to come in and work at all hours, and he promised me that when he made his movie he’d fly me to the premiere.” The movie was Thief, the premiere was in Chicago and the writer was Michael Mann. I seem to remember you smoking at the time of Thief. You say you’ve been a smoker off and on, and that you stopped again before the making of this movie. I know a lot of creative people who use smoking as a sort of kick-start. Did it work that way for you? You ever smoke? Never did. Well, I don’t know exactly how it works but it’s not a kick-starter. It’s actually more of a depressant. It becomes a habitual thing and associates with memories. When I was a student living in Europe, I stayed up endless nights in 63

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Paris, where this very good friend and his wife lived, and we’d drink coffee and smoke lousy, lousy Gauloises. So there’s an association, for me, with a certain kind of conviviality. I mean, I would love smoking, except that if I take a cigarette I feel like someone punched me in the chest – which is good, ’cause if I didn’t feel that way, I’d really be in bad shape. If you could get the flavor of smoking and have an auxiliary set of lungs to take all the damage, then it wouldn’t be bad. But nicotine is addictive and it’s just lousy for your health. And you have to be responsible. I’m a father. That’s an issue. You have to think of the impact on your children of cigarette smoking, and of the impact on them of your own potential for early disease and earlier death. You are asphyxiating yourself on a cellular level. Everything is suffering – your fingernails, your hair, your skin, your lungs, everything is taking a hit. That’s the fact of it. What was important to Eric Roth and myself from the outset was that there be nothing didactic or patronizing about this film. I would be offended if somebody had the arrogance and the presumption to tell me what I ought to do in my life. This film is not about “you all ought not to smoke” or “you all ought to smoke.” That’s an individual choice. Eric Roth and I are both smokers. We were smoking at the bar at the Broadway Deli in Santa Monica while we wrote the screenplay. What this film is about is corporate power and malfeasance. And huge businesses that are highly profitable, that are really in a drug trade. From their point of view, they have a wonderful business – they have a market addicted to their product. In the movie we view what they do from the perspective of Jeffrey Wigand. And now we’re getting into the reason to make the film – the chance to explore the experience of a man who, like all of us, is far from some ideal of perfection. Jeffrey said, “I’m very much a company man.” He understands corporate life, he’s a product of it, he believes in it, he thinks all corporations should be run like Johnson & Johnson. He talks about James Burke, the CEO of Johnson & Johnson, where Jeffrey once worked – how when somebody was putting poison in Tylenol, Burke took all the bottles off the shelves of every store in America and created the safety cap. Burke didn’t need the FDA to tell him to do it, he did it on his own, ’cause he’s a smart business man who’s also a man of science – he’s not gonna have Johnson & Johnson, his company, put on the shelf a product that’s gonna hurt people. It’s bad business, it’s bad science, it’s bad everything. Now, Burke is Jeffrey’s ideal. From that, one must infer why Jeffrey would go work for tobacco. Because, what does tobacco do? Tobacco hangs out a sign that says, “Wanted: Scientists without conscience, for double your previous salary.” Jeffrey answered the ad. But if this were Mr. Deeds Goes to Washington, I wouldn’t have been interested in making the film. Jeffrey is a normally flawed, inconsistent human being whose personality is somewhat atonal. But he ultimately personifies an 64

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anti-ad hominem perspective – to him, life is not about who you are, it’s about what you do. Jeffrey knew that if he went forward and spoke to 60 Minutes and testified against tobacco, the sky would fall. And indeed it did. Jeffrey knows that within his basic concept of being human, standards are often fungible, negotiable; he also knows that, at a crisis point, you are either going to betray them or you won’t. And if you do, you’re going to be less of yourself than you were before – then some of you is going away. Jeffrey takes a position, the sky does fall on him, and parts of his life get deconstituted. People think Lowell comes out very well in this film, but you can argue that Jeffrey comes out better. Jeffrey attacks Lowell bitterly in a couple of scenes. “What is it that you do? What is the function? You gonna inform people and that’s gonna change things? Maybe that’s just something you tell yourself to justify the status of your position. Maybe this is all infotainment, and people have nothing better to do on Sunday night.” It was our intent that these questions would resound later on through the film. Because when Lowell hits a crisis, it’s after things have turned around for him in terms of the story – that’s when he truly has some critical decisions to make. And in all of the words the audience’s subconscious has been collecting for over two and a half hours, Jeffrey has established the basis for the questioning of what Lowell’s been doing at 60 Minutes for 14 years. Lowell can tell himself, “I’m still that guy who worked for Ramparts and I get my way with the show and have a larger audience.” But is he really? It’s a challenge to deal with these true-to-life issues. That’s what made the material so exciting. How did you come to know Lowell Bergman? A mutual friend in the DEA, Bill Alden, told me for years, “You have to meet Lowell Bergman.” Alden at the time was head of congressional affairs in the DEA. He had been an agent – a street agent. And he said Lowell was one of three or four journalists that you honestly could trust. If you told Lowell something was on background, it would be on background, regardless of how much Mike Wallace or Hewitt wanted to go out front with it. So his reputation was that of a man of his word – and that reputation preceded my meeting him by a couple of years. We had both gone to the University of Wisconsin, but that’s a big school; we didn’t know each other, we’d gone at different times. When we eventually met, we were trying to develop some projects together, not on this subject at all. But he was living through this experience, and at one point I said, “Forget the arms merchants in Marbaya, what you’re living through is a drama.” What attracted me was the way Lowell and Jeffrey were such opposites – if they met each other in a social context, I don’t think one would see much of anything in the other. But here were these two men thrown together with only one element in common. Both of them are not living inside the circumscribed “I” of just sheer gratification in careers; both of them recognize that there’s 65

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something else in life. They both have superegos that tell you “you ought to be this way” or “you ought to do this somehow,” and they do have a sort of respect for each other’s actions, character and principles. That there’s nothing else in common was great, because it brings into higher relief their sole common component. When I was in post-production on Heat, in the fall of ’95, Lowell was going through all this. I was one of about 10 or 12 people that he would call up to discuss these issues. He’d say, “You’ll never guess what Don Hewitt said to me today. I don’t believe what’s happening here. I have relations with people and all of a sudden I’m walking through like a pariah; as I walk past them their eyes make it seem like I’m not there.” Another thing is: I’ve known investigative journalists a long, long time. And I do a little bit of that work myself. Whether investigating 1757 (for The Last of the Mohicans) or drugs, you seek people out and talk to them with different degrees of confidentiality. I’ve always been attracted to this kind of reporting, and I understand the guys who do it a little bit. But it is difficult for me to imagine digging out a story on a subject as important as this and having it censured, expunged. I can imagine it from my own experience in a limited way, but this is terribly important stuff – this isn’t just my artistic vanities involved. Yeah, if I’m one of those journalists, my ego is involved because I dug up this newsbreak of the year, or two or three years, or half a decade. But this is also really important stuff, important to the point where if this can’t get on the air, I’m no longer who I am doing this job, or this job is not what this job is supposed to be. And the way it unfolds – to borrow a line from Heat: “You gotta make up your mind, right now, what’s it gonna be, yes or no? There’s no ‘I’ll call you back.’ ” That’s really dramatic stuff. That’s another reason why this material so terrific. If you were already talking to Lowell, what benefit did you get from buying Marie Brenner’s Vanity Fair piece? What that provided, big time, was Jeffrey; we couldn’t talk to Jeffrey at that point. Marie had some insights into Lowell, even though I knew Lowell pretty well, and we were able to trade notes, and so his character was helped some with that. My anticipation of the film was not to do an elegant, somewhat distant docudrama. I had zero interest in doing that. I want you to feel that you are underneath the skin of Jeffrey Wigand. I want you to step into Lowell Bergman’s shoes. I did not want even to attempt to tell the story if I couldn’t take you there, ’cause that’s the real experience to have. I’d be so disappointed in myself if I couldn’t do that. The picture is two hours and 32 minutes of talking. Everything is dialogue. On the one hand you could view it as a horrible restriction; on the other hand you could view it as this great adventure. I mean, someone asked me early on, “How do you feel 66

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about filming all these phone calls?” And I said, great – you get to have two people talking in two different places. We shoot Jeffrey in his bedroom making a phone call, and where does he get Lowell? He gets him at a crime scene in New Orleans, with a dead body and a street full of mounted police, because Lowell’s working on a story about the New Orleans P.D. Then you can modify the places as a function of the perspective they give to the scene. So when Jeffrey is sitting alone in this Hopperesque bedroom, viewed from the back, cloistered in his corner – and you know he’s heading into a corner – it’s not accidental, given what Jeffrey is thinking, that we show Lowell at a crime scene where there’s blood on the ground. It’s not an analogy or even a simile, but there is a linkage. Jeffrey Wigand is an angry man, and we’re beginning to know the nature of his anger. It’s that the people who are persecuting him get to go home at night. He’d be less angry if they hated him. “They are just functionaries, they get to go home at night, and I have to live with this fear of the horrible things that might happen to my family.” Another advantage of phone calls is that the second character can’t see the first character, so Lowell can have a gesture of irritability or concern without Jeffrey knowing it. And as the geographies change, you move into Lowell’s world. He’s always working on two or three things, including the piece on Sheikh Fadlallah, the spiritual head of Hezbollah, which he does right at the beginning of the film. We shot in Berkeley, we shot in Los Angeles, we shot in Louisville, we shot in New York City, we shot in Pascagoula (Miss.), we shot in the Caribbean, we shot in Israel. There’s also a shocking collision between Lowell’s world and Jeffrey’s. Maybe that’s dramatized best when Jeffrey takes his wife to New York without telling her he’s going to do an interview with 60 Minutes – and she only finds out when they’re at dinner with Lowell and Mike Wallace. Wigand as a character and a man is so human to me and, I found, so powerfully emotional, because he isn’t a two-dimensional invention of fictive imagination. You would never sit in a room, by yourself, and imagine a scene in which he goes to New York for an interview and does not find it possible to bring himself to tell his wife. And yet, when it happens, you know that in the nanosecond before she trips to it, he is in agony, because of course he realizes it is inevitable that she’ll have to know. He just couldn’t tell her. And that’s life, man – that’s what happens in life. When that happens, and Wallace asks Lowell, “Who are these people?” – it’s a laugh line, but – The laugh immediately turns on you. The laugh line sets you up for what to me is one of the most important lines in the picture, which is Lowell saying that 67

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they’re ordinary people in an extraordinary situation: “What do you expect? Grace and consistency?” The line we could have added and never put in was: “Like in the movies?” Which brings us to the opposition of Lowell Bergman and Wallace. And Wallace is not a bad man in the film. But from the way he’s depicted here, he’s probably been involved with high-stakes journalism for too long; maybe he can’t separate from the adrenaline rush and the perks to the extent that Bergman does even from the start. Well, what did you feel about Wallace’s sense of himself and his life – of where he is in the throw of his life? You feel that he’s a guy who is incredibly good at what he does. I mean he’s terrific even before he starts to interrogate the sheik – I’ve cut it down. It’s hilarious. It went on. And he has a sense of integrity tied up with his own performance, which is valid. Sure he does. He’s the guy who says, in Scene 54, where they eat lunch, “They aren’t gonna be able to stop a story like this. This is public interest. This is like someone dumping cyanide in the East River, or someone manufacturing faulty airframes. We can publish it.” You bet he believes that. I think Wallace wants to keep doing this the rest of his life, so a self-protective reflex kicks in when he bows to CBS. Yet he also finally knows that not running the interview is wrong. Or that the game is up. I mean, this is all public record – he switched when the New York Times, the New Yorker’s bible, came out and attacked 60 Minutes for smearing the legacy of Edward R. Murrow, and after the Daily News was very vocal on the same issue, with a banner headline something like “What 60 Minutes won’t show you.” Public opinion swung the other way. The show airs without the Wigand interview on Nov. 12, ’95, and by Nov. 13, ’95, he’s on Charlie Rose saying, “We were caving in, and we were wrong.” And he has flipped over to the other side. Now, I don’t think any of that’s wrong. I don’t think it is a measure of some kind of moral deficit that he reacts to his community. I think it’s human; I think it’s what people do. So let’s drop all the pretense and bullshit. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s actions that count, not what motivated you to do them. There’s no purely motivated action in this motion picture – not on the part of Wigand, not even on the part of Lowell. It’s life. 68

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I always viewed Wallace and Hewitt and everybody at 60 Minutes as riders in a train wreck not of their own making. You had CBS corporate anticipating or reacting to messages they were getting from Brown & Williamson. So of course CBS corporate focuses in on this show and tries to block this interview. Everybody is a victim in a train wreck, and everybody reacts differently. That’s the way we viewed it, and I think that’s the way the film portrays it. All this is what separates The Insider from a conventional “docudrama.” There seem to be five things going on in every scene. I wanted to direct, I tried to direct the subtext. That’s where I found the meaning of the scenes. You could write the story of certain scenes in a code that would be completely coherent but have nothing to do with the lines you hear. For example, in the hotel room scene, Scene 35, when Lowell and Jeffrey first meet: all Lowell knows for sure is that Jeffrey has said “no” to helping him analyze a story about tobacco for 60 Minutes. He doesn’t know yet that there’s a “yes” hiding behind this “no.” There’s a whole story going on that’s not what anybody’s talking about. If you wrote an alternate speech for Jeffrey, it would go: “I’m here to resurrect some of my dignity, because I’ve been fired, and that’s why I dressed up this way and that’s why I have these patrician, corporate-officer attitudes.” And you could do the same for Lowell, and have him sitting there and saying, “This man wants to tell me something that is not about why he’s meeting me.” Al Pacino just took over Lowell’s great reporter’s intuition to sit there and laser-scan Jeffrey with his eyes. You know, he looks at him, looks at him, and doesn’t move, until, after all the fidgeting and shuffling with the papers, Russell, as Jeffrey, gets to say his great line – “I was a corporate vice president” – with the attitude “Once upon a time, I was a very important person.” And that [Mann snaps his fingers] is when Lowell has it. Suddenly, here’s the significance of this meeting: “He’s the former head of research and development at Browne & Williamson Tobacco Company, and he wants to talk to me.” Without hitting anything on the head with exposition, without any of that awful dialogue, like “Boy, have I got a lead which may give us the newsbreak of the decade,” you know that Lowell knows he’s on the scent of a helluva story. What’s great about Pacino’s performance is that he never loses that alertness and sensitivity – even when the light goes out of his eyes. It’s so profound and so subtle. It happens when he picks up the remote and turns off the VCR that’s been playing the interview that didn’t air. It’s in that moment, and it’s the simplest thing. I’ve looked at it over a thousand times, I guess, in the editing. If you analyze it frame by frame there’s nothing going on. But in the context of the scene and of the story, it’s one of the most perfectly 69

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acted moments I’ve ever seen. It’s a Picasso brush stroke; it sucks you in and you impute what’s happening. And Al is managing what you impute, not consciously, but because he’s being the moment – to the core of his being. There is no performance there. That is total, one-to-one meaningfulness. He shuts off the VCR and holds up the remote and turns and – boom. It’s just a spectacular moment. There’s no way Bergman comes off as unscathed in this movie. The whole point is – The whole point is “Well, my career is over. I can’t do what I want to do the most. I want to stay at 60 Minutes and work on 60 Minutes.” And why shouldn’t he? Why shouldn’t he want to have a big audience? Why shouldn’t he want to take tough subjects and put them in front of the 30 million people who watch that show every Sunday night? And he realizes that he can’t do it. There’s not a happy ending for him. Of course, Crowe’s biggest moment comes when Wigand decides to testify in court in Mississippi even though he knows Brown & Williamson may try to have him thrown in jail when he returns to Kentucky. He’s standing in front of the house of his lawyer, Richard Scruggs, and he says, “Fuck it, let’s go to court.” To me, the key words come right before that; when he suggests he wants to change things that haven’t changed “since whenever.” He’s saying that these issues are not temporary and they are affecting your life in the real simple ways and in the profound ways. And if you don’t make that choice – “Fuck it, let’s go to court” – then you’re going to wind up walking away less of who you were than a moment before. That’s the key moment. And that’s exactly the way it happened. There was nothing we could to improve on it, or we would have. We just did exactly what was said, on that same lawn, in front of that house, by those trees. “Fuck it, let’s go to court.” Those were his words. And he said ’em, to Lowell and Scruggs, at that place – we used Scruggs’ house for Scruggs’ house – with more police there than I put in the scene. In some of your films, I thought you strained to touch on the pressure the world puts on home life and families. Here these scenes are tremendously moving, partly because of Crowe and Diane Venora, who is amazing as his wife. When Jeffrey realizes he may go to jail, he asks flat out what that means and what will happen to his wife and daughters. People go to jail on episodic television and in motion pictures all the time. “Well, if you’re convicted, Guilty!” Bang. Bullshit! What does it really mean? I mean, what does your wife do if that happens? Oh, your wife’s gonna have 70

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to go to work? So who’s gonna take care of your children? In the real world, there are ramifications. When Brown & Williamson threatens Jeffrey Wigand with litigation, how does he get attorneys? Who pays for the attorneys? How do you stay secure? How do you afford security? How do you protect your telephonic communications from being invaded? It costs money to have somebody sweep your phone systems. How do you afford all this stuff? Even the pressure on a well-constructed marriage would be huge. Think of it: a Fortune 500 company that is highly litigious, that is known for having thuggish tactics, wants to get you. They really want to get you. And Jeffrey Wigand is not in a marriage where there is a lot of communication – this is not Lowell Bergman walking home and his wife looks up from gardening and asks, “Honey, what’s wrong?” ’cause she knows something’s wrong. This is a marriage where the two people can’t talk. You know the heart of the marriage, ’cause they can relate to a third party – the only time they’re just spontaneously close is when one of their kids is sick. But one-to-one, it’s defensive, the words and behaviors are encoded, there are all these problems. It’s not so much a good marriage that gets broken, as a broken marriage in which the participants care about each other, try to re-form, and just when they’re trying to re-form – that’s when it gets attacked. You bet that’s where the pressure hits. It’s a wonderful ensemble, but to me Crowe gives the most original performance. He’s got this crabbed intensity that comes out in an unpredictable, stop-and-go style. How did you work with him on that? Did you go moment to moment? First of all, I don’t talk about some of that. Some of this stuff, it’s just not right to be public about. It’s how we work, it’s what we do; the Freedom of Information Act doesn’t apply to it! But it’s not moment to moment, it’s all in preparation. It’s in really understanding the character and then finding ways to build on that understanding. In the hands of an actor like Al Pacino or Russell Crowe, that’s a great exploration. And the way I work you have to form most of the character, ideally, before you rehearse. You test it in rehearsals, you modify it on rehearsals, so by the time you’re on the set, you’re executing, and if you can do it like that, then you’re open for spontaneity. And that’s the gold. It’s when what you didn’t plan is suddenly occurring because the actor is in the moment, because he’s being the moment. The look in Russell’s eye when he rolls his head a little bit; the way he delivers the soliloquy he’s got when he stands against the window and tells his wife it’s gonna be better: “Can you imagine what it’s gonna be like for me coming home from work and feeling good at the end of the day?”

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Figure 8.1  The Insider. Former tobacco company scientist Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) takes the stand.

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SMOKING GUN1 Stuart Husband

There’s a scene midway through Michael Mann’s new movie The Insider where would-be whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, played as a sombre ­obsessive– compulsive by Russell Crowe, is walking around a lawn, locked in internal debate as to whether or not he should testify that his former employers, tobacco giant Brown & Williamson, knowingly added cancer-causing chemicals to its cigarettes. Attorneys and police look on; the atmosphere is hushed; the tension excruciating. Eventually, Wigand walks up to his confidante, 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (played by Al Pacino), and says simply: “Let’s go to court.” This, in many ways, is a quintessential Michael Mann moment, as heartstopping as any death-defying Die Hard or Bond stunt. It’s also a perfect illustration of the singular genre that Mann has carved out for himself in the cerebral action movie. True, he’s as adept at choreographing bullet ballets as any number of John Woos, those who cowered and flinched through the protracted heist in Heat will testify to that. But the key scene in that movie was the verbal face-off between Robert De Niro’s career criminal and Al Pacino’s driven cop: two men painted into opposite but complementary corners by the force of their passions and their determination to pursue them, at whatever cost. Mann has been called a “hard-boiled sensualist,” a sort of feng-shui’d Hemingway, and the term could equally apply to any of his anti-heroes, from James Caan’s high-class burglar in 1981’s Thief; through William Petersen’s From The Guardian (London), January 21 (2000).

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empathic detective in Manhunter, Mann’s 1986 take on Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon; to the cigarette-industry deep throat Wigand. Though, as Mann says in his throaty Chicago rasp, “Jeffrey has to be the most confused and unclear character I’ve ever worked with.” The Insider is based on the real events sparked when Wigand, former head of research and development at Brown & Williamson, violated the confidentiality clause in his severance agreement by going public with his knowledge of the carcinogenic properties of B&W’s products to Bergman; Bergman then put his devastating testimony on tape in an interview with 60 Minutes’ silky anchor Mike Wallace (played with brilliantined brio by Christopher Plummer). However, by the time the segment was due to air, Wigand had become a central witness in the lawsuits filed by Mississippi and 49 other states against the tobacco industry, and his marriage had fallen apart in the face of intimidation and threats of imprisonment from his former employers; at the 11th hour, CBS, fearing litigation, decided to pull the interview, to Bergman’s dismay and Wigand’s disgust. Eventually, the opprobrium heaped on the network forced them to backtrack, but not before Bergman had resigned, Wigand had succumbed to a near-breakdown, and 60 Minutes’ vaunted journalistic ethics were left in tatters. It’s far from a classic two-line Hollywood pitch: a Vanity Fair article on the case ran to 24 pages, and was filled with arcane references to tobacco industry practice and obscure points of law. What, then, did Mann see in it? He clasps his hands and furrows his already knotted brow. “I thought the story was less about big tobacco,” he says, “than the effect on your life when someone decides to go after you, though in this case it was a large corporation rather than a gunslinger. Way back in Thief, you had James Caan getting into these mob-sponsored heists, and when he wants out, the don says he can’t; he, the don, now owns the paper on this guy’s life. That’s also what you have here; the company owns the paper on Wigand, and is trying to destroy him, completely legally. It’s brutal, and it’s terribly dramatic.” Mann locates the film in paranoid political thriller territory: a kind of sweatier-palmed All the President’s Men, with Pacino’s Bergman standing in for Woodward & Bernstein. It’s one of the few major Hollywood products of recent years that’s actually about something – morality, conscience, c­ ulpability – and which also has the temerity to prod American apathy in the face of corporate condescension. Given that, it’s also a drama about credibility. Can Bergman trust the insular and tormented Wigand? Can Wigand trust the story-fixated Bergman? Can anyone trust 60 Minutes not to bottle out? Some of the film’s de facto participants have criticized Mann for being too close to Bergman, the one-time radical firmly ensconced among the New York media elite. Bergman acted as “consultant” on the movie, and, while Pacino forgoes his usual grandstanding theatrics, Mann admits that certain events have been re-jigged in Bergman’s 74

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favour. While, for instance, Wallace is seen to capitulate at CBS’s decision to kill the interview, it was actually he, and not Bergman as the film has it, who called Wigand to break the traumatic news. Mann concedes that “there may be something” in these criticisms. “I’ve known Lowell for a long time, and he would occasionally bring me stories. In fact, we started thinking about a movie based on this arms merchant in Marbaya that he knew. Then he began living through the Wigand thing, and it was my idea to do this film rather than his. You know, Lowell’s integrity as a journalist is a function of his accuracy and his refusal to compromise, and that doesn’t make for a real pleasant guy to be around sometimes. He’s not real negotiable, and he can be a little irritating. We may have skimped on the irritation, but I was introduced to him by someone in law enforcement, who said Lowell was one of the three journalists in America that he trusted, because of that integrity. He could have stayed at 60 Minutes and cut himself a good deal, but he’s now freelance, because he didn’t want to tell his next source: ‘Hang with me, you’ll be fine maybe.’ Comparatively, everyone around him is shameless.” It’s safe to say that The Insider will not be on heavy rotation in Mike Wallace’s home cinema. The veteran newsman has already informed the likes of the Los Angeles Times of his displeasure at scenes such as the one where he watches, rapt, a recording of one of his own interviews. “I respect Mike Wallace,” Mann insists. “But a crisis like this throws what you’re made of into high relief and, you know, even Mike Wallace makes mistakes, and guess what, there’s nothing wrong with that. I think he doesn’t like the film because it makes him seem too human; he has this idea of what his image ought to be which is very adamantine and two-dimensional.” “Actually,” he continues, “the thinness of these people’s skins surprised me. I was like, what, they never faced a little criticism? They stick cameras in people’s faces every day for the last 32 years and they don’t like the attention turned back on them.” More important, he says, was Wigand’s reaction. “That was the real responsibility, because Jeffrey is complex and awkward, and we had to construct his character on all these disharmonious elements. Like, he loves his wife, but can’t bring himself to say as much; there’s a lot of dysfunctionality in him. He’s a proud man, which I think is why he did what he did. Brown and Williamson leaned on him like thugs, whereas if they’d finessed him, offered him a couple of hundred thousand dollars never to tell, I think they could have bought him. They challenged his dignity and his image of himself; they manufactured him to some degree. So the day of reckoning came when I screened the film for him; if he could say that that was how he felt, that the intensity of what he felt was captured, then that was my baseline. Same thing with Lowell. And they were both positive, which was gratifying. Because every other character is kind of secondary.” Maybe so, but nothing is extraneous in Mann-land; the director likes to refer 75

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to a movie’s “genetic coding,” an all-embracing helix of image and sound, character and story, that fuses everything, from the way a character dabs sweat off his forehead to the lighting of a suburban street to the music on the soundtrack, into a seamless whole. This exacting scrutiny elevates the pulpy, noirish elements of his material into something more elemental. Can you think of South Beach without thinking of the pastel slacks, avant-garde vehicles and skittish Harold Faltermeyer soundtrack Mann layered over it in Miami Vice? [The soundtrack is composed and performed by Jan Hammer.] Can you hear “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida” without recalling the bleached-out, brutalist architecture of Manhunter and running to bolt the doors? The Insider’s visual architecture is fittingly dense; blizzards of coded messages racing through buzzing networks, and portentous decisions taken in claustrophobic boardrooms (though they’re not smoke-filled; this could be the most conspicuously cigarette-free movie about the tobacco industry yet made). “Everything in a film is a part of the whole and acts on it, every color, every object,” Mann enthuses. “You’ve got to get it right. To research this film, Al and I hung with reporters from Time magazine, and spent time inside a news operation: ABC, actually,” he smiles wryly “to imbibe that excitement, the way they’ll put tapes on the air in minutes and field their worldwide correspondents on conference calls. And I had Russell do chemistry experiments,” he chortles. Mann and his actors are a mutual admiration society. Crowe, in particular, respects his bravery, both in his refusal to glamorize the truth, putting all Wigand’s ambivalence up on screen – “We’re programmed to accept the guy in the white hat as the hero and the guy in the black hat as the villain,” he says, “and that’s just not the reality of the human condition” – and his creative approach to casting. At an initial meeting, Crowe was painfully aware that he was a 34-year-old Australian reading for the part of a 52-year-old American; on telling Mann that he thought it was a waste of time, the director stared at him, before leaning forward and jabbing his finger into the actor’s chest, saying: “I’m talking to you because of what you’ve got in here.” For his part, Mann is modest. “I’ve got tremendous respect for actors,” he says, “but I don’t know if that’s unusual among directors, because I don’t know how any other director operates. But no, I love actors; they produce incredible stuff.” Actresses, however, are a thornier question. Mann has been castigated for relegating his female characters to anaemic secondary roles, usually that of Frustrated Wife, as played by Ashley Judd to Robert De Niro in Heat, and Diane Venora to Crowe in The Insider, particularly when there are few directors as good at catching the seesawing rhythms of male–female intimacy. Perhaps it’s a legacy of his upbringing in The Patch, one of the roughest areas of Chicago, which he describes as “very aggressive, very masculine and very heterosexual” (Mann has a certain Norman Mailer-esque academic pugilist feel about him); or his penchant for guy milieux, from the Chicago PD of Crime Story to the wild frontier of Last of the Mohicans. A mooted future project, a biopic of Howard Hughes starring Leonardo DiCaprio, is unlikely to 76

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redress the gender imbalance. “I just go with things that consume my interest,” he shrugs. “It’s not something I even think about.” Whoever’s peopling them, however, there’s no denying the power of Mann’s movies; now that the US tobacco industry is on its knees – the state lawsuits were eventually settled for $246 billion, and others are pending – does he feel vindicated? “This was never about getting the tobacco industry,” he says, a little testily. “This was about telling the very human story of these guys caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Hell, I haven’t even given up smoking, much as I’d like to.” He laughs. “In fact, Eric Roth and I spent a year and a half writing this screenplay in the bar at the Broadway Deli in Santa Monica, because it’s one of the few places left in California where you can smoke.” And the world’s foremost action auteur breaks into a deep, tobacco-stained laugh.

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“ALI LIKES THE FILM A LOT. HE’S SEEN IT SIX TIMES”1 Xan Brooks

There are few obvious parallels between the boxer and his biographer. In one corner you have a rangy African–American from Kentucky, a champ by the age of 22. In the other there’s a stocky Chicago Jew who barely began punching his weight as a film-maker until early middle age. Yet one quality at least links Muhammad Ali and Michael Mann: both men talk a terrifically good fight. In Mann’s film Ali, the hero spends the first 20 minutes or so in a kind of wordless reverie before blowing noisily into the weigh-in for the first Sonny Liston fight, bragging 19 to the dozen. Likewise Mann, who prowls deliberately around his hotel room for a few moments, arranging chairs, ordering coffee, pouring water. Then he takes his seat, and – bam! He talks about the political and racial tensions of mid-1960s America, about how Ali was wired into every cultural conflict going. About how he was studying film in London at the time of the Liston rematch and stayed up until nearly 3 A.M. to watch it on TV; how the first-round knockout was over in an instant. His speech is a flurry of passion and justification, a crash course in his own artistic credentials. One suspects that this normally wouldn’t matter to Mann. This, after all, is the director of films such as Manhunter, Heat and The Insider: he shouldn’t need to argue his case with anyone. And yet the Ali film was a prize that had to be earned. Ever since it was first mooted as a possibility a decade ago, the film has been one of Hollywood’s more prestigious projects. At one stage it looked as though Barry Sonnenfeld (Get Shorty, Men in Black) would direct From The Guardian (London), February 13 (2002).

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“ali likes the film a lot. he’s seen it six times” the picture, with Will Smith in the title role. Then Sonnenfeld slipped out of the frame, while Smith stayed on board. For a few fraught months the script was tugged between two film-makers, Michael Mann and Spike Lee. The decision lay with backers Sony. Their budget was set at $100 million and Mann, who had just received an Oscar nomination for his smoking-gun tobacco industry exposé The Insider, was generally regarded as the safer pair of hands. Lee was left smarting, protesting the decision and complaining (via a friend quoted in the New York Post) that “only a black man could do justice to the Cassius Clay story.” I wonder what Mann thought when he heard that. “Nothing,” he says flatly. “Really nothing.” Even so, he can’t resist defending himself. “The support for this film within the black community has been extremely strong, and that’s important to me, you bet. Because I wanted the film to come from the point of view of the main character, Muhammad Ali. I’m not interested in showing a white man’s idea of how someone suffered racism. The perspective of the film has to be African–American. So the endorsement of African–American viewers and critics is terribly significant.” “The only other endorsement that’s more significant to me is Muhammad Ali’s, and he likes the film a lot. He’s seen it six times.” His laugh is like a bomb going off. Small wonder that Ali likes Ali. The film plays as a veritable victory lap, opening with his surprise win over Sonny Liston in 1964 and closing a decade later with an exultant freeze-frame after the George Foreman fight in Zaire. It gives us Ali’s golden years, the period when the fighter was at his most crucial, charismatic and confrontational – before his professional decline and eventual illness. Isn’t it almost an authorized biography? “No, I don’t think so,” says Mann. “First of all, I make films for myself. I have total creative control over what I do. I don’t have a history of trying to please people.” Not even the studio? Surely he encountered some pressure to tailor the film for a white mainstream audience, to cater to the sort of viewer who loves Ali for his grace and wit but doesn’t want to be grappling with all the hard-line Nation of Islam baggage that comes with it. “Oh, I’m sure the studio would have wanted a different movie altogether. They’d have wanted it PG-13 as opposed to R-rated, which means you can’t say ‘motherfucker’. That would have added another $20 million to the box office. But nobody can say I cater to this group or that group. Why?” A gimlet stare. “Do you think this film caters to a white mainstream audience?” Actually I’m in two minds. It seems that Ali, by and large, attempts a painstaking portrait of its subject (aided by Smith’s spot-on mimicry in the lead role). Yet you sense that the film also skirts over some of its story’s more charged issues. For instance, it alights only with extreme delicacy on the subject of Ali’s womanizing and goes to great lengths to paint him as his own man in his dealings with the Nation of Islam. 79

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“But I’m not doing a documentary,” Mann says. “Part of the discipline of making a motion picture is to stay on-message. It would be catastrophic to divert into every interesting story. Everything this guy does is fascinating. I could have made an entire movie about Ali’s relations with women. Music, Cadillac convertibles and women. It would have been great.” The problem, he admits, comes from shooting a film about a man who is one of the most photographed and documented figures of the late 20th century. “Everybody has got their own idea about what this movie should have been. It’s not like The Insider, where people say, ‘I didn’t know about this.’ You could ask everyone what Ali meant to them, and each person would have a specific story.” Mann sighs. “That’s why I don’t plan to do another reality-based movie. I was supposed to direct a movie about Howard Hughes next, but now I’m not going to do it. I started to feel that the format was too imprisoning. It’s like, ‘In 1947, Howard Hughes goes in front of a congressional hearing.’ And it can’t be 1946. It can’t be 1937. And I’d like to say, ‘Y’know what? He crashes his plane on the way to the hearing.’ But you can’t do that.” Instead Mann is planning a return to television. Having begun his career as a writer for Miami Vice and Starsky & Hutch, he is now shooting the pilot for a Los Angeles police drama for CBS. The coffee has grown cold. Mann bounds up from his chair and offers a firm handshake, plus a pat on the back that almost becomes a hug. The body language is at once briskly businesslike and oddly affectionate. His work-out complete, the champ can afford to be magnanimous.

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PAINT IT BLACK1 Mark Olsen

Mark Olsen: In Collateral you seem to be exploring the aesthetics of DV. Was that one of the things that attracted you? Michael Mann: It’s useful here to make an analogy with architecture. When steel was first introduced as a building material architects disguised the structure of their buildings to look like masonry. It wasn’t until Louis Sullivan’s pioneering work in Chicago in the 1890s that the aesthetics of the steel structure were allowed to be expressed. So my reason for choosing DV wasn’t economy but was to do with the fact that the entire movie takes place in one city, on one night, and you can’t see the city at night on motion-picture film the way you can on digital video. And I like the truth-telling feeling I receive when there’s very little light on the actors’ faces – I think this is the first serious major motion picture done in digital video that is photoreal, rather than using it for effects. DV is also a more painterly medium: you can see what you’ve done as you shoot because you have the end product sitting in front of you on a Sony high-def monitor, so I could change the contrast to affect the mood, add color, do all kinds of things you can’t do with film. Digital isn’t a medium for directors who aren’t interested in visualization, who rely on a set of conventions or aesthetic pre-sets, if you like. But it’s perfect for someone like David Fincher or Ridley Scott – directors who pre-visualize and know just what they want to achieve.

From Sight & Sound, 14:10, October (2004), p. 16.

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Figure 10.1  Collateral (2004). Hit-man Vincent (Tom Cruise) comes to L.A.

MO: Did digital allow you to use a smaller crew or make the production more mobile? MM: Not the way we did it. We had a whole film complement working alongside us so we could shoot in either medium. If we could shoot on film, we did, though in the end 80 per cent of the movie was shot on video. For instance, the shootout in the Korean disco was done on film because we were on a big interior set that had to be lit and we could move around more freely with the camera on our shoulder shooting 35mm than we could using digital. I find that I’m a convert to multi-media. On my next film there’ll be some scenes shot on film – there’s no reason not to use film for a daylight desert scene, for instance, though if I went digital I wouldn’t use the Sony camera but perhaps the Viper since the Thomson chip responds especially well to a lot of light and has fabulous warm colours. MO: What about the shot towards the end of Collateral when Jamie Foxx is on top of the parking garage looking up at the windows of an office building where Jada Pinkett Smith is on one floor and Tom Cruise on another? MM: That’s a perfect example of why I shot this picture in high-def, of the best of what digital can achieve. There are a couple of lights on the parking structure that were just there, but I don’t think we added any light to the scene. MO: Collateral traces a very real geography of Los Angeles, which is something you also explored in Heat. MM: It isn’t always topographically accurate – for instance, when they head towards the El Rodeo nightclub I detour them through Wilmington. Selecting 82

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Figure 10.2  Collateral. Vincent (Tom Cruise) survives a shoot-out at a Korea-town nightclub.

the location always had to do with the content of the scene and this was the first time they got familiar and personal with each other so I wanted the most impersonal and depopulated landscape I could imagine. I always look for anomalies, and the idea of a club like El Rodeo in the middle of the oil refineries in that area around San Pedro and Wilmington is bizarre. But there are clubs like that, all kinds of weird nightlife in the middle of this forest of fragmenting columns. I always try to find something that makes a scene feel real, and what makes things feel true to me is usually something anomalous, a component you would never expect to find, so it doesn’t look manicured or perfect. This can be a location, a gesture, an expression, a thought in somebody’s head – if you look at life, that’s what it’s like. MO: You made a lot of changes to the script, most notably moving it from New York to Los Angeles. What attracted you to the concept in the first place? MM: Los Angeles is relatively undiscovered as a location for pictures. It has its own pattern of culture which is almost like travelling on the internet – when you visit websites you journey through some kind of interstitial space and the domains are not contiguous. I think LA is the most exciting contemporary city in the United States, but you have to know where to go. And a lot of Angelinos don’t. In terms of the script, the most important part of it for me was the structure, which was brilliant. I did a lot of re-writing but I didn’t change anything significant, which is why Stuart Beattie has sole screenplay credit. We changed the culture, the locale, the characters’ back stories and what they talk about, 83

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but I didn’t change the narrative structure or the engineering under the surface, which is the really difficult thing to do well in a script. I’d asked myself what I wanted to do next before I even came across Collateral and I’d decided I wanted to do a very condensed narrative, one in which you’d take what would normally be the third act of a three-act structure and make it into the whole motion picture. I was interested in an intense character piece, with characters in collision within a compressed narrative frame, in contrast with the elaborate but un-intense experience of dealing with the actual events of Muhammad Ali’s life from 1964 to 1974 in five cities on two continents, which was an epic narrative involving a whole different set of dynamics. There were two screenplays that came to my attention and Collateral was the better of the two. I was drawn to the feel of a lifeboat making a night-time odyssey through the city.

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MANN AMONG MEN1 Michael Sragow

Michael Mann has a modus operandi as distinctive as any master criminal’s. He’s a hard-boiled sensualist: half muckraker and half fabulist. If he had been born 100 years ago, he’d have followed Jack London’s path, not just into bareknuckled journalism but also into transcendent evocations of the beautiful and the wild. Talking to Mann is as surprising as it is stimulating. His unfettered intuition and exquisite awareness compel your rapt attention. It’s as if you’re tuning your radio dial to a brainy, original talk show host on a faint college-town station – you strain not to miss his special code words and hard-won observations. You feel Mann gets extraordinary commitments from actors like James Caan in Thief (1981) or Tom Noonan and Brian Cox in Manhunter (1986) or Daniel Day-Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans (1992) because he catches them up in his enthrallment with his material. When I listen to tapes of the marathon interview sessions I held with him five years apart, one before the release of Thief and the other before the release of Manhunter, they sound as if they’re halves of an ongoing conversation, whether he’s discussing his past or the projects then at hand. He grew up near “the Patch,” one of the roughest areas of Chicago. (“It was very aggressive, it was very masculine and it was very heterosexual.”) He still has a flat-A accent. “In my neighborhood,” he once told me, “anyone who carried around a camera would be considered a ‘fairy.’ ” By his count, only 13 of his high school graduating class of 365 went on to college, Mann included. It was at From Salon.com, http://www.salon.com/1999/02/02/mann_4/

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Figure 11.1  Thief (1981). L. to r., Jessie (Tuesday Weld) and Frank (James Caan) establish a relationship.

the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he majored in English, that movies first got their hooks into him. The film that clinched the obsession was (appropriately enough) G.W. Pabst’s coruscating study of urban vice, The Joyless Street (1925). By the time he graduated from college, Mann knew he wanted to make movies. But he didn’t like the curricula of most American film schools: “It was like vocational training. You’re not supposed to do ‘student’ films; you’re supposed to do a show reel.” So, in 1965, Mann entered the London Film School, where he got an M.A. in film and did what he thought he should do – “make two-and-a-half-minute, fully symbolic statements on the nature of reality that’ll shame you 10 years later.” Mann stayed on in London for about six years, filming documentaries and TV commercials and working as an assistant production supervisor for Twentieth Century Fox. Having been part of the Madison campus’s radical days, he began to feel the contradictions of his position: “I would make money on commercials and try to put it to use on my own projects. Some material I filmed on the Paris student riots wound up on NBC’s First Tuesday because NBC’s own people couldn’t get close to the radical leaders. You never resolve these contradictions.” Missing the “intensity” of life in the United States – “the patterns and the rhythms, the color tones and the frequencies” – Mann returned in the early ’70s, eventually settling in Los Angeles. He learned how to write by toiling on Starsky & Hutch: “For structure, nothing beats the melodrama of episodic TV.” He graduated to what he calls “the Rolls-Royce of TV shows,” Police Story, and created the hit series Vega$ before embarking on his 1979 moviedirecting debut, The Jericho Mile – a prison film unlike any other. It was made for television, but on The Jericho Mile, Mann crystallized all his trademark techniques. First he absorbed whatever “soft” information he could 86

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find about prison subcultures. He tapped into the essence of big house pride in the sports pages of the prison newspapers: “Everyone seemed to be doing great, probably because if you criticized anyone in an article your ass would be grass.” Then he put that data at the service of his artifice. The story centered on a convict (Peter Strauss) who based his integrity on becoming a world-class runner. Mann was able to get around the claustrophobia built into jail-house movies by placing the bulk of the action (filmed at Folsom Prison) in the exercise yard. Each racial and ethnic group had its own turf – blacks dominating the weight-lifting area, Hispanics the handball court. Add a music track that spun off from “Sympathy for the Devil” and “No Expectations” and you had a movie that externalized the prisoners’ state of mind and conjured up what Mann called “social Technicolor.” Mann likes to talk about a movie’s “genetic coding’’: a swirling double helix of image and sound, character and story, fantasy and fact. His first theatrical feature, Thief, floats on a neon-lit Styx into the heart of the underworld. The camera descends in a downpour to nighttime Chicago, where, operating with a precision that suggests telepathy, the thief (Caan) guides a drill that seems to liquefy as it chews into a vault containing diamonds. In this asphalt Hades the heist technology is out of Star Wars and the underworld bureaucracy is Byzantine. When a don persuades Caan to work full time on mob-sponsored heists, the thief hopes to make some big scores and ease off. Instead, the don, in his own icy phrase, ends up “owning the paper” on the thief’s life. What better metaphor could there be for the constrictions of modern America than having an organization – the government, a credit-card company or the mob – “own the paper” on you? Mann’s perennial attempt to infuse elemental tales like Thief with allegory and atmosphere led him far astray in The Keep (1983), a vampire movie set in Nazi-occupied Romania. But again and again, he’s broken through to the mass audience in the medium that masters of moviemaking usually abjure: the weekly TV series. In the mid-’80s, when asked to produce an MTV-style cop show, Mann exploited the breakthroughs he’d achieved in The Jericho Mile and Thief and came up with the phenomenon of Miami Vice. With avant-garde vehicles and clothing, pastel backdrops to bloodletting and guest appearances by hard-news celebrities like G. Gordon Liddy as well as rock icons like Glenn Frey, Mann turned the urban schizophrenia of the ’80s into an influential style. (To Mann, of course, this style was primarily “an expression of place and content, the milieu the guys are moving through.”) The series used its soundtrack the way urbanites use Walkmans and car radios – either to articulate surrounding chaos or to provide a defiant counterpoint. Returning to the movies, Mann audaciously adapted Thomas Harris’ first Hannibal Lecter novel, Red Dragon. In Manhunter he soldered an FBI search for a serial killer to an eerie exploration of the murderer’s mind and awkward elements of family melodrama. When Mann follows the point of view of the killer as he moves from a van to a bedroom, where he shines a light in the face 87

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of a sleeping wife and mother, the director (who also served as a camera operator) puts fear and loathing in your belly. He twists the knot further when the FBI Manhunter retraces the killer’s steps and analyzes the bloodstains on the walls and floor. Mann conveys all the horror of a serial killer using murder as a means of aesthetic expression. And Brian Cox is a sardonic, chilling Lecter – he talks with terrifying blandness and looks like a bleached Bela Lugosi. Simultaneously, Mann set up another groundbreaking TV series, Crime Story (1986) – a show about cars with fins and cops with teeth. Dennis Farina played the crusading detective in charge of the Major Crimes Unit of the Chicago P.D., a cop caught in changing times. In Mann’s words, he’s a guy with a “personalized” sense of justice: “He has his own cosmic sense of right and wrong. And that makes him a hell of a cop in 1963. It doesn’t make him one hell of a cop in ’69 or ’70.” In the pilot (the series’ high point), the trail of a dangerous new criminal crew leads Farina to a cocky Irish kid (David Caruso), who happens to be the son of the hero’s surrogate parents. It’s a headlong story of neighborhood connections and betrayals done in an explosive mix of styles: The serious guys wear fedoras and the punks go out in ducktail haircuts; Del Shannon melds with Johnny Mathis on the sound track; age-old Sicilian traditions unravel in a suburban estate fitted out with space-age decor. The show’s V-8 engine pickup powered a vision of a hyper-masculine culture – the virile pop Zeitgeist of Mann’s adolescence – on its eve of destruction. Nothing Mann has done has lacked intrigue, even when he returned to familiar territory in the ultra-contemporary Heat (1995). This cops vs. crooks epic pitted an untouchable target, master thief Robert De Niro, against an irresistible force, police lieutenant Al Pacino. It suggested new arenas of stressed-out-yuppie fantasy. De Niro is prudent and code-abiding, Pacino manic and instinctive. They play out a macho version of sense and sensibility in a vicious, morally booby-trapped universe. Ultimately, these doppel-heroes are too limited to propel a near-three-hour saga, and their domestic scenes are as stilted as the ones in Manhunter. Still, the movie does capture a fresh urban fatalism. In Heat, exhilaration is out. The freedom that high-stakes crime can buy has little to do with esprit; it’s about practicing an illicit craft and living according to your own rules, which can be even more restrictive than society’s. For the characters, excitement comes from seeing a calculation work or an educated guess pay off. For the spectators, it comes from catastrophe. In 1992, Mann’s voluptuous wide-screen retelling of that fictional warhorse of the French and Indian War, The Last of the Mohicans, proved the breadth of his vitality and talent. Once again, Mann immersed himself in data, drawing not just on James Fenimore Cooper’s original 1826 novel and on Philip Dunne’s script for the 1936 Randolph Scott version, but also on the diaries of the comte de Bougainville and histories and essays by Francis Parkman and Simon Schama. Most important, he enlisted Daniel Day-Lewis to play Nathaniel Poe (aka Hawkeye), the Indian-raised white scout who tries to save the English maiden he loves from the Huron massacre of the British 88

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Figure 11.2  Heat (1995). Armored car take-down by Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) and his crew in L.A.

retreating from Fort William Henry. Day-Lewis’ “white Indian” hero, with his frontier-Samson locks and prehensile alertness, rebels against bogus English authority and bridges gaps among all those who live honestly (and sensually) in the woods. Using virtuoso guerrilla and survival skills for his own ethical purposes, he’s the noblest expression yet of the Michael Mann hero. The Last of the Mohicans reinvents the legend of the honest, all-capable frontiersman in a way that honors whites and Indians alike. It’s no more “accurate” yet no less moving than, say, Young Mr. Lincoln, and it leaves you guessing at what wonderment the filmmaker will create for us next.

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Figure 12.1  Heat. Robbery-homicide detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) and his crew. L. to r., Ted Levine, Wes Studi, Mykelti Williamson, Al Pacino.

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L.A. BELONGS TO THE COYOTES1 Leif Kramp

Thriller director Michael Mann is rumored to be a perfectionist among Hollywood’s filmmakers. He talked to SPIEGEL ONLINE about Collateral, star Tom Cruise, and censorship issues raised about Hollywood by Christian fundamentalists. SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mr. Mann, why are you so obsessed with tragic stories about men? Michael Mann: Hard to say. I’m fascinated by the challenges of life and all of the contradictions involved. I’m especially interested in people who present themselves as clear-headed and self-confident. For example, at the beginning of Collateral, contract killer Vincent has a consistent, rational view of himself and the world he lives in. He feels absolutely justified in what he does. He’s a nihilist, thoroughly convinced that the universe is fundamentally meaningless. What happens is not his concern. Time and space will continue to exist, no matter what. Vincent has internalized this philosophy of life. But at the end of the movie, he contradicts himself when he asks the taxi driver: “Will anybody notice that I was here once?” In other words, he wants to know whether his life had any meaning at all. SPIEGEL ONLINE: What about Max, the black cabbie Vincent forces to accompany him on his murderous journey? From Spiegel Online, October 4 (2004).

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Mann: Max finds himself unable to respond to any sudden urge, to let himself go. If there’s something that calls for him to react, he balks, he hesitates, and he stifles whatever initial impulse he has. There’s nothing more dramatic than quite divergent characters who are thrown into a situation where conflict then arises, forcing them to act, and this is why I’m particularly drawn to stories of this kind. Sociopaths are a phenomenon I find particularly fascinating, especially how such people deal with the real world, even as they also withdraw from it. SPIEGEL ONLINE: The film’s also a topographical study. Cinematically, which city appeals to you more, New York or Los Angeles? Mann: The original script for Collateral was conceived with New York in mind, and it was quite different in other ways as well. It involved the Russian mafia, and the character Max wasn’t Afro-American. At its core, the original story was much too clichéd. So we made radical changes. When I met Jamie Foxx, I was sure he was the only one who could plausibly embody Max. We relocated the story to Los Angeles because, as I see it, this city is dreamlike and a place of fantasy. Cinematographically, there’s no more exciting city. I’m not talking about Hollywood, but the city itself, the metropolitan area filled with businesses and conference centers. It’s a flexible space; I can use it as a vehicle to convey a great variety of meanings. Although I grew up in Chicago, I’m attached to L.A. The place arouses stronger emotions, which can be better depicted there as well. SPIEGEL ONLINE: With a star like Tom Cruise, does a director still have a say? Mann: You bet! It wasn’t at all as if he was in charge. Ever since I started making films, that is, since 1980, I’ve shot every film just the way I’ve wanted to. Every single detail, even the smallest bit of every story, has been shot in accordance with my vision. Preparation is crucial, it’s the most important thing, in fact. When filming starts, everyone involved is already in character. It’s what I expect from everybody. We’d been doing pre-production work together for five months, thinking about aspects of Vincent’s tradecraft that don’t even appear in the final cut. How does he spy on his victim? Where does he park his car when he goes to the gym? The smallest details of his life. We also did some improv training sessions, in which Tom was called upon to tell some story from Vincent’s childhood. That material didn’t appear in the movie itself, but it ensured that he formed a deeper bond with Vincent as a character. SPIEGEL ONLINE: It seems you were even in charge of the coyote that trots down the street in one scene. How did you go about staging something like that? 92

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Figure 12.2  Collateral (2004). Max (Jamie Foxx) and Vincent (Tom Cruise) in Max’s cab on an L.A. freeway.

Mann: You really can’t put a coyote through much training, if at all. But it wasn’t really necessary. If you live in L.A., you’re always seeing them on the street. About six months ago, it must have been about seven when we were going out for dinner in Hancock Park, and there was this big pack of them absolutely devouring a cat. Not really an unusual sight. One Tuesday night when I was giving a babysitter a ride home about one in the morning, I spotted three coyotes walking down the middle of Sunset Boulevard. I switched off the car lights and let them go by. The city, quite simply, belongs to them. SPIEGEL ONLINE: Because of its quiet intensity, that scene more or less sums up the movie. How do you explain this departure from raucous shoot-ups and action sequences? Mann: I’ve always aimed at putting the most deeply emotional situations on the screen. It’s quite a challenge to create, from a simmering conflict between two individuals, a moment in which they jointly, and yet separately, engage in soul-searching as they fight some inner battle. And a good example of this is the sequence in which the coyote’s spotted crossing the street. SPIEGEL ONLINE: Your career has coincided with the time in office of several different presidents. Is there some way that the George W. Bush era changed Hollywood? Mann: Bush knows he enjoys little support in California. The film industry almost traditionally is Democratic. That is why he focuses more on Iowa and Florida. His presidency has certainly influenced the film business, however. 93

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Currently, there’s a very strong attempt being made by the right-wing, Christian fundamentalists to control what movies are about. A fierce battle’s going on. Ten directors and I, along with the Directors Guild, have brought suit against the companies and organizations involved. And of course, they’ve counter-sued. Along with Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, I’ll soon be going to court about this. Right-wing fundamentalists would have a tough time if there were a Democrat government. They want to take a film like Ali and delete all vulgar language, sexual expression, and racist comments, regardless of whether this kind of whitewashing makes sense in the context of the story. It’s much the same controversy John Milton started in the seventeenth century when he published his pamphlet Areopagitica, which deals with the vexed question of censorship. SPIEGEL ONLINE: Will Smith recently talked about a new racism in Hollywood. Your leading actor Jamie Foxx is black. What do you think about this issue? Mann: I have always been interested in the problem, also in stereotyping and “typing” in general. Just to take my practice as an example, I’m not convinced that any part should necessarily be thought of as Afro-American so a black actor can play it. No black character should have to carry the enormous cultural burden connected with the Afro-American community. SPIEGEL ONLINE: Your films are dominated by male main characters. Don’t you like actresses? Mann: I love actresses! If that’s the impression people have, it’s really not my fault. It’s not as if there haven’t been any women in my movies. In Heat, for example, I was more concerned with the relationships between Val Kilmer and Ashley Judd, and Robert De Niro and Amy Brenneman, as well as Al Pacino and Diane Venora, than with the action scenes. That’s why I’ve always been interested in a character-driven project like Insider. I don’t dislike women. In fact, one of my current projects is about Janis Joplin. And the lead role certainly won’t go to Tom Cruise!

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MICHAEL MANN INTERVIEW1 John Maguire

Los Angeles is so hot right now. Not like Paris Hilton’s twittered catchphrase (although I suppose it is that too) but more in the sense of sweating through your fingernails. The TV weatherman has run out of superlatives to describe the 112 degree inferno blazing outside and has resorted to fanning himself theatrically and hooting at a crimson map of the Californian peninsula, dotted with swollen yellow suns. In an anonymous room in the Four Seasons, I’m in a puddle, even with the air-conditioning on full blast and a shelf full of condensation-dripping water bottles standing by. I’m checking the capillary creep under my armpits and wondering if there’s time to dash upstairs and change my shirt when the door opens and Michael Mann scurries into the room, looking like he just stepped out of the fridge where they keep the talent chilled. He’s around the table in a trice to take my soggy hand in a firm grip and carefully place a discreet Dictaphone down beside mine. In any other circumstances this would be unusual, but Mann’s attention to detail is legendary and this recorded insurance is part of that cautious data-mining. Squat and intense, with swept-back hair matching his silver glasses and a confident grin, he sits himself down and motions his bored-looking assistant into a discreet chair in the furthest corner. All set, he takes a final check on everything around him, rolls his shoulders and cocks his head to one side, exposing a thin, transparent hearing aid that follows the contour of his inner ear, waiting for my first question. I start off our conversation by casually remarking that the director has come full circle with his new film, Miami Vice. It’s a kind-of remake of the seminal From maguiresmovies.blogspot.co.uk, July (2006).

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Figure 13.1  Miami Vice pilot, “Brother’s Keeper” (1984). Sonny Crockett (Don Johnson) on South Beach.

1980s TV series that Mann originally brought to television screens worldwide as executive producer, the pop-culture defining success of which allowed him to write his own ticket in Hollywood, after his Hannibal Lecter story Manhunter and the Nazi horror of The Keep. He takes the observation with a nod, and shrugs his shoulders. “The time was right to make this one,” he says quickly and finally and we move on. The night before, the combined European press watched this new incarnation (which stars Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx as Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs) in a preposterously comfortable screening-room in West Hollywood. The reaction to the frenetic, astonishingly violent cop drama, even from the hard-bitten chaws of the continental press, was decidedly muted. As Mann himself was sitting three seats down from me throughout the screening, I wondered what his reaction to our reaction was. “Ah, the foreign press. I’ve learned with you guys that you just cannot judge by the room. We had the American press in the same theatre, watching the same movie, and they were applauding and laughing and cheering. They were 96

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much more expressive. Personally I love this movie, so the short answer is, I don’t know yet exactly what the foreign journalists think, but it is the movie I wanted to make and that’s that.” I tell him I’m only going on the silence as the credits rolled, and the hurried exit of most of the audience. He fixes me in a look and asks me what I thought of it. Trying to be diplomatic and mindful that we’ve only just sat down, I tell him that with the cars and the guns and the violence, it’s a guy’s movie, typically Mannish in its high-octane delivery and brutal exposition. The director stops me with a raised hand and quotes some focus group statistics. “Well, that’s not the case,” he says in his Midwestern drawl, dredging up the facts from some recess of his encyclopaedic mind. “Women under twenty-five love this movie and what they love most about it is the violence. This goes against everything that the studio marketing department would tell you, but they’ve done their tests and that’s what the figures say.” Ok, but to get back to the original question, why did he make the movie in the first place? “The idea came up first at a party I was at with Jamie Foxx and he gave me the hard sell on playing a new kind of Tubbs. He had everything worked out, even down to specific shots for the trailer. My initial reaction was, you’ve got to be kidding me, why would I want to go back to Miami Vice? Then I looked again at the pilot and some of the early episodes and I got kind of captured afresh by the deep currents and the emotional power of those stories, and I’m talking here about the first two seasons. The way the issues were brought in from the outside world into the lives of Crockett and Tubbs and the way the stories impacted on them. To me, these stories summed up Miami Vice as it originally was. Secondly, Miami has always had a real allure for me, in the same way maybe as Las Vegas had in the 1970s [Mann wrote and directed the Robert Urich-starring TV series Vega$ back then], it was really sexy and beautiful and really dangerous and deadly and tragic at the same time. I love those kinds of places, those Twilight Zones, you know. Today, Miami still has all of those elements, even more so, but the physical look of the place, especially at night, has completely changed, even though I don’t have as much of the city on screen as I might have liked.” It’s not all that has changed. Forget the pastel shades, the flamingos, the flashy jackets with rolled-up sleeves, the pounding Jan Hammer theme tune and the neon graphics. This is a far tougher, more practical Miami Vice, one that takes the business of fighting crime by working undercover very seriously and hasn’t time for goofing around with girls in bikinis. What we forget though, in the time since the show ended in 1989, is how ground-breaking and gritty the original series was, in its depiction of unorthodox police procedure and its commitment to prime-time moderated violence and gunplay. This time, Farrell and Foxx play the charismatic, unorthodox duo, working undercover infiltrating a South American drug trafficking network. The deeper into the business they go, the more the line between reality and fabrication becomes blurred. This is an altogether darker, more grounded take on the work of 97

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undercover cops, fighting a better equipped, infinitely richer enemy in Luis Tosar’s cold-eyed drug lord, Arcángel de Jesús Montoya, a typically isolated, ruthless Mann villain. Where he does show his hand, and gives the nod to the film’s origins, is in the shiny machinery: the growling Ferraris, the bouncing speedboats and the swanky private jets that ferry the new model Crockett and Tubbs from palm-sprayed Miami to their far-flung investigations around the Caribbean. Most surprising of all though, in Mann’s macho, testosteronefuelled world, this is his most tender film, featuring synchronous relationships that are given plenty of time to develop, between Farrell and Chinese superstar Gong Li and Foxx and the rising British talent Naomie Harris. These women get both undercover cops into trouble in different ways, adding heart and emotion to the grandly staged, percussively violent set-pieces that mark Mann’s films out from his legion of pretenders. This version of Miami Vice is a far more dangerous proposition than a meekly told re-hash of an old TV show, cravenly baiting retro-nostalgia and crippled by homage. Casting the film posed few problems for the director. “Jamie Foxx was a no-brainer for Tubbs, this is our third movie together. With Colin, it was a question of asking who out there would be Crockett. I saw his work on Minority Report, which was great, and I watched all of his other movies, but there was the prisoner of war movie with Bruce Willis, Hart’s War, that’s the one that got me. Everyone was telling me, ‘oh, Colin’s the real deal’, but he has these couple of moments in that film that really got me and that made up my mind. It’s not about glamour or celebrity; he is a great actor.” Was there any pressure on him to make more of the film’s small screen origins? “The studio really wanted to make this film, they were pushing me to get it started, but what I wanted to do was going against the conventional industry wisdom, which says that your summer tent-pole movie is a PG-13, disposable popcorn movie. My idea was that you do Miami Vice for real, make it a hard R-rated movie with real violence, real sexuality and using the language of the streets. That took them aback more than a little and there was a series of meetings where I had to make my point. But they knew what I wanted from the outset, and in sitting around the table it’s my job, in part, to convince them that this is the right way to go. We all have to feel that we are making the same movie, and that we want to make that movie. And to their credit, I brought my perspective on Miami Vice to them and they endorsed it completely.” Mann sees the studio’s willingness to listen to him as part of a sea-change in the way summer films are made and marketed. “There were two R-rated movies last summer, comedies, that both did really well. After that, Hollywood started to believe that maybe everyone is getting tired of the same old bubblegum summer movies. I felt strongly that nobody wanted to see some nostalgic version of Miami Vice, like the other movie versions of TV shows that have been made, with the same elements and cameos from the original cast and all that stuff. Not putting those kinds of movies down, you know, but why would you bother? If you want to see the Miami Vice from 1984, we’ve 98

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got a whole rack of really beautiful DVDs you can buy, so you can get your nostalgia trip that way.” Part of that new realism is updating the technology that goes into both creating and fighting crime. Even something as rudimentary as a mobile phone was the fevered dream of a madman at the time the original series was made, but the new Crockett and Tubbs are equipped with the latest in high-tech crimefighting gizmos, with the villains likewise equally well equipped. “Well,” says Mann, “it’s not really a balance. The bad guys have bigger budgets and more money, simple as that. That’s why they’re tricked out with the latest in technology.” He gives me a run down on the speculative finances. “Imagine you spend $500 to produce a product that you can then wholesale for $15,000. That’s just a single kilo of cocaine, and tons of this stuff is moved every week. Only two or three per cent is intercepted. So the business has unbelievable profitability and a tremendous amount of cash flow, meaning these guys can go out and buy the best. If you’re a drug producer and you want to find out what moves the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency] are making on you, you go out and buy the best people on the planet to do your counter-intelligence, your signal intercepts, to be on the DEA phone lines listening on your behalf. Like we show in the movie, if you want a private meeting, and you want to keep it private, you can buy a private army and close down a neighbourhood – jam the phones, block the roads – whatever. The scene as we show it is very real and the technology is a major aspect of that. It’s like the whole world is a globalised ‘Crazy Eddie’s’ and you can buy anything you want within it – drugs, software, weaponry, information. I have to hew to what’s real and that is the reality.” Mann himself isn’t afraid to spend money on the new cinema technologies that he used in making this movie, although he points out that my assumption – digital cameras make filmmaking more economical – is incorrect. “Not so,” he says, “and that’s a common misunderstanding. Digital on a major movie has little or no effect on the budget. You could use the technology to make cheaper movies, for like $100,000 or whatever, but why would I want to do that? Short answer, I don’t. If I go to Cuba, for example, and I see a location, beautifully crumbling buildings, Art Moderne architecture, astonishing scenery, even down to the old cars they have there and I want to use it in my movie. But I can’t shoot in Cuba, so I go to Uruguay and I build that house or recreate that scene or whatever. Uruguay is far away and it costs a lot of money to go there and do these things. I’m not ever going to be able to do that with $100,000.” Getting to the point of spending any money at all wasn’t easy. First off, his star Colin Farrell had a much-publicised battle with drink and “prescription” drugs that landed him a stint in rehab, from which he is now fully recovered. So much so that a visiting Finnish journalist’s well-intentioned gift of a bottle of expensive vodka is diplomatically returned by the Dubliner’s minders unopened, something unthinkable a year ago when the party animal was in his pomp. Temptations aside, filming was then delayed by a series of hurricanes 99

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(Dennis, Rita and the all-destroying Katrina) with Mann fighting to keep up with his hefty schedule throughout the shoot as Mother Nature battered the south-east coast of the US. These troubles were compounded by other, hotlydenied, rumours of script problems, well-publicised on-set incidents with firearms and gangs and, worst of all for the perfectionist director, a budget that eventually ballooned to a figure somewhere bordering $200 million, a quarter more than was originally envisaged. He is unwilling to discuss his star’s recent difficulties, saying only that he is delighted that Farrell has put his experiences behind him and was a charm to work with. Otherwise, he says, there was a lot of nonsense rumour and there wasn’t much he wasn’t prepared to deal with. “You know this is a big movie and things will happen while you’re making it. If you’re going to go to Miami to shoot and you’re there for June and July and the whole summer and you have to ask ‘what’s the weather going to be like?’, you’re going wrong from the start. We knew what was coming in terms of hurricanes, and we had to know exactly what we were doing and prepare for it in advance. From the moment the meteorologists gave us a hurricane warning, we were in a studio-approved overage situation (meaning the cost of down-time is factored separate to the shooting budget). Everybody agreed to this beforehand.” Still, it must have been frustrating? “If you’re going to let something like that frustrate you, you’re going to have a lot of trouble in this business. You reach down into yourself and you make sure everything and everyone is safe and secure and you use that time to prepare, maybe for a scene that will shoot a month and a half from now. You get the job done.” With a nod of finality, he shakes my hand again, thanks me for making the trip, picks up his recorder, gives a thumbs-up to his assistant and struts out the door, on to the next thing. “What about a sequel?” I shout after him. “We’ll have to see what happens,” comes the reply, the gently closing door pushing warm, twice-breathed air across the room as outside Hollywood burns.

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A MANN’S MAN’S WORLD1 Scott Foundas

If it is true, as Jean Renoir said, that a director makes only one movie, then Michael Mann makes the one I don’t just want to watch, it’s the one I want to live in. Perhaps you have seen it. It is the story of the night and the city and the men who inhabit it – professionals to the core who operate on instinct, sometimes living inside the law, but more often indifferent to it. They will meet on rooftops or in desolate industrial expanses to suss out the terrain, plotting their next move, while the low rumble of an electric guitar sounds in the distance. Inevitably, there will come a woman, and with her the momentary illusion of a “normal” life. And just as inevitably, that hoped-for bliss will prove as out of reach as Proust’s dream of fair Albertine. This is not always the story, for Michael Mann has made a historical epic about the French and Indian War (The Last of the Mohicans), a supernatural fable set in the waning days of World War II (The Keep), and a fine, underrated biopic of Muhammad Ali. Yet even those films are finally portraits of solitary men on a mission, the last exponents of some dying way of life. This is as true of Hawkeye the Mohican as it is of the journalist Lowell Bergman, the subject of The Insider (1999), who is willing to sacrifice himself to protect his source. Surely, if Mann had lived at the time of his namesake, director Anthony Mann (no relation), he would have been a master of noirs and Westerns. Now he is the maker of such films reconceived as existential urban tragedies. What I am describing here is not some adolescent when-men-were-men fantasy (on my part or Mann’s), but rather the sense of profound symbiosis From L.A. Weekly, July 26 (2006).

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between the content of a film, its form, and the personality of its maker. It’s the feeling that a movie isn’t just telling a story, but expressing a fully realized sensibility about the world and the motives of human behavior. This is the experience you get watching the movies of the directors Mann names as his influences – Dreyer, Murnau, Eisenstein – and of several others he does not mention but whose presence is nonetheless felt: Bresson, Peckinpah and JeanPierre Melville. And it is a feeling that courses through Mann’s own work. Few in American movies have delivered more consistently exciting picture shows over these past 25 years, or done so with such relative anonymity. Though he is their contemporary, Mann is not typically mentioned in the same breath as Coppola and Scorsese and the other enfants terribles of the New American Cinema, in part because he did not make his first theatrical feature until 1981. He has only once been nominated for the directing Oscar (for The Insider). And he may be the only major American filmmaker whose greatest popular success thus far has been on television. I am referring, of course, to Miami Vice, the trendsetting 1984–9 series on which Mann served as executive producer and resident stylistic guru. Indeed, if you lived in South Florida in the 1980s, as I did, it was hard to tell whether the show was more influenced by its location or the other way around. Now Miami Vice is a feature film written and directed by Mann, though a less reverent small-to-big-screen transfer can hardly be imagined. There are no pink flamingos or white linen suits to be found here, and the pastel picturepostcard vistas of the 1980s have given way to steely expanses that are like etchings on metallic plates. Even detectives Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) have evolved, as they find themselves confronted with a new generation of kingpins who are to yesterday’s Pablo Escobar what Wal-Mart is to the mom-and-pop corner market. Says Mann: “In a postmodern globalized world, there is no criminal organization locked to a geographical place producing one commodity, like cocaine. Now, if you’re running a transnational criminal organization, you’re a master of tubing, down which anything can move: pirated software, frozen chickens out of Russia, Ecstasy from Holland.” By Mann’s own admission, the dynamic between the old Vice and the new is “a profound connection and no relationship whatsoever, at one and the same time.” And that suits him just fine, for Michael Mann doesn’t like to repeat himself. “I like change. I don’t like being in the same room for too long,” he says in fast, clipped diction and a flat Chicago accent that’s been little dulled by three decades of living in Los Angeles. “That’s why a two-year period making a movie is perfect for me, and that’s why, after two years, I basically tried to substitute other folks for myself on Miami Vice [the TV show]. I said to myself: ‘I’m here trying to help folks making these little movies – why aren’t I directing?’ So I went off and made Manhunter [1986].” What drew Mann back, he says, was a combination of factors, starting with the changed landscape of Miami itself. “In 1984, Miami was larger than a 102

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small town, but smaller than a small city,” he says. “And sure, at the Mutiny, there were a bunch of wild guys who were making a lot of money every weekend running in loads. But that was then. Now, Miami is way different. It’s more South American than it is Central American; the money is bigger, there’s more of it; and it’s hugely cosmopolitan.” Moreover, there was the appeal of making a film about undercover police work – a subject left unexamined by Mann’s earlier films about law enforcement officials, career criminals and the often short distance separating the two. “I did some research into people who do very difficult kinds of enhanced undercover work. Really wild stuff – extremely dangerous, long term, some of it outside the country. Stuff that distorts your identity. I thought I knew about undercover – I’d seen Serpico and everything else – but I really hadn’t explored what happens when you go that far undercover.” It’s Tuesday morning, 10 days before Miami Vice arrives in theaters, and 24 hours after Mann has completed a grueling four-day press junket. As we talk, he gives me a tour of his expansive Santa Monica offices, oddly depopulated now, but until recently home base for Vice’s post-production. In one room, a bank of blinking and whirring hard drives store some 300 hours of dailies, all shot using the latest generation of high-definition video cameras – the second “film” Mann has made this way, following Collateral in 2004. And there is a screening room powered by a 2K digital projector and a pricey Avid Nitrous computer system, allowing Mann to look at a high-resolution output of the movie on a theater-sized screen, at any stage of the editing process, at any time of the day or night. “We run a 24-hour operation here,” Mann tells me, and it isn’t hard to believe. His reputation as a perfectionist precedes him. On the set, he frequently operates the camera himself. At screenings of his films, he has been known to rope off seats that he feels have an undesirable viewing angle. And right now, he is tape-recording our conversation as well. He is driven and demanding, and he expects nothing less of those who collaborate with him. “This work is for people who are artistically ambitious,” he says. “This is for people who like challenges. If you want to kick back and take life easy, this is not for you.” On Vice, in addition to his own exhaustive research, that meant subjecting stars Farrell and Foxx to three months of on-the-job training in Miami, where they worked with local and federal law enforcement officials learning not just how to seem like Crockett and Tubbs, but how to be Crockett and Tubbs. “We ran scenarios. We ran simulations. And they were as close to real reality and lifelike as you can imagine,” says Mann. “We ran loads in from offshore at midnight, in the pitch dark – two boats trying to find each other seven miles out at sea from Miami with no lights, using radio codes and the kind of signals these guys would use on a radio, knowing that stuff may be intercepted, so you’ve got to be talking about something else. And when they were supposed to hit a drop and unload a load, the drop would be blown and they’d have to get to a fallback drop, and when they got to the fallback drop the load would 103

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be short: they’re supposed to have 20 kilos and they’ve only got 18. You name it, we did it.” Mann and I have moved on to his private office – pastel and uncluttered, with sweeping views of the Santa Monica skyline – when we’re interrupted by a cell phone call. It’s Mann’s wife, Summer, asking about a replacement ink cartridge for their home computer printer. The interlude is a powerful corrective to those who might imagine that Mann’s Spartan protagonists are somehow alter-egos or examinations of self: Michael Mann has a wife. Of more than 30 years. Who calls him at work about printer ink. He also has four grown children, including a daughter, Ami, who has followed in her father’s footsteps, writing and directing for TV and the movies. But beyond that, Mann is loath to talk about himself or his personal life, and in that he is like one of his own characters, unwilling to confuse business with pleasure. This much he will allow: born in 1943, he grew up in Chicago’s rough-andtumble Humboldt Park neighborhood, where, as a teenager, he fell deeply under the spell of the burgeoning Chicago blues-music scene. He is the son of Jack Mann, a WWII combat vet whom Mann describes as “a small businessman, and not very successful at it; but he was a spectacular human being – highly, highly principled, and he affected a lot of people’s lives in a lot of ways that I don’t ever really talk about that much.” He was also close to his paternal grandfather, Sam, a Russian immigrant who had fought in the First World War, and says that both men “influenced the way I think about things. They both had dramatic lives, so the idea of some kind of sedentary, mercantile, bourgeois thing, when I was 20 or 21 years old – that was not going to happen.” Conspicuously, Mann doesn’t talk about his mother, in this or any other interviews. Sure of what he didn’t want to do with his life, but unsure of what he did want, Mann enrolled at the politically active University of Wisconsin–Madison campus at the dawn of the turbulent 1960s. “I was really impacted upon by the ’60s, so the idea of real life, real people, life in the streets – that’s something that’s very much a part of my formation,” he says, noting that his cultural interests at the time ranged from Chicago bookies to Che Guevara; his academic ones from geology to history and architecture. Movies came later, when the Madison campus began offering its first courses in film history and film theory. Mann signed up and liked what he saw. But his real inspiration came with the 1963 release of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. “It said to my whole generation of filmmakers that you could make an individual statement of high integrity and have that film be successfully seen by a mass audience all at the same time,” he says. “In other words, you didn’t have to be making Seven Brides for Seven Brothers if you wanted to be a part of the commercial film industry, or be reduced to niche filmmaking if you wanted to be serious about cinema. So that’s what Kubrick meant, aside from the fact that I loved Kubrick and he was a big influence.” Saved from the Vietnam draft by asthma, Mann enrolled at the London 104

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Film School, where he made “pretentious” student films he refuses to screen anymore, then segued into commercials and documentary production, funneling the money he made into more personal projects. (His 1971 experimental short film, Jaunpuri, won a prize at Cannes.) After six years, he returned to the U.S. and settled on the West Coast, landing work as a writer on Starsky & Hutch and Police Story, before being hired by the late Aaron Spelling to create the series Vega$ in 1978. His true debut came the following year with The Jericho Mile, a feature-length film for television about a Folsom prison lifer (brilliantly played by Peter Strauss) whose distance-running prowess earns him a shot at the Olympics and a rare glimpse of life beyond the jailyard walls. Shot on location with many real inmates in the cast, Jericho won three Emmys, including one for Mann and co-writer Patrick J. Nolan’s script, and it remains one of the most authentic and starkly unsentimental of prison movies. More importantly, in Strauss’ Larry “Rain” Murphy, it offered early evidence of Mann’s affinity for men of heightened self-awareness – antidotes to the Freudian psychoanalysis that is the familiar model of dramatic characterization. “I’m interested in the phenomenon of it – awareness heightened, or awareness absent, and the price you pay for either,” Mann says, in one of many concerted attempts to disabuse me of making thematic connections between his films. His first two theatrical features, Thief (1981) and Manhunter, together with Vice on TV, announced Mann as one of the most breathtaking cinematic stylists of his era. These were gripping thrillers in which the documentary hyper-realism of Jericho was married to a feverishly beautiful graphic sensibility: dramatic colored lighting, actors framed small against great canvases of water and sky, jarring frame-rate manipulations, and long set-pieces in which dialogue was displaced by contemporary pop music. It’s impossible to discuss Mann’s work without addressing these matters of style, though Mann himself would just as soon that we not. He’s suspicious of the superficiality of visual beauty, he says, and resists the “modernism” label that would make for such an easy fit (except to say that he’s “really fascinated with what’s happening right now”). But what is powerful and moving in Mann’s work (and, admittedly, rather hard to describe) is the way that style – which is to say everything that is in the frame, from the costumes to the locations to the movement of the camera itself – seems to grow out of the characters, to be expressive of something, as opposed to the vacant prettifications of Adrian Lyne or Tony Scott. I am talking about the way, in Manhunter, that the sensual caress of a blind woman’s hand against the skin of an anesthetized tiger tells us more about that woman than any dialogue possibly could; how, in Heat (1995), the flashing lights of an airport runway become a desperate, Gatsbyesque beacon; or how, in The Insider, an elaborate hotel-room mural manifests the escapist dream of the beleaguered whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe). These are images as abstract and epochal as anything in Kubrick’s 2001. “What I try to do – I mean try, because you don’t get there all the time – is 105

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to have impact with content,” Mann says. “It’s those moments in which you’re trying to bring people beyond filmed theater. If I have an ambition, it’s that. In The Insider, I had violence – lethal, life-taking aggression – all happening psychologically, all with people talking to other people. What am I making a film of? What am I shooting? What’s in the viewfinder of that camera? It’s a head, talking, in space, in a place. So then, the excitement for me as a filmmaker was the challenge of making suspense and drama involving life and death in which everything I’m shooting is only a human face. So, you start thinking about what you can do to make the places talk.” To date, Mann’s masterpiece remains Heat, the sprawling chronicle of a career thief, Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), planning one last score before dropping out of the game, while staying one step ahead of the dogged LAPD detective, Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), who’s intent on bringing him down. It was another story of professionalism, and one that had haunted Mann for decades. He had written the script in the 1970s, first discussed making it in the 1980s, and had directed half of it as a TV movie, L.A. Takedown, in 1989. Heat was promoted at the time as the first screen pairing of two legendary Hollywood stars and quickly immortalized for a breathtaking shootout on the streets of downtown L.A., but what was more notable about the film was the full dimensionality in which Mann envisaged nearly a dozen major characters, skirting police story clichés to show them all (cops, crooks or otherwise) in a richly human light. “Why would their lives be less than dimensional?” he asks, as if the answer were obvious. “Of course they’re dimensional: they have mothers and fathers and kids. I knew a lot of these people, people like this. What do you have? You have a complete human being. The Tom Sizemore character: he has a nuclear family. He cares about his kids the same way you care about your kids. The big difference is that he doesn’t care about your kids: he’ll use one of your kids as a shield.” Mann admits to being obsessive about his work. He likens himself to people who climb mountains for sport. “The next one is exciting when it’s a little bit more difficult,” he says with a grin. There is a moment from one of his films, I tell him, that I think perfectly embodies that sentiment. It is the opening scene of The Insider, in which Lowell Bergman is driven through the streets of Baalbek, Lebanon, en route to a private audience with the Hezbollah leader Sheikh Fadlallah, whom he is attempting to land for a 60 Minutes interview. The scene, which was actually filmed in Israel, might have been shot anywhere – for most of his trip, Bergman is blindfolded, and no other scene in the movie takes place in the Middle East. But then there is a shot, inside Fadlallah’s darkened compound, where Bergman throws open a window and suddenly the sights and sounds of the bustling city below stream through. That is the moment, I say, when we know we are watching a Michael Mann movie. “You know it’s not Montana,” Mann jokes. He wouldn’t have it any other way. He is an iconoclast, and he prides 106

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himself on it. “That’s the thrill of doing this, to be able to go deep,” he says. “First of all, why would you not? I mean, why would anybody want to slack off, take it easy, do it at half speed? I can’t imagine why anybody would want to, when you have the opportunity, for example, to do what Will Smith did in Ali. People think, Okay, you learn to box for two or three months and then you go shoot it. Right! The accomplishment of Will Smith in that movie is extraordinary. It’s not just the movement and the boxing – that’s difficult enough; it’s having your head in 1964, which came from sitting where you’re sitting and talking to Geronimo Pratt. That’s the challenge, because that’s what’s really, sincerely exciting – to get things to the point where they become emotionalized and real, so hopefully they have an impact upon audiences.” It sounds, I say, like the way a cop prepares to go undercover. “That’s what knocked me out, which I’d never really realized before. I met these guys who were doing undercover work where they’re inside for six, seven, eight months – really heavy-duty stuff with very dangerous people. I’d say to them: ‘What’s the high? What are you doing this for? You’re making $100,000 a year, so it’s not about the money. It’s not to serve and protect really. I mean, of course you’re a moral person and these vicious crimes against these innocent people offend you deeply – but that’s not why you’re doing it.’ And this one guy says, ‘Well, when I’m there and I’m talking to some guy about how I’m going to sling this dope here and this dope there, and then we’re going to move the money from A to B and B to C and C to D and it’s going to all wind up with him owning a shopping center in Berlin, and his eyes are wide and I’m putting it down and he’s buying it and I’m scoring – man, there’s nothing like that!’ Guess what? That’s Al Pacino on a stage! That’s performance! That’s theater for real.” “These guys are projecting themselves, and they’re talking about what they do in dramaturgical terms. It’s like An Actor Prepares, only there’s no take two. If you’re a filmmaker and you’re hearing these tales . . . well, that answers your first question about why I wanted to make Miami Vice.” In Heat’s most iconic scene, Hanna and McCauley meet for coffee at Kate Mantilini and lay out their lives for each other in the tersely lyrical dialogue that has become Mann’s signature. It includes the following exchange: Hanna: I don’t know how to do anything else. McCauley: Neither do I. Hanna: I don’t much want to either. McCauley: Neither do I. That could just as soon be Mann talking. “When you say that I can go and make a movie, I feel like I’m one of the most fortunate men,” he says. “I feel myself to be a fortunate man that I found something to do that I really love.” The proof is in the pudding: Mann’s films are works of deep passion at a time when it is ever more fashionable to seem cool and detached. He makes big demands of audiences, but bigger ones of himself, and if that partly explains why Mann – whose movies have performed strongly, but unspectacularly at 107

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Figure 14.1  Heat (1995). The coffee shop scene. Criminal Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro). “A guy told me one time don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.”

Figure 14.2  Heat (1995). The coffee shop scene. Robbery-homicide detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino). “I spend all my time chasing guys like you around the block. . . . I don’t know how to do anything else. . . . I don’t much want to either.”

the box office – has never had a major hit, it is our good fortune that he has never given in to compromise. As I’m leaving, he asks me how I think Miami Vice will do and I tell him that I wish it the best, but that it may be too smart of a summer movie to really take off. All that matters is that it do well enough to insure that Michael Mann can go on climbing mountains. 108

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NUMBER ONE WITH A BULLET1 John Patterson

Michael Mann is talking about the last two hours of John Dillinger’s life, as the infamous and charismatic midwestern bank-robber sat in the Biograph movie theater in Chicago, watching Clark Gable playing Blackie Gallagher, a suspiciously Dillingeresque criminal, in WS Van Dyke’s Manhattan Melodrama. “There’s even a reference to Dillinger in the early part of the movie!” says Mann. “Imagine being John Dillinger sitting there in the movie house. All your friends are dead; your woman, the true love of your life, is gone. There’s fewer and fewer people like you any more. You’re facing these gigantic evolutionary forces trying to crush you – organized crime on the one hand and the FBI on the other. And the end is near. You’re not a sentimentalist about it – you don’t think you’re going to live for ever anyway. And you, Dillinger, are sitting there and Clark Gable delivers these words to you, while unbeknownst to you, less than 75 feet away there are 30 FBI agents out there planning to kill you.” John Dillinger, the Indiana farm boy who robbed more banks than historians can now count, and busted out of not one but two jails, was and remains intimately linked with the movies. He didn’t just like Clark Gable movies – he looked like Clark Gable. It is said that he copped his signature move of vaulting elegantly over a bank’s counter, one hand on the wood, the other clutching a huge Thompson machine gun, from some Warner Brothers gangster movie or other. Having spent the years 1924 to 1933 – the whole of his 20s – rotting in an Indiana penitentiary for a drunken, botched mugging he always regretted, he was insatiably hungry for life and whatever it could offer in the depths From The Guardian (London), June 26 (2009).

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Figure 15.1  Public Enemies (2009). John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) is taken into custody.

of the Great Depression. Money, women, excitement – sure, he got all these and more in the headlong, event-filled last 13 months of his life, but he also loved the movies, which had gone from silent to sound while he was inside, and he went as often as he could manage. One scene in Public Enemies, Mann’s tremendously gripping account of Dillinger’s criminal career, shows him watching a newsreel about himself in a crowded cinema. The news announcer tells the audience that Dillinger “may be in the seat right next to you in this theatre,” and asks everyone to “look at the person to your left, and now to your right.” No one spots the feted outlaw. One of the funniest lines in the movie comes near the end when the team of FBI agents must decide which local movie house Dillinger is more likely to attend that evening. The two nearest cinemas are showing Manhattan Melodrama and Little Miss Marker. Referring to the latter, one of the agents ventures, laconically, “I don’t see John Dillinger watching no Shirley Temple picture.” Quite right. Dillinger was shot down by the FBI, led by Special Agent Melvin Purvis (played in the movie by Christian Bale), outside the Biograph that same evening. Thereafter he lived in legend, and in movies. He’s the basis for Humphrey Bogart’s doomed gangster Roy Earle in Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra and he lurks behind characters such as Farley Granger’s Bowie in Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night. He’s played (with staggering inaccuracy) by bad-boy actor Lawrence Tierney in the King brothers’ Dillinger (1945); by Warren Oates (like Gable, a convincingly simian lookalike) in John Milius’s Dillinger (1973); by Robert Conrad in Lewis Teague’s The Lady in Red (1979); and by Mark Harmon in the TV movie Dillinger (1991). He’s a bona fide American folk hero, even 75 years after his death. “He was a national hero as well,” adds Mann (who, considering he’s friends with seasoned cops and lots of professional criminals, is oddly socially 110

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Figure 15.2  Public Enemies. John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) smirks as the audience in the movie theater is told, “He may be sitting amongst you.”

awkward, diffident and, dare I say it, a tad nerdish, in person). “When we were location-scouting, we went up to Little Bohemia Lodge in Manitowish, Wisconsin [the site of an infamous shoot-out between the FBI, Dillinger and his gang, including the psychotic, trigger-happy manic depressive Lester ‘Baby Face’ Nelson]. We walked into this lodge, which is still standing and is something of a local tourist attraction. They’d taken all the contemporary newspaper accounts and kind of used them as wallpaper – all Dillinger headlines. Chicago American, newspapers like that. Monday, three-inch-high typeface: ‘Dillinger breaks out of jail!’ Tuesday: ‘Dillinger robs bank in Grangecastle!’ Then Saturday . . . same thing, Monday, Wednesday . . . I mean, this was every two or three days! We were scouting up there during the presidential primaries and, believe me, Obama didn’t get banner headlines like this guy! Dillinger at one point was the second most popular man in America after President Roosevelt. And he was a national hero for a good reason. He was robbing the very institutions, the banks, which had afflicted the people for four years, and after four years nothing was getting any better. You’re in the depths of the Great Depression in 1933 and when the authorities came after him – these were the same authorities that couldn’t fix anything. They also couldn’t remedy the misery of people out of work, or made homeless, or made into orphans by the Dustbowl. They couldn’t do anything right, and they also couldn’t catch John Dillinger. And he had a wicked sense of humor and really knew how to use the press. He was outrageous and funny, so you bet he was a hero.” Public Enemies is the first movie to attempt to disentangle the Dillinger myth from the facts – until now every other filmmaker has, so to speak, printed the legend – and one wonders, in retrospect, why it took Mann this long to get around to it, so well matched are the gangster’s story and the themes and 111

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concerns that have animated Mann throughout his career. Mann got to grips with the story after reading, in Vanity Fair, an extract from Bryan Burrough’s comprehensive history of the rural bandits of the 1930s (also called Public Enemies). While researching, Burrough noticed that all the infamous bandits, bank robbers and kidnappers of the period – Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelly, Alvin “Creepy” Karpis and Ma Barker’s hellish brood, and Dillinger himself – all rose and fell in a single 14-month period in 1933–34. The perception that a national crime wave was under way gave J. Edgar Hoover, then a little-known Washington bureaucrat heading a toothless agency of unarmed agents, the chance to consolidate his power and lay the foundations for a federal police force able to pursue criminals across state lines. Mann recruited screenwriters: NYPD Blue writer and Southland creator Ann Biderman, and novelist and sometime Guardian writer Ronan Bennett. Mann had admired Bennett’s Congo-based novel The Catastrophist and an unfilmed screenplay about Che Guevara: “We met up because Ronan had done time [Bennett was wrongly convicted of a political murder as a schoolboy in Northern Ireland and was imprisoned in Long Kesh for a year until his conviction was overturned], and with his background I felt he had an understanding of Dillinger even though there was nothing about his culture to clue him into Dillinger at all.” It probably helped that Bennett had also written two movies – Face and Lucky Break – about professional criminals and a prison escape, respectively. Together they pared down Burrough’s epic into a manageable narrative. The writers tossed out Bonnie and Clyde, who still have enough unearned mythic weight to capsize a movie about Dillinger. They ditched the Barkers – aside from a few passing appearances by Alvin Karpis (played by Giovanni Ribisi), the mastermind of the Barker gang – and cut everything about Pretty Boy Floyd except his death at the hands of Purvis. That left Dillinger and his occasional cohort Baby Face Nelson (played by the British actor Stephen Graham), and Dillinger’s girlfriend Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard). What results is a Michael Mann movie through and through. In structural outline, it has much in common with his other movies: a charismatic, dedicated and doomed professional criminal (who nonetheless, like James Caan’s heist-man Frank in Thief, would describe himself as “a straight arrow”) faces off against an equally competent antagonist (in this case Purvis). The criminal strives for independence and self-determination, but is oppressed and thwarted not just by his near-doppelganger on the right side of the legal fence, but by wider forces that seek to capture or exploit him, in this case the Feds and the nascent Chicago Outfit, which sees the bank robbers as a distracting anachronism drawing unwelcome heat down on their own oddly corporate endeavors. Each antagonist has his own army-like group of cohorts, all carefully ranked and calibrated, just like the DEA and the drug-lords in Miami Vice, the thieves and the cops in Heat and Thief, the Redcoats and the Native Americans in Last 112

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of the Mohicans, or even CBS News and big tobacco in The Insider. Dillinger at one point expresses the desire to “just slide off the edge of the map,” a sentiment also voiced by Frank in Thief, who essentially destroys his entire life just to prevent others – crooked cops and more senior criminals – encroaching on his independence, and by Heat’s bank-robber Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), whose code requires him to drop out of his own life in a trice at the first sign of a bust. “I’m fascinated with intense lives,” Mann tells me. “My own, I guess, or Jeff Wigand’s or Lowell Bergman’s (in The Insider), or an aviator in the case of Howard Hughes.” A lot of your heroes are doomed, then? “Well, you know, we’re all doomed in a way . . .,” he chuckles. “We’re all going to the same place, but I’m most interested in people who are actually aware of it. Doomed, facing death – it’s also a big theme in 1933, it’s what people were thinking about.” If Dillinger was thinking about death, he didn’t seem to fear it much. “The movie I saw in my head, the movie I wanted to make, had to do with this kinda wild guy who wants everything, and he wants it right now, with this passion. And he doesn’t just get released from prison – he explodes out of the landscape, wanting everything he hasn’t had for 10 years with all the power and force of his personality and his skill-sets. And he launches this unique ride, this white-hot trajectory – three or four lifetimes’ worth of dynamics crowded into one lifetime that, finally, is only 13 months long. It’s taking down the Greencastle bank on the way to picking Billie up in Florida. And saying to her, ‘Where do you want to spend Christmas?’ ‘I dunno, Tucson?’ I mean they’re driving all over the country like there’s a freeway system, but a good 20, 30 years before there was a freeway system. And they seem to score on a Monday, and then get shot up on Thursday and get patched up a week later and then take down another bank the next day. Then they’re pinched next Monday and then they’re on a plane being extradited to another state, and then he breaks out of that jail, then they shoot their way out of that scrape. Not in the movies – in real life! So the intensity of it – and where does he think he’s going? That for me is really the heart of it – what’s he thinking from the inside-out? For me, it’s the opportunity to take this intense trajectory, this fascinating life filled with mystery, and, if I could, to locate an audience intimately within the frame of his existence and to experience some of that rush of . . . where’s this going? What’re you doing? You’re not gonna live for ever. And then you find yourself in the movie, in the Biograph – to be on that ride. That is why I made the movie.” There is this sort of reassuringly familiar formula governing many of Mann’s movies, no matter how disparate their themes, and Public Enemies successfully 113

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reworks it once again. This time, however, Mann was faced with the formidable visual and folkloric iconography established by Warner Bros and RKO gangster movies in the 1930s and 1940s, and then thoroughly reworked and revised by the long succession of 30s-revival movies that came in the wake of 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde (including Milius’s Dillinger). Mann was in danger of treading some wearyingly stale and over-familiar ground. “I had a different orientation,” he says. “Mine was to make it so you feel you’re there. I didn’t want audiences looking at 1933. As far as I could make it happen, I wanted to make them feel like they were in 1933. Hence I used hi-def, and that determined the range of choices on the surfaces of everything: set decoration, wallpaper, fabrics, clothes, everything. It became like, pile detail upon detail so it feels as complex as” – he points across his hotel suite – “that desktop over there, or the mess on top of that bureau up there.” Choosing to shoot the movie digitally has evoked some anger and confusion among viewers who saw the movie early on and claimed that it takes the spectator out of the illusion of period reality (I would disagree – to me, the movie looks stunningly clear and immediate). One associates digital photography more with Mann’s steel-and-glass contemporary works – Heat, The Insider, Collateral – not with the largely brick-and-wood environments of the 1930s rural midwest, but Mann remains unapologetic. “Digital makes things feel more real, like you could reach out and touch them. You can see every pore on Depp’s face. You get great depth-of-field, we got very close with the lenses, and you don’t have that fuzzy lack of focus at night. That was why we went digital. I thought I was gonna shoot on film and I did these tests side-by-side. I came away from the tests – we just brought a Sony F23 camera out there to look at it, to be diligent – and I looked at them, and that [celluloid] looked like a period film, and this [digital] looked like what it was like to be alive in 1933. In the end it made total sense: video looks like reality, it’s more immediate, it has a vérité surface to it. Film has this liquid kind of surface, feels like something made up.” What did he ask of his lead actors, Depp and Bale? “Immersion, mainly. I’m having a good time shooting this, but on a more serious level, I ain’t playing. This isn’t a lark. The commitment I need from both guys is right there, though. And then you get into the relativistic discussion of how actors work. Suffice it to say, every actor works differently. Laurence Olivier would put on his costume and when the wardrobe was right, he was in character. That sounds superficial, but it’s true, and look at the results. Johnny plays very strongly when he feels an inner identification, which he certainly felt with John Dillinger. He’d been interested in Dillinger for a long time. So he draws from an internal source; the wardrobe is important to him, certain physical things. What I was after from Depp, as a Johnny Depp fan, is what I wanted to see Johnny Depp do – something I hadn’t seen him do for a long time – was play a tough man. And Johnny is a man – he’s not a boy, but a tough man. And secondly, I know some of the deeper currents within him, and I wanted to see 114

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an emotionally exposed piece of work from him. That was the entry requirement for him doing this. And Christian Bale has a completely different way of working; he just dives into the deep end of the pool, that’s it. From day one to the last day of shooting. There’s no work in this film by any of these fine, fine actors, starting with Johnny, that is performance. I mean, they are there. They’re living it, and being it.” Public Enemies is rife with contemporary echoes and not simply because it’s the first large-scale movie about the Great Depression to be made in the shadow of this depression, however great it turns out to be. Billy Crudup’s Hoover has a Rumsfeldian cast of mind – he’s an adept political manipulator using a perceived period of national distress to build up a formidable powerbase of an agency, and he’s not shy about using torture. At one point he tells Purvis, in his prissy, strangulated accent, “Suspects are to be interrogated ‘vigorously’. Grilled. No obsolete notions of sentimentality. We are in the modern age and we are making history. Take direct, expedient action.” And he adds, with a fascistic flourish reminiscent of Rumsfeld’s Abu Ghraib memos, “As they say in Italy these days, ‘Take off the white gloves.’ ” When Billie Frechette is beaten late in the movie to extract Dillinger’s whereabouts, you just know what that fat Chicago phonebook on the desk will be used for (James Caan was abused with the same tome in Thief). But even Mann, preparing the movie in 2007 and shooting it last year, had no idea how contemporary Public Enemies would seem by its release date. Was that just luck? “Well,” he laughs sardonically, “I dunno about ‘luck’. I wouldn’t call this a ‘lucky’ time in our history. It certainly has happened. I doubt the echoes will be a big factor with audiences. I mean, it is to you and I and others who observe these things, these historical patterns, but as for everyone else,” he ventures, with a nod to Transformers, his principal competitor at the multiplexes this summer, “I guess they’ll show up after they’re all done with flying robots and toys.”

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Figure 16.1  Heat (1995). L. to r., Eady (Amy Brenneman), Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro).

16

THE STUDY OF MANN1 F.X. Feeney

Thieves, assassins, mad men, whistle-blowers, and gamblers have all populated the extreme adventures of Michael Mann’s films. For more than 30 years, with style and precision, he has examined the richness of human experience. Chicago born and raised, Michael Mann was majoring in English literature at the University of Wisconsin when a screening of G.W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street moved him to want to become a director. Discovering Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove at a local theater later that same year closed the deal. He entered the London Film School in 1965, then crossed to Paris as a film correspondent for NBC television to cover the May 1968 student uprisings. He returned to the U.S. in 1971 and made his first mark in television, writing for Starsky & Hutch and directing Police Woman and a number of movies for television, culminating in The Jericho Mile (1979), which won a DGA Award and was released to critical acclaim as a theatrical feature in Europe. While learning the ropes, Mann was saving his money and building his own production company. His successful TV work in the 1980s – Miami Vice and Crime Story – afforded him the autonomy to choose only those projects that most excited him. Asked recently how he was able to maintain creative control over his first theatrical feature, Thief (1981), he replied: “Easy. I cut the checks.” In all, he has directed ten features, creating a body of work that is abundantly energetic in its precision and variety, from the psychologically layered crime film Heat (1995), to the historical epics The Last of the Mohicans (1992) From DGA Quarterly, Winter (2012).

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and Public Enemies (2009), to an all-American study of corruption, The Insider (1999). Most recently, Mann directed the pilot and is the executive producer of the new HBO horse racing series Luck. We caught up with him at his Santa Monica-based production company, in his office filled with skyscrapers of books and art and artifacts from the many eras he’s visited in his movies. F.X. FEENEY: A lot of directors know from an early age that this is what they want to do. Did you have a life plan that you wanted to make films? MICHAEL MANN: I wasn’t really interested in cinema until I saw Dr. Strangelove, alongside a set of films by F.W. Murnau and G.W. Pabst for a college course. These were a revelation. I’d already seen some of the French New Wave and some Russian films, but the idea of directing, of shooting a film myself? Never. Prior to Strangelove, it simply had not seemed possible that you could work in the mainstream film industry and make very ambitious films for a big mainstream audience. The whole film is a third act. The mad general played by Sterling Hayden is totally submerged in his character the moment we first encounter him. There’s no prelude, no context. We’re just with him, we know who the guy is, and we catch up along the way. Even as a young man I found that intensity very exciting – how immediate it was. Q: So how did you organize yourself as a director? What did you have to pull together to make it happen? A: One of the most instructive events was when, right out of the London Film School, I got a job working for Bill Kaplan in the British office of 20th Century Fox in Soho Square. Bill was production supervisor for a lot of films that were being made at that time in England, owing to the budgetary rebates then in force under The Eady Plan. Working in physical production, helping organize scheduling, budgeting, and production logistics became for me a model of how to think, of how to organize the totality of a movie. I apply the lessons I learned there to this day, not just in terms of budgeting – but in terms of the content of a movie. There’s a critical planning that is very three dimensional at this early stage. That has become really important in everything I’ve done since. Q: Your earliest films were documentaries. Is that what formed your commitment to authenticity? A: My ambition was always to make dramatic films. I had a strong sense of the value of drama growing up in Chicago, which has long had a thriving theater scene. I’d also found, working a lot of odd jobs as a kid – as a short-order cook, on construction, or as a cab driver – that there was tremendous richness in reallife experience, and contact with people and circumstances that were sometimes 118

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Figure 16.2  The Last of the Mohicans (1992). L. to r., Chingachgook (Russell Means), Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis).

extreme. I was drawn to this instinctively. You find out things when you’re with a real-life thief, things you could never make up just sitting in a room. The converse is also true. Just because you discover something interesting, you don’t have to use it; there’s no obligation. Yet life itself is the proper resource. I’ve never really changed that habit of wanting to bring preparation into the real world of the picture, with a character that actors are going to portray. Q: Is that why you develop biographies for every character, not just for your use but for your actors as well? A: I like to know everything about a character. Major characters, minor characters, even if a picture’s got nothing to do with what their childhood is, I want to know what their childhood was like. What were their parents like? Where did they grow up? What do they like, what do they not like? What kinds of women are attracted to them? Why are these women attracted to them? If the character is a woman, who is she? How is she relating to the situation of her life? Q: In a period piece such as The Last of the Mohicans, it must have been difficult to get the kind of authenticity you’re after. A: Making The Last of the Mohicans was particularly challenging. We were trying to re-create the conditions, the tones, the value systems of 1757, particularly for somebody raised in an Algonquian-speaking tribal group, such as the Mohicans. How does Hawkeye come on to a woman? How does he say, “Hey: I like you. Let’s go out?” Behind that is an anthropological perspective I always want to have. I want the actor to have that same deep clarity about his or her character. Mind you, this inquiry includes not wasting time on stuff that 119

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Figure 16.3  Miami Vice (2006). A thousand broken diamonds of light glisten on the surface of the Atlantic Ocean and Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) momentarily forgets his life of stealthy, feral danger.

is ­immaterial. On The Insider Russell Crowe met the real Jeffrey Wigand three times, and then we both said, “That’s enough.” He got everything he needed, and there was that fine point in which he was still on a frontier – needing to project and extrapolate what Jeffrey would do. The trap both Russell and I wanted to avoid was falling into a Xerox of the actual guy. I didn’t want anything imitative. What results therefore is Russell’s evocation of Wigand, the essential, authentic Wigand that’s based on his origins and what he’s confronting. Q: What was your connection to Wigand as a character in this drama? A: The beauty of Wigand is his awkwardness. He was definitely a hero, warts and all. He’s a scientist who went to work for a tobacco company – for the money. That’s what makes his obstinacy so heroic. His personal failings by contrast are what make him so much like us. If there had been bonding and pal-ship between him and Lowell Bergman [the producer from 60 Minutes goading him to take action played by Al Pacino], I might not have had the idea to make the film. It was precisely because Lowell didn’t exactly care for the guy, and yet put everything on the line to defend him, that I could access him, access the pair of them, and hopefully persuade the audience to access him. Q: Are you conscious of choosing actors who share your intensity? A: It’s usually a good idea. [Laughs] I’ve made one or two mistakes, but most of the people I’ve worked with are really down for the cause. Q: Do you like to rehearse your actors before and during shooting? A: Yes, but never for too long. There’s an art to rehearsal. Never rehearse to the point where you wish you’d shot it. I always want to stop just before 120

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the moment becomes so actual that I wish I had a camera. I don’t want that to happen until take 3 or 4 of the day we’re shooting it. You always want to back off, you always want to leave potential. There’s a tremendous thrill for me in finding the spontaneous moment. Sometimes that happens when you’re smart enough not to rehearse too much – when you know where to stop, because otherwise you’ll get too programmed. Other times, that spontaneity comes with a liberation you get at the end of tremendous preparation – where everybody is confident and the players know exactly what they’re going to do. Q: How did you apply that to the famous coffee shop scene between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Heat (1995) when the two adversaries meet head-tohead for the first and only time? A: We did two things: we discussed the scene. Then we did some rehearsals, but I was wary because the entire movie is a dialectic that works backward from its last moment, which is the death of the thief Neil McCauley [De Niro], while the detective Vincent Hanna [Pacino], who’s just taken McCauley’s life, stands with him as he passes. The “marriage” of the two of them in this contrapuntal story is the coffee shop scene. Now Pacino and De Niro are two of the greatest actors on the planet, so I knew they would be completely alive to each other – each one reacting off the other’s slightest gesture, the slightest shift of weight. If De Niro’s right foot sitting in that chair slid backward by so much as an inch, or his right shoulder dropped by just a little bit, I knew Al would be reading that. They’d be scanning each other, like an MRI. Both men recognize that their next encounter will mean certain death for one of them. Gaining an edge is why they’ve chosen to meet. So we read the scene a number of times before shooting – not a lot – just looking at it on the page. I didn’t want it memorized. My goal was to get them past the unfamiliarity of it. But of course these two already knew it impeccably. Q: You made an interesting choice directorially in the finished film. The whole scene takes place in over-the-shoulder close-ups – each man’s point of view on the other. A: We shot that scene with three cameras, two over-the-shoulders and one profile shot, but I found when editing that every time we cut to the profile, the scene lost its one-on-one intensity. I’ll often work with multiple cameras, if they’re needed. In this case, I knew ahead of time that Pacino and De Niro were so highly attuned to each other that each take would have its own organic unity. Whatever one said, and the specific way he’d say it, would spark a specific reaction in the other. I needed to shoot in such a way that I could use the same take from both angles. What’s in the finished film is almost all of take 121

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11 – because that has an entirely different integrity and tonality from takes 10, or 9, or 8. All of this begins and ends with scene analysis. It doesn’t matter if it’s two people in a room or two opposing forces taking over a street. Action comes from drama, and drama is conflict: What’s the conflict? Q: At the opposite end of the scale from that intimate two-man scene in the coffee shop is the huge street-battle in Heat. How did you prepare a sequence that massive? A: That scene arose out of choreography, and was absolutely no different than staging a dance. We rehearsed in detail by taking over three target ranges belonging to the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. We built a true-scale mock-up of the actual location we were using along 5th Street in downtown L.A., with flats and barriers standing in for where every parked car was going to be, every mailbox, every spot where De Niro, Tom Sizemore, and Val Kilmer were going to seek cover as they moved from station to station. Every player was trained with weapons the way somebody in the military would be brought up, across many days, with very rigid rules of safety, to the point where the safe and prodigious handling of those weapons became reflexive. Then, as a culmination, we blocked out the action with the actors shooting live rounds at fixed targets as they moved along in these rehearsals. The confidence that grew out of such intensive preparations – all proceeding from a very basic dramatic point – meant that when we were finally filming on 5th Street, firing blanks, each man was as fully and as exactly skilled as the character he represented. Q: What was the ‘conflict’ your choreography was proceeding from? A: McCauley’s unit wants to get out, while the police want something else, and are sending in their assets. Judged strictly in terms of scene analysis and character motivation, the police are used to entering a situation with overwhelming power on their side. When they’re assaulted by people who know what they’re doing, they don’t do well. McCauley’s guys are simply more motivated, and have skills that easily overwhelm the police. Choreography has to tell a story; there’s no such thing as a stand-alone shootout. Who your characters are as characters determines your outcome. Q: Collateral (2004) is largely a two-character drama, which must have created its own demands. How did you prep your players for that film? A: Prepping Jamie Foxx for his role in Collateral was a matter of getting him to understand the neighborhood this man came from, and the death-by-repetition involved in being a cab driver. Having been a cab driver myself, I knew what a grind that is. For Tom Cruise, who plays a hit man, the preparation involved 122

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all kinds of crazy stuff in preproduction – acquiring the skill sets he would need to be this man. We had him stalking various members of the crew for weeks, in secret, learning their habits, and then picking the moment. This person would be coming out of a gym at 7 a.m. and feel somebody slap something on his back – and it would be Tom, who had just put a Post-it on their back. In our virtual world, that was a confirmed kill. Q: Each of your films seems to set out in a different direction from the one that preceded it. What attracts you to a project? A: Usually I think I know what I’m going to look for next, and usually that turns out to be wrong. How I chose to do Collateral is a prime example. I had just come off of doing Ali (2001), a picture about a huge real-life figure. I had developed The Aviator, about Howard Hughes. But as brilliant as John Logan’s screenplay was, and as much as I wanted to work with Leonardo [DiCaprio], I felt I would be doing a rerun of what I’d just done. What attracted me to Collateral was the opportunity to do the exact opposite: a microcosm; 12 hours; one night; no wardrobe changes; two people; small lives; inside a cab; a small time frame viewed large. I very much admired the hard, gem-like construction of Stuart Beattie’s screenplay. There were a lot of modifications as we prepared to shoot, but the structure was there from the start – and it was tremendously appealing. That made my decision. I asked Marty [Scorsese] if he wanted to do The Aviator. The idea for The Last of the Mohicans came to me because I’d seen the film written by Philip Dunne when I was 3. I realized 40 years later that it had been rattling around in my brain ever since, that it was a part of me, a very important part. I just hadn’t been consciously aware of it up to that point. I also thought: there hasn’t really been an exciting epic, period film in a long, long time. Joe Roth and Roger Birnbaum were running 20th Century Fox at the time. They got the excitement of it immediately. Q: Even though you’re always trying to do something new, there seems to be continuity in your work. A: As far as the continuities you’re noticing in my work, those are arrived at film by film, and are not planned as such. The film directors I admire most don’t consciously have a form that is their form. Marty Scorsese doesn’t say to himself: ‘I will make a certain decision this way because it either does or doesn’t conform to my form.’ No, what he chooses to do flows from him organically. I think that’s the case for every filmmaker. The more diverse one film is from the other, the more exciting it is. What you want is to find yourself on a frontier. For the working director, there is no conscious form from film to film. We all know what our ambitions are, but in a very healthy way we are all unconscious of ‘signature.’ 123

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Q: In Public Enemies you shaped your portrait of John Dillinger to dramatize the fact that a series of revolutions in technology – the speed of cars, telecommunications, even the power of movies – had made his career possible. A: Our digital age is older for us than was Dillinger’s access to high-speed travel. He could pull off major robberies in a single 10-day period, starting in Minnesota, jumping to Indiana, then speeding to Tucson to take a break. His ability to do that was less than five years old. One irony that attracted me was, here was a guy who did formal planning, who had a deeply methodical approach to every single score, yet was on a ride to nowhere specific. He had no outcome goal. There was no plan for his life in the sense that Butch and Sundance had said, “Once we accumulate X amount of capital, or the risk gets too extreme, let’s head for South America.” I don’t think the film succeeds in conveying this. That point eluded me. If I were making the film all over again, maybe a whole different screenplay would be written. Q: Yet this is an abiding theme. Neil McCauley in Heat is in a similar position – ready to walk away from any life situation on a moment’s notice. A: I’m attracted to characters who are conscious of trying to figure out what they’re doing here, and what’s the best way to do it. Maybe that’s because I’m engaged in the same thing and I either have, or I haven’t! Q: Music is an important element in all your work. Do you use it to pre-imagine your films, or are your choices discoveries you make in postproduction? A: As research, music enters early for me. If you can find that piece of music which evokes the central emotion of one of your characters, some pivotal crisis where he or she must rouse themselves from despair and manifest something very aggressive within his or her own mind – this becomes the piece of music for that moment. If I want to quantify how a character is feeling and thinking, in a way that is replicable, so I can re-evoke that emotion many, many times, finding the right piece of music is positively essential. Not only as I prepare the scene – but as I shoot the scene, as I direct the actors, and finally, as I edit the scene. One specific example comes to mind in Collateral, when the coyotes cross in front of the cab. For me, that was a watershed in the story’s progression. Each of the two principal characters is submerging into his own perspective of what life is: a retrospective moment; a prelude to a violent confrontation. The song “Shadow on the Sun” by Audioslave nailed that moment for me. It became an indelible part of planning, sustaining, and executing that scene. Q: You once told me that for Thief, in your mind you saw the city as a “three-dimensional machine.” Was that behind your choice of the electronic Tangerine Dream score, over the earthy blues you originally considered? 124

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A: One of my great weaknesses is that I’m still hung up on the choice I made over that score. Thirty years later I’m still debating this. By string theory, in some alternate reality, there’s a version of Thief with wall-to-wall blues. Q: Parallel universes aside, you’ve certainly revisited and re-edited your films on DVD. A: Highly recommended! I’m all for that. Q: Sometimes you’ll match an image entirely to music, but you also use sound effects melodically and integrate audio textures. A: You have no idea, it can actually get quite nuts. In Thief there’s a fire extinguisher going off in F minor. We actually found a way, in Tangerine Dream’s studio, of processing actual sound effects and rendering them into a key. This was long before digital computers. The layering can be extraordinarily intricate. During the safe-cracking sequence in Thief, the chaotic sound of the burning bar suddenly stops, and in the silence – corresponding to the bright points of light on the diamonds when the first tray is pulled out – you start hearing a high-pitched note in the key of E, and every once in awhile there’s a blast in F minor of the fire extinguisher putting out the embers. This moment happens to work for me, now, in a way that I can still look at and not cringe. It’s withstood the test of time. Other things in the film are nonsensical: ocean waves crashing in G minor – sounding big, but yielding nothing at all. Q: From what I’ve observed, you keep a very long workday, from the crack of dawn to late at night. A: In terms of a shooting day? No. I like a 12-hour day, but I’d like to get that down to a 10-hour day. I’m at my best in those kinds of chunks. It all gets down to selection: “This is really of value.” It’s pivotal; if you don’t get this particular moment right, you just blew the Act II ending. You go get that thing, and you don’t let anything stand in your way. By the same token, there’s another event that may show up and be part of the scene that’s a visual, and it may be trivial; it really is not important. To be able to have that discretion allows you to direct your concentration and logistical assets to what’s really important. The more you can have that discretion of accurately reading: “This is really pivotal, this really is not,” that is absolutely the key to doing this stuff well. Q: Does this discretion grow out of the preparatory work? A: It grows out of the preparatory work, it grows out of experience, and out of necessity. We shot The Jericho Mile under horrendous conditions. We were 125

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working in Folsom Prison, and it turned into 19 seven-hour days. Every two hours the guards had to count the population of convicts I had. The IQ of the guards wasn’t tremendously high, so if I had 28 convicts out there and three guards are doing a head count, inevitably each one would come up with a different number. “I got 27.” “I got 26.” “I got 29.” [Laughs] Meanwhile we’re dying! We were dying in every minute of shooting time. Q: Over time, you’ve come to work with the same people again and again. How do you assemble your team? A: You have to work backward from how great it is when you’re in the trenches and who you’re there with. If people are as ambitious as you are, you keep them close to you. If a person gets excited by the things I am excited by – say, transforming a run-down arena in the middle of Mozambique that hasn’t had electricity or plumbing since 1974, as we had to do for Ali – if a challenge like that gets your blood running, you would be a person I gravitate toward. We would wind up working together on a lot of pictures. My 1st AD Michael Waxman, who is now directing television successfully, has been working with me since 1986. Cinematographer Dante Spinotti and I have done five movies together. There are a number of folks on my crew who’ve been working with me since Mohicans back in 1991. We’re all working now on Luck. Q: As executive producer of Luck, you’re in the position of directing other directors. A: And I want them all to be as expressive as they can possibly be. I directed the pilot. Fidelity to the narrative – the brilliant rotating story tracks devised by David Milch – informs the shooting style, and the disjunctive editing that is so crucial. What most attracted me to David’s pilot script is that it doesn’t have a beginning, middle, or end. We’re suddenly immersed in his characters full form. We encounter each of them in an instant, without context; then we move to the next character. This is an exciting challenge for any director. Can you bespeak some cloud or challenge in a character’s past, purely by conveying their particular attitude to the world around them? Our common ambition became to locate you within these characters as much as possible. That there would be a consistency, a narrative style arising out of these imperatives was a foregone conclusion. All of the directors – among them Phillip Noyce, Mimi Leder, Allen Coulter, Terry George, and Brian Kirk – are bringing their best game. In healthy competitive ways, each wants to do their best work within the series. I do everything I can to encourage that. Q: Luck has a varied cast with many different kinds of actors. How do you work with someone such as Dustin Hoffman who is a legendary perfectionist? 126

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A: The cast is splendid, I couldn’t be happier. But you’re wrong to characterize Dustin as a perfectionist. A perfectionist to me is someone who can’t tell the difference between detail that’s important, and detail that’s irrelevant. Dustin concentrates, with great thoroughness, on what’s relevant. Something that’s not important simply does not arrest his attention. He is so very specific, so grounded in his character that he is never lost. Every look, every action, expresses a determined intention on the part of Ace, the character he’s playing. Q: In terms of creating an aesthetic through the pilot, how do you shoot a horse race? A: Not by observing, but by conveying the experience of a jockey. I wanted the audience to be, as much as possible, on the horse. There’s a lot of lyrical work one can do with long lenses, but I prefer the intimate perspective. As elegant as distance can be, I wanted to take us inside the moment. Q: So did you mount cameras on the horses as they were racing? A: No, you can’t do that. We tried; it doesn’t work. We devised systems for working with small cameras – the Canon 5D or the Canon 1D Mark IV. Then we found various different devices to get us right up next to the horse and drop the camera right in. We built a tracking vehicle. Nothing too advanced: a pickup truck, stripped to suit our purposes, with a hand-operated arm, a lightweight pole a sound man uses, over the shoulder, to lower in these cameras, because they’re small enough to do that with. Since then we’ve made further modifications through practice, failure, and frustration that have enabled us in every episode after the pilot to give us an improved sense of being in among these horses. There’s a whole other aspect of this: getting the horses used to our presence; the question of how many horses we were allowed at a given moment; how frequently we could run them, because of the limitations which we very strictly adhere to for their protection. If we film a race, we can only run them for a third of a mile. Then they get a rest period. We could do that two, maybe three times in a day and that was it. They have a very short day, then they’re retired and we use a duplicate set. Sometimes to film a single race we would use three separate sets of horses to get us nine passes. Q: How many setups do you like to shoot in a day? A: That depends on the film – but I’d say 30 to 40, on average. Less ever since Collateral, because that was when we began shooting digitally, and did 15-minute takes. But I use two or three cameras quite often. That considerably increases the number of setups. I love working fast. What makes me crazy is waiting; any obstacle to a smooth flow will get me agitated. What you want to 127

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be is on a roll. This is what I particularly love about working with Al [Pacino]; we always get into a steady groove. Takes 5, 6, or 7 are generally his golden takes. You get into a tempo with all good actors, a rhythm, and it’s wonderful. There’s not even verbal communication after a while. You don’t have to talk about it – eyes connect. Q: What’s a Michael Mann set like? A: Protecting concentration is a big thing for me. I like a quiet set. The actors have the most extraordinarily difficult task: being somebody else, and projecting themselves authentically into a given moment. I’m extremely zealous about guarding their concentration – and mine – from any needless distraction that might interfere. Q: You’ve been active in the Guild and a board member for a long time. How has that served you as a director? A: Directors don’t see other directors a lot. When we’re making films, there’s only one director on that set. It’s not like actors, working with other actors, or writers, who are working at home and can get together after work over coffee. If you’re working in Rome and I’m in Mozambique, we can’t just hang out. So what the Guild provides, apart from the many superb bedrock forms of support whose virtues are well known by its membership – creative rights, the pension plan, etc. – what I personally hold close is the society it offers of spending time with fellow directors. Whenever we get a chance to get together and talk, it is both rare and tremendously enjoyable. If Alejandro González Iñárritu wants to ask me about a certain cameraman, actor or actress, there are things I can reveal to him, regardless of the political sensitivities, which I wouldn’t say to anybody else. I can always tell the unvarnished truth to another director. And I’ve enjoyed the same benefit coming the other way. There’s a wonderful solidarity and truth-telling that goes on among directors. Q: For years you were talking about doing For Whom the Bell Tolls, but more recently you’ve shifted your attention to a chapter in the life of photographer Robert Capa, set during the same time period. Is that an evolution of the same interest? A: I’ll be attracted to an arena or milieu for a long time, and I’ve long been interested in the Spanish Civil War. On For Whom the Bell Tolls, I was forced to realize that every aspect of the story has been so ripped off over the years and there’s nothing left. There was no way for me to make it fresh, even though Hemingway’s book is as brilliant as ever. I’m still interested in the period, and I’d long been interested in Capa, but his life story is so vast that there never seemed to be any way to do it until a few years back, when new information 128

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came to light about his love affair in Spain, in 1936, with fellow photographer Gerda Taro. It was a defining moment for him – the defining moment. His entire life changes from that point on and is never the same. That presented a way to tell the story. What next? There’s a medieval movie I’m developing, that I really want to make, called Agincourt. There’s a science fiction project I’d love to do. And some other things I can’t discuss. Ask me in a week.

129

CHRONOLOGY

1943

Michael Kenneth Mann is born on 5 February in Chicago to Jack and Esther Mann. 1961–5 Attends University of Wisconsin, Madison, studying English ­literature. Takes a course in film studies and discovers his love of film. 1965 Following graduation from Wisconsin, enters the London International Film School. 1967 Graduates London International Film School. While in London, forms “Michael Mann Productions” and shoots commercials. Works for 20th Century Fox in London and learns the fundamentals of film production. 1968 Hired by NBC News program First Tuesday to interview student radicals during historic May–June strikes in Paris. 1969–71  Directs commercials in France. His short film, Jaunpari, receives awards at film festivals in Cannes, Barcelona, Melbourne, and Sydney. 1971 Returns to the U.S. Produces and directs the documentary 17 Days Down the Line. 1974 Marries for the second time. From his previous marriage he has a daughter, Ami Canaan Mann. With his wife, painter Summer Mann, he has three daughters, Aran, Jessie, and Rebecca. 1975–7 Writes episodes of Starsky & Hutch and Police Story, and directs “The Buttercup Killer” episode (December 3, 1977) of Police Woman. 1976–7 Works on adapting Edward Bunker’s prison novel, No Beast So Fierce, as a Dustin Hoffman vehicle. 1978 Dustin Hoffman’s film is released under the title Straight Time. Mann’s work uncredited. Writes the pilot for the TV series Vega$, which runs until 1981. 1979 The Jericho Mile broadcast March 18 and given a theatrical release 130

chronology

1980 1981 1983 1984–9

1986

1986–8

1989 1990 1992 1995 1999

2001 2002 2004 2006

2009 2012

in Europe. Mann and his screenwriting collaborator receive an Emmy. Made-for-TV movie Swan Song, written and directed by Mann, broadcast February 8. Mann’s first feature film, Thief, adapted from the novel The Home Invaders by Frank Hohimer, opens March 27. Mann’s second feature film, The Keep, opens December 16. Executor Producer for multiple award-winning TV series Miami Vice (1984–9). Co-writes (with Maurice Hurley) “Golden Triangle” episode (broadcast January 18, 1985). Mann’s third feature film, Manhunter, based on Red Dragon, a novel by Thomas Harris, opens August 22. First screen appearance of the character Hannibal Lecter. Executor Producer for the TV series Crime Story, which he likens to a twenty-two-hour feature film. Directs “Top of the World” episode (broadcast March 6, 1987). Executive Producer for TV movie Band of the Hand, broadcast August 27, 1988. Directs TV movie L.A. Takedown (August 27), a precursor to Heat. Executive Producer of Emmy Award-winning TV miniseries Drug Wars: the Camarena Story. Mann’s fourth feature film, The Last of the Mohicans, opens September 25. Mann’s fifth feature film, Heat, opens December 15. Features first joint onscreen appearance of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. Producer, director, and co-writer of The Insider, Mann’s sixth feature film, nominated for seven Academy Awards, including screenwriting and direction for Mann. Mann’s seventh feature film, Ali, a biopic of Muhammad Ali, opens December 25. Executive Producer of the short-lived TV series Robbery Homicide Division (13 episodes). Mann’s eighth feature film, Collateral, opens August 6. Mann’s ninth feature film, Miami Vice, with a script by Mann, opens July 28. Location shoots include Miami, Haiti, the Dominican Republic. First Mann film to be shot entirely in HD. Mann’s tenth feature film, Public Enemies, opens July 1. Mann directs pilot of Luck, with teleplay by David Milch. HBO, broadcast January 29.

131

FILMOGRAPHY

As Director 1968 INSURRECTION (A short documentary about the 1968 Paris riots, broadcast, according to some sources, on American TV. No further production/release details available.) 1971 JAUNPURI (A short experimental/abstract film that won the jury prize in that category at Cannes in 1971. No further production/release details available.) 1972 17 DAYS DOWN THE LINE (A short narrative film detailing the return to the U.S. of a Newsweek correspondent. Complete production/release details not available.) Production: Richard Braws, Michael Mann Director: Michael Mann Editor: David Szabo Sound: Noel Tetrev Cast: Marvin Kupfer 1979 THE JERICHO MILE (ABC TV) Producer: Tim Zinnemann Production: ABC Circle Films Director: Michael Mann Screenplay: Patrick J. Nolan, Michael Mann Director of photography: Rexford Metz Editor: Arthur Schmidt 132

filmography

Art director: Stephen Myles Berger Costumes: John S. Perry Sound: James E. Webb Music: Daniel J. Johnson, Ken Johnson, Mark Southern Cast: Peter Strauss (Rain Murphy), Richard Lawson (R. C. Stiles), Roger E. Mosley (Cotton Crown), Brian Dennehy (Dr. D), Geoffrey Lewis (Dr. Bill Janowski) Running time: 97 minutes  VHS (out of print) 1981 THIEF a.k.a. VIOLENT STREETS (United Artists) Producers: Richard Brams, Jerry Bruckheimer, Ronnie Caan, Michael Mann Production: Mann/Caan Productions Director: Michael Mann Screenplay: Michael Mann, based on the novel The Home Invaders, by Frank Hohimer Director of photography: Donald E. Thorin Editor: Dov Hoenig Art director: Mary Dodson Costumes: Jodie Tillen Sound: Larry Carow, David B. Cohn, Samuel C. Crutcher, Scott Hecker, Jerry Stanford Music: Tangerine Dream Cast: James Caan (Frank), Tuesday Weld (Jessie), Willie Nelson (Okla), James Belushi (Barry), Robert Prosky (Leo), Tom Signorelli (Attaglia), Dennis Farina (Carl) Running time: 122 minutes  VHS/DVD 1983 THE KEEP (Paramount Pictures) Producers: Colin M. Brewer, Richard Brams Production: Associated Capital, Capital Equipment Leasing Director: Michael Mann Screenplay: Michael Mann, based on the novel The Keep, by F. Paul Wilson Director of photography: Alex Thomson Editors: Dov Hoenig, Chris Kelly Art director: Alan Tomkins, Herbert Westbrook Costumes: Anthony Mendleson Sound: Larry Carow, David B. Cohn, Samuel C. Crutcher, Jerry Stanford Music: Tangerine Dream Cast: Scott Glenn (Glaeken Trismegestus), Alberta Watson (Eva Cuza), Jürgen Prochnow (Captain Klaus Woermann), Robert Prosky (Father Fonescu), Ian McKellen (Dr. Theodore Cuza) Running time: 96 minutes  VHS (out of print) 133

filmography

1986 MANHUNTER (De Laurentiis Entertainment Group) Producers: Dino De Laurentiis, Richard Roth, Bernard Williams Production: DEG, Red Dragon, Studio Productions, Studio Canal Director: Michael Mann Screenplay: Michael Mann, based on the novel Red Dragon, by Thomas Harris Director of photography: Dante Spinotti Editor: Dov Hoenig Art director: Jack Blackman Costumes: Colleen Atwood Sound: Robert R. Routledge Music: The Reds, Michel Rubini Cast: William Petersen (Will Graham), Kim Greist (Molly Graham), Joan Allen (Reba McClane), Brian Cox (Dr. Hannibal Lecktor), Dennis Farina (Jack Crawford), Tom Noonan (Francis Dollarhyde), Stephen Lang (Freddy Lounds) Running time: 119 minutes  VHS/DVD 1992 THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS (20th Century Fox) Producers: James G. Robinson, Ned Dowd, Hunt Lowry, Michael Mann  Production: Morgan Creek Productions Director: Michael Mann Screenplay: John L. Balderston, Paul Perez, Daniel Moore, Michael Mann, Christopher Crowe, based on The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper, and the screenplay written by Philip Dunne for the 1936 film The Last of the Mohicans (directed by George Seitz, released by United Artists) Director of photography: Dante Spinotti Editor: Dov Hoenig Art director: Robert Guerra, Richard Holland Costumes: Elsa Zamparelli Sound: Willy Allen Music: Randy Edelman, Trevor Jones Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis (Hawkeye/Nathaniel Poe), Madeleine Stowe (Cora Munro), Russell Means (Chingachgook), Eric Schweig (Uncas), Jodhi May (Alice Munro), Steven Waddington (Major Duncan Heyward), Wes Studi (Magua) Running time: 112 minutes  VHS/DVD 1995 HEAT (Warner Bros.) Producers: Pieter Jan Brugge, Gusmano Cesaretti, Arnon Milchan, Art Linson, Kathleen M. Shea Production: Warner Bros., Regency Enterprises, Forward Pass, Monarchy Enterprises BV, Art Linson Productions 134

filmography

Director: Michael Mann Screenplay: Michael Mann Director of photography: Dante Spinotti Editor: Dov Hoenig Art director: Marjorie Stone McShirley Costumes: Deborah L. Scott Sound: Per Hallberg, Larry Kemp Music: Elliot Goldenthal Cast: Al Pacino (Vincent Hanna), Robert De Niro (Neil McCauley), Val Kilmer (Chris Shiherlis), Jon Voight (Nate), Tom Sizemore (Michael Cheritto), Diane Venora (Justine Hanna), Amy Brenneman (Eady), Ashley Judd (Charlene Shiherlis), Mykelti Williamson (Sergeant Drucker), Wes Studi (Detective Casals), Ted Levine (Bosko), Dennis Haysbert (Donald Breedan), William Fichtner (Roger Van Zant), Natalie Portman (Lauren), Tom Noonan (Kelso), Kevin Gage (Waingro), Hank Azaria (Alan Marciano), Danny Trejo (Trejo) Running time: 171 minutes  VHS/DVD 1999 THE INSIDER (Touchstone Pictures) Producers: Pieter Jan Brugge, Michael Mann Production: Blue Light Productions, Forward Pass, Kaitz Productions, Mann/ Roth Productions, Spyglass Entertainment, Touchstone Pictures Director: Michael Mann Screenplay: Eric Roth and Michael Mann, based on the Vanity Fair article, “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” by Marie Brenner Director of photography: Dante Spinotti Editors: William Goldenberg, David Rosenbloom, Paul Rubell Art director: Marjorie McShirley Costumes: Anna B. Sheppard Sound: Gregg Baxter, Gregory King Music: Pieter Bourke, Lisa Gerrard Cast: Al Pacino (Lowell Bergman), Russell Crowe (Jeffrey Wigand), Christopher Plummer (Mike Wallace), Diane Venora (Liane Wigand), Philip Baker Hall (Don Hewitt), Lindsay Crouse (Sharon Tiller), Debi Mazar (Debbie De Luca), Gina Gershon (Helen Caperelli), Stephen Tobolowski (Eric Kluster) Running time: 157 minutes  VHS/DVD 2001 ALI (Columbia Pictures) Producers: Howard Bingham, Lee Caplin, Graham King Production: Columbia Pictures, Forward Pass, Initial Entertainment Group, Moonlighting Films South Africa, Overbrook Entertainment, Peters Entertainment, Picture Entertainment Corporation Director: Michael Mann 135

filmography

Screenplay: Gregory Allen Howard (story), Stephen J. Rivele, Christopher Wilkinson, Eric Roth, Michael Mann Director of photography: Emmanuel Lubezki Editors: William Goldenberg, Lynzee Klingman, Stephen E. Rivkin Art director: Jonathan Lee, Bill Rea, Tomas Voth Costumes: Marlene Stewart Sound: Gregory King Music: Pieter Bourke, Lisa Gerrard Cast: Will Smith (Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali), Jamie Foxx (Drew “Bundini” Brown), Jon Voight (Howard Cosell), Mario Van Peebles (Malcolm X), Ron Silver (Angelo Dundee), Jeffrey Wright (Howard Bingham), Mykelti Williamson (Don King), Jada Pinkett Smith (Sonji), Nona M. Gaye (Belinda Ali), Michael Michele (Veronica Porche), Giancarlo Esposito (Cassius Clay Sr.), Barry Shabaka Henley (Herbert Muhammad), LeVar Burton (Martin Luther King Jr.), Albert Hall (Elijah Muhammad) Running time: 157 minutes  VHS/DVD 2004 COLLATERAL (DreamWorks) Producers: Frank Darabont, Rob Fried, Peter Giuliano, Chuck Russell Production: DreamWorks SKG, Paramount Pictures, Parkes/Macdonald Productions, Edge City Director: Michael Mann Screenplay: Stuart Beattie Directors of photography: Dion Beebe, Paul Cameron Editors: Jim Miller, Paul Rubell Art director: Daniel T. Dorrance Costumes: Jeffrey Kurland Sound: Elliott L. Koretz Music: James Newton Howard Cast: Tom Cruise (Vincent), Jamie Foxx (Max), Jada Pinkett Smith (Annie), Mark Ruffalo (Fanning), Peter Berg (Richard Weidner), Bruce McGill (Pedrosa), Irma P. Hall (Ida), Barry Shubaka Henley (Daniel), Javier Bardem (Felix), Emilio Rivera (Paco) Running time: 120 minutes  VHS/DVD 2006 MIAMI VICE (Universal Pictures) Producers: Anthony Yerkovich, Pieter Jan Brugge, Michael Mann Production: Universal Pictures, Motion Picture ETA Forward Pass, Michael Mann Productions Director: Michael Mann Screenplay: Michael Mann, based on the television series created by Anthony Yerkovich 136

filmography

Director of photography: Dion Beebe Editors: William Goldberg, Paul Rubell Art director: Carlos Menendez, Seth Reed Costumes: Michael Kaplan, Janty Yates Sound: Elliott L. Koretz Music: John Murphy Cast: Colin Farrell (Detective James “Sonny” Crockett), Jamie Foxx (Detective Ricardo Tubbs), Gong Li (Isabella), Naomie Harris (Trudy Joplin), Ciaran Hinds (Fujima), Justin Theroux (Zito), Luis Tosar (Arcángel de Jesús Montoya), Barry Shabaka Henley (Castillo), John Ortiz (José Yero), Elizabeth Rodriguez (Gina Calabrese), Domenick Lombardozzi (Switek) Running time: 134 minutes  VHS/DVD 2009 PUBLIC ENEMIES (Universal Pictures) Producers: Kevin Misher, Michael Mann Production: Universal Pictures, Forward Pass, Relativity Media, Misher Films, in association with Tribeca Productions, Appian Way, and Dentsu Executive Producer: G. Mac Brown Director: Michael Mann Screenplay: Ronan Bennett, Michael Mann & Ann Biderman, based on the book by Bryan Burrough Cinematographer: Dante Spinotti Editors: Jeffrey Ford, Paul Rubell Cast: Johnny Depp (John Dillinger), Christian Bale (Melvin Purvis), Marion Cotillard (Billie Frechette), Billy Crudup (J. Edgar Hoover), Giovanni Ribisi (Alvin Karpis), James Russo (Walter Dietrich), Jason Clarke (“Red” Hamilton), Stephen Dorff (Homer Van Meter), Channing Tatum (“Pretty Boy” Floyd), Domenick Lombardozzi (Gilbert Catena), Stephen Lang (Charles Winstead), Lili Taylor (Sheriff Lillian Holley), Stephen Graham (“Baby Face” Nelson), John Ortiz (Phil D’Andrea), Bill Camp (Frank Nitti), Christian Stolte (Charles Makley), Diana Krall (Torch Singer) Running Time: 140 minutes  DVD As Executive Producer (Television Series Only) 1984–9 (111 episodes) “Miami Vice” (NBC Television) Production: Michael Mann, Anthony Yerkovich, Universal Television Principal continuing cast: Don Johnson, Philip Michael Thomas, Edward James Olmos, Olivia Brown, Saundra Santiago

137

filmography

1986–8 (44 episodes) “Crime Story” (NBC Television) Production: Michael Mann Productions, New World Productions Principal continuing cast: Dennis Farina, Anthony Denison, Stephen Lang, Bill Smitrovich 1987 (7 episodes) “Private Eye” (NBC Television) Production: Michael Mann, Anthony Yerkovich Principal continuing cast: Michael Woods, William Sadler, Lisa Jane Persky, Josh Brolin 2002–3 (13 episodes) “Robbery Homicide Division” (CBS Television) Production: Michael Mann, Frank Spotnitz, Universal Network TV, Forward Pass Principal continuing cast: Tom Sizemore, Klea Scott, Barry Shabaka Henley

138

PUBLISHER’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this book that has previously been published elsewhere. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. Julian Fox This article originally appeared in Films and Filming, 26:4 (1980), pp. 19–25. Harlan Kennedy This article originally appeared in Film Comment, 19:6 (1983), pp. 16–19 and is reprinted by permission of the copyright holder Harlan Kennedy. Art Harris This article originally appeared in The Washington Post, October 16 (1985), p. B1 and is reproduced here by permission of the copyright holder. Alain Charlot and Marc Toullec This article originally appeared in Cinefantastique May (1987), pp. 37–9. Translated from the French by R. Barton Palmer. Graham Fuller This article originally appeared in Interview, December 1 (1995) and is reproduced here by permission of the copyright holder. Jonathan Romney This article originally appeared in The Guardian (London), April 18 (1996), Features, p. 10 and is reproduced here by permission of the copyright holder.

139

publisher’s acknowledgments

Michael Sragow This article first appeared in Salon.com, at http://www.Salon.com. An online version remains in the Salon archives. Reprinted with permission. Stuart Husband This article originally appeared in The Guardian (London), January 21 (2000) and is reproduced here by permission of the copyright holder. Xan Brooks This article originally appeared in The Guardian (London), Febuary 13 (2002) and is reproduced here by permission of the copyright holder. Mark Olsen This article originally appeared in Sight & Sound, 14:10, October (2004), p. 16 and is reproduced hereby permission of the copyright holder. Michael Sragow This article first appeared in Salon.com, at http://www.Salon.com. An online version remains in the Salon archives. Reprinted with permission. Leif Kramp This article originally appeared in Spiegel Online, October 4 (2004). Translated from the German by R. Barton Palmer. John Maguire This article originally appeared in maguiresmovies.blogspot.co.uk July (2006) and is reproduced here by permission of the copyright holder John Maguire. Scott Foundas This article originally appeared in L.A. Weekly, July 26 (2006) and is reproduced here by permission of the copyright holder. John Patterson This article originally appeared in The Guardian (London), June 26 (2009) and is reproduced here by permission of the copyright holder. F.X. Feeney This article originally appeared in DGA Quarterly, Winter (2012) and is reproduced here by permission of the copyright holder.

140

INDEX

ABC, 15, 17, 19, 21, 29, 41, 76 Agassi, Andre, 53 Agincourt, 129 Ali (2001, Michael Mann), 2, 4, 11–12, 78–80, 94, 101, 107, 123, 126 Alien (1979, Ridley Scott), 33 All the President’s Men (1976, Alan J. Pakula), 74 Altman, Robert, 11 American Graffiti (1973, George Lucas), 45 Apocalypse Now (1979, Francis Ford Coppola), 13 Areopagitica, 94 Armani, 40 Attaglia, 56 Audioslave, 123 Avatar (2009, James Cameron), 13 Aviator, The (2004, Martin Scorsese), 123 Avid Nitrous, 103 Azaria, Hank, 53 Baalbek, Lebanon, 106 “Back in the World” (Miami Vice episode), 5 Bale, Christian, 110, 114–15 Band of the Hand (TV pilot), 12, 47 Barcelona, Spain, 2, 16 Barker, Ma, 112 Battleship Potemkin (1925, Sergei Eisenstein), 13 Beattie, Stuart, 83, 123 Beebe, Dion, 11 Benair, Jonathan, 63 Bennett, Ronan, 112 Bercovici, Eric, 31 Berg, Jeff, 41

Bergman, Lowell (character), 11, 62–3, 65–6, 68, 70–5, 101, 106, 113, 120 Berkeley, California, 67 Bettelheim, Bruno, 8, 32–3 Biderman, Amy, 112 Biograph Theater, The, 109, 110, 113 Birnbaum, Roger, 123 Biscayne Boulevard, 42 Biutiful (2010, Alexander Gonzales Inarritu), 13 Blake, William, 50 Bloch, Paul, 44 Bonnie and Clyde, 112, 114 “Bought and Paid For” (Miami Vice episode), 6 Bowers, Bowie (character), 110 Box, John, 36 Brenneman, Amy, 12, 55, 94, 116 Brenner, Marie, 66 Bresson, Robert, 102 Brooks, Xan, 4, 78–80 Brown, Gerry, 20 Browne, Jackson, 5 Browne & Williamson (tobacco company), 62–3, 69–71, 73–5 Bunker, Eddie, 16 Burke, James, 64 Burma, 8, 44 Burrough, Bryan, 112 Bush, George W., 93 Bush, Jim, 21 Cadillac, 80 Cameron, James, 13 Cannes Festival, 2, 16, 45, 105 Canon ID Mark IV, 127 Canon SD, 127

141

index

Capa, Robert, 128 Caperelli, Helen (character), 63 Caribbean, the, 45, 67, 98 Caruso, David, 88 Cash, Johnny, 20 Catastrophist, The (novel), 112 CBS, 12, 62–3, 68–9, 74–5, 80, 113 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 5 Cerrito, Michael, 53 Charlene (character), 53, 55 Charlot, Alain, 8, 12, 47–51 Chase, David, 4, 13 Chevette, 41 Chicago, 3, 7, 11, 16, 26, 29, 44–6, 53, 55, 58–9, 63, 74, 76, 78, 81, 85, 87–8, 92, 102, 104, 109, 111–12, 115, 117–18 Chile, 5 Choirboys, The (1977, Robert Aldrich), 31 Christian Fundamentalists, 91, 94 Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles), 13 Ciudad de Este, Paraguay, 9 Clay, Cassius, 79 Cognac Film Festival, 47 Cohen, Rob, 43 Cohn-Bendit, David, 27 Collateral (2004, Michael Mann), 2–4, 9–10, 12, 81–4, 91–3, 103, 114, 122–4, 127 Comte de Bougainville, 88 Congo, 112 Conrad, Robert, 110 Cooper, James Fenimore, 88 Coppola, Francis Ford, 13–14, 102 Corvette, 41 Cotillard, Marion, 112 Coulter, Allen, 126 Crime Story (TV series), 3, 6–7, 9, 11–12, 14, 47, 52–4, 58, 62, 76, 88, 117 Crockett, Sonny (character), 6, 40–1, 43, 96–9, 102–3, 120 Crowe, Russell, 11–12, 62, 70–3, 76, 105, 120 Crown, Cotton (character), 18 Cruise, Tom, 3, 9, 12, 82–3, 91–4, 122 Cuba, 18, 28, 43, 99 Cumbuka, Ji-Tu, 22 Cuza, Eva (character), 34–5 Cyber (2015, Michael Mann), 12 Dachau, 33 Dassin, Jules, 17 Day-Lewis, Daniel, 3, 85, 88–9, 119

142

De Niro, Robert, 3, 9, 12, 52–3, 55, 58, 61, 73, 76, 88–9, 94, 106, 108, 113, 116, 121–2 Dead Birds, Dead Birds (student film), 27 “Death and the Lady” (Miami Vice episode), 6 Demme, Jonathan, 4 Denby, David, 10, 14 Denison, Anthony, 7 Dennehy, Brian, 16, 22 Depp, Johnny, 3, 10, 110–11, 114 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 76, 123 Digital Photography, 114 Dillinger (1945, Max Nosseck), 110 Dillinger (1973, John Milius), 110 Dillinger (1991, Rupert Wainwright), 110 Dillinger, John, 10, 109–15, 124 Director’s Guild, 94 Dirty Laundry (script), 28 Dr. D (character), 16, 18–19 Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964, Stanley Kubrick), 1, 13, 104, 117–18 Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 13, 102 Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), 5, 65, 99, 112 Duddy, Steve (character), 44 Dude, the, 18 Dunne, Phillip, 88, 123 “Duty and Honor” (Miami Vice episode), 5 Eady Plan, The, 118 Earle, Roy, 110 East River, 68 Eisenstein, Sergei, 13, 17, 45, 102 Emmy Awards, 2–3, 15, 31, 41, 45, 105 Existentialism, 1, 3–4, 6, 8–10, 14, 57, 61, 101 Fadlallah, Shiekh, 67, 106 Faltermeyer, Harold, 76 Farina, Dennis, 7, 11, 88 Farrell, Colin, 96–100, 102–3, 120 Ferrara, Abel, 53 Ferrari, 3, 41, 43, 98 Film Comment, 4, 13, 32, 45 First Tuesday (TV series), 4, 86 Floyd, Pretty Boy, 112 Folsom Prison, 10, 59, 87, 105, 126 For Whom the Bell Tolls, 128

index

Ford, John, 13 Foreman, George, 79 Fort William Henry, 12, 89 Fox, Julian, 2, 10, 13–31 France, 2 French and Indian War, the, 88, 101 French New Wave, the, 11, 118 Fresno, California, 55 Frey, Glenn, 40, 43 Friedkin, William, 40 Fuller, Graham, 1, 3, 10, 12–13, 52–5 Gable, Clark, 109–10 Gallagher, Blackie (character), 109 George, Terry, 126 Gere, Richard, 28 Germany, 2 Gershon, Gina, 63 Get Shorty (1995, Barry Sonnenfeld), 11, 78 Glenn, Scott, 33, 47 Glover, John, 44 Golden Triangle, The, 44 Gong, Li, 12, 98 Graham, Stephen, 112 Graham, Will (character), 8, 47–9 Grangecastle, 111 Granger, Farley, 110 Great Britain, 2 Great Depression, the, 111, 115 Guardian, The (newspaper), 13, 57, 73, 78, 109, 112 Guevara, Che, 104, 112 Hammer, Jan, 76, 97 Hancock Park, 93 Hannibal (2001, Ridley Scott), 4 Harmon, Mark, 110 Harris, Art, 8–9, 39–46 Harris, Naomie, 98 Hart’s War (2002, Gregory Hoblit), 98 HBO, 2, 12, 14, 118 Heat (1995, Michael Mann), 2–4, 9–10, 12, 38, 52–5, 57–61, 66, 73, 76, 78, 82, 88–90, 94, 105–8, 112–14, 116–17, 121–2, 124 Hecht, Harold, 28 “Hell Hath No Fury” (Miami Vice episode), 6 Hell in the Pacific (1968, John Boorman), 31 Hellman, Monte, 17 High Sierra (1941, Raoul Walsh), 110 Hill, Walter, 17–18

Hilton, Paris, 95 Hiscock, John, 5, 14 Hoenig, Dov, 11 Hoffman, Dustin, 16, 126 Hong Kong, 28–9 Hoover, J. Edgar, 112, 115 Hughes, Howard, 76, 80, 113, 123 Humboldt Park, 45, 104 Huron Massacre, the, 88 Huston, John, 17 “In a Gadda-Da-Vida,” 76 Inarritu, Alejandro Gonzalez, 13, 128 Indonesia, 16, 28 Insider, The (1999, Michael Mann), 2, 4, 11, 14, 61–3, 69, 72–6, 78–80, 101–2, 105–6, 113–14, 118, 120 Insurrection (1968, Michael Mann), 2, 16 Israel, 67, 106 Jameson, Richard T., 4, 13 Jaunpuri (1971, Michael Mann), 2, 16, 105 Jericho Mile, The (1979, Michael Mann), 1–3, 10, 14–17, 29, 32, 41, 45, 47, 57, 59, 61, 86–7, 105, 117, 125 Johnson, Don, 5, 40–1, 43, 96 Joplin, Janis, 94 Jordan, Michael, 53 Joyless Street, The (1925, G.W. Pabst), 86, 117 Judd, Ashley, 12, 53, 55, 58, 76, 94 “Junk Love” (Miami Vice episode), 6 Justine (character), 53 Kaden, Ellen, 63 Kaelis, Sid, 30 Kaplan, Bill, 118 Karpis, “Creepy” Alvin, 112 Keane, Arthur, 31 Keep, The (1983, Michael Mann), 2, 4, 8, 32–4, 36–7, 45, 47–8, 50–2, 60, 87, 96, 101 Kelly, Machine Gun, 112 Khan, Chaka, 40 Kino Eye, The, 17 Kirk, Brian, 126 Kluster, Eric (character), 63 Kojak (TV series), 42 Kramp, Leif, 12, 14, 91–4 Krivine, Alain, 27 Kubrick, Stanley, 1, 11, 13, 17, 38, 45, 57, 104–5, 117

143

index

LA 49 (script), 28 L.A. Takedown (TV series), 3, 106 Lady in Red, The (1979, Lewis Teague), 110 Lang, Stephen, 50 Las Vegas, 3, 7, 97 Last of the Mohicans, The (1992, Michael Mann), 2–4, 10, 12, 52, 57–9, 62, 66, 76, 85, 88–9, 101, 117, 119, 123 Last Public Enemy, The (script), 28 Lauter, Ed, 22 Law & Order (TV series), 11 Lawson, Richard, 16 Leder, Mimi, 126 Lee, Spike, 79 Lewis, Geoffrey, 22 Liddy, G. Gordon, 5, 87 Liston, Sonny, 78–9 Little Bohemia Lodge, 111 Little Miss Marker (1934, Alexander Hall), 110 London International Film School, 4, 59 Los Angeles, 1–2, 15–16, 20, 22, 28, 50, 52, 55, 61, 67, 75, 80, 82–3, 86, 92, 95, 102 Los Angeles Times, 75 Luca, Ray (character), 7, 54 Luck (TV series), 2, 12, 14, 118, 126 Lyne, Adrian, 105 Ma, Yo-Yo, 53 Macao, 16, 28 Majorca, 45 Manhattan Melodrama (1934, W.S. Van Dyke), 109–10 Manhunter (1986, Michael Mann), 2–6, 8–9, 39, 47–52, 57–8, 74, 76, 78, 85, 87–8, 96, 102, 105 Manitowish, Wisconsin, 111 Mann, Anthony, 101 Mann, Jack, 104 Marcuse, Herbert, 62 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, 33 Masters, Kim, 9, 14 McCluggage, Terry, 43 McKellen, Ian, 33 Means, Russell, 119 Mel, Melle, 40 Melbourne, Australia, 2, 16 Melville, Jean-Pierre, 102 Men in Black (1997, Barry Sonnenfeld), 76, 78 Mercedes-Benz, 3, 42

144

Miami, 1, 3, 5, 8, 25, 28, 41–3, 45, 98, 100, 102–3 Miami Vice (TV series), 2, 4–10, 12, 14, 39–40, 43–4, 47, 50, 52, 57–9, 62, 76, 80, 87, 96, 102, 112, 117 Miami Vice (2006, Michael Mann), 2–4, 9–10, 12–13, 95, 97–8, 102–3, 107–8, 120 Milius, John, 40, 110, 114 Milton, John, 94 Missing in Action (script), 28 Molasar, Roderick (character), 34–5 Montoya (character), 10, 98 Morocco, 45 Mosley, Robert, 18, 22 Murnau, F.W., 59, 102, 118 Murphy, Rain (character), 15–17, 19, 24–5, 105 Murrow, Edgar R., 68 My Darling Clementine (1946, John Ford), 13 Nathan, Ian, 10, 14 Nation of Islam, the, 79 NBC, 4, 6–8, 13, 16, 27, 41, 45, 86, 117 Nelson, Lester ‘Baby Face,’ 111–12 New York Times, The, 13, 68 Nicaragua, 5 Night of the Shooting Stars, The (1982, Taviani Brothers), 38 No Beast so Fierce, 16 Nolan, Patrick J., 15, 17, 105 Noyce, Phillip, 126 NYPD Blue (TV series), 112 Oates, Warren, 110 Ober, Eric, 63 O’Brien, Liam, 30–1 Olivier, Laurence, 114 One Hundred Years of Solitude, 33 O’Neill, Eugene, 17 Onion Field, The (1979, Harold Becker), 31 “Out Where the Buses Don’t Run” (Miami Vice episode), 6 Pabst, G.W., 59, 86, 117–18 Pacino, Al, 3, 9, 11–12, 52–3, 58, 62, 69, 71, 73–4, 88, 90, 94, 106–8, 120–1, 128 Paradise Lost, 34 Paramount Pictures, 28, 32–3, 45 Paris Student Riots (1968), 4, 16, 86

index

Parkman, Francis, 88 Pascagoula, Mississippi, 67 Passion of Joan of Arc, The (1928, Carl Theodor Dreyer), 13 Patch, The (Chicago), 76, 85 Peckinpah, Sam, 13, 102 Petersen, William, 8, 48, 73 Pinero, Miguel, 22 Police Story (TV series), 4, 9, 29–31, 45, 86, 105 Police Woman (TV series), 4, 9, 117 Pratt, Geronimo, 107 Prochnow, Jürgen, 33–4 Prosky, Robert, 10 Proust, Marcel, 101 Public Enemies (2009, Michael Mann), 2–3, 10–12, 110–13, 115, 118, 124 Punta de Este, Uruguay, 9 Purvis, Melvin, 110, 112, 115 Raging Bull (1980, Martin Scorsese), 13 Ray, Nicholas, 110 Reaganism, 5 Renoir, Jean, 101 Resnais, Alain, 13, 38 Ressner, Jeffrey, 11 Ribisi, Giovanni, 112 “Rites of Passage” (Miami Vice episode), 6 Robbery Homicide Division (TV series), 3, 9, 12, 14 Romney, Jonathon, 2, 4, 6, 10, 57–60 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 111 Rose, Charlie, 68 Roth, Eric, 11, 61, 64, 77 Roth, Joe, 123 Rybin, Steven, 9, 14 Sacramento, California, 55 San Pedro, 83 Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic, 9 “Savage, The” (Miami Vice episode), 5 Schama, Simon, 88 Schary, Timothy, 13–14 Scorsese, Martin, 13, 94, 102, 123 Scott, Ridley, 4, 81 Scott, Tony, 105 Screen Actors Guild, 43 Second World War, 48, 104 Segal, George, 29 Serpico (1973, Sidney Lumet), 103 Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954, Sidney Lumet), 104

Seventeen Days Down the Line (1972, Michael Mann), 2, 29 “Shadow in the Dark” (Miami Vice episode), 6 “Shadow in the Sun” (song), 124 Shiherlis, Chris (character), 53 Sight and Sound (magazine), 13 Signorelli, Tom, 56 Silence of the Lambs, The (1991, Jonathan Demme), 4, 57 60 Minutes (show), 62–3, 65, 67–70, 73–5, 106, 120 Sizemore, Tom, 53, 106, 122 Smith, Jada Pinkett, 82 Soho Square, 118 Solaris (1972, Andrei Tarkovsky), 38 Sonnenfeld, Barry, 11, 78–9 Sopranos, The (TV series), 4 South Central, Los Angeles, 55, 59 Southland (TV series), 112 Spain, 129 Spanish Civil War, 128 Spelling, Aaron, 4, 45, 105 Spielberg, Steven, 94 Spinotti, Dante, 126 Stalker (1979, Andrei Tarkovsky), 38 Starsky & Hutch (TV series), 4, 9–10, 14, 26, 29–30, 45, 59, 80, 86, 105, 117 Stiles, R.C. (character), 16–18, 23 “Stone’s War” (Miami Vice episode), 5 Straight Time (1978, Ulu Grosbard), 16 Strauss, Peter, 15, 18–21, 47, 87, 105 Sullivan, Louis, 81 Sydney, Australia, 2, 16 Tallis, Thomas, 37 Tangerine Dream, 37, 124–5 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 13, 38 Tartikoff, Brandon, 7, 41, 43 Taviani Brothers, 38 Teague, Lewis, 110 Tex-Mex (script), 28 Thailand, 16, 28 They Live By Night (1949, Nicholas Ray), 110 Thief (1981, Michael Mann), 2–4, 9–11, 14, 29, 32–3, 37, 45, 47, 52, 56–9, 62–3, 73–4, 85–7, 105–6, 112–13, 115, 117, 124–5 Thomas, Philip Michael, 40, 43 Thomas, Wilmore, 24, Thompson, Alex, 36 Thomson, David, 4 Tierney, Lawrence, 110

145

index

Time Magazine, 11, 76 Tobolowsky, Stephen, 63 Torello, Mike (character), 7, 54 Tosar, Luis, 10, 98 Toullec, Marc, 8, 12, 47–51 Trapeze (story), 30 Trismegistus, Glaeken (character), 33–5 Tri-Star, 41 Tubbs, Ricardo (character), 6, 40, 43, 96–9, 102–3 Tynan, William, 11 Twentieth-Century Fox, 4, 45, 86, 118, 123 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Stanley Kubrick), 13 United States, 2, 6, 29, 50, 83, 86 Universal Pictures, 28, 41, 43 University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), 21, 27 University of Southern California (USC), 27 University of Wisconsin, 4, 16, 45, 65, 86, 104, 117 Urich, Robert, 97 Uruguay, 9, 99 Uses of Enchantment, The, 8, 32 Van Dyke, W.S., 109 Vanity Fair (magazine), 66, 74, 112 Veevers, Wally, 32 Vega$ (TV series), 4, 45, 86, 97, 105

146

Venora, Diane, 12, 53, 70, 76, 94 Versace, 40 Vertov, Dziga, 13 Wales, 32 Wallace, Mike, 11, 14m, 62–3, 65, 67–9, 74–5 Walsh, Raoul, 110 Wambaugh, Joe, 31 Washington, DC, 41, 112 Waters, Ed, 30 Watson, Alberta, 33 Waxman, Michael, 126 Wayne, John, 34 Wehrmacht, The, 33–4 Welles, Orson, 13 Wigand, Jeffrey (character), 11, 62–4, 66–76, 105, 113, 120 Wild Bunch, The (1969, Sam Peckinpah), 13 Wilder, Thornton, 17 Willis, Bruce, 98 Wilmington, 55, 82–3 Wilson, F. Paul, 32–3 Yerkovich, Anthony, 4, 41 Young Mr. Lincoln (1939, John Ford), 89 Zaire, 79 Zarmati, Elio, 27 Zinnemann, Tim, 16