It is normal that Michael Mann is in the spotlight at the Lyon Lumière Festival, since the director of “Ali”, “Heat” and “The Insider” began his career as a filmmaker in France. After graduating from the London Film School in 1967, Mann – who grew up in Chicago and switched from studying literature to film after seeing Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr Strangelove” – was determined to direct feature-length dramas.
In the meantime, he traveled to Paris to document the student uprisings of 1968 as they occurred. Mann adopted the protesters’ slogan: “Take a camera and hit the streets” (or “take a camera and take to the streets”), achieving what American networks could not: he convinced student leaders Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Alain Geismar and Alain Krivine to grant him interviews, edited into a segment called “Insurrection” and broadcast on NBC. Mann then transformed these images into an 8-minute abstract short film (“Jaunpuri”), screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971.
Ten years later, Mann was invited to world premiere his theatrical debut, “Thief,” in competition at Cannes – quite an honor for a director so early in his career. “At that time, ‘The Jericho Mile,’ which was the film of the week that I had made before ‘Thief,’ was being distributed in theaters and playing on the Champs-Élysées next to ‘Thief,'” Mann explains. “It was completely weird, especially at the time when you couldn’t make a movie on an iPhone, after a decade or more of trying to make a movie, to have two (released) at the same time.”
Hosted by Cannes director Thierry Frémaux, the Lumière Festival will screen Mann’s 12 feature films this week, before awarding him the Lumière Prize, following a master class on Friday October 17. The retrospective will also include his pilot for the Max series “Tokyo Vice” — the apotheosis of the intersection of Mann’s elevated aesthetic and commitment to authenticity — and “The Jericho.” Mile,” a sports film set in Folsom Prison featuring real inmates as extras.
“Human intelligence does not diminish when we limit a geographical space. On the contrary, the opposite happens,” explains Mann, impressed by the prisoners’ interest in the device. The director remembers the one who asked him questions for half an hour, after which he understood the principles of blocking and coverage.
The production had several inmates get Taft-Hartley licenses, Mann says, “which meant they got a minimum SAG, on their commissary instead of making, you know, three cents an hour stamping license plates or something.” The only condition: There could be no race war between Folsom’s three gangs—the Black Guerrilla Family, the Bluebirds (a precursor to the white supremacist Aryan Brotherhood), and “La eMe,” the Mexican Mafia—or the warden would pull the plug.
Three minutes into the film, a member of the Black Brotherhood tells a reporter, “It’s all real. That’s our motto,” and while that’s not exactly Mann’s mantra, the sentiment certainly fits with his commitment to authenticity.
“Reality is where I go. That’s where the richness is for me: in real people, real circumstances, real trials and emotional tidal waves that happen to people,” Mann says. This applies whether he’s telling contemporary stories like “The Jericho Mile” and “The Insider” or adapting a work of historical fiction, a la “The Last of the Mohicans.”
For this film – a pre-revolutionary American epic starring Daniel Day Lewis and Madeleine Stowe – Mann not only insisted on period-accurate sets and wardrobe, but also strove to channel the psychology of the times: what a young woman growing up in the mobile district of Portman Square in London in 1757 would have thought, what kind of music she would have could listen (the answer: Handel), and so on.
“The Insider” was inspired by Mann’s friendship with Lowell Bergman, the “60 Minutes” producer (played so fiercely by Al Pacino) whose explosive segment featuring a Big Tobacco whistleblower frightened the upper echelons at CBS. Mann was talking to Bergman about other projects when the network self-censored his interview with Jeffrey Wigand (played by Russell Crowe in “The Insider”), giving him a personal insight into a big business scandal.
“Whether I’m doing ‘Manhunter,’ ‘Heat 2’ or ‘The Insider,’ it’s a deep dive into real people…what it was like to be in their shoes and look through their eyes,” Mann says. “That’s what occupies me in the writing or in the preparatory phase, and that’s where I find things that you can’t invent.”
In the case of “Manhunter,” Mann had come into contact with a convicted killer named Dennis Wayne Wallace, around whom he was trying to write an original screenplay, when he read Thomas Harris’ “Red Dragon.” The novel presented Mann with a plot in which to place his character, overwriting Harris’s ideas about “Tooth Fairy” serial killer Francis Dollarhyde with details that interested Mann about Wallace, who had a fantasy relationship with a woman.
Wallace had told Mann that their love song (at least in the killer’s imagination) was “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”, which is why the director used that music in the end credits. More important was Dollarhyde’s dark humor, also drawn from Mann’s correspondence with someone who had truly been capable of such crimes. “Just because something is real doesn’t mean you have to use it,” Mann says. The director, who defined the ultra-stylized look of ’80s “Miami Vice” and brought an equally elevated aesthetic to “Manhunter,” fills entire notebooks with the research and background documents needed to prepare each project.
In “Thief,” he cast John Santucci, the thief on whom James Caan’s main character was based, in the role of a corrupt cop. But his dedication to authenticity went even further: “Not all of the props in ‘Thief’ were props. They were all his burglary tools,” Mann says. The heat lance Caan uses to break into the vault was Santucci’s own hot rod. Other facets, like the problems the characters had with their wives and children, came from Mann interviewing Santucci and immersing himself in the man’s life. (Mann helped him get a SAG card and made him a regular on his “Crime Story” series in the late ’80s.)
Studying both criminals and law enforcement officers over the years, Mann was repeatedly fascinated by the complexities and contradictions of their personalities. “I’ve interacted with some spectacular people in law enforcement who are doing things that are pretty incredible and so complicated that they could be CEOs of major Fortune 500 companies, and no one will know because they’re taking out Khun Sa, who was responsible for producing 65 percent of the world’s heroin.”
Mann invites interaction with anyone who could be a character, adapting their life experience in detail for his films. Perhaps the most striking example is that of Chicago police officer Chuck Adamson, whose experience inspired aspects of Mann’s spectacular 1995 crime film “Heat.” Adamson once told Mann how he sat down for coffee with Neil McCauley, a high-level professional thief whom he later killed in a shootout — the basis for a dramatic tête-à-tête between Pacino and Robert De Niro in what has arguably become the director’s most iconic scene.
According to Mann, Adamson greatly respected his career. “When he met him, he realized that they had a unique relationship. He really liked this guy, and at the same time, as he said, he would pull him out of his socks without thinking twice.” Mann appreciated this paradox and understood why McCauley might agree to meet Adamson at the Belden Deli on Clark St. in Chicago. It was a way for both men to assess each other, since they understood — as the audience does in “Heat” — that they were on a collision course from which only one would make it out alive.
I have a soft spot for the terse, reality-based psychology of “The Insider” and “Thief,” as well as the sleek, darker-than-black elegance of “Collateral.” Still, “Heat” is Mann’s most elaborate film — in terms of logistics and the scale of his ensemble — and one that many consider his masterpiece. In making it, Mann challenged himself: could he construct a vast cast of three-dimensional characters (where even the most minor supporting characters had fully imagined lives) and program a meticulously precise structure that would bring everything to this explosive collision?
No wonder this is the only sequel he plans to make. The way Mann works, his characters are so fully realized that their lives seem to go on even when the cameras aren’t rolling. It’s only a matter of time before they do it on “Heat 2” (which picks up right after the original with Val Kilmer’s character Chris Shiherlis, a role Leonardo DiCaprio reportedly considered). The novel is published and the notebook is in preparation. Because when Mann talks about “action,” he really means it.
