Living the high vice

he World Cup may be over but those possessing XY chromosomes can take heart. The appositely named Michael Mann is back. Though we’re wary of gender stereotyping around these parts, it’s unlikely that this particular director could ever be confused with Douglas Sirk or William Wyler.

Films such as Heat, Manhunter and The Insider may boast a panoramic appeal – the latter was this girl’s favourite film of 2000 – but the sex most likely to swoon at Mann’s feet is the one that loves shiny things, evil dictators, sharks and breasts.
Since he presided over Miami Vice, the show that beamed his name and dodgy pastel clobber into living rooms throughout the '80s, Boy-Mann love has become something of an epidemic. His distinctly masculine milieu – a stylised saturnalia of fast cars, tough loner protagonists and Mexican stand-offs – may have muscled its way into general consciousness, but generally speaking, it’s a Mann’s man’s world. Boys love his passion for hi-tech knick-knacks and a meticulous attention to detail that borders on pettifogging.
Russell Crowe, you might remember, was less than thrilled with the director’s characteristic thoroughness when 17 takes were required for the opening shot of The Insider. Was it an elaborate, beautifully choreographed Touch Of Evil inspired overture? No. He was merely walking through the front door and the shadows had to be just so. For Thief, Mann bought trucks to douse the streets of his native Chicago with water. Why? So they might resemble the work of French Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro of course. More famously, during the filming of Heat, wire-brushed coat hangers were specially commissioned to make a specific noise when they collided. It’s enough to make Kubrick seem lackadaisical by comparison.
When I walk into his suite at London’s Mandarin Hotel, I’m expecting someone fussy. And brawny. Or, as actor and Mann veteran Barry Shabaka Henley has suggested, a latter day Colonel Kurtz. I’m somewhat surprised to find a gentleman under nine feet tall not smoking a pungent Italian cigar. Compact, with facial features that speak of Jewish ancestry and a broad blue collar Illinois accent, Mann immediately strikes you as charmingly gruff and reasonably uncomplicated.
“To be out on the Caribbean on a super cat fast boat is almost a religious experience,” he beams. “It looks great on film but there’s nothing to beat being there. It’s transcendent.”
Yep, this is Michael Mann alright. But, let’s be clear, there’s more distinguishing his oeuvre than speedboats.
It’s estimated that the average woman speaks between 6000 and 8000 words everyday with men clocking up between 2000 and 4000. The average Michael Mann hero barely manages a dozen. Like most swaggering Western archetypes, Mann’s men aren’t big on talking. (Colin Farrell’s near wordless seduction of Gong Li in the new Miami Vice film is a case in point.) Though not quite as aloof as Leone’s lone wolves, they’re often moody and existential. And with the exception of Will Graham in Manhunter, they rarely end up at home with Penelope.
“Well, that comes from personal experience and my observations of the world”, says Mann, somewhat undermining his reputation as an obsessively private person. “If you think about Heat, that tension bears down on every character. But it’s just what goes on in the world. Tom Sizemore has a nuclear family. He takes his kids to the doctor. He knows he is responsible. But he also knows that he is the author of what happens. Val Kilmer is all confused about it and is in the process of falling apart and coming back together and reforming. And you’re right. It is like the Western hero and his traditional problems with domesticity. But it’s a very real thing.”
The ladies meanwhile are certainly shown a degree of respect. Unlike, say, James Bond’s conquests, they hardly ever recall Flannery O’Connor’s line that “she could have been a good woman if there had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life”. But they do reside on the fringes of Mann’s movies, largely as background noise and damsels in distress. Still, the 63-year-old is keen to dispel the notion that he’s a Boy’s Own filmmaker.
“You know, I don’t think of it consciously at all,” he says. “I have a lot of women in my life. I’ve been married for 32 years. I have four daughters. And in the US culture has changed somewhat. When we tested this film we found women under 25 for some reason not only like the film, but they particularly like the action. The studios keep saying, 'Wait a minute, women want a romance.' They have some antiquated idea of what women are interested in. But, as you probably know, that bizarrely Edwardian attitude is no longer relevant. Young women today simply don’t feel that way.”
Then he laughs.
“But I am a guy, you know.”
While Mann is immediately less imposing than one might suppose, he quickly confirms his reputation as Hollywood’s most formidable brain-box. Like a walking embodiment of Herkimer’s Handbook Of Indispensable Information, somehow, some way, over the course of a 30-minute meeting, we get around to Bauhaus, Hong Kong cinema, geopolitics and, erm, Phil Collins. All of these disparate elements have found their way into Miami Vice, Mann’s latest opus.
A radical departure from the TV show that launched a thousand slip-ons, the film reinvents Crockett and Tubbs for the 21st century in the suitably Dionysian persons of Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx. A melange of global drug trafficking, undercover deals and steely blues and grey, it seems an odd choice for Mann who freely admits that the final seasons of Miami Vice were far from satisfactory. He has, however, wished to examine the geopolitics of the black market for many years. (An earlier project was abandoned when Stephen Soderberg beat him to the punch with Traffic.) Was Mann concerned that the final, increasingly ludicrous days of the TV franchise would undermine the credibility of the new film?
“Maybe a little bit,” he nods. “But then I felt, 'Okay, make the film you want to make.' You have to assume that people, for the most part, will see what you did for what you did and will react to the film accordingly. There shouldn’t be a big problem with preconceptions. With all the publicity and trailers one should get the point. If you want Elvis the alligator you got the wrong movie.”
Geography has always been Mann’s thing. Heat and Collateral manage something thought impossible by cultural commentators such as Frederic Jameson in providing a handy cognitive map of LA. Miami Vice, however, goes one better. Impressively charting the serpentine drug trading routes of an entire continent, the film skips from Florida’s white supremacist thugs to Cuba and the Ciudad del Este in the Triborder Region, a hub of illegal dealings located where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet.
“That’s the thing about Miami”, he tells me. “It’s so cosmopolitan. More precisely, it’s so South American. So everyone who lives there in some strange 16 million dollar condo and a security building – which is really secure for obvious reasons – that is not their home. Their home is Caracas or Rio. That’s the way that world works. So if you are doing Miami, it lets you go into Little Haiti and from there you are outreaching. You know, these huge trans-national criminal organisations emerged after the Cold War. They’re the dark side of globalisation.”
Wouldn’t the legalisation of drugs impact on them significantly, thus reducing the problem?
“Yeah, I could live with that”, he nods. “But there are other realities that can’t be ignored. Like anti-drug policy and conflict with foreign policy or the billions of dollars in the banking system. You could assault its profitability at the retail price point so there is no profit in it. And if there is no profit in it there is no point in taking the risk. But these trans-national criminal organisations are not moving one commodity. The amount of money from drug trading is less than one percent for them. When they are not moving drugs, they are moving arms and pirated software. In Russia you are moving diamonds, rockets, even chickens. You can move anything from anywhere at a reasonable profit. That’s what you are seeing in Afghanistan and with the Hezbollah. The guns and the money from both moved around the same channels as the opium. It’s a business.”
Unsurprisingly, given the fraught backdrop, the production wasn’t easy. A drunken, pistol-totting local was shot by set security in the Dominican Republic. Colin Farrell collapsed in Cuba after a rib broke away from his sternum during a weightlifting section. The resulting six-week delay took them right into the worst hurricane season ever recorded. A wardrobe assistant was hit in the face by – wouldn’t you know it – flotsam from a speedboat.
The rumour machine went into overdrive. ‘Colin’s Drug Hell!’ screamed the tabloids after the star checked into rehab. The entertainment papers reported that the studio had pulled the plug on Mann’s original ending. That Jamie Foxx had crashed a plane.
Mann begs to differ. Mr. Farrell, he assures me, was “perfectly charming” throughout. No, there were no frogs and locusts. And yes, he got to shoot the final scene he wanted.
“We did go to shoot in Paraguay,” he explains. “Universal’s first reaction was - you can’t go there, it’s too dangerous. But we said, 'You aren’t aware of what Paraguay is.' After 24 hours they reversed their decision. And it was fine and without incident and a terrific, terrific experience. I happened to have two endings and sometimes it is difficult to decide which is better. But I could tell in an instant this is a better ending for the picture. The other took Crockett and Tubbs into a heart of darkness. I was lucky with the way everything turned out.”
The film once again showcases Mann’s intriguing marriage of brains and brawn, style and realism, tough guys and art. It is, without doubt, a Michael Mann film. His singular approach to cinema has been honed drawing in influences from all over the planet. Born into a lower-middle class Chicago family, his Ukrainian father, a grocer and World War II veteran, encouraged the young Michael to apply himself completely. He studied English at the University of Wisconsin, developing obsessive interests in history, geology and architecture. (As he has noted before - “If you know about anthropology and topography, then one day you can figure out how Hawkeye thinks at 7am on a Tuesday morning in August 1757 when you’re directing The Last Of The Mohicans.")
His fastidious nature almost led him into an academic career, until a screening of Dr. Strangelove fired up his interest in filmmaking. He enrolled at the London Film School, and when asthma kept him out of Vietnam, he stayed abroad and made mostly documentaries and commercials alongside contemporaries Ridley Scott, Alan Parker and Adrian Lyne.
Did this resolutely televisual background count against him when it came to making feature films, I wonder.
“Not at that point,” he reflects. “I had directed The Jericho Mile in 1979 which was released in France as well as Ireland. I did Thief and that was quite a sizeable film so I went from theatrical film making into Miami Vice and the success of that made it a little easier to get Manhunter made. But in America there was a prejudice about TV. Miami Vice was seen as a one off but professionally it did not help.”
Was he disappointed when Manhunter didn’t attract the plaudits that the later (and inferior) Harris adaptation The Silence Of The Lambs did? Was it bad timing?
“No, not bad timing”, he sighs. “The only bad decision I made was the person I made the movie with. The business arrangement changed. There was no marketing and no attempt made to get the movie out there. Bottom line, there was no cheque book. But I take responsibility for it. That comes with the territory. You should have those abilities. You need to think about who you’re working with as a director. And ultimately you are accountable as we all know what we are doing.”
Before he would return to the “pace and aggression” of American life and a distinguished career in television writing such seminal shows as Starsky And Hutch and Vegas, Mann’s seven-year stint in the UK coincided with the Parisian riots of 1968, arguably the most romantic period in cinema’s history. He would make Insurrection, a documentary on that period for NBC. Among his favourite films, he lists such canonical texts as Last Year At Mairenbad, Faust and The Passion Of Joan Of Arc alongside more manly American movies like Apocalypse Now, Raging Bull and The Wild Bunch. Does that mean he was swept up by the cineaste’s revolution?
“Well, I never responded to Godard,” he admits “I kinda go from Resnais to Wong War Wai. So I skipped Godard altogether. So, for whatever reason, my life as a cineaste is not a linear course. I am very interested in post-modern structure, in deconstructing everything. I like switching around lines and how stories get told. There is a lot of that in Miami Vice. I love early Russian cinema. I like Wong Kar Wai and Chris Doyle a lot.
"Sometimes I can’t relate to some of the Hong Kong stuff because it’s about cartoon bad guys and gangsters. The interesting thing is that they copy American films to get their gangsters and even though they talk about triads, they have never really done a serious film about triads. I’d love to see one. Same with some British gangster films like The Krays. I don’t relate to it because it is a rip off of American films.”
Mann, on the other hand, despite his global evolution as a filmmaker, is as authentically American as apple pie. It’s tempting to see the director’s Chicago origins as the springboard for his seemingly contradictory duel fascination with manly men and art. That city’s bipolar composition, a juncture where high art meets an industrialised working class ethos, seems to inform everything Mann does.
“Oh yeah, probably”, he nods. “I think the first thing I was interested in as a kid, long before I took any notice of film, was the scale of the city. I was drawn to the industrial core, the shape of bridges over the river. It gets magical at certain parts of the day, but it’s purposeful. It affects a lot of folks. The Institute of Design provides a remarkable history. There’s a poetry about the city. There’s a poetry about bridges.”
He smiles his big butch smile.
“Like I said. I’m a guy.”