Edinburgh University Press Michael Mann

INTRODUCTION: MICHAEL MANN IN HIS INTERVIEWS Steven Sanders Press 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 himUniversity 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 definitiveMann 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 televisionEdinburgh 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 themesMichael 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 STEVEN SANDERS 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,Press 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 Universityerrors 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, whereMann needed, brief explanatory identifications have been placed in the text in brackets. Edinburgh 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 hisMichael 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 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 INTRODUCTION: MICHAEL MANN IN HIS INTERVIEWS 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-BenzPress 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 RenaissanceUniversity 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 stunningMann 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 TVEdinburgh 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-cinemaMichael 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 3 STEVEN SANDERS 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 Pressin 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 UniversityStory (1973–7), Police Woman (1974–8), and Starsky & Hutch (1975–9).

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