‘I Probably Shouldn’t Even Be Answering This Question’
Michael Mann on why American critics dismissed Thief, and what’s going on with Heat 2.
www.vulture.com
(full interview at the link)
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I've spoken to Mann a few times over the years about his work. But we'd never really gone deep on Thief specifically. The occasion of this 4K release seemed like the right time to do so. (And yes, I did ask him about Heat 2.)
Thief was such a visually arresting film for its era. Was there a lot of visual research you did for it — films, photographs, things like that?
Not affecting the visualization. The visualization of it was: How do I want you to feel about Frank relative to the city he's operating within, the circumstances of his life? I wanted you to see and feel that city from within his perspective. For Frank, Chicago is not this flat city built on the Great Plains. It's a three-dimensional matrix. It's a maze that he has to operate in and also decode and pursue. So, I took advantage of what Chicago looks like when it rains. Because as the black streets get reflective and the lights reflect off them, you feel like you're driving through a tunnel, not like you're driving on top of a surface. We wet down the streets at night so they would be reflective, and that became the camera perspective, as well as him having that black '71 Eldorado and seeing the lights reflected all over the car as he moved through it.
This sense of him moving through a tunnel also highlights his loneliness, which feels crucial to the fact that he then falls in love.
I don't know that he's lonely as much as alone. He views life very much as an outsider, and he's aware of it. I thought of him as a certain kind of conventional character in literature, which is the wild child. Somebody who, because of his circumstances, has grown up outside of society. In Frank's case, he has been in prison from when he was 18 to sometime in his late 30s. He didn't have TV. Then he's suddenly dropped into this society and its mores, the values, the culture — this matrix of life as it is in 1980. How does he prepare himself? Who will I be? How should I conduct myself? What should my life be? So, he's using sources like magazines and newspapers to put together that collage. Okay, I'm going to have a car. What kind of car should I have? I'm going to have a house. What kind of house should I have? Should I have a wife? Should I not have a wife?
He also, like a lot of convicts that I met, used the time in prison to read. It was reading and researching how life is for an extremely pragmatic purpose: "Why should I not commit suicide and just end this?" That goes back to experiences I had with some convicts in Folsom when I was casting The Jericho Mile. I had guys quoting Immanuel Kant to me. One guy was quoting the labor theory of value. He had become a Marxist and a Buddhist at the same time, because he needed to get an answer to the question: "What is my life to myself?" This was a guy with a sixth-grade education. They'd go into libraries and say, "I'm doing time. Give me a book on time." I cast 28 convicts in roles in The Jericho Mile. There's a guy I tried to cast who said, "No, man, I like what you said you're doing here and everything, but I can't be in your movie." I asked him why. And he said, "Because if I allowed myself to be in your movie, I would allow you to appropriate the surplus capital of my bad karma." And he wasn't being cute. Inherent in that answer was the fact that he saw the time he was doing as his labor, and that the reason he was doing time was because he had bad karma in the first place, i.e., he got caught.
What are your memories of James Caan? You guys did the commentary on the film back when it first came out on Blu-ray, and it sounds like you really got along.
He was terrific. He was down for the cause. He wanted to master all the skill sets that his character should have. Because he knew that it would affect his speech. He knew it would affect how he picked up a glass. It would affect everything. Most importantly, the fact that you can do all these things in real life imbues you with a confidence. For example, when you feel an inner rage and something's about to come out, but then because of the scene, you're supposed to repress it, but you then also have to figure out, "How am I going to get out of this office having pulled a .45?" The wariness of it. Everything about what he's doing is informed by the fact that Jimmy could do every single thing in reality that his character could do.
Any good film, we're connected to it and moved by it; we're in the scene with the actors. The heart of that connection is that we're very smart animals, and every part of our brain is believing what we're seeing, because of the authenticity. That other human being, James Caan in this case, he is Frank. It means all the training that Jimmy did, where he was drilling safes. We did time out at a place called Gunsite, Arizona, with a guy named Jeff Cooper on training with weapons. Jimmy could really handle himself. He'd been a college football player and everything, he was very athletic. He was a very tough guy to begin with.
Your work is on the Criterion Channel right now, to coincide with the 4K release of Thief on Criterion. Is there a film of yours you wish more people would see and discover and appreciate?
For me, it'd be The Insider. For myself, that was very challenging. It's a tense psychological drama that takes place in two hours and 45 minutes. The ambition of it is the challenge: Can I engage and deliver the intensity that Jeffrey Wigand and Lowell Bergman lived through? In Lowell Bergman's case, your life's work may be trashed, and you may be excluded. In Jeffrey Wigand's case, with the assault upon you and your family, you're reduced to the edge of suicide. So, it's a psychological assault by your adversaries, and it's a mortal threat. Both in the construction of the screenplay that Eric Roth and I wrote, but also directorially and cinematically, how was I going to bring the audience into the intensity of that experience? Naturally, it was a wonderful place to push myself into. Personally, I felt that I pushed myself onto a frontier, and I always feel that those are very healthy places to be.
It seems that over the past 15 or so years, there's been a resurgence of interest in your films — even with some that weren't seen as successes at the time of their release. Obviously, I think the movies are great, but why do you think people are connecting with your work now?
I don't like to speculate. I think it may have to do with what's in the work. I'm not a journeyman director; I'd like to be, because I love shooting. But I put a lot into a film, and so I think sometimes they have layers of relating. They're not simple. They may be totally accessible — not all my films, but some of them may be accessible just as something that's going to flow, just going to occupy you for two hours, or two hours and 45 minutes in the case of Heat and Insider — but there's also a lot there, because my ambition was to put a lot of depth into it. I probably shouldn't even be answering this question to tell you the truth.
Can I ask what's going on with Heat 2?
I just finished the screenplay and handed in the first draft.
In a case like this, who do you hand your screenplay in to?
In this case it was Warner Brothers. Any more than that, I can't talk about. But it's an exciting project.
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Not getting my hopes up too much, since it's arguably been 21 years since his last great film. But it seems to be a passion project and the Heat 2 novel he co-wrote is supposed to be good.
