INTERVIEW BY F.X. FEENEY
DGA | WINTER 2012

F.X. FEENEY: A lot of directors know from an early age that this is what they want to do. Did you have a life plan that you wanted to make films?
MICHAEL MANN: I wasn't really interested in cinema until I saw Dr. Strangelove, alongside a set of films by F.W. Murnau and G.W. Pabst for a college course. These were a revelation. I'd already seen some of the French New Wave and some Russian films, but the idea of directing, of shooting a film myself? Never. Prior to Strangelove, it simply had not seemed possible that you could work in the mainstream film industry and make very ambitious films for a big mainstream audience. The whole film is a third act. The mad general played by Sterling Hayden is totally submerged in his character the moment we first encounter him. There's no prelude, no context. We're just with him, we know who the guy is, and we catch up along the way. Even as a young man I found that intensity very exciting—how immediate it was.

Q: So how did you organize yourself as a director? What did you have to pull together to make it happen?
MANN: One of the most instructive events was when, right out of the London Film School, I got a job working for Bill Kaplan in the British office of 20th Century Fox in Soho Square. Bill was production supervisor for a lot of films that were being made at that time in England, owing to the budgetary rebates then in force under The Eady Plan. Working in physical production, helping organize scheduling, budgeting, and production logistics became for me a model of how to think, of how to organize the totality of a movie. I apply the lessons I learned there to this day, not just in terms of budgeting—but in terms of the content of a movie. There's a critical planning that is very three dimensional at this early stage. That has become really important in everything I've done since.

Q: Your earliest films were documentaries. Is that what formed your commitment to authenticity?
MANN: My ambition was always to make dramatic films. I had a strong sense of the value of drama growing up in Chicago, which has long had a thriving theater scene. I'd also found, working a lot of odd jobs as a kid—as a short-order cook, on construction, or as a cab driver—that there was tremendous richness in real-life experience, and contact with people and circumstances that were sometimes extreme. I was drawn to this instinctively. You find out things when you're with a real-life thief, things you could never make up just sitting in a room. The converse is also true: Just because you discover something interesting, you don't have to use it; there's no obligation. Yet life itself is the proper resource. I've never really changed that habit of wanting to bring preparation into the real world of the picture, with a character that actors are going to portray.

Q: Is that why you develop biographies for every character, not just for your use but for your actors as well?
MANN: I like to know everything about a character. Major characters, minor characters, even if a picture's got nothing to do with what their childhood is, I want to know what their childhood was like. What were their parents like? Where did they grow up? What do they like, what do they not like? What kinds of women are attracted to them? Why are these women attracted to them? If the character is a woman, who is she? How is she relating to the situation of her life?

Q: In a period piece such as The Last of the Mohicans, it must have been difficult to get the kind of authenticity you're after.
MANN: Making The Last of the Mohicans was particularly challenging. We were trying to re-create the conditions, the tones, the value systems of 1757, particularly for somebody raised in an Algonquian-speaking tribal group, such as the Mohicans. How does Hawkeye come on to a woman? How does he say, 'Hey: I like you. Let's go out?' Behind that is an anthropological perspective I always want to have. I want the actor to have that same deep clarity about his or her character. Mind you, this inquiry includes not wasting time on stuff that is immaterial. On The Insider Russell Crowe met the real Jeffrey Wigand three times, and then we both said, 'That's enough.' He got everything he needed, and there was that fine point in which he was still on a frontier—needing to project and extrapolate what Jeffrey would do. The trap both Russell and I wanted to avoid was falling into a Xerox of the actual guy. I didn't want anything imitative. What results therefore is Russell's evocation of Wigand, the essential, authentic Wigand that's based on his origins and what he's confronting.

Q: Are you conscious of choosing actors who share your intensity?
MANN: It's usually a good idea. [Laughs] I've made one or two mistakes, but most of the people I've worked with are really down for the cause.

Q: Do you like to rehearse your actors before and during shooting?
MANN: Yes, but never for too long. There's an art to rehearsal. Never rehearse to the point where you wish you'd shot it. I always want to stop just before the moment becomes so actual that I wish I had a camera. I don't want that to happen until take 3 or 4 of the day we're shooting it. You always want to back off, you always want to leave potential. There's a tremendous thrill for me in finding the spontaneous moment. Sometimes that happens when you're smart enough not to rehearse too much—when you know where to stop, because otherwise you'll get too programmed. Other times, that spontaneity comes with a liberation you get at the end of tremendous preparation—where everybody is confident and the players know exactly what they're going to do.

Q: How did you apply that to the famous coffee shop scene between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Heat (1995) when the two adversaries meet head-to-head for the first and only time?
MANN: We did two things: We discussed the scene. Then we did some rehearsals, but I was wary because the entire movie is a dialectic that works backward from its last moment, which is the death of the thief Neil McCauley [De Niro], while the detective Vincent Hanna [Pacino], who's just taken McCauley's life, stands with him as he passes. The 'marriage' of the two of them in this contrapuntal story is the coffee shop scene.

Now Pacino and De Niro are two of the greatest actors on the planet, so I knew they would be completely alive to each other—each one reacting off the other's slightest gesture, the slightest shift of weight. If De Niro's right foot sitting in that chair slid backward by so much as an inch, or his right shoulder dropped by just a little bit, I knew Al would be reading that. They'd be scanning each other, like an MRI. Both men recognize that their next encounter will mean certain death for one of them. Gaining an edge is why they've chosen to meet. So we read the scene a number of times before shooting—not a lot—just looking at it on the page. I didn't want it memorized. My goal was to get them past the unfamiliarity of it. But of course these two already knew it impeccably.

Q: You made an interesting choice directorially in the finished film. The whole scene takes place in over-the-shoulder close-ups—each man's point of view on the other.
MANN: We shot that scene with three cameras, two over-the-shoulders and one profile shot, but I found when editing that every time we cut to the profile, the scene lost its one-on-one intensity. I'll often work with multiple cameras, if they're needed. In this case, I knew ahead of time that Pacino and De Niro were so highly attuned to each other that each take would have its own organic unity. Whatever one said, and the specific way he'd say it, would spark a specific reaction in the other. I needed to shoot in such a way that I could use the same take from both angles. What's in the finished film is almost all of take 11—because that has an entirely different integrity and tonality from takes 10, or 9, or 8. All of this begins and ends with scene analysis. It doesn't matter if it's two people in a room or two opposing forces taking over a street. Action comes from drama, and drama is conflict: What's the conflict?

Q: At the opposite end of the scale from that intimate two-man scene in the coffee shop is the huge street-battle in Heat. How did you prepare a sequence that massive?
MANN: That scene arose out of choreography, and was absolutely no different than staging a dance. We rehearsed in detail by taking over three target ranges belonging to the L.A. County Sheriff's Department. We built a true-scale mock-up of the actual location we were using along 5th Street in downtown L.A., with flats and barriers standing in for where every parked car was going to be, every mailbox, every spot where De Niro, Tom Sizemore, and Val Kilmer were going to seek cover as they moved from station to station. Every player was trained with weapons the way somebody in the military would be brought up, across many days, with very rigid rules of safety, to the point where the safe and prodigious handling of those weapons became reflexive. Then, as a culmination, we blocked out the action with the actors shooting live rounds at fixed targets as they moved along in these rehearsals. The confidence that grew out of such intensive preparations—all proceeding from a very basic dramatic point—meant that when we were finally filming on 5th Street, firing blanks, each man was as fully and as exactly skilled as the character he represented.

Q: What was the 'conflict' your choreography was proceeding from?
MANN: McCauley's unit wants to get out, while the police want something else, and are sending in their assets. Judged strictly in terms of scene analysis and character motivation, the police are used to entering a situation with overwhelming power on their side. When they're assaulted by people who know what they're doing, they don't do well. McCauley's guys are simply more motivated, and have skills that easily overwhelm the police. Choreography has to tell a story; there's no such thing as a stand-alone shootout. Who your characters are as characters determines your outcome.

Q: Each of your films seems to set out in a different direction from the one that preceded it. What attracts you to a project?
MANN: Usually I think I know what I'm going to look for next, and usually that turns out to be wrong. How I chose to do Collateral is a prime example. I had just come off of doing Ali (2001), a picture about a huge real-life figure. I had developed The Aviator, about Howard Hughes. But as brilliant as John Logan's screenplay was, and as much as I wanted to work with Leonardo [DiCaprio], I felt I would be doing a rerun of what I'd just done. What attracted me to Collateral was the opportunity to do the exact opposite: a microcosm; 12 hours; one night; no wardrobe changes; two people; small lives; inside a cab; a small time frame viewed large. I very much admired the hard, gem-like construction of Stuart Beattie's screenplay. There were a lot of modifications as we prepared to shoot, but the structure was there from the start—and it was tremendously appealing. That made my decision. I asked Marty [Scorsese] if he wanted to do The Aviator.

The idea for The Last of the Mohicans came to me because I'd seen the film written by Philip Dunne when I was 3. I realized 40 years later that it had been rattling around in my brain ever since, that it was a part of me, a very important part. I just hadn't been consciously aware of it up to that point. I also thought: There hasn't really been an exciting epic, period film in a long, long time. Joe Roth and Roger Birnbaum were running 20th Century Fox at the time. They got the excitement of it immediately.

Q: Even though you're always trying to do something new, there seems to be continuity in your work.
MANN: As far as the continuities you're noticing in my work, those are arrived at film by film, and are not planned as such. The film directors I admire most don't consciously have a form that is their form. Marty Scorsese doesn't say to himself: 'I will make a certain decision this way because it either does or doesn't conform to my form.' No, what he chooses to do flows from him organically. I think that's the case for every filmmaker. The more diverse one film is from the other, the more exciting it is. What you want is to find yourself on a frontier. For the working director, there is no conscious form from film to film. We all know what our ambitions are, but in a very healthy way we are all unconscious of 'signature.'

Q: Yet this is an abiding theme. Neil McCauley in Heat is in a similar position—ready to walk away from any life situation on a moment's notice.
MANN: I'm attracted to characters who are conscious of trying to figure out what they're doing here, and what's the best way to do it. Maybe that's because I'm engaged in the same thing and I either have, or I haven't!

Q: Music is an important element in all your work. Do you use it to pre-imagine your films, or are your choices discoveries you make in postproduction?
MANN: As research, music enters early for me. If you can find that piece of music which evokes the central emotion of one of your characters, some pivotal crisis where he or she must rouse themselves from despair and manifest something very aggressive within his or her own mind—this becomes the piece of music for that moment. If I want to quantify how a character is feeling and thinking, in a way that is replicable, so I can re-evoke that emotion many, many times, finding the right piece of music is positively essential. Not only as I prepare the scene—but as I shoot the scene, as I direct the actors, and finally, as I edit the scene. One specific example comes to mind in Collateral, when the coyotes cross in front of the cab. For me, that was a watershed in the story's progression. Each of the two principle characters is submerging into his own perspective of what life is: a retrospective moment; a prelude to a violent confrontation. The song "Shadow on the Sun" by Audioslave nailed that moment for me. It became an indelible part of planning, sustaining, and executing that scene.

Q: You once told me that for Thief, in your mind you saw the city as a 'three-dimensional machine.' Was that behind your choice of the electronic Tangerine Dream score, over the earthy blues you originally considered?
MANN: One of my great weaknesses is that I'm still hung up on the choice I made over that score. Thirty years later I'm still debating this. By string theory, in some alternate reality, there's a version of Thief with wall-to-wall blues.

Q: Parallel universes aside, you've certainly revisited and re-edited your films on DVD.
MANN: Highly recommended! I'm all for that.

Q: From what I've observed, you keep a very long workday, from the crack of dawn to late at night.
MANN: In terms of a shooting day? No. I like a 12-hour day, but I'd like to get that down to a 10-hour day. I'm at my best in those kinds of chunks. It all gets down to selection: 'This is really of value.' It's pivotal; if you don't get this particular moment right, you just blew the Act II ending. You go get that thing, and you don't let anything stand in your way. By the same token, there's another event that may show up and be part of the scene that's a visual, and it may be trivial; it really is not important. To be able to have that discretion allows you to direct your concentration and logistical assets to what's really important. The more you can have that discretion of accurately reading: 'This is really pivotal, this really is not,' that is absolutely the key to doing this stuff well.

Q: Over time, you've come to work with the same people again and again. How do you assemble your team?
MANN: You have to work backward from how great it is when you're in the trenches and who you're there with. If people are as ambitious as you are, you keep them close to you. If a person gets excited by the things I am excited by—say, transforming a run-down arena in the middle of Mozambique that hasn't had electricity or plumbing since 1974, as we had to do for Ali—if a challenge like that gets your blood running, you would be a person I gravitate toward. We would wind up working together on a lot of pictures. My 1st AD Michael Waxman, who is now directing television successfully, has been working with me since 1986. Cinematographer Dante Spinotti and I have done five movies together. There are a number of folks on my crew who've been working with me since Mohicans back in 1991. We're all working now on Luck.

Q: How many setups do you like to shoot in a day?
MANN: That depends on the film—but I'd say 30 to 40, on average. Less ever since Collateral, because that was when we began shooting digitally, and did 15-minute takes. But I use two or three cameras quite often. That considerably increases the number of setups. I love working fast. What makes me crazy is waiting; any obstacle to a smooth flow will get me agitated. What you want to be is on a roll. This is what I particularly love about working with Al [Pacino]; we always get into a steady groove. Takes 5, 6, or 7 are generally his golden takes. You get into a tempo with all good actors, a rhythm, and it's wonderful. There's not even verbal communication after awhile. You don't have to talk about it—eyes connect.

Q: What's a Michael Mann set like?
MANN: Protecting concentration is a big thing for me. I like a quiet set. The actors have the most extraordinarily difficult task: being somebody else, and projecting themselves authentically into a given moment. I'm extremely zealous about guarding their concentration—and mine—from any needless distraction that might interfere.