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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 inter-national 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

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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 publica-tions 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 originat-ing 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 grammati-cal 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 “documen-tarist’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 corporatiza-tion 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

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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 documen-taries 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 connec-tion 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, drug-related 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 audi-ences, 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 the-atrical 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

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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 televi-sion 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 produc-tion 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 executive-producing 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 film-making with Thief and would utilize in his subsequent films. This was reason

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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 characteriza-tion 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

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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 ideol-ogy that made it possible.

Themes of global trafficking and political conspiracy can be found through-out 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 hegem-ony 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 drama-tizing 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 simultane-ously 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 mur-dering 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 executive-produce Crime Story (NBC, 1986–8), a project often described as a twenty-two-hour feature film for television, and one that would engage Mann’s deepest cinematic ambitions. As he tells Jonathan Romney, “I approach execu-

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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, show-casing 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 detec-tive, 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 objec-tive 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 com-mitment 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 operat-ing 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 ambi-tions 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 dif-ficulty 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

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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 produc-ers 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 shoot-ing 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

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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 pos-sibilities 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 com-mitment 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 plural-ity 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,”

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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, first-hand 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 protago-nists’ motivations. To help his actors get inside their skins he devotes months

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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 opera-tors 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 conspicu-ous 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

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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 mate-rialize. 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 executive-produced 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 dif-ficult 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

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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 filmmak-ers 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/july-dec01/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-mann-crime-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 addi-tional 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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