Nothing concentrates the attention like watching a film in the presence of its
director. And if it’s Michael Mann we’re talking about, and he is sitting a
few feet away in the same row, then you check three times rather than the
usual two that your mobile is off. Renowned as a flinty, tough guy, with a
reputation for perfectionism outstripped only by the late Stanley Kubrick,
the Chicago-born Mann has made only 11 feature films in three decades, most
of them visually innovative hymns to the loner, the warrior, the man who’s
gotta do what a man’s gotta do. (What a shame he never got to work with
Steve McQueen.)
Mann’s men include a lifer chasing Olympic success (in his 1979 debut, The
Jericho Mile), an emotionally guarded safe-cracker (Thief), an FBI agent
with a gift for empathising with his quarry (Manhunter), an introspective
criminal (Heat) and a shy, terrorised whistle-blower (The Insider). The
dinner-party guest list from hell, in other words. Now the director is on a
flying visit to London for the first screening of Public Enemies, a handsome
1930s gangster movie with a killer cast. Johnny Depp plays John Dillinger,
the dapper bank robber who became a folk hero, and Marion Cotillard is
Billie Frechette, the cloakroom girl who charmed his expensive socks off.
Meanwhile, Christian Bale plays Melvin Purvis, the FBI G-Man hunting the
crook for whom the term Public Enemy No 1 was coined.
The story has been told before, but never with this degree of forensic
scrutiny. Mann, 66, has described himself as a “method director”, and after
an hour in his company, you don’t need to be told twice. Picking at a dish
of steaming scrambled eggs in his hotel room, he expounds at length on
everything from the history of the Native American Menominee tribe to the
influence of Prussian military tactics on bank-robbing techniques. At one
point, he pulls a bulging file from under a cushion and starts reading, in
his chewy Chicago twang, the figures from Dillinger’s heists: “Greencastle,
Indiana, October 23, 1933, $75,000. November 20, four weeks later, $25,000.
Then they take Christmas off and go to Reno...”
Mann doesn’t merely make films, he lives them. And in Public Enemies, he makes
us feel we’re living through the action too. It’s not merely the pedantic
attention to detail. (When Purvis reveals to his squad that Dillinger’s coat
is 32% wool, with a salt-and-pepper weave, it could be the director himself
talking.) Nor is it the often handheld camera, which gets so close to
Dillinger, it’s almost under his skin. Rather it’s the nature of that
camera, the Sony F23, a high-definition DV number that produces vivid, zesty
images. It seemed logical to use the digital medium to render a neon-singed
LA in Collateral, or the candy-coloured convertibles and snazzy nightclubs
of Mann’s recent film version of his 1980s television show Miami Vice, but
it’s surely a less obvious choice in conjuring the granite and oatmeal
Chicago of the depression era.
“I never intended to shoot Public Enemies on high-def,” Mann tells me. He
looks ready for the country club, with his tanned skin, light blue shirt and
beige trousers; his short silver hair contributes somehow to his alert,
sprightly air. “I had planned to use film. Then, at the last minute, I
decided to run a test because Sony had this new camera coming out. I shot
the two side by side on a rainy night in Los Angeles; we had a 1933 Buick
out there, and the 1930s street lighting, because streetlights were
different back then, so that changed the look of the entire cityscape. But
the film looked like a period motion picture, whereas the DV made it feel
like you were right there in 1933. You could reach out and touch that drop
of rain on the black enamel paint of that car. That’s what I wanted. I
wasn’t interested in nostalgia. I wanted the immediacy of, you know, 11.17pm
on a Tuesday night in 1934.”
With this decision made, the rest of the production was geared toward the
quest for authenticity that is Mann’s raison d’être. Remember, The Jericho
Mile was filmed entirely inside California’s notorious Folsom State Prison,
where 13 stabbings occurred during the 21-day shoot; unlike a traditional
set, none resulted from a dispute over the last croissant on the craft
services table. And many of us still watch Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans
in the knowledge that its star, Daniel Day-Lewis, spent a month living in
the forest and hunting his own grub, as his 18th-century character would
really have done. For Public Enemies, the methods varied from actor to
actor. “Melvin Purvis is really a Southern gentleman,” explains Mann, “so
Christian kept the accent for 24 hours a day. It freaked out his young
daughter: ‘Daddy doesn’t talk like that!’ ‘Well, ah’m sorry, mah dear, but
Daddy’s studying for a part, and ah’ll be speaking like that for the next
four months.’ Johnny’s different. He’s very influenced by wardrobe. We got
to see some of Dillinger’s packed suitcases, which he had left behind after
an escape, and Johnny was able to actually hold his shirts in his hands.
They still had the pink paper band around them from the Chinese laundry. And
there were more accoutrements than you’d have thought for a guy on the run —
shaving kit, talcum powder.” Mann’s face brightens as he speaks with
unmistakable awe. “You bet there’s magic to that stuff. I’m not
superstitious, but I couldn’t help it.”
The film also incorporates many of the settings in which the real events took
place. There’s the Biograph, the cinema Dillinger visited on the night of
his death to see Manhattan Melodrama, in which Clark Gable plays a character
modelled loosely on the gangster himself. (Beat that, Charlie Kaufman.)
“Depp dies on the same one square foot of alley where Dillinger died,” Mann
says proudly. “But these locations are only important to me if they’re
great,” he adds. “If they’re not, I have no slavish obligation to include
them.”
More crucial is occupying the headspace of the characters, understanding what
they saw and how they felt in each moment. “The requirements are real easy
to figure out. I know all the details of my life and what’s going on around
me. I don’t need to think about it, it’s just there. Well, you need that
degree of detail in the film.” This ranges from finding the exact ceiling
tiles that Dillinger would have seen when he awoke in bed to mounting a
stick-up in an actual working bank. “The staff knew we were making Public
Enemies,” Mann points out, responding, perhaps, to my concerned expression.
“We told them we were going to come in at some point and hold up the bank,
and that they should just do what they’d normally do.”
Mann’s devotion to minutiae, described by one journalist as “the infinite
refining of detail”, is one of the factors that has contributed to his
reputation as a difficult or demanding taskmaster, something else he has in
common with Kubrick. William Petersen, the star of Manhunter, called him “a
cross between Napoleon and Peter Pan”, while an anonymous Universal employee
said in 1986: “Like many who worked for him, I felt overworked and
unappreciated, abused, even.” One crew member on the set of The Last of the
Mohicans wore a T-shirt bearing the message “It Doesn’t Get Any Worse Than
This”, while another wrote a letter to an American magazine saying that Mann
was “a general... straight from hell. He hired some of the best talent in
the industry, drove them all batty, then drove many of them away”.
Not that those same working methods don’t inspire admiration as well as
anxiety. The late producer Don Simpson once observed of Mann: “He is the
personification of indomitability. This man will not be stopped by anything.
If I were in an alley and had to choose between him or 10 guys to be on my
side, I’d choose him.”
The British actor Stephen Graham, who proves a proper scene-stealer in Public
Enemies, with his devilish portrayal of Baby Face Nelson, has nothing but
praise for the director. “He was an absolute dream,” enthuses Graham, who
was recommended for the part by Leonardo DiCaprio. “We got on really well.
Every morning he’d grab me and give me a big hug, or say, ‘Good kid, good
kid.’ I felt like the teacher’s pet!
“With every creative person, there are explosive moments, but you only have to
look at his crew — a lot of them have worked with him for 15 or 20 years.
They keep coming back because they love him.”
Graham also found that Mann was adept at getting actors into the correct state
of mind before a take. “Michael would come over and have a chat with you,
not about the scene as such, but it would have some relation to something
happening within it. All very relaxed. He’d still be talking right up to the
second that he’d walk away and say, ‘And... action.’”
As well as its technical brilliance, Public Enemies is notable for its
relevance to early 21st-century life. The opening titles explain that many
people during the depression blamed the banks for the loss of their jobs and
homes, which is bound to earn an ironic snort from audiences. J Edgar Hoover
announces a “war on crime” that can’t help but evoke the similarly misguided
“war on terror”. And as the manhunt gets under way, the use of torture by
supposed law enforcers becomes widespread. Could it be that the film’s title
is double-edged, and that the FBI is as much an enemy of the public as the
criminals it is pursuing?
“That would be an overstatement, I think,” Mann decides after a pause. “Life
is more complex. The formation of the FBI was long overdue. It was
innovative and progressive. But then, in going up against Dillinger and
failing, they started putting aside habeas corpus, they began arresting
people whom they knew had committed no crime. They dumped them in horrendous
conditions so they could ‘flip’ them, force them to become informants. You
start to realise how contemporary it all is. Despite that, what’s of
interest to me is not to do a parable of the present. That would be a kind
of passive approach — ‘Oh, that’s analogous to this. Okay, great, so what?’
I want the experience of something that’s dynamic. What I want is life.”
A Mann for all seasons
He made the first Hannibal Lecter film, Manhunter, in 1986 and was the
creative force behind Miami Vice.
Mann loves the roar of violence, as seen in Heat (1995) and now in Public
Enemies, but he has a lyrical side too, as shown in the stunning
cinematography of Last of The Mohicans (1992). Also his heroes are very
complex, from James Caan's safecracker in The Thief (1981), to Russel
Crowe's conflicted whistleblower in The Insider (1999)
Public Enemies is released on Wednesday
