Happy Sad Confused - Michael Mann

Episode Date: February 15, 2016

This was a big one. Michael Mann is kind of the man. Michael is an incredible director, screenwriter, and producer known for Heat, The Last of the Mohicans, and most recently Blackhat. Michael joins Josh this week to talk about the behind the scenes of many of his terrific films. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey guys, welcome to Happy, Sad Confused. I'm Josh Horowitz. Welcome to my podcast. Joining me back by Popular Demand, Sammy for the intro. Hey, Sammy. Hi. Back from California. Yeah, it feels good to be back. Feels great to have you here in the office. I was really sad, too. It felt weird just talking to myself. I always had me threatening messages. I'm used to talking to myself. I'm used to talking to myself. my regular day-to-day life, but not for the podcast. Usually I need somebody to talk to. You should have put that little E.T. doll on the chair I'm sitting on now. That's true.

Who says I don't do that anyway when you're not in the office? That's true. For context, yes, I have a weird little E.T. doll that has a, like, a... What is the on the E.T.'s head? Cat ears is scarf. He's all of your basketball. He's also facing the corner, like in the Blair Witch project right before they get killed. They have to stand in the corner.

Wasn't the character at the end, Josh? All I remember from watching Boer Witch the first time years and years ago was that, like her screaming, Josh! It was like hearing my name screen for like 20 minutes at the end. It was very disconcertain. Serting as I have a cerebral hemorrhage. And he's out.

No, no, I'm still here. The reason I am tripping over my words is I'm very excited because I just taped this week's podcast, this week's interview, with this is a big one for me. I know I feel like I say that every other week. If I don't say it on a week, that means I don't really care about the guest. A lot of good people. But this is a huge one for me, guys. for any big film fan, Michael Mann is kind of the man. He really is. He didn't see what you did

there. No, he really is. He is, of course, directed Heat, Last Minute, Heikens, The Insider, Manhunter, so many great films, Thief. And most recently, last year, he directed a film called Black Hat starring Chris Hemsworth. And he is, so the reason for this interview, it's fun to interview somebody when they're, frankly, not hawking a product. Like, there's not that, like, okay, we got to get to the thing. Frankly, Michael Mann is just in town because he's being celebrated at Bam, Brooklyn Academy of Music, where they're showing all of his films this week as I tape this. They're continuing throughout his filmography. I think it goes into even a little bit early next week. So if you're hearing this on Monday, there might still be a chance to check out

some of his films. If not, sorry. If not. You miss. You missed it. You missed a great time. No. I mean, I got a chance to watch. I made a point of going to see heat on the big screen, which I have not seen since it came out in 1995, and it is not Sammy, the one with Sandra Bollock. Don't embarrass me here.

Well, before we started, she asked me, she was like, wait, remind me is, did he do the heat or heat? Which heat? I was like the Sandra Bullock, Melissa McCarthy Classic. I'd love to have Paul Feig who directed that on soon, and hopefully we'll have them on for Ghostbusters, but no. like Heat, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Val Kilmer, Tom Seismore, Ashley Judd, everybody killed it in that movie. It's a classic and amazing to see that on the big screen. And then I saw Black Hat last

night, which is, which for context, so we talk about Black Hat a little bit in the beginning of this conversation because Black Hat, when it came out last year, it didn't frankly get a huge reception either commercially or critically, which is unusual for Michael Mann film. It's a film about cybercrime and Michael has taken the liberty for no like no one told him to do it he except that he wanted to he's recut the film in in a pretty significant way so the film i saw last night the film that a few hundred people saw last night is a much different black hat frankly a much better black hat i really enjoyed it um that he's changed continuity in terms of putting events that happen later in the film earlier and a lot of changes that's so cool

it is cool so i would think he we talk about it he doesn't confirm whether it's going to be in Blu-ray anytime soon, but I got to think they're going to release a different version of this at some time. So hopefully everybody gets a chance to see his bigger and better version of Black Hat. I remember when I first saw the trailer for that movie and I was like, okay, Chris Hemsworth is a computer hacker. I'm like, Thor's a computer hacker. Give him respect. The guy's got chopped. He's good. And then I realized, I'm like, oh, he's got, he can handle it. Yeah, he was great in rush, et cetera. Yeah, I'm like, Thor's got it. He's got it. So, and yeah, Call me, Chris.

Please. This interview, I apologize at advance for gushing that happens in the interview. I try to keep it in check, but I'm legitimately a huge, huge Michael Mann fan. And this is kind of like a greatest hits discussion. We talk a lot about thief and his beginnings, but a lot about heat and Mohicans and collateral and all the way out through Black Hat. So it's a rare opportunity to get this kind of in-depth conversation with a filmmaker of his accomplishment, frankly. someone that's really been at the forefront of the digital revolution in terms of going from film to digital. And, you know, there's no mistaking of Michael Mann film. He's, he cannot be

mistaken for anybody else whose use of music, et cetera. Exactly. So, that's this week's show. What else to mention? I have a quick question. Viewer question from me. Okay. What, who have you embarrassed yourself most by gushing over during the interview? Do you think Michael Mann? Yeah. Kurt Russell, you, you, you, you, you, you, you. We were pretty excited. It was very excited. We were a little worked up about. Guillermo, obviously, you always...

The difference in those is, like, they're infectious, and they're, like... So, Kurt and Guillermo... Ron. Ron Howard? Yeah, yeah. Just Ron. Yeah, the difference of those is that they're very effusive guys, and Michael Mann is, like, he's, like, tough Chicago stock.

He's kind of, like, a little taciturn, a little dry, it's perfectly nice. To set the scene here, okay, this is interesting. So he walks in the room. I've never interviewed him in person before. And I'm a little intimidated going in because, like I say, this is like, this is a tough guy. He's from Chicago. He writes and directs films about hard-aged criminals. Yeah, but you're from the Upper West Side, man.

The tough streets of West 70th. And he walks in, I'm not joking, he walks in with a folder underneath his arm, puts the folder on the desk, has like tab. I notice as the interview is going on, there are tabs for, like, different, like, projects of his. I don't know if he's, he's just got a lot of things. I feel like he's doing prep on his next film during the interview. He also puts down on the table a digital recorder and hits record as he sits down, which I got a respect. I mean, this is a guy.

And some people have done this over the years with me and other journalists where, frankly, they've been misquoted. And they want to cover their ass and basically say, you know, if something comes back where they disagree with how things went down, they can say, well, I've got a recording there. And then not so fast. Exactly. So, you know what? I mean, he lived up to kind of like, you know, that's who Michael Mann should be. So that set the tone. That's awesome. That set the tone in the beginning. But I got over my jitters, hopefully, and had a coherent conversation because there are a few things I'm more well-versed in than Michael Mann movies. So I was ready for this one. Not a lot more to say except. I hope he releases the real version of the interview at some point versus this one that you cut together having and be like, I love Josh Horowitz. There's none of that. There's none of that. He saved his gushing for after you do.

Got it. He was very nice after the interview. I will say that. He passed the test. He did. Not much else to say except Oscars around the corner. I'm going to be there on like red carpet for MTV. So more to come on that one.

You need me to come with you, right? Always. We're going to do a live podcast intro. Oh, great. On the red carpet. I'm sure everybody there will appreciate. that. No, I'll be doing my shenanigans my usual silly dance in a tuxedo for that. Luckily, it's just a metaphor. I'm not actually dancing. We'll see. We'll see.

Enough preamble. We've talked long and hard enough. Here is my extensive conversation with a true visionary, one of the best out there. Enjoy Michael Mann. Let's dive right in. There's no official introduction. there were an official introduction, your head might explode because I'm a tremendous fan of your work, sir. And it's, it's been a pleasure. There are few greater pleasures than prepping for an interview with Michael Mann because it's just an excuse to revisit films that I love. Black Hat was fun last night. I was there. You're being fetid currently at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. And give me a sense. I mean, let's start with Black Hat if we could, because that's, I think,

something that a lot of fans of your work are curious about. You introduced it as a revised cut. What would you call it? I mean, is it a director's cut? How did this one manifest? No, because the director, the director cut the last cut, too, so it's actually it's how it distinguishes it. They're both directors

cut. So you were happy with the cut that came out in theaters to set the... No, I wasn't 100% happy with it. You know, it was a, I mean, it was a challenging film to do because the ambition of the film was was to do an event-driven narrative and then develop the characters within scenes,

but have a very, very rapid event-driven narrative, almost doing a kind of, with rhythms that are almost imitative of how fast our world moves today in the digital information age. Right. So that's why it intentionally had a very rapidly driving plot line. And the plot line, the engine of that is all cyber tech. So you had to track with, you know, like the search for the code, which turned out to be the code for the rat and how it got on the thumb drive and leads you on and on and on and on through various hacking techniques.

Yeah. Like downloading a key logger when the guy thinks he's, you know. So in moving some of the pieces around, big pieces of story around, I may have obfuscated or put impediments in the way of people tracking the events, tracking the actual basic plot. Right. So the biggest change was to put back to the original order in which the first hack is the soy hack. Right. Because that one has, you know, I think we access the stream of causality, which is that plot.

Well, and in this new cut, I mean, the stakes build, obviously. The stakes build in a way. So what was the impetus, was it a studio note? Or was it your own kind of like hesitation in the early cut? I think for responsibility for all. You're happier with this one, though. The studio, guys legendary studio, which is great. Yeah.

So, and I'm happy. And there's a lot of other changes as well. This is, I mean, because you've tweaked with some cuts in the past of previous films, but this is by far the biggest kind of adjustment I think I've seen in one of your. Well, Hickens has had quite a number of different. The current version of it, because the current version of it is, which came out on the Blu-ray about three years ago, and that's the one that was screened here at BAM. Right.

We made a digital cinema package of the Blu-ray. It's not the same as projecting a Blu-ray. Sure. Because the resolution in the color space is vastly, you know, bigger in what's presented on the screen. that had a lot of changes but again that was also actually similar to Black Hat in the sense that I brought it back to the original

concept more you know so it doesn't have the end speech by Shengashko it relies on the audience to deliver that sense of the you know the the end of the Mohicans the annihilation of a people and yet his

progeny you know there's a frontier in front of them so life goes on and will progress and they will have future and eventually, you know, eventually their future will also come to an end, something else will follow, you know, that sense of kind of, so, so that's, and then a lot of it's tightened, some excesses were taken out. This black hat is probably a couple of minutes shorter than when I at least theatrically. Yeah. And there's also, I think, improvements in a relationship

and dialogue and a number of other. So are you some, like when the film came out initially last year, Were you someone that, like, did you immediately have kind of regret and say, I'm going to go back to this when I have time and some time to kind of, I don't know, reassess sort of the interpretation? Like, did the fact that in the way that was received commercially or critically affect how you came back to it? No. It's all internal. It's all just what. It doesn't matter. Totally.

Yeah, it's pretty. It's all internal. I mean, I knew there were things that weren't right that I wanted to fix. And that's the, what's wonderful about digital is that, is that. is that we're able to improve, improve these things, modify them. It's just my own personal. I'm impelled to do it. Personally, what I think is something.

I've never touched a frame of heat or insider. I was going to say, so those two, at least, for you, feel like they are what they are. There's nothing I would change. I think a filmmaker knows when he knows that this is it. This is the final iteration of all your ambition for what. what this part of your imagination that you've projected into characters and situations and through film form to impact an audience, that's complete. You feel that sense of completeness. I didn't feel complete with Blackett before. And did you feel complete sitting with an audience? You sat through

the film watching it with an audience that received the play well. That's the key thing. I mean, to have it projected on a really large screen in front of, you know, 250, 300 people, that's when you really are tune in with how it's working and uh i think it's working a whole hell of a lot better there's probably still a couple of small things i do well you release this in a blu-ray etc in some form available outside of cinemas we'll see right now i mean this really wasn't internal i just felt that i wanted to yeah you know make the significant changes that i made i mean one of the you know i've been revisiting your work in the last couple weeks as i knew we were going to chat and and and watching the film last night i mean there's something

Hallmarks and things in there that I think you do better than most, if not all. And one is like, I mean, the audience really responded a lot to Viola Davis's character a lot. And it always strikes me in watching Heat recently again, too, how you really love your supporting characters. And they feel like they're almost worthy of their own films. And you can imagine, when someone enters the frame in your film, you imagine their life that has come before and you want to imagine what's to come after. I mean, is that fair to say that you have your passion for your characters? It transcends just the protagonist, that you have equal love for sort of the people on the periphery. Absolutely.

And I think I imagine them all as full-blown three-dimensional characters with complete lives. They have a backstory. I can predict where the future story might be, who your parents were, whether it's Breeden, the driver in in heat, and his relationship with his wife, circumstances I could have made a movie of the week, just about breeding. I met men like him in Falson Prison. And so, and I, one, the secondly is I think that when you do the kind of, what do you want to call it kind of anthropological immersion or submergence into various subcultures.

which to me is one of the thrills of doing what I do. Sure. And, you know, everybody has a life. Everybody's got a mother and father and sisters and brothers and kids, and they got, you know, domestic problems with their wife, and maybe their ex-wife, and in one case of John Santucci, who the thief is based on. He had two wives the same time, which is very complex.

But the dilemmas, you know, what he thinks about his take on his psychology, his wife's psychology. It's a fascinating. It is a fan maker to feast on, yeah. dimensional. So consequently, when you run, particularly in a genre, when you run into two-dimensional stereotypes or archetypes, it feels so kind of shallow to me, you know, because it's so much richer where you understand. And so that I think there's a certain democratization that I believe in in terms of all the people in the film are real people. They really have real life, so they

really have really characters. It's my obligation to develop them fully. And I think it makes for much richer tapestry. And richer for the audience to revisit in different incarnations, you can focus on a different, you can focus on Vow's character and heat and just sort of like zero in on that storyline if you so wish. He's an interesting guy, because it really was, his name is Chris Scherlis, and he's based on a guy

named Chris Scherlis. Oh, really? Who was called Chris, Chris Magistus because the other people I know try to kill him three times, which was the Chicago Police Department, the CIAU, which is Dennis Farina, and, I mean, Dennis Farina, when he was a detective, and

Bill Lanhart and And a whole Charlie Adamson, I mean, people who, Charlie, as somebody I mentored into becoming a writer, he co-created a crime story. Right. And it was a great guy. He's passed away. But in their life as this major crime unit in Chicago, they were, had cut into this crew and were taking down burglaries, burglarying, burglarizing homes are very, very wealthy people. And they figured out how they were doing it, and they cut into it. And their whole, the CIU's MO was to wait until they were going to come in and basically kill him. Right. And so they, three different times, they shot up a car that he was in.

He just skated on all of this. So the notion of somebody who was almost like postmodern and that there is no causal reason why he should successfully escape. It's all just by kind of happenstance that he gets away. That became the core of the girl's character. I mean, what's... This is why, by the way, Edie just weighs in life. on. I don't mean, you know, I mean, like, Ashther's character, of course.

Yeah. Which is, by the way, one of my favorite moments in the film is just a heartbreaking, a touching kind of moment that resolves that relationship. And I mean, my sense of much, I was talking to my wife afterwards and like, what happens to him after that? I'm like, he's going to run out of, he's going to run out of good luck at some point. He's not destined to make it, I think. I don't know. Maybe he'll run out of luck when he runs out of charm. Maybe. And he's got a lot of that, luckily. Um, thief, which was, was your first feature. You directed Jericho Mile, of course, for television. We got some acclaim for that. I mean, what strikes me about a film like that. And I think, I mean, I don't know what the reception was exactly at the time, but it felt like a fully form, you were a fully formed filmmaker. Like you, there was like a certainty to what you wanted to deliver on the screen in terms of music and image and the whole shebang. Um, did you feel at that time like you were ready itching like this was my time? Was there any trepidate? Was there any kind of like aspect of the filmmaking process that you didn't feel like you knew at that point?

Not in, no, there wasn't any trepidation about the story or tackling the making of the motion picture. Yeah. There was in terms of how to direct actors. I really hadn't had that much experience directing actors. I had in Jericho Mile, and Jericho Mile had 28 convicts in Folsom and speaking parts as well, you know, as our cast. Right. But the, including Miguel Pinero, by the way, who was at the time quite famous New York Rican poet who had been in Sing Sing and Attica during the riots in Rikers Island, who was quite a character. He played on camera.

He also played Calderon in Miami Vice. Oh, sure. Okay. And the pilot and in some subsequent episodes. And wrote one of the best episodes of the first season called Smuggler's Blues, which was based on Glenn Furrow. Fry's song, Smugglers Blues, and we decided that the lyrics should be a libretto when we based the whole episode, almost like it was an opera. Amazing. And then Glenn Frye was in it, but a lot of, a lot of, but, um, but Pinero and that, that, uh, the whole cast were, were real people that I was working

with. And I was actually more comfortable working with something I was with actors. And I didn't, you didn't know the language of acting or? I did not know the language of acting. And I realized exactly that. And I realized I had a learning language of acting. So then I just took, I went and took acting lessons and was a lousy student, but I wound up a lousy actor, but I did wind up, you know, having some facility with understanding how actors, you know, kind of the operating system that goes on within an actor. That's what I wanted to know because I wanted to be able to talk to them in a language and understanding there was common to them. And then I discovered that every actor really has his own language, and there is no such thing as, quote, a method actor. There's, you know, Al Pacino's got his method, and De Niro has his method. So what was that experience the first time around?

I'm curious with James Kahn, because he's a tough cooking himself. I would think, like, I mean, did he give you the respect that you felt you deserved or needed at that point? Or was it a little bit of a learning curve? Yeah, he did because he's very generous because he and I were, I mean, we had a closeness. If I had a, you know, if I had some shortcomings and a more sophisticated way to communicate to an actor on that film, I had gone to great lengths and our, you know, our relationship had evolved to, you know, said, we're pretty intimate. Right. We had done a lot of, all the prep work ourselves. It wasn't like director saying, when actor, well, you go off and figure out how to open up stage.

You weren't in it, too. Yeah. I was there with them on all of it. So we did all of the combat training and the cutting the safe in half. You know, and then I immersed him in that whole world because a lot of the people who were in the film as actors were also the tech advisors who were also professionally still active as thieves. So, I don't know, Bill Brown, who was Robert Proske's number two. Right. It was in his late 70s, and he's still on the FBI Most Wanted list.

He was, and John Santucci, who's in the film as an actor, was a thief, and we didn't really have any props on that film. and we just use all of John St. Santucci's tools. And the people who are chasing John or were also acting in parts, but they had all known each other and there was a familiarity because they all grew up together

and they were all living in the same neighborhood. So there's no problem socializing because they do that all the time anyway. But at the same time, you know, when Dennis Farina in a crime story pilot beats up John Santucci in the alley, he beat up John Santucci because that's what he was used to doing.

Because that was his method of, you know, informant. You mentioned Farina. I mean, he's one that acted for the first time in your films in Thief, I believe. And, I mean, I didn't even realize that Robert Praski had never acted in a feature film prior to Thief. I mean, was there any resistance in terms of casting? I mean, Praskey obviously wasn't a non-actor at that point. He had done a lot of work. Proscke?

Yeah. Absolutely. Proscue was a lead actor in the arena theater in Washington, D.C. And I have a great debt to Jerry Bruckheimer because Jerry line produced. safe with me. We were very part of a small group with very close friends in the late 70s in Los Angeles. And so Jerry

was blind producing it, and I must have talked to 50, 60 different actors for that part. Now, the character is so tangible to me because he's based on two people that I knew a lot about, the Milwaukee Phil El Dorizio and Leo Ruggendorf, who were the two

outfit figures that were combined into the character of Leo. The paternalism, which was just a shell for exploitation and the and a viciousness capable of tremendous violence

and there's not attractive violence really ugly violence and I interviewed maybe 60 different actors and I didn't like any of them they were all kind of cliched

character actor, actor, mafia boss and at one point I said to Jerry in New York and I said I said, Jerry, look, am I doing something wrong? Have I got the wrong criteria I'm implying here? Because I'm not finding any of these guys I like. And he said, no, he said, no, everything's right. The guy, he hasn't walked in the room yet.

When he does, trust yourself, you'll know it. And then, sure enough, about three or four people later. Robert Prosky came in, read three lines of dialogue, had it a vuncular smile. He felt the menace below. He's the guy. That's it. I'm curious. I mean, that film you used Tangerine Dream for the score.

And you're among, you know, your many asset people talk about, obviously, the ways you've used unusually over the years, music to great effect. Do you always have like a specific music landscape in mind before you shoot a frame of film? Or does that come afterwards? Has your philosophy about what kind of music to use change in the course of making a film ever? I try to. It's much better if I do. And I did, I was pre-conceived Tangerine Dream as doing the music to the film. But there was a dilemma that I had, even though I preconceived it as being Tangerine Dream,

on one part of me, the other part of me was I was drawn to Chicago Blues and to have the track be all Chicago Blues. I mean specifically, you know, muddy waters in particular. And I had, I had, as when I was a student at the University of Wisconsin, I would come down on weekends. This is 62, 63, 64, and go to a bar on Madison and Holman, which is Muddy Waters, local bar. And he had his band, probably the best incarnation of his band, the oldest span. He had all the great regulars he played with. They played at like five nights a week and listened to him. And so it was so native to Chicago.

and I still to this day don't know which would have been better. The deficit of the blues was that it's so regionally specific. It would have locked it into this one place. The benefit of Tangerine Dream is that because it's kind of music concrete, even though a lot of what they do is based on a 12-bar blues structure, music concrete is because of its abstraction. It opened the film up to thematic interpretations. And that was really important to me because the film was a metaphor.

It's, to me, anyway, it's an overtly ideological film. And it's about exploitation. It's kind of a Marxist analysis of, basically, proceeds from a Marxist analysis of, based on labor theory of value, the whole exploit, the whole of the movie could have taken place in Leo Burnett advertising agency and would have been the same, you know, thematic content. So, you know, reasoning that through, I kind of stuck, with a tangerine dream.

It'd be great to see. Hey, there's another recut for you if you want. I don't want to put more work on your plate. I do not plan to go that far back and I don't wish me to redo that movie. Jumping around a little bit, just speaking of the way you've utilized music and scores and sometimes using different composers, et cetera.

I mean, for my money, the last sequence in Last Blueheekins is one of the most stirring, fascinating, amazing pieces of filmmaking that anyone's done. Again, can you just talk me through sort of how that that came about in terms of it being basically a silent sequence and the interaction of score and image and and silence in that sequence. Like anything else, it starts with story and story for me always begins at the end. And I mean, actually, that's not the Genesis. The Genesis is kind of crazily tangential.

Right. You know, you, it begins with some sensory memory that kind of doesn't really associate with, but somehow does some other little factoid of life. And before you know it, you're in, you're doing Glass of the Mohicans. I remember, I think I was walking around in 1990 or 91 and not knowing what movie I wanted to do next. And I'm thinking about this and then I went and all of a sudden, it just popped into my head. Wait a minute. You've had this movie rattling around.

your head since you were three, I mean, emotionally, you're just so totally taken with the poignance of something tragic about these girls and an Indian in, in Last of the Mohicans, on one hand, and something about this strange, otherworldly combination of the way the Iroquois looked and compared with the, compared with the British soldiers, you know, red, red, red, coach. That combination to a three-year-old or five-year-old, six-year-old was powerful because you always saw American Indians portrayed in relationship to the West. You never saw them in the East. So where the wild Northwest was the Northwestern Upstate New York. And there was something so wonderful about that. And then later on I saw drums along the Mohawk, the same thing. And that led me into the novel, which I thought was horrible. And basically a rationalization for how James Finnamar Cooper's ancestors stole a lot of land from Native Americans, which is why it's called Cooperstown. And the fact, his father bragged that he settled more land, meaning he appropriated more land from Native Americans than anybody else in this time. That's quite a claim to fame.

So the rationalization goes like this, that if you, the novel posits Native Americans. as noble savages, meaning they're nice people, but they're not very good stewards of the God-given lands. Therefore, we shall be the stewards for them. And that's the, you know, the basis of that's work. So, but then the, but then it became what is in fact the end of the movie and then working backwards into that, into that, uh, sequence. Today's episode of Happy Set Confused is brought to you by, Casper mattresses. Obsessively engineered American-made mattresses at a shockingly fair price. And now, guys, you can get $50 towards any mattress purchase by going to casper.com slash happy

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comparing that to industry standards. That is an outstanding price point, guys. So get $50 towards any mattress purchase today by going to casper.com slash happy and using the code happy. Terms and conditions apply. I got a chance I went also to BAM to see the print of heat, which looked amazing.

And, of course, holds up. It's fantastic. I mean, and again, in terms of theme and some stuff that you often refer, come back to in a lot of your films, I feel like you often have as much reverence for the antagonist as the protagonist. Like the, I mean, that film is really about duality. It feels like there are two crews. They're, in some ways, I feel like you have more reverence for the crooks than the cops in that one. I don't know if that's fair to say or not. In heat.

I mean, I don't know if that's telling about me. Maybe I have more, I'm siding more with a Neil than Vince, than Vincent in that one. But it is fascinating because I feel like you split your protagonist in half in that one. It's basically you have two protagonists in that one that just have opposite goals. Is that fair to say? I mean, is that, I mean, structurally it's kind of a fascinating film in that you have kind of two stories that are like battling each other. What really challenged me in a great way because challenged to me as an adventure was the prospect of can I, create this kind of fugue-like structure where the, these two characters that were fully invested in each one simultaneously, and they're heading towards a fatal collision.

And when we're with Hannah, we're invested in Hannah's and the outcome of his life, his expectations. We want him to catch Neil McCauley. When we're with Neil McCauley, we want him to escape Hannah and get away with Edie. and can I have us invested simultaneously with both critical paths as they merge into this lethal conflict in which only one of them is going to survive? And on top of that, they actually met and they like each other, as well as going to kill. So everything has two layers. That's why I say it's fug like. They're both operating simultaneously.

So that became the challenge of it. And it was only when I imagine that ending. did I fully rewrite the screenplay and make everything conform to that dialectic kind of with reverse engineering? So it's very, very intentional that you are emotionally engaged in both of them. And I think some of the complexity of that, which I never want to be apparent to audience while watching it. I mean, you know, this is kind of the mechanisms behind and underneath the story. The complexity there was very, very challenging, very, very attractive. And I then realized that the only way to do this is that in my mind, in my image,

in my take on my characters, that I have to have a kind of a fiction. And that is that both of these men are the only men who are fully conscious of their lives in the whole, in the universe of this film, but the only men who get fully self-aware. There are no games, no tricks, no nothing. And each of them relates to reality in a, in a sense. certain kind of way. There was a prison poem that went something like Realness is a motherfucker. It walks in its own shoes. Needs where I meet. It never wavers. And, you know, when you relate to reality that way, when you know that all I am

is who I'm going after. You know, as Hannah says to Justine, and I'm nothing without you, as Neil says to Eadie, you know, that's powerful stuff. But it needed that setup too in the beginning, if you think about it. Everybody else is leading normal lives and, you know, whatever delusions they may have or including Chris Scherlis, we talked about, who just has no conscience. It doesn't even feel the obligation to have awareness, you know. And it's funny, you're right. I mean, and Vincent and Neil, like, they're kind of aware of their own inevitability

and maybe know in their heart of hearts they're destined to fail or one of them will fail. They know who they are in every single moment, and they know every choice. They know that all the responsibility is theirs, that if there was some kind of omniscient microscope that could measure causality, that could see and reproduce causality, that there's not a thing that happens to them that they didn't cause somehow, some way. Even if it's so obscure, you can't see it. That's our lives, by the way, I think. Did Pacino's, I mean, a lot of that, if not all of it, I would assume is in the script, but his explosive performance, which like, and it felt even bigger, it's kind of watching it with an audience, it becomes like a cathartic kind of humorous, breaks the tension at times, kind of the way he kind of explodes. Was that something that was always in the script, or was that something that he came to the table?

Well, that was always in the script, because it's not, it's method. It's not, I mean, it's his character's method. Yeah. It's a kind of street theater when you, and it's actually, it's, it's, it's. It's actually observed, I observed it firsthand many, many times. And it's how, it's in that relationship of how a cop, a detective will manage, I mean, manage his informant. Because reformants lie. They lie to the people they're with, they will lie to you if they can get away with it.

So you have to keep them on edge. Right. Okay. Or they will deceive you. If they weren't deceptive, they wouldn't be informants. They're ranting somebody out. Okay. So they'll lie, you know, they'll read out some people and others.

So, um, so he's using Hannah's characters, Hannah's character's methods absolutely is to keep, is to keep Ricky Harris guessing. Yeah. You know, Ricky Harris has no idea what Hannah's going to do or say next, you know, and that's it was a method. So even if it was an actor other than Al Pacino playing their role, those scenes would still, some of the explosiveness, some of the unpredictability would be there. When you saw what no one did with the Dark Knight, did you see elements?

of heat in there. I think he's talked about that. I mean, he's talked about it quite a bit. He's a friend. He's a really good friend. And he's talked about that quite a bit. I actually don't. No? I mean, I don't look at it and say, oh, this was great. This was inspired by. And there's work of

directors who came before me who've inspired my work. So this isn't, this isn't plagiarism. Or it's not even derivative. I mean, this is what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to. But he was taken by some components of it. I don't know exactly what it is. Maybe it's an attitude. I'm not quite sure.

Yeah. Yeah. I think some people also think of that even just the opening heist scene, that propulsive kind of nature of it recalls maybe in some ways you're one of your, the key heist in the middle or towards the end of the film. I think it's suspending, it may have to do with suspending artificial, or suspending conventional moral, you know, values and two poles and instead taking life as it really really is and that ad mixture of of components that are in people do you uh people don't walk around i'm real people don't walk around saying oh i'm a good person and then that's the end of that story right do you uh you've operated camera yourself for at least a fair amount in some of your films sometimes yeah i mean do you

enjoy doing that i mean you again sort of a homework in a lot of your films and i think of like the insider or up to Black Hat is you're in the face of your characters. Right. I mean, you're clearly in love with the faces of actors. Like, there's a lot. You can obviously, that's all you need sometimes, whether you're on their shoulder or early in front of them. Where did that come from?

Was that something that you just sort of like evolved over the years? I have, first of all, I have tremendously admiration for my camera crew. And I've had a lot of the same guys for, I don't know, 20, I don't know, 20-some-odd years. and the but what it comes from is I'll just take for example insider I probably did more operating an insider than nothing else and so when I had you know work with Russell to bring him into the character of Jeffrey Wigand a man is uncomfortable in his own skin yeah and who does everything effectively but with little grace so Russell had for example had to learn how to be powerful in judo but not very elegant He had to learn how to be a powerful golfer, but have an ugly swing. Got it. Okay. So that was, so all of the, consequently, with the closeness of my connection to Russell, directing him and his grasp of the character, when I was behind the camera and we were on a tight lens, I knew how that next line of dialogue was going to impact him.

And I didn't know exactly what Russell would do because I'm a big believer in spontaneity. but I knew that's just that sliding it over just ever so much so that a shadow hit a different, you know, a different shadow was created on his face because he's going to move in a certain way and I wanted to capture him. So it made for a certain intimacy.

So for most of the meaningful dialogue scenes, I was 24 inches away from him. I'm behind the camera, the lenses in his face. Wow. And I absolutely felt that connection, almost like if there was dialogue between Russell and Lowell, played by Elpichino, that there's a third actor in the scene, that's me

in the camera. Yeah. And so it was a very, very intimate experience in all of us Do you find, do you need to get back to video village and see playback to know what you got? Not if I'm operating. I know if I'm operating, I see it. Otherwise, I'm in Video Village, which is not a village.

It's a village with one man. I'm not as bad as as Martin's, as Marty. It's Martin Scrazy. I mean, he has a tent. He has these giant truck mirrors. Is that right? Yes, to the right in the left of the tent so he could see if anybody's trying to peek over his shoulder. Who knew Martin Scorsese was insecure? My God, he doesn't need it. Everybody trusts his judgment always.

You've obviously experimented and more than experimented in some films with digital. I think of collateral and obviously many do as one of like a big hallmark in a transition in terms of using digital for, I mean, I don't know what percentage of the film or all the film. Was it all in digital? collateral is all digital so so give me a sense of sort of like did that feel like a leap at the time and why was it necessary or why did you feel it was necessary at the time why did it lend itself to that project it felt like a leap off a tall building that's what it felt like because it's the first photo real digital feature film meaning there had been some digital animation right feature films prior to this is the first one so there was no lookup tables there was

not the consequence of a color chart. There was nothing. So we were totally flying blind. I had the first two, three weeks of shooting, I had these horrible nightmares that all the guys at Dreamworks, you know, who are friends of mine, are going to

Jeffrey Canterberg, Speen Spielberg, are going to realize pretty soon that there's no, there's no record of anything we did. It's all conceptual art. It's only in my imagination. Zero's and ones that could. These were the nightmares, but we had done months and months and months of R&D beforehand to figure out how to know what we were getting and that, in fact, we were getting it.

But the excitement about it, the reason to do it and to evolve that technology on that film was, if you imagine it, the whole film takes place at night. It's one night, which was this gem-like construction or circumstances of the movie, which was so why it was so attractive to me, because I'd made about three movies in a row. They were very large in scale. And the idea of going to the opposite extreme and doing something that was like a diamond that had, everything was in the refractions within the walls of the stone and just one, you know, kind of a real unified singularity. of experience over two hours. So, but you, with film, you can't see end of the night.

You can't see distance. You can't, because you're shooting so wide open that you have a very narrow depth of field. Anything beyond your subjects becomes soft focus. And what L.A. looks like at night, sometimes extraordinary when the marine layer is, the cloud layer comes in at its time of year, and so about 1,200 feet, and all the sodium vapor bounces off the bottom. So it becomes like a soft yellow orange fill and illuminates everything. So it's kind of like, I don't know, late afternoon in a winter in northern Europe. And that they inhabit this world and all this whole drama, this whole story takes place in it.

So, of course, you'd want to see and what. But then something else was that there was something that we discovered on Ali. One, there's two or three sequences shot with video and Ali. And the light sensitivity in the cameras was something. great that we could use very little and almost no lighting and there was a scene where Lee's on a rooftop in Chicago and it's the night after Martin Luther King is killed, there's riots in the street. And I'm seeing Will, I'm seeing the whole streets and I'm kind of, you know, hit

with this huge question, why is this so real to me? Why is my believability so intense about this scene, about what Will is doing? I totally believe this. This is really happening, you know. And I realized it was because of the subtraction of the conventional theatrical lighting. Even when it's beautiful done by Steraro, you pull it out and it looks like it's not there, which of course there's plenty of lighting there. But if it looks like it's not there, it has that flat midrange.

You just believe it, you know, and that's what we aspired to with collateral. That's what caught people, some people off guard at first maybe with public enemies, fair to say, which is something we're, as you say, we're kind of so conditioned to see, especially a film, a period film of that type, look a certain way. And that film has such a mediacy and reality in a way

that we're not used to interpreting. It was kind of like, it took a little moment for me, at least, to kind of tune into it. There's two things about both of those films. When collateral came out, there were no digital cinemas. So consequently, you didn't see

what I shot at all. It wasn't even close to what I shot because you had these indifferent bulk release prints that the labs used to churn out and they were horrible. Their tolerances were a joke. It was just awful. And every director I know was bemoaning it.

So all the, you know, Chris Nolan, who's a particular advocate of shooting on film. I love shooting on film too. But it's great for those of us who are going to see it as an EK print, meaning right off the camera original. For everybody else, getting these bulk release prints, it was terrible.

And so I couldn't watch the release prints on collateral. This one was showing on, I think it's on the 16th, February 16th, is the first time it's ever been seen on the screen in this native digital format, meaning when I'm sitting there color timing and I'm looking at it on a big screen at Company 3, something we call CTM, a color time master. I'm seeing the film I shot nobody else is so now with digital cinema you know

everybody else is seeing that same thing yeah it's backtracking is public enemies I'm just curious your take on that in terms of the choice to shoot digital on that came down to the wire we were you were going back and forth we were either film or

or shooting high death and Dante Spanati who I worked with on five films and I were splitting it and it came down to this if I shot on film. It was very beautiful. And it looked, and it looked like an artifact, looked like an historical artifact, a very elegant historical period artifact. And if I shot digitally, it looked like I'm there. I'm absolutely there. It really is 1933. And this is what 1933 looks like, for real. If you went to a time, a black hole in space, and showed up in

Chicago on Lincoln Avenue in 1933. And so I went for that, again, only if you saw it in a digital cinema, which today would be everywhere. Yeah. With the DCP, would you see that? Speaking of sort of like the landscape. By the way, it's not what it looks like. These are not visual issues. These are how, these are totally emotional engagement, how, you know, I feel. You can, you can jump into the skin of Jamie Fox and Tom Cruise.

Yeah. And, you know, you feel everything they're saying. You see the thought, you feel the thoughts behind the words coming out of Tom's mouth when he's manipulating Jamie in the cab. Ask him if he'd ever been to Rwanda or something. Does the landscape of film today, I mean, you've never really done, quote, unquote, a franchise film. I mean, my Miami Vice could be considered, I mean, it was obviously derived from work that you had a huge influence on in the first place. But, I mean, have you, I assume you've been offered franchises. Have you been tempted to give your take on a Mission Impossible?

I feel like I could see a Michael Mann Mission Impossible, for instance. Almost, but then what stops me is the notion of I'm on a stage and there's a gigantic green screen, there's a piece of tape on it, and I'm saying to the actor, you see that piece of tape? That's not really a piece of tape. That's really a mountain. You need that mountain. That's a mountain and it's falling in you.

I can't really, you know. So that's kind of kept me away. There's a science fiction thing I want to do, which I may find myself in exactly that situation, although now with the way LEDs are being used, you know, it's not as brutal as, you know. You piqued my interest by mentioning sci-fi. I'm curious to see what a Michael Man sci-fi film would be. Can you say anything of what kind of a film would it be?

Thematically or anything? Okay, fair enough. A distant future for sure. More close at hand, you're going to do the Ferrari film, yes. Yeah. It's a Ferrari. what's intriguing about that man that that that that story it's not a biopic from cradle to grave this is not at all it's exact opposite it's a very narrow slice of one year in his life so it's really an opera family drama he had he had he literally had two households functioning simultaneously he lives in a town that he had two opera companies two football teams and two race car manufacturers and they all knew each other and kind of cut each other up

with this kind of strafing wit all the time and everything was in a crisis and it got worse in 1957. It was also time when the cars, because of his genius as an engineer, made tremendous power, but the technology for brakes and safety hadn't caught up.

So there's recently a 335S, which was 1957 that just sold for a fortune at auction. in Europe and there's two of those they're supposed to be in our film but he

those cars would do 300 kilometers about 200 miles an hour but they didn't have disc brakes yeah they didn't have safety to have seatbelts

I mean it was so it's in the town is an elegant elegant Modena is an elegant place and so it's really a it's very regionally specific

and And the more specific I make it, the more universal the story becomes. I know Christian was attached to it. That fell apart, unfortunately, because of issues of weight going up and down. It's tough for him, I guess. I mean, it's a tough for any actor. If you track with him from the machinist when he was 128 and then 217 for Batman and back down the 130 for the fighter, then back up, you know, for America. You can only do that so many times.

You can only do that. Yeah. It's not a health. Have you found your leading man? We're in a discussion. We put it in a day line. Okay. I mean, is this the fun time right now?

I mean, what's the time in the process that you love the most? I mean, it seems like you love the research. You love diving into that. But I would think getting on set is fantastic or mind-knowing it's scary. You know, it's really a cycle through all of that that really gets me. I mean, the idea of kind of being a cultural, a very lowercase C, cultural anthropologist, and diving into character in that narrow spectrum, but you go very deep.

So it's kind of a coarse sample of a narrow spectrum. That's fascinating to me, and I really can get lost, and on occasion have gotten lost in the research winding around the Schawn Mountains or something. And that's great. And I love the writing. But it gets a moment of time when I'm tired of the research,

tire of the writing, and then you find stuff in pre-production, and that's great, and now the whole thing keeps expanding, and you have this massive, you know, engine called a film crew and company and tremendously talented folks and you're making a movie and it's two, three hundred of you sometimes, you're having a wonderful shared experience and just when that gets to be too much, you get to be by yourself with it in the editing room.

Get away from me, everybody. Sit and tired of it of being with people who get maladjusted because they are in dark rooms to their whole life. You know, it's finally time for the movie to be on the sound stage, then released, and the whole cycle starts again. Coming full circle to some stuff that we were talking about earlier. Characters, whether it's supporting characters or protagonists that you've, that have been in your films that, whether you've seriously considered it or not, that you've thought about exploring in a further incarnation, like doing another film about Vincent Hanna or whatever. Mohicans is one I could easily do a prequel or sequel to.

Yeah. A prequel to Heat is possible. I mean, I know those, I know every one of those people. It seems like you have the backstory of every single character. Every single character, you know, and, you know, what their stories were from Wayne Grove to Shurlis to, you know, all of them. And, you know, the further adventures in life of Lowell Bergman from the insider. That's Berkeley.

I could have done, I could do, this is really going to sound weird. I could do a different John Dillinger story. Nobody will ever in a million years pay for me to do it. knew John Dillard's story, but there was one whole aspect of that guy's life that my film didn't touch on. And I find very, I find very interesting, which is what was his end game? He had none. And this is one of the smartest people around, a guy who's out of touch from society for 11 years. And within two or three weeks of getting out of prison, he knows the hip neighborhood to live in in Chicago.

The vernacular, what's current, and it's not like he had television in 1933 in prison, Indiana. And so he had the rate of which he tuned in and his sophistication and logistics. And he's a brilliant guy, really thinking quickly, culturally attuned, to what purpose? Where does he think he's going? He's incorporated the most cutting-edge technology into what he's doing, into his logistics. The V8 automobile, a highway. system that's only three years old, the notion of being totally transient all the time, making that your human condition, okay, because then they can't find you, because you could rob a bank

in Wisconsin, drive in Illinois and your home free. There was no interstate, there was no federal prosecution for that. Police departments didn't talk to each other. Information couldn't travel. It's a fascinating kind of like double bill with black hat talking about interconnectivity and a total lack of such in back in public. Exactly, except he's one step ahead into the future. The only other person who's is smart about information and technology is he is, is this reactionary creature, Jared Gio Hoover. And who's quite brilliant in how he used the technology, the available technology and data processing for his time. But where do you think it was going? That whole question, you know, still haunts me, you know.

And my film didn't deal with that. Right. I want to touch on briefly just a television, which obviously, I mean, your involvement in whether Miami Vice or Crime Story or Luck in more recent years. Are you interested in going back to TV, developing whether it's a heat prequel TV series or whatever? Is that something that intrigues you? I am.

And there's a couple of stories I'm really excited about telling. And they have, in fact, one of them is the kind of savage wilderness of frontier America in the earlier 1700s. That's something I'm really fascinated with. That and

there's also an epical story that drives us into Southeast Asia and some of the same geographical territory and some of the same issues as Black Hat, but not about a hacker. Does part of you there's so much love right now for television

And I feel like... There should be. It's the best writing in English language on the planet is happening in American television. The British is starting to catch up, particularly something like London Spy, which just came on. It's very good.

What are some of your favorites? Can you list a couple of things that have intrigued you in recent years? Well, my favorites begin with everything that Ted Serendos and Michael Lombardo both Netflix and HBO have done over the last three, four years. The first season of True Detective, I thought, was just spectacular.

Yeah. I like Mr. Robot, you know, I mean, there's just great stuff. There is. I feel I should release you back into the wild because we only touch on about half of your films, but we'll save some for the next conversation, I guess. I can't thank you enough for coming by today. I'm such an admirer of your work, and I hope folks get a chance to see Black Hat in this new incarnation, whether it's on the screen or a great new Blu-ray or whatever. It's well worth checking out again.

Great. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you. Great to talk to you. Hey, Earwolf, listeners. This is Hillary Frank from the longest, shortest time, where we ask the hard-hitting questions. What will happen if I don't have a shadow?

What is the tooth fairy? do with her tooth. I'm neither real Batman. Who's Jesus' grandparents? John Willis, age three, bringing out the big guns. I'm actually, like, rattled. The Longest Shortest Time. It's the parenting show for everyone.

Listen at Longest Shortestime.com, Earwolf.com, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Goodbye. Summer movies, Hello Fall. I'm Anthony Devaney. And I'm his twin brother, James. We host Raiders of the Lost Podcast, the ultimate movie podcast, and we are ecstatic to break down late summer and early fall releases. We have Leonardo DiCaprio leading a revolution in one battle after another, Timothy Shalame, playing power ping pong in Marty Supreme. Let's not forget Emma Stone and Jorgos' Bougonia. Dwayne Johnson, he's coming for that Oscar. In The Smashing Machine, Spike Lee and Denzel teaming up again, plus Daniel DeLuis's return from retirement. There will be plenty of blockbusters to chat about, too. Tron Aries looks exceptional, plus Mortal Kombat 2, and Edgar writes, the running man starring Glenn Powell.

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