Michael Mann, the director of Ali, Heat and The Insider, began his filmmaking career in France, so it’s no surprise that Lyon’s Lumière Festival would honor him. Mann, who grew up in Chicago and switched from a literature degree to filmmaking after watching Stanley Kubrick’s The Strange Love, turned his attention to directing dramatic feature films after graduating from the London Film School in 1967.
In the meantime, he traveled to Paris to document the 1968 student uprising as it happened. Mann adopted the protesters’ slogan, “Prenez une caméra et decezez dans la rue” (or “Pick up your camera and take to the streets”) and do what American networks could not. Mann persuaded student leaders Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Alan Geismar, and Alan Kriveen to grant interviews, which were edited into a segment called “Rebellion” and broadcast on NBC. Mann then reconstructed the footage into an abstract eight-minute short film (Jaunpuri), which was screened at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival.
Ten years later, Mann was invited to the world premiere of his first feature film, Thief, in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. This is a huge honor for a director early in his career. “At the time, the movie I made before Thief, The Jericho Mile, was being distributed theatrically and was showing on the Champs Elysées, across the street from Thief,” Mann explains. “It was completely strange to have two (released) at the same time after trying to make a movie for over 10 years, especially at a time when you couldn’t make a movie on an iPhone.”
All 12 of Mann’s plays will be screened this week at the Festival Lumière, organized by Cannes chief Thierry Frémaux, and Mann will be awarded the Lumière Prize after a masterclass on Friday, October 17th. The retrospective also includes the Max series pilot “Tokyo Vice” (an apotheosis of Mann’s elevated aesthetics and obsession with authenticity) and “The Jericho.” The Mile is a sports movie filmed inside Folsom Prison and featuring real inmates as extras.
“Confinement of geographic space does not reduce human intelligence; in fact, the opposite happens,” says Mann, who was impressed by the prisoners’ interest in the ship. The director remembers someone who asked questions for 30 minutes and by the end understood the principles of blocking and reporting.
Mann said the production arranged for several inmates to obtain Taft-Hartley permits. “That meant getting a minimum SAG at the kiosk instead of earning 3 cents an hour stamping license plates.” The only condition was that there be no race war between Folsom’s three gangs, the Black Guerrilla Family, the Bluebirds (a precursor to the white supremacist Aryan Brotherhood), and the Mexican Mafia’s La Eme, or the warden would stop it.
Three minutes into the film, a member of the Black Brotherhood tells a journalist, “Everything is real. That’s our motto.” This isn’t exactly Mann’s creed, but the sentiment certainly aligns with his commitment to authenticity.
“Authenticity is where I go. That’s where the richness is for me, in real people, real situations, real challenges, and the emotional waves that happen to people,” Mann says. That’s true whether he’s telling modern stories like The Jericho Mile or The Insider or adapting historical fiction like The Last of the Mohicans.
In this pre-Revolutionary American epic starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeline Stowe, Mann not only focused on period-accurate set costumes and costumes, but also tried to convey the psychology of the time, wondering what a young woman growing up in London’s increasingly mobile Portman Square neighborhood in 1757 would have thought and what kind of music she might have listened to (the answer being Handel).
“The Insider” was inspired by Mann’s friendship with Lowell Bergman, the “60 Minutes” producer (whose ferocity was personified by Al Pacino) who wowed CBS executives with a bombshell segment featuring a Big Tobacco whistleblower. Mann was talking to Bergman about other projects when the station self-censored an interview with Jeffrey Wigand (played by Russell Crowe on The Insider) in which he gave personal insight into a major corporate scandal.
“Whether it’s ‘Manhunter,’ ‘Heat 2,’ or ‘The Insider,’ it’s about digging deep into real people…what it felt like to be in their shoes and see it through their eyes,” Mann says. “That’s what I spend writing and preparing for, where I find things that people can’t make up.”
In the case of “Manhunter,” Mann was in contact with a convicted murderer named Dennis Wayne Wallace when he read Thomas Harris’ “Red Dragon” and was trying to write an original screenplay. The novel provided Mann with a plot in which to place his characters, overwriting Harris’ ideas for Tooth Fairy serial killer Francis Dolarhyde with details that interested Mann about Wallace, who had fanciful relationships with women.
Wallace told Mann that their love song (at least in the killer’s imagination) was “In a Gadda da Vida,” so the director used that music in the end credits. Even more important was Dollarhyde’s dark humor, which was also drawn from Mann’s correspondence with people who had actually committed such crimes. “Just because something is real doesn’t mean you have to use it,” Mann clarifies. The director who defined the hyper-stylized ’80s look for Miami Vice and brought a similarly heightened aesthetic to Manhunter is famous for filling notebooks full of the research and background material needed to prepare for each project.
Thief cast John Santucci, the thief who inspired James Caan’s title character, as a corrupt cop. But his commitment to authenticity goes one step further: “All the props in ‘The Thief’ weren’t props. They were all tools of his heist,” Mann says. The thermal lance Khan used to penetrate the safe was Santucci’s own Burning Bar. Other aspects, such as the problems the characters had with their wives and children, came from Mann’s interviews with Santucci and his immersion into the man’s life. (Mann helped him get his SAG card and made him a regular on his series “Crime Stories” in the late ’80s.)
In his years studying both criminals and law enforcement officers, Mann has repeatedly been fascinated by both the complexities and contradictions of their personalities. “I’ve interacted with amazing people in law enforcement who do very incredibly complex things. They could be the CEOs of major Fortune 500 companies, but no one knows because they’re trying to take out Khun Sa, who was responsible for producing 65 percent of the world’s heroin.”
Mann invites interactions with all the potential characters, letting their life experiences inform the details of the film. Perhaps the most influential example is Chicago police officer Chuck Adamson. His experiences inspired Mann’s epic 1995 crime film Heat. Adamson once told Mann that he spoke over coffee with Neil McCauley, a professional High Line thief whom he later killed in a gunfight. This scene is the basis for a dramatic confrontation between Pacino and Robert De Niro that has become perhaps the director’s most iconic scene.
According to Mann, Adamson had great respect for his quarry. “When he met him, he realized they had a kind of unique relationship. He really liked this guy, and at the same time, like he said, he would have blown his socks off without thinking.” Mann understood that contradiction, and understood why McCauley would agree to meet with Adamson at the Belden Deli on Clark Street in Chicago. This was the two men’s way of evaluating each other. Because they understood, as the audience does in “Heat,” that they were on a collision course and only one of them would make it out alive.
I love the concise, reality-based psychology of “The Insider” and “Thief,” and the sophisticated, darker-than-noir elegance of “Colterior.” Still, Heat is Mann’s most elaborate work, and is considered by many to be his finest work, both in terms of its composition and the breadth of its ensemble. In creating this work, Mann set himself a challenge. Can you build a vast collection of three-dimensional people (even the most minor supporting characters have fully imagined lives) and program the meticulously precise structure that brings them all into that explosive collision?
No wonder it’s the only sequel he intends to produce. In Mann’s way, his characters are fully realized and their lives seem to go on even when the cameras aren’t rolling. It’s only a matter of time before they appear in Heat 2 (which picks up right after the original film starring Val Kilmer’s Chris Sihalis, with Leonardo DiCaprio reportedly being considered for the role). The novel has been published and the notes are in preparation. Because when Mann says “action,” that’s what he means.
