Whe works in the genre, as Michael Mann does – thriller (“Heat” and many others), horror (including “Manhunter”), adventure (like “The Last of the Mohicans”) – for him the cinema is usually the point of reference . But for Michael Mann it’s not about the cinema. He doesn’t even care about the genre: “When I’m making a film about thieves,” he once said, “I’m not watching Melville’s Cruel Intentions, I’m watching how I meet a thief.”
He admires Jean-Pierre Melville, and he suspects that he too was in contact with thieves. When asked about his favorite films, he replies: “Apocalypse Now”. “Battleship Potemkin”. “Raging Bull”. Not surprising. But also: “Last year in Marienbad” and “Joan of Arc”. It is often a long, winding road from what you love to your own art.
Michael Mann was born in 1943 and comes from Chicago. After studying film in London, he stayed in Europe. Even then – in the second half of the sixties – American studios liked to shoot in England because of the generous subsidies, and Michael Mann came to 20th Century Fox, as the studio was still called at the time. There he learned everything about filmmaking, scripts, budgeting, production processes. Later he watched May ’68 for American television in Paris.
Cold colors against warm sunlight
So it comes from the documentary. Not from the advertising, as you can read about him again and again. This misunderstanding has to do with his aesthetics, which he has also developed in his films, especially since the television series “Miami Vice” (which he produced): the highly polished surfaces of his pictures, the coolness of many of his characters, the cold colors against the warm sunlight, the monochrome cityscapes, the seemingly minimalist details before the clearly choreographed and potentially bombastic action begins.
Unlike any advertising aesthetic, however, Michael Mann’s aesthetics are never an end in themselves. She doesn’t want to sell us anything, but to open up a world for us that is fed by reality. He’s not a stylist. “Style begins,” he says, “when the form is orphaned because the content is gone. My stance assumes an audience sitting in a dark room as an extremely sensitive organism, and everything has an effect.” That’s what matters to him. For effect instead of bang.
The making of “Heat”
Michael Mann is interested in the world, not formulas. This gives his films their dense texture. This is most evident in Heat, one of his many best films. He worked on it for almost a quarter of a century.
It all started when I met a police officer in Chicago who had experienced the story in one way or another: this tug-of-war between two similar men, separated only by the law. A few years later, namely in 1979, Mann had already written a thick screenplay. A complex thing, complicated to turn, expensive too. What finally emerged is so tightly woven in story structure, characters and visual motifs, so brilliantly jointed, so hardened in steel that it became indestructible: a cult film. But above that is the music of Elliot Goldenthal and Brian Eno, played so transparently by the Kronos Quartet that you think you can see right through them.
Between drafting the screenplay and completing Heat (which came out in 1995), Mann created all of his early work up through The Last of the Mohicans. It was his success that allowed him to realize the “Heat” idea – on about a hundred locations, all in Los Angeles. Mann stages this city – before in “The Thief”, later in “Collateral”, for example – again and again as a co-star, as he did with Miami in “Miami Vice” and with Chicago in “Public Enemy”. In “Heat” Robert De Niro stands at the window of his empty apartment overlooking the Pacific and says that one day he will observe the phosphorescent plankton in Fiji.
Only in this place in the Hollywood Hills, with this view, can such a mirage become a longing. It’s things like that that Michael Mann knows.
His films about thieves, murderers or warriors are mostly relationship films, which makes things much more complicated. It’s about the fascination between people who are on opposite sides of the law or the social fabric. This is where ambivalence comes in.
It ensures that these films neither age nor become boring with repeated viewing. The fight between men is not about good and evil. The always beguiling opposites are rather plan, efficiency, discipline as opposed to instinct and feeling. Michael Mann will be eighty on February 5th.
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