Search Results

This book brings together for the first time sixteen interviews granted by award-winning screenwriter-director-producer Michael Mann from 1980 to 2012. Conducted by an international roster of critics, commentators, journalists, and film and television insiders, the interviews elicit some of Mann's most revealing comments on his work in cinema and television that has earned him critical acclaim and a worldwide following. In the interviews, Mann tackles a wide range of subjects, from Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964) and its profound effect on him, to his seemingly existentialist ideas, his stylistics of evil and horror, and his depiction of the corporatization of crime. He also discusses themes such as locale and developing technologies in cinema; 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.

This chapter focuses on the films made by Michael Mann, one of the hardcore hustlers of American film and television and Hollywood's foremost urbanist. 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 he sits in his empty cell, flexing. In Manhunter — Mann's 1986 precursor to The Silence of the Lambs — Hannibal Lecter doesn't even run, he 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’. A hungry aspirant to the Stanley Kubrick class of control freak, Mann overlorded, as executive producer, the highly successful Miami Vice for several years. 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 chapter analyses Ali, a film by Michael Mann. Starring Will Smith in the title role, Ali tells the story of the boxer Muhammad Ali, including his capture of the heavyweight title from Sonny Liston. For a few fraught months the script was tugged between Mann and Spike Lee. When Sony chose Mann, Lee was left smarting, protesting the decision and complaining that ‘only a black man could do justice to the Cassius Clay story’. According to Mann, he wanted the film to come from the point of view of Ali himself. He said: ‘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’.

This chapter presents an interview with Michael Mann, one of Hollywood's singular visionaries. An arbiter of modernist film style and a student of frenetic masculine endeavor, Mann has directed such films as Thief (1981), The Keep (1983), Manhunter (1986), The Last of the Mohicans (1992), and Heat. He has also made two TV series, Miami Vice (1984-1989) and Crime Story (1986-1988). A common theme of Mann's films is their recognition of the primacy and pragmatism of violence in the American landscape. In this interview, Mann explains why he has returned to making films in the urban-crime genre after stepping outside it with The Last of the Mohicans; whether his characters' dysfunction is a result of being criminals and cops; whether Will Heat will satisfy our need for moral order; and what inspired him about shooting Heat on the streets of Los Angeles.

This chapter comments on Miami Vice, a film by Michael Mann. Miami Vice is the movie version of the trendsetting 1980s TV series that Mann originally brought to television screens worldwide as executive producer. The new incarnation stars Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx as undercover detectives Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs, respectively. Written and directed by Mann, Miami Vice features no pink flamingos, white linen suits, or pastel picture-postcard vistas of the 1980. In their place are steely expanses that are like etchings on metallic plates. Even detectives Crockett and Tubbs have evolved, as they find themselves confronted with a new kind of organized crime. Farrell and Foxx underwent 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.

This introductory chapter provides a background of Michael Mann's success in film and television to reflect on the influences which have engendered his unique standing in both media. Rather than enrolling in a film school in the U.S., Mann travelled to Europe to attend the London International Film School. His absorption in practice and practicality at this stage while exploring the aesthetics and artistic motivation for filmmaking epitomises the parallel intensities, which have defined his cinema. A combination of ideological, aesthetic, practical, and commercial influences and approaches in this formative period have carried through the divided critical evaluation of Mann — being both praised and dismissed as overt stylist, proficient genre filmmaker, and self-conscious auteur director — in later decades. Although the genres associated with depictions of criminal activity predominate Mann's output, significant films, such as the period adventure The Last of the Mohicans (1992), the horror film The Keep (1983), the docudrama The Insider (1998), and the biopic Ali (2001), provoke consequent authorship “questions”.

This chapter presents an interview with Michael Mann, in which he talks about his crime thriller Manhunter. Oscillating between fantasy and the whodunit, everything in Manhunter seems out of order, out of sequence, spaced out, out of time, colorless in the extreme. In this interview, Mann explains the juxtaposition of reality with nightmare in his films; Manhunter protagonist Will Graham, a killer played by William Petersen; why the film's title was changed from Red Dragon to Manhunter; and the differences between novel and film.

This chapter presents an interview with Michael Mann, who talks about his film Collateral and its star, Tom Cruise, as well as censorship issues raised about Hollywood by Christian fundamentalists. Mann also explains why he is so obsessed with tragic stories about men; the character of Max, the black cabbie played by Jamie Foxx who is forced by Vincent (Cruise) to accompany him on his murderous journey; which city appeals to him more, New York or Los Angeles; how he goes about staging something like a coyote that trots down the street in one scene; how the Bush administration changed Hollywood; and racism in Hollywood.

This chapter examines the themes and working methods of Michael Mann. Talking to Mann is as surprising as it is stimulating. Mann catches his actors up in his enthrallment with his material, whether it is James Caan in Thief (1981), Tom Noonan and Brian Cox in Manhunter (1986), or Daniel Day-Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans (1992). He majored in English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he first got hooked into films. The film that clinched the obsession was G. W. Pabst's study of urban vice, The Joyless Street (1925). By the time he graduated from college, Mann knew he wanted to make movies. In 1965, he 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 ten years later’. 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 other works include The Keep, Heat, Crime Story, The Jericho Mile, and Miami Vice.

This chapter presents an interview with Michael Mann, who talks about his film Collateral. Mann explains why he explored the aesthetics of digital video in Collateral; whether digital allowed him to use a smaller crew or make the production more mobile; the scene towards the end of the movie 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; and why he moved the location from New York to Los Angeles.

This chapter presents an interview with Michael Mann, whose films have been populated with thieves, assassins, mad men, whistleblowers, and gamblers. For more than three decades, Mann has examined the richness of human experience with style and precision. Born and raised in Chicago, 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. His discovery of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove at a local theatre later that same year closed the deal. He entered the London Film School in 1965 and returned to the United States in 1971, making his first mark in television. In this interview, Mann explains why he decided to enter filmmaking, how he organized himself as a director, his commitment to authenticity in his work such as The Last of the Mohicans, why he develops biographies for every character, his connection to Jeffrey Wigand as a character in The Insider, and his other films such as Heat, Thief, Luck, and Collateral.

This chapter presents an interview with Michael Mann, in which he talks about the television show Miami Vice. It was Mann's fetish for detail that made him one of the hottest triple threats in Hollywood today and Miami Vice a hit. Millions tuned 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, at that time, Miami Vice spun its contemporary morality plays via staccato storytelling. Some critics called it just another New Look formula, but others said it took 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. Miami Vice stars Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas as detectives Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs, respectively.

This chapter presents an interview with Michael Mann, who talks about his 2009 film Public Enemies. Starring Johnny Depp in the title role, Public Enemies is a gripping account of John Dillinger's criminal career. Dillinger was shot down by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, after which he emerged as a bona fide American folk hero and, adds Mann, a national hero as well. Mann's decision to shoot Public Enemies 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. One associates digital photography more with Mann's steel-and-glass contemporary works such as Heat, The Insider, and Collateral, but not with the largely brick-and-wood environments of the 1930s rural midwest. Mann remains unapologetic, insisting that ‘Digital makes things feel more real’.

This chapter analyses The Insider, a 1999 film by Michael Mann. Starring Russell Crowe and Al Pacino, The Insider is based on the real events sparked when Jeffrey 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 the company's products to 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman. Bergman then put his devastating testimony on tape in an interview with 60 Minutes anchor Mike Wallace. However, by the time the segment was due to air, Wigand had become a central witness in the lawsuits filed by Mississippi and forty-nine other states against the tobacco industry. The Insider is one of the few major Hollywood products of recent years that's actually about something — morality, conscience, culpability — and which also has the temerity to prod American apathy in the face of corporate condescension.

This chapter concludes that Michael Mann's authorship must be viewed in several chronological, industrial, and formal contexts: the post-classical context, inflected by television but still marked by the influence of experimentation in American films of the 1960s and 1970s, in which his career begins; the brand name, commercial American auteurist cinema of the 1980s and 1990s in which Mann's signature and success became established; and the emerging digital cinema of the new millennium. His work has been central to and instrumental in the definition and success of a modern cinema of heightened technique, aimed at intense and intended manipulation of audience response, which has nonetheless striven to retain modernist credentials of style, address, and political orientation. Also, the consistency of the generic territory that his films have traversed has provided both archetypal and iconoclastic examples of classical film formulae, and has given voice to realist structures of misplaced and endlessly frustrated yearning, as well as revealed the fallibility of misplaced and misprized heroism.

This chapter presents an interview with Michael Mann, who talks about his 1999 film The Insider. Starring Russell Crowe and Al Pacino, The Insider is not only a docudrama about Big Tobacco, Big Television and a whistleblower who upends both; it is also a docutragedy about men who face, too late, that they are bigger than the jobs corporate America lets them do. It is a ravaging account of the hell their business dealings wreak on their bonds with friends and family. The travails of upper-middle-class life and corporate careers are often fodder for movie comedy; The Insider approaches them without condescension or preconceptions. In this interview, Mann discusses his views about smoking; how he came to know Lowell Bergman, the character played by Pacino in The Insider; his purchase of Marie Brenner's Vanity Fair piece; the collision between Lowell's world and that of Jeffrey Wigand, the character played by Crowe; and Pacino and Crowe's performances in the film.

This chapter presents an interview with Michael Mann, who talks about his film Miami Vice, a kind-of remake of the seminal 1980s TV series that he originally brought to television screens worldwide as executive producer. The new incarnation, which stars Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx as Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs, respectively, is a frenetic, astonishingly violent cop drama. This is a far tougher, more practical Miami Vice, one that takes the business of fighting crime by working undercover very seriously. The original series was ground-breaking and gritty 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 detectives, working undercover infiltrating a South American drug trafficking network.