Michael Mann Blogathon: The Keep

BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post is a part of the Michael Mann Blogathon going on over at the Seeti Maar - Diary of a Movie Lover blog. If you get a chance, check it out as there are all kinds of amazing contributions so far.

Let’s get this out of the way – The Keep (1983) is not a good film. It is, at times, an interesting one that has its inspired moments, but it is a narrative mess with lackluster performances. It is the equivalent of David Lynch’s Dune (1984) – a big budget folly beset by production problems and an uncaring studio that butchered the film before its release. And like Lynch, the experience was so painful for Michael Mann that he has never revisited it since. It’s all George Lucas’ fault. The success of Star Wars (1977) motivated all kinds of directors to dabble in the science fiction, horror and fantasy genres. For example, in the year The Keep was released, Peter Yates directed Krull, John Carpenter and David Cronenberg tackled Stephen King adaptations with Christine and The Dead Zone, respectively, Tony Scott’s directorial debut was the gothic vampire tale The Hunger, and there was also Something Wicked This Way Comes. These films, however, were overshadowed by the third installment of the Star Wars trilogy, Return of the Jedi, which dominated the box office.


After Thief (1981), Mann was offered all kinds of urban crime films. He was not interested in repeating himself and wanted, instead, to do something like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude that would allow him to make a film that was “non-realistic and create the reality.” He worked briefly on the screenplay for Jim McBride’s Breathless (1983) but left that project to make The Keep, an adaptation of F. Paul Wilson’s novel about a mysterious force within a Nazi fortress. The film begins with a transition from a black screen to blue sky and then pans down to the action. Mann would do the exact same thing at the beginning of Manhunter (1986) three years later. As is typical with the beginning of a Mann film, the opening sequence is devoid of dialogue. A convoy of trucks filled with Nazi soldiers drive through desolate countryside. They arrive at a small village in the Dinu Pass in the Carpathian Alps in Romania circa 1941. The town’s inhabitants look at these intruders suspiciously. Out of the fog, the convoy arrives at the Keep, which is to be their new base of operations. The commanding officer, Woermann (Jurgen Prochnow) proudly proclaims to a subordinate, “Now we are the masters of the world. Doesn’t that enthrall you?” The irony of this statement is that it is said before the Nazis invaded Russia and failed.

The Keep is a massive, imposing structure. Mann used vintage arc lamps from the 1920s and 1930s to get “a certain kind of hard blue shaft of light coming through all the openings in the keep.” The village outside of the Keep was shot with very bright light and in white in order to represent innocence. However, something is not quite right and this is symbolized by the fact that none of the rooftops are symmetrical. In contrast, everything inside the Keep is dark. Mann said, “We exposed for the highlight and let all the shadows go. Instead of a flood or a wash of light, there are very defined shafts of light. It’s only in those shafts that we can see things.”

Father Fanescu (Robert Prosky) is the caretaker of the Keep and warns Woermann that he and his men should not stay inside the structure because bad dreams drive out people who attempt to stay too long. Naturally, Woermann scoffs at such notions. He is an overconfident antagonist like Leo in Thief, Waingro in Heat (1995) and Thomas Sanderford in The Insider (1999). Fanescu also warns them never to touch the many metal crosses embedded in the walls. Of course, two greedy soldiers on night watch try to pry one out, believing that it hides some kind of treasure. In doing so, they uncover the vast interior of the Keep and a powerful force that kills them. They have unknowingly awakened a being known as Molasar (Michael Carter). This even awakens a man by the name of Glaeken (Scott Glenn) who lives in Greece. He quickly packs his things and goes to Romania. This man is a loner, much like other Mann protagonists. He is a man of few words, driven by intensely personal reasons to do what he does.

Reinforcements arrive led by a vicious officer, Major Kaempffer (Gabriel Byrne) who starts killing villagers in retaliation for the mysterious deaths of five soldiers. He finds inscriptions on a wall in a language that none of them can decipher but Fanescu knows of a scholar who can – Dr. Cuza (Ian McKellen). He and his daughter Eva (Alberta Watson) are summoned from a concentration camp. When two soldiers try to rape Eva, they are eradicated by Molasar and enveloped by smoke. In comparison to the cold, calculated Kaempffer, Woermann seems much more reasonable. He is smart enough to fear this unknown force and has enough compassion to send Eva to the local inn. Kaempffer is weak of mind, like Freddie Lounds in Manhunter and Van Zandt in Heat. Kaempffer thinks too rationally and deludes himself into believing that he is in control.

For Molasar, the more it kills the more of a physical presence it has. It makes a deal with Dr. Cuza that if he carries out the talisman that keeps it imprisoned in the Keep, Molasar will kill all of the soldiers. However, Glaeken knows that if Molasar is released, it will destroy the world. Glaeken is not just a traveler, as he describes himself, but also watches over the Keep and makes sure that Molasar does not get out.

As the film builds towards its climax, Woermann confronts Kaempffer and tries to appeal to his conscience one more time:

“All that we are is coming out, here in this Keep. And what truth do you see, what are you discovering about yourself, Kaempffer? I murder all these people. Therefore I must be powerful. Smash them down because only that raises you up. It’s a psychotic fantasy to escape the weakness and disease you sense in the core of your soul ... You have released the foulest that dwells in all men’s minds. You have infected millions with your twisted fantasies. And formed millions of diseased mentalities that worship your twisted cross.”

This is not only an indictment of the Nazi philosophy but also the godlike mentality alluded to by Hannibal Lecktor to Will Graham in Manhunter. Dr. Cuza has become corrupted by power like those he hates – the Nazis. When Molasar heals him of his diseased state, he loses sight of what is good and evil.

Producers Gene Kirkwood and Howard W. Koch, Jr. optioned F. Paul Wilson’s book for Paramount. Not surprisingly, Mann was not interested in a straightforward adaptation. He did not want to make a traditional horror film. As he said in an interview at the time, “What it is overall is very dreamy, very magical, and intensely emotional.” Mann admired fairy tales and was drawn to Wilson’s best-selling novel as a way to make a fairy tale movie for adults.

The filmmaker did not use Wilson’s book as his starting point, but it was actually a meeting with Otto Skorzeny in 1969. Skorzeny was a former member of the S.S. and one of World War II’s most successful commandos. He led the raid that rescued Benito Mussolini from Italy in 1943. At Nuremberg, Skorzeny successfully defended himself and was acquitted. After the war, he ran a mercenary operation out of Spain. Mann was fascinated by Skorzeny’s psychology. Mann said in an interview that “the overt politics interest me less than the states of mind: the specific kinds of aberration that explain why a lower middle-class bourgeois in Munich would be attracted to the Waffen SS in 1933.”

Mann also read The Walter Langdon Report, a document commissioned by the Office of Strategic Services to psychoanalyze Adolph Hitler. Walter Langdon was a New York doctor who had talked to many people that knew the dictator before the war. This portrait of Hitler and how he reflected the psychosis of whole nation fascinated Mann. Another primary influence on the film was Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment, which posits the theory that fairy tales were complex morality fables. Bettelheim argues that myths have clearly defined heroes and usually end in tragedy, while fairy tales were universal with happy endings. It goes on to propose the theory that most enduring children’s stories do not teach moral messages as fables do but deal with action and horror in a way that allows children to deal with real world horror over time.

Mann first scouted locations in Romania but was unable to find a mountain pass of black rock in Pyrenees or the Alps. He then asked experts at a nearby university to use their geology computer to help him find the location he wanted. With the help of production designer John Box, Mann found an abandoned slate quarry in Wales. The quarry was 150 feet deep and a lift or a crane had to take people in and out. Cinematographer Alex Thomson placed his lights on cherry pickers around the edge of the quarry and at one point 80 miles per hour winds threatened to knock the lights in.

Mann first wrote the screenplay and then made additional changes while shooting the film. “Now the words are plastic, flexible,” Mann remarked in an interview at the time. He constantly rewrote dialogue before shooting which frustrated his actors. Two days before a scene was shot the actors would get new pages. Then, a day before they got additional new pages. Mann storyboarded the entire film only to get on the set and realize that the lighting was different and so he threw them out, opting instead to work on a more instinctual level. On the set, Mann listened to the music of Tangerine Dream and Laurie Anderson. He was particularly taken with Anderson’s vocal stylings and wanted Glenn to speak like she does in her songs.

By certain accounts, the shoot was a particularly grueling one. The crew worked 16-18 hour days in cold, rainy weather. In particular, make-up artist Nick Maley remembers that he had to change make-up effects three times in one week. He claimed that Mann did not listen to more experienced crew members and that eight of them suffered nervous breakdowns as a result of the film’s demanding schedule. Maley also claims that he was exhausted a lot of the time from the miscommunication he experienced with Mann over prosthetics for Glaeken. Six weeks into filming, Mann changed the color of Molasar’s final costume, which meant some scenes had to be re-shot.

Mann described Molasar as the essence of “just sheer power, and the appeal of power, and the worship of power, a belief in power, a seduction of power.” This is a description that could easily apply to future Mann antagonists, Francis Dollarhyde and Hannibal Lecktor in Manhunter. Mike Carter played Molasar and spoke highly of Mann: “His direction was simple and clear—always the best. The physical presentation of Molasar was always carefully worked out. The way in which I played Molasar was pretty much my decision. Obviously he would have changed things if he didn’t like it.” However, Carter was not blind to the problems that Mann faced on the film: “We went over budget and over schedule, but he was trying to make a particular kind of film, almost a German Expressionist movie, and I’m not surprised it was as long and expensive as it was. It needed to be a big-budget movie.”

There was a six-month delay because of the death of special effects expert, Wally Veevers two weeks into post-production, forcing Mann to rethink the film’s effects after the cast and crew had departed. Without Veevers to provide the needed opticals for Molasar, the creature resembled the Michelin Man as opposed to an ominous force of evil. To make matters worse, Veevers had not made any storyboards for his vision of the movie and no one knew his methods. The production went over schedule by 22 weeks and tens of millions of dollars.

When it came to the finale, Mann chose between two different endings. Glaeken versus Molasar in the dark cave of the Keep or on its summit. The director went with the former but was forced to scale it down. Originally, he had wanted a more visually elaborate, ending with Glaeken fighting Molasar with a giant laser coming from the Keep that evolved into something akin to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). After Veever’s death, Paramount did not give Mann enough money to finish the film and he had to abandon certain sequences. French artist Enki Bilal was brought in to help design Molasar. He traveled to Shepperton Studios five or six times and felt that the film was ruined during the editing process. Special effects make-up artist Bob Keen felt that one of the biggest problems was the long, grueling shoot and that by the end of it a lot of the crew members had left.

The current version of the film runs 90 minutes but rumors say that the rough cut ran over two hours. The Keep was released on December 16, 1983 in 508 theaters, grossing $1 million in its opening weekend. It went on to make $4.2 million in the United States and was a commercial and critical failure. In his review for Time magazine, Richard Corliss wrote, “It boasts some pictures as pretty as any to be seen on a gallery wall, and, in narrative terms, it is a mess.” Vincent Canby, in his review for The New York Times, wrote, “The movie makes no sense as either melodrama or metaphysics, so that its expensive special effects go up in smoke. Literally ... At the screening I saw, the film's soundtrack, as stuffed with talk as with ominous sounds and music by Tangerine Dream, was so sibilant that I longed to stuff cotton in my ears or, at least, to hear a character who lisped.” At the time, Mann felt that The Keep was “emotionally deeper because it tries to get at the way you think and feel in the way dreams work.” However, after many years had passed, Mann admitted, “The Keep was really hard because I did something I swore I’d never do again. And that is that I went into pre-production without a completed screenplay.”

Author F. Paul Wilson joined in on the critical bashing of Mann’s film and dispelled the rumor that it might have been the victim of studio interference. “The film followed his (bad) script pretty faithfully. He simply decided that he wouldn’t mention the word ‘vampire,’ anywhere in the film. Of course, that’s the major red herring in the story.” Wilson felt that Mann did not understand the novel or how to adapt it. “He did not build character. He did not tell a coherent story. When I read the script, I wrote to him and I pointed out all of this to him in a very gentle, non ego trampling way, I thought. But he ignored me.” To put it mildly, Wilson was not happy with Mann’s film as he commented in an interview, “the dialogue was wooden, dumb, phony and stupid. And the direction, all those pregnant pauses ... And I would have chucked that stupid looking monstrosity that passed for Molasar. What a joke!” However, like what happened to Lynch after the soul-crushing failure of Dune, Mann went back to familiar subject matter and ended up making one of the best films of his career, Manhunter. I admire Mann’s ambition to tackle a new genre for him at the time but he was clearly out of his depth and it shows in the final film. Since The Keep he has wisely stuck to his strengths – urban crime films and historical biopics.

Also, check out this excellent analysis of the film over at the Wonders in the Dark blog and this comprehensive fan site.
 

Heat

It seems rather fitting that it took nearly 15 years for Michael Mann to get his ambitious crime epic Heat (1995) made and it has been 15 years since it was unleashed in theaters. After the commercial and critical success of The Last of the Mohicans (1992), he parlayed its commercial and critical success to get his pet project made. He was able to cast legendary actors Robert De Niro and Al Pacino as the leads in what would be their first the on-screen appearance together in a film (they were in The Godfather: Part II but never appeared in the same scene). Mann returned to a 1986 draft of a screenplay that had originated before he made The Jericho Mile (1979). He now had a much clearer idea of how he wanted Heat to be structured and decided to expand its scope.

At the core of Heat is the relationship between career criminal Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) and dedicated cop, Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino). Mann takes the career criminal from Thief (1981) and the intensely dedicated cop from Manhunter (1986) and places them in the same film together with the sprawling metropolis that is Los Angeles as its backdrop. It is a deadly cat and mouse game realized on an epic level. Imagine Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956) but on the scale of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

The opening of Heat introduces the two main protagonists, McCauley and Hanna without any dialogue. Mann relies entirely on their actions to illustrate their defining characteristics. McCauley, disguised as a paramedic, steals an ambulance. It is how he does it that is so impressive. He walks through a busy hospital purposefully, taking in everything and touching nothing so that he leaves no clues behind for the police to find later. Within a matter of moments he is gone.

We first meet Hanna as he is making passionate love to his wife, Justine (Diane Venora). From the beginning, Mann shows a sharp contrast between Neil and Vincent’s professional and personal lives. McCauley is all business. His life is devoted to preparing for his next score. Mann remarked in an interview that the character “is not an archetypal ex-convict, who steals mindlessly until he gets busted back. This guy is methodical and good at what he does. He's going to accumulate a certain amount of capital, and then he's going to boogie. He has a doctrine of having no attachments, nothing in his life he can't walk out on in thirty seconds flat.” Hanna is married — albeit in a relationship rife with problems but at least he has some semblance of a personal life. During the course of the film, these two men will switch roles and this will determine their respective fates.

Hanna may have a personal life but it is a relationship in decline. He is on his third marriage and is gradually losing touch with Justine and her daughter, Lauren (Natalie Portman). After Hanna and Justine make love she tries to invite him to breakfast but he brushes her off to hook up with one of his partners. But not before he comes off as a bit of hypocrite. He criticizes Lauren’s real father for being late in picking her up and for standing her up repeatedly in the past, but he hardly pays attention to her or her mother either. This scene also establishes one of Mann’s prevalent themes: the fracture that exists between parents and their children.

Hanna is not in his element in a domestic setting and this becomes obvious when he appears at the crime scene of the armored car heist perpetrated by McCauley and his crew at the beginning of the film. As soon as Hanna walks on the scene he immediately takes control. It is a real treat to see Pacino act out this scene. He dominates it both physically — in the way he gestures and moves around — and verbally, in the authoritative tone that he speaks to the people around him. Pacino displays a confidence of an actor totally committed to his role, which is appropriate considering his character is someone who is completely committed to his profession. With little prompting, Hanna’s subordinates fill him in on the evidence they found and expertly piece together what they think happened. Hanna listens intently, absorbs everything and then quickly analyzes the situation. He assigns specific tasks to his men with all the efficiency of a professional. This is the complete opposite of what we saw him like at home. He barely hears what Justine has to say and briefly acknowledges Lauren’s presence before quickly leaving for work.

If Hanna is all about the verbal side of the professional Mann protagonist, McCauley is the flip side of the same coin. He is the quiet individual who lets his actions speak for him. Mann defines McCauley’s character visually. This is achieved not only in the exciting armored truck heist sequence — the essence of ruthless efficiency but, more significantly, when he returns to his home. Like most Mann protagonists, he lives in a Spartan, empty place. The establishing shot utilizes a blue filter that saturates the frame, with the ocean infinitely stretching out in the background. This is reminiscent of the scene in Manhunter where Graham and Molly make love in their bedroom. However, Mann uses this scene to illustrate that, unlike Hanna, McCauley is a loner, a prisoner trapped in his own empty surroundings. This is further reinforced by a close-up of his handgun; placed on a coffee table. As he walks over to the large windows overlooking the ocean, the gun looms large, upsetting the composition of the frame as it dwarfs McCauley. He is a man dominated by his profession — it defines who he is as a person. The camera pans up and we see him standing in the middle of this large, empty room, the frames of the window acting as bars, metaphorically trapping him.

Mann uses architecture to illustrate McCauley’s personality. His apartment is comprised of large, blank white walls, cabinets with the bare minimum of dishes and very little furniture. There is just enough to make it functional. This simple design is also reflected in his fashion sense: simple gray or black suits with a white dress shirt. According to Mann, this was an important clue to McCauley’s character: “His main job, as he sees it, in the way he’s elected to live his life, is to minimize risk. That’s why he wears gray suits and white shirts—he doesn’t want to have anything about his personal appearance that’s memorable. He’s a gray man, just some figure who moves through the umber of a poorly lit coffee shop. It’s all invisible, and it’s strictly pragmatic.” Like Frank in Thief, Graham in Manhunter, and later, Jeffrey Wigand in The Insider (1999), McCauley is yet another Mann protagonist who is constantly shown to be a solitary figure in an empty room. He claims, at one point, that “I’m alone. I’m not lonely,” but he is a forlorn figure or else he would not feel the need to get involved with Eady (Amy Brenneman).

Heat is different from other crime films in that it goes to great lengths to show how those around these criminals and the police that chase them are affected by what their loved ones do. Most of the relationships are very dysfunctional and none more so than between Chris Sherilis (Val Kilmer), one of McCauley’s crew, and his wife Charlene (Ashley Judd). He gambles away all of the money he makes on scores and this makes her very upset. She tells him, “It means we’re not making forward progress like real grown-up adults living our lives.” They argue and she makes it clear that, for her, it is not about the money but their son, Dominick. She is concerned for his safety and well being. For her role, Ashley Judd met several women who had been prostitutes and were now housewives. Mann located them through the convicts’ wives and ex-cons he had interviewed in his pre-production research. Some of them had turned tricks in their teens and were now middle-aged housewives selling real estate.

This scene of domestic disharmony is paralleled by Hanna’s own problems. When he comes home Justine informs him that she had dinner ready for them four hours ago. She tells him, “Every time I try to maintain a consistent mood between us you withdraw.” He replies, “I got three dead bodies on a sidewalk off Venice Boulevard.” Hanna tries to articulate something resembling an apology but he is unable. This is not good enough for her and she leaves the room leaving him alone and frustrated. The final shot is of him sitting alone watching T.V. Justine, like Charlene, is frustrated with her relationship. Both women are unhappy and not afraid to let their significant others know how they feel. Justine does not understand Vincent’s devotion to his job or his obsession with taking Neil and his crew down and this results in a rift between the two that is not repaired by the film’s conclusion. Both Hanna and Chris are unable to explain themselves to their wives. They may be the best at what they do but their personal lives are a mess.

Up until this point Neil has stayed faithful to his personal credo, “Don't keep anything in your life you're not willing to walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” This begins to change when he meets Eady at a coffee shop. Initially, he is guarded and stand-offish — an attitude that comes with his job. But once he realizes that she is genuinely interested in him, he softens somewhat but is still evasive, lying to her about what he does (a salesman) and asking her a lot of questions but offering little information about himself. He gives out only vague details: “My father, I don’t know where he is. I got a brother somewhere.” However, he does offer one interesting insight into his character. As they look out at the city lights of Los Angeles he tells her about his dream: “In Fiji, they have this iridescent algae. They come out once a year in the water … I’m going there someday.” Like Frank’s dream of a family in Thief and Wigand’s vision of seeing his children playing in The Insider, McCauley will be unable to realize his ambitions because of his failure to adhere to his own personal code. His fatal flaw is that he develops feelings for Eady and thereby betraying himself. Mann foreshadows McCauley’s inevitable downfall as a result of this relationship with tragic sounding electronic music that plays while McCauley and Eady kiss.

The film’s centerpiece is undeniably the classic meeting of Pacino and De Niro, on-screen together for the first time in the careers that takes place over coffee at Mantelli's restaurant in Beverly Hills. Although, ironically, Mann edits the scene so that each man is shown in over-the-shoulder shots and we don’t actually see them face-to-face at any time in the scene. This is the moment when both men size each other up and tell each other their personal philosophies. The dialogue between the two men reveals a lot about who they are:

Neil: If you’re one me and you gotta move when I move, how do you expect to keep a marriage?

Vincent: So, then if you spot me coming around that corner, you just gonna walk out on this woman? Not say goodbye?

Neil: That’s the discipline.

Vincent: That’s pretty vacant.

Neil: It is what it is. It’s that or we both better go do something else, pal.

For Mann, the coffee shop scene between De Niro and Pacino is when "every theme and every storyline in the picture winds up in that scene. It's very much the nexus of the film." Mann made sure that nothing distracted from the exchange between these two men. He wanted the place to be as invisible as possible with the “background is as monochromatic and as minimalist as I could get it, because, boy, I did not want anything to take away from what was happening on Al's face and Bob's face.”

It makes sense, then, that these two men understand each other better than they do their wives or girlfriends. They are more open with each other than with their loved ones because there is a mutual respect and bond between them. Over coffee they tell each other their dreams and Neil’s is particularly illuminating: “I have one where I’m drowning. And I gotta wake myself up and start breathing or I die in my sleep.” Vincent asks him, “You know what that’s about?” To which Neil replies, “Yeah, not enough time.” Like Frank in Thief, Neil’s dilemma is that he does not have enough time to do everything he needs to do. Neil is a fascinating variation on Frank’s character in the sense that he too is forced to decide between preserving a relationship and his work but unlike Frank, he wastes too much time deciding on which one to follow. When Neil finally does make up his mind it is too late and he is punished for his indecision.

Heat’s most exciting action sequence is the now famous bank heist scene. Right from the beginning, Mann establishes a quick pace as Neil enters the bank with pulsating electronic music that anticipates what is going to happen. With incredible precision and timing, McCauley and his crew have taken out the guards, have control of the bank and are taking out large quantities of money in under a minute. The music is underplayed but still effective in creating tension during the sequence. Once McCauley and his crew emerge from the bank and Chris fires the first shot, the music stops and the rest of this exciting sequence plays out with no music — only the deafening roar of the guns firing as McCauley and his men try to escape and turn the streets of Los Angeles into a war zone. Mann made sure that the gunshots sounded realistic and went to great pains to make sure he got the right sounds for the machine guns. He said, “There's a certain pattern to the reverberation. It makes you think you've never heard that in a film before so it feels very real and authentic. Then you really believe the jeopardy these people are in.”

Mann alternates between shaky, hand-held cameras and fluid tracking shots with kinetic editing that brilliantly conveys the exciting action that is taking place. One of the reasons why this sequence works so well and comes across as being so authentic is due in large part to one of the technical advisors for the film: Andy McNab, a Special Forces soldier who infiltrated enemy lines in the Persian Gulf War to sabotage SCUD missiles. De Niro gave Mann his copy of Bravo Two Zero, written by McNab. It so impressed the filmmaker that he hired him to train the cast how to shoot guns for two months. McNab worked from a tape of L.A. Takedown, Mann’s T.V. movie rough draft of Heat, to get an idea of what Mann wanted. The actors rehearsed carrying around the weight of the money they would be stealing in the bank heist. De Niro had to practice how he would carry Kilmer once he was shot and how to fire his weapon with one hand.

Before filming the bank heist sequence, Mann and McNab conducted a dry run with the actors on a real bank. De Niro, Tom Sizemore and Kilmer all wore disguises and body armor. Only the bank manager knew what was really going on. A couple of guys covertly videotaped everything from cameras in bags. The sequence was to be shot at the Far East Bank in Los Angeles. Location manager Janice Polley and the producers spent months beforehand meeting with officials of the bank explaining what was involved. Mann and his crew took over the entire financial district of the city every weekend for five weeks. They were allowed to shoot between 6 pm on Friday and 5 am Monday morning. The production shut down 5th street in L.A. and notified hotels and residents within earshot. The bank heist sequence was so authentic that in 1998, two men foolishly tried to copy what was done in the film. They robbed a bank in L.A. and as McNab remembered, they even "delayed the robbery for three days so they could get exactly the same bags as Kilmer had, and they used machine guns, body armor—everything."

The rest of Heat plays out the aftermath and fallout of the bank heist as McCauley ties up loose ends and attempts to escape with Eady before Hanna can catch him. Ultimately, Heat is about choices. Neil’s final choice in the film is also his most crucial. He has to decide whether to stay with Eady or run on his own from Hanna who is now in hot pursuit. However, Neil hesitates too long and this is what ultimately defeats him. He goes against his own personal code and is punished. Hanna does not and is willing to sacrifice his personal life so that he can take McCauley down. The film ends as it began — without dialogue as Hanna tracks Neil down.

The origins of Heat were based in large part from the experiences of an old friend of Mann's, Chuck Adamson. The police officer had been chasing down a high-line thief named Neil McCauley in Chicago in 1963. One day, "they simply bumped into one another. Chuck didn't know what to do: arrest him, shoot him or have a cup of coffee." Heat was also based on another person according to Mann: “Another is a guy I can't really talk about, who's bright, intuitive, and driven, and runs large operations against drug cartels in foreign countries. He's a singularly focused individual and much of the core of Hanna's character comes from him.” From these two sources, Mann created a story that explored the relationship between Neil McCauley, a career criminal and Vincent Hanna, a dedicated cop with very similar approaches to their professions but on opposite sides of the law.

Mann wrote an early draft of Heat in 1979 that was 180 pages and based on real people he knew personally and by reputation in Chicago. He wrote another draft after making Thief with no intention of directing it himself. During a promotional interview for The Keep (1983), Mann talked about making Heat into a film and was still looking for another director to make it. In the late 1980s, Mann tried to produce the film several times and offered it to his friend and fellow filmmaker, Walter Hill but he turned it down. Mann was still not satisfied with the script, which had developed the character of McCauley but Hanna still needed work.

After making The Last of the Mohicans, Mann returned to a 1986 draft of Heat and decided that he would make it himself. He felt that the L.A. Robbery-Homicide division would be an ideal basis for a television show and took his script and “abridged it severely. I abstracted probably something like 110 pages from 180 pages ... so it’s lacking in the sense that it’s not fully developed.” The result was a made-for-television movie entitled, L.A. Takedown. It was an incredibly fast shoot – uncharacteristic for the methodical Mann – with only ten days of pre-production and 19 days of shooting. In comparison, Heat would have a six-month pre-production period and a 107-day shooting schedule. Takedown starred Scott Plank as Hanna and Alex McArthur as Patrick McLaren, the character that became Neil McCauley in Heat, with Michael Rooker, Xander Berkley (who has a small role in Heat), and Daniel Baldwin. It aired on NBC on August 27, 1989 at 9 pm. In many respects, Takedown was another draft of Heat. The director said in an interview, "it had a similar kind of nucleus, which was the rapport between the thief and the cop." In the L.A. Takedown script, McCauley's gang is not fleshed out all that much. The Chris Shiherlis sub-plot does not exist, the bungled bank robbery sting is gone, and Hanna's step-daughter's sub-plot does not exist. NBC was willing to buy the show if Mann recast the lead actor. He refused and the network did not pick it up.

After L.A. Takedown, Mann had a much clearer idea of how he wanted Heat to be structured. "I charted the film out like a 2 hr 45 min piece of music, so I'd know where to be smooth, where not to be smooth, where to be staccato, where to use a pulse like a heartbeat." In 1994, Mann showed producer Art Linson another draft of Heat over lunch and told him that he was thinking of updating it. Linson read it, loved it and agreed to make the film with Mann. On April 5, 1994, Variety announced that Mann was abandoning his James Dean biopic and prepping Heat with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro attached to the project with filming to take place in either Chicago or Los Angeles.

De Niro got the script first and then showed it to Pacino who read it and wanted to be a part of the film. De Niro thought it was a "very good story, had a particular feel to it, a reality and authenticity." To research their roles Mann took Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, and De Niro to Folsom prison and interviewed several inmates. Sizemore talked to one career criminal in particular who was a multi-millionaire and “had socked away several million dollars and continued to do it, you know one more score ... The guys we educated ourselves about only do big jobs, they won't do anything under $2 million. It's all true, that's what's amazing,” the actor remembered.

Scouting locations for Heat started in August of 1994 and continued through December with location manager Janice Polley, who had first worked with Mann on Last of the Mohicans. She had a staff of three to four people who went all over Los Angeles to find locations that had not been filmed before — no easy task. Mann let them know the kinds of houses each character would live in according to their income and financial status, the look of the house and the surrounding area. For example, Chris Shiherlis lived in Sherman Oaks, Vincent Hanna lived in Santa Monica, Neil McCauley's house was on the beach in Malibu, and Eady's house was in the Hollywood Hills. Polley did her job: less than 10% of the 85 locations used had previously appeared in a film. Not a single soundstage was used.

It was important for Mann to capture a certain vibe of L.A. It was almost another character in the film. The director remembers, “I wanted to capture basically the way the city felt to me being out in the middle of it at two in the morning or on top of the gas tower or on top of a roof or flying over it with the LAPD helicopters. You know, there’s a glow that it has, it’s unique western.” The most challenging location for Polley to get was Los Angeles Airport, one of the busiest in the country. After much negotiation, permission was given to shoot in a restricted area where the radar towers are located. At the last minute, Polley got a call. The Unabomber had threatened the post office at LAX and the FBI were called in to investigate. A delay in filming would have cost the production thousands of dollars. They met with LAX security and the FBI and it was determined that the area they were going to shoot in was far enough away from any potential danger.

Heat was released on December 15, 1995 in 1,325 theaters, grossing $8.4 million on its opening weekend. The film was a commercial success, grossing $67.4 million in North America and $120 million in the rest of the world for a worldwide total of $187.4 million.

Heat received mostly positive reviews from critics at the time. In his review for Time magazine, Richard Schickel praised Mann’s direction: “An opening sequence that may be the best armored-car robbery ever placed on film. He proceeds to a crazily orchestrated bank heist that goes awry and finishes in a wild firefight on a crowded downtown street that is a masterpiece of sustained invention.” Newsweek magazine’s David Ansen wrote, “Mann’s not interested in good or evil, but in behavior: the choices people make, the internal pressures that can cause the best-laid plans to go awry.” Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, “It's not just an action picture. Above all, the dialogue is complex enough to allow the characters to say what they're thinking: They are eloquent, insightful, fanciful, poetic when necessary. They're not trapped with clichés.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “The huge, well-chosen cast for Heat attests to Mr. Mann's eye for both esthetic interest and acting talent. Even small roles are so well emphasized that they show these performers off to fine advantage.”

However, in his review for the Washington Post, Hal Hinson wrote, “Ultimately, though, the movie never transcends the limitations of its Hemingwayesque, men-with-men attitudes. Its point of view about the innate violence of men is essentially that of Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, but while the idea itself remains valid and even relevant, Mann cancels all that out with a ridiculous ending that suggests some sort of final spiritual, metaphysical mind-meld. To call it mythic absurdity is a kindness.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B-“ rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Mann's most perverse decision was to cast these two legends and then keep them apart from each other. Half-way through, they finally get an extended dialogue in a coffee shop (it's the first time the actors have ever been in a scene together), and you can feel their joy in performing. We're not watching McCauley and Hanna anymore; we're watching De Niro and Pacino trying to out-insinuate each other. For a few moments, Heat truly has some.”

One of the problems critics (and some viewers) had with Heat was Pacino's sudden, loud outbursts of outrageous dialogue. However, the actor justified his character's behavior in an interview: “I think that the character is prone to these kind of explosive irrational outbursts. A lot of those interrogations and that kind of thing, I got from watching detectives working, going into a kind of, flipping into a kind of–flipomatic, as they say–this state of just general chaos in order to get something. The hysteria shakes up the subject and gets to the truth.” Mann further elaborated in an interview where he explained that Pacino's character "will rock that person of his foundation, to the point where the man loses whatever defense mechanisms he may have set up against this detective coming in."

Heat has gone on to inspire numerous other films and filmmakers. Directors for both the Hong Kong crime film Infernal Affairs (2002) and the British gangster film Layer Cake (2004) have cited the look of Heat as an influence on their own work. Most impressively, before going into production on The Dark Knight (2008), director Christopher Nolan screened Heat for all his department heads. He said, “I always felt Heat to be a remarkable demonstration of how you can create a vast universe with one city and balance a very large number of characters and their emotional journeys in an effective manner.” Indeed, the bank heist that begins the film is reminiscent of the one staged in Heat right down to a cameo by William Fichtner as a defiant bank manager in a nice reference to the actor’s role in Mann’s film.

Images of Isolation

Jeremy Richey over at the Moon in the Gutter blog tagged me with a meme that has been making the rounds. It originally asked that we assemble "a gallery of images ... to stand for so much of what makes Cinema such a rich and exciting medium." This meme began at the Checking on My Sausages blog with MovieMan0283 over at his The Dancing Image blog championing this meme. So, what was the theme that picked? Well, continuing with the Michael Mann vibe from my previous post on Thief, I've decided to pick images from Mann's films that show his protagonists isolated. Almost always, they are loners or people who, often by choice, are apart from others. It wasn't easy picking stills from certain films as the composition of frames are so beautifully shot but here we go.

Here are the rules for the meme if you choose to participate as copied partially from Moon in the Gutter:


1. Pick as many pictures as you want - but make them screen-captures. These need to be moments that speak to you that perhaps haven't been represented as stills before.

2. Pick a theme, any theme.

3. You MUST link to Stephen's original gallery (see above) and my post if I am tagging you and you choose to participate.

4. Tag five blogs.

Here are the five bloggers that I would like to tag (my apologies if you have already):
 
Sean Gill over at Junta Juleil's Culture Shock
 
John Kenneth Muir over at John Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Film/TV
 
le0pard13 over at Lazy Thoughts from a Boomer
 
Kevin J. Olson over at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies
 
The Sci-Fi Fanatic over at Musings of a Sci-Fi Fanatic
 
 

Thief (1981)

 

The Keep (1983)

Manhunter (1986)

The Last of the Mohicans (1992)

Heat (1995)

The Insider (1999)

Ali (2001)

Collateral (2004)

Miami Vice (2006)

Public Enemies (2009)

Thief

While working in television in the 1970s, Michael Mann met Chuck Adamson through a family friend, Nate Grossman, a Chicago Police detective that worked with future Mann regulars Adamson and Dennis Farina. At the time, Adamson was Head of Investigation for the Sheriff of Clark County in Las Vegas. Adamson subsequently introduced Mann to professional thieves John Santucci and W.R. (Bill) Brown (who plays Mitch in the film) in 1975. Santucci spent over eight years as a safecracker and had cleaned up his act after spending three years in prison. He was operating a successful pawn shop and jewelry store in Denver when Mann contacted him. Brown gained notoriety by reputedly stealing London’s Marlborough Diamond, a jewel worth 400,000 pounds back in 1980. The best thieves operated in independent crews working high-line jobs in the United States from the 1940s to the '70s. Most of them came out of Chicago, in particular, a neighborhood known as the Patch. Meeting these people would prove vital to creation on Mann’s next film, Thief (1981).


Thief is Mann’s feature film debut and one that lays out a thematic blueprint for his subsequent work to follow. Frank (James Caan) is an independent safe cracker who dreams of marrying his girlfriend, Jessie (Tuesday Weld), and starting a family. To make this happen, he needs to take on some quick, big-time scores. Frank makes a Faustian pact with Leo (Robert Prosky), a local crime boss and soon realizes that he is bound to serve the Mob for life and this so disgusts him that he takes extreme measures to assure that he never has to deal with them again.

The dialogueless opening sequence that has become the trademark of Mann’s films is established in Thief. Frank and his crew open a safe in meticulous detail and it becomes a study of what they do. One partner monitors a police band radio while another monitors the alarms. This sequence tells us a lot about Frank. He is very efficient, wastes no time and knows exactly what he wants, finds it, and then takes it. Thief also establishes Mann’s particular color scheme. Early on, he uses green and red to represent danger and death. As Frank and his partner Barry (James Belushi) leave the score there is a low angle shot of their getaway car on the rain-slicked streets of Chicago. The red of the traffic light is reflected beautifully on the wet streets and the car door with green light also reflected on the street hinting at the possibility of danger. They could get caught at any moment.

The purpose of the opening sequence is to establish the professionalism of Frank and his crew. He is only truly complete when he is working, which is true of all the protagonists in Mann’s films. What is also true is that they are all loners and Frank is no exception. After the job, there is a shot of him walking alone along a lake at dawn with the cityscape of Chicago in the background. Then, he comes across a man fishing and they strike up a conversation. The next shot is a quintessential Mann image that will appear again in Manhunter (1986), Heat (1995) and The Insider (1999). Frank, his back to the camera, looks out at the lake which represents his peace of mind and contentment. He has successfully pulled off a bank job and life is good but this will be the last time he will achieve that kind of inner and outer tranquility.

Frank meets his contact to unload the diamonds he stole and is asked if he wants to meet with someone for another potential job. This only serves to antagonize Frank who replies, “If I want to meet people I’ll go to a fucking country club.” He is fiercely independent and does not need anybody else. He likes to keep his life free of complications, right down to the plain suits he often wears. It is his uniform, as it is with Neil McCauley in Heat and Vincent in Collateral (2004). Mann introduces the things that mean the most to Frank: his girlfriend Jessie and his buddy, Okla (Willie Nelson), who is in prison. The character of Okla was based on Roger Touhy, an Irish-American mob boss who, after 25 years in prison, was murdered within four weeks of his release in 1959 by the Chicago Mob. All of Frank’s dreams and aspirations are encapsulated in a postcard-sized collage he keeps in his wallet. There are images of a luxury car, a nice house, babies, children, women, Okla, and, most interestingly, two columns of skulls. As he later tells Jessie this represents his desire to die in the outside world on his own terms and not in prison which is the worst thing he can imagine.

The first foreshadowing of the trouble to come is signified by the green glass in the background of the bar Frank owns. He calls Barry on the phone to find out that the exchange of the diamonds they stole for money did not happen. Their contact has been killed by a mobster named Attaglia (Tom Signorelli). Frank pays him a visit and he denies taking his money so Frank threatens him with a gun demonstrating that he is clearly not someone to cross. Of note, the walls of Attaglia’s place are white representing authority and conformity – the antithesis to Frank’s worldview. This is carried over in the next scene where Frank visits Okla in prison. He finds out that his friend is dying and will not last the ten months he has left on his sentence. The two men also talk about Jessie and Frank asks Okla if he should tell her what he really does for a living to which is friend replies, “Lie to no one. If there’s somebody close to ya, you’re gonna ruin it with a lie. If they’re a stranger who the fuck are they you’re gonna lie to.” Frank looks up to Okla as a mentor, a father figure who dispenses sage advice.

When Frank meets a local mobster by the name of Leo to get his money it is a similar set-up to the Van Zant meeting in Heat only on a smaller scale. Both Frank and Neil have one of their crew hiding out in a sniper position in case things go bad. Leo tries to entice Frank to come work for him but he is not interested. Frank tells him, “I am self-employed. I am doing fine. I don’t deal with egos. I am Joe the boss of my own body so what the fuck do I have to work for you for?” Leo offers him a very attractive deal: big scores, minimum risk, protection from the cops, and only diamonds or cash jobs. On the surface, Leo appears to agree to a limited partnership of two or three jobs but alarm bells should be going off in Frank’s head when the crime boss says that he will be his new father. That is Okla’s role. As with what happens to Neil in Heat, Frank is blinded by his desire to realize his dream of a family and he makes a decision that he would not normally do, one that goes against his personal code. It is this betrayal of his beliefs that will cause his downfall.

The centerpiece of Thief, as it is in Heat and The Insider, is a conversation between two characters in which they espouse their worldviews to each other. This is a chance for Frank and Jessie to come clean with each other, she tells him about her past and the bad relationships she has been in. She also hints at an involvement in drug trafficking but all of this is behind her now. “My life is very ordinary, very boring which is good because it’s solid.” She is tough, honest and Frank’s equal. She does not put up with any of his nonsense and is one of the strongest female protagonists in Mann’s films despite her limited screen time.

Frank then tells her about his stint in prison and the mentality he adopted in order to survive. “You’ve got to forget time. You’ve not got to give a fuck if you live or die. You got to get where nothing means nothing.” He recounts a story in prison where he endured a severe beating from a powerful gang leader but the man died as a result of messing with Frank. Once out of the prison hospital he expected to be killed in retaliation, “’Cause I don’t mean nothing to myself. I don’t care about me, I don’t care about nothing. I know from that day that I survive because I achieved that mental attitude.” These lines are crucial to what Frank does later on in the film in order to survive.

Frank shows her his postcard and how it represents his dream and the passage of time. He tells Jessie, “I have run out of time. I have lost it all. And so I can’t work fast enough. And I can’t run fast enough. And the only thing that catches me up is doing my magic act. But it ends.” Being in prison took ten years of his life away. He has little time to realize his dreams and this affects his decision about Leo. Hooking up with Leo will allow Frank to realize his dreams much faster and, at first, it does. The mobster gets him bigger scores; he helps Frank adopt a baby when he and Jessie cannot get one through legal means; and the money Frank makes allows him to buy a big home in the suburbs and pay off a judge to release Okla early from prison. However, making a deal with Leo is akin to making a deal with the Devil. It seems good initially but comes with a horrible price.

Okla gets out of prison only to die in a hospital. Afterwards, Frank and Jessie eat at a Chinese restaurant and through the color scheme, Mann foreshadows the bad things to come with the deep red of the seats and in the background of the scene are green glass and walls. Sure enough, Frank is roughed up by corrupt cops because he will not pay them off. However, Mann offers a brief glimmer of happiness for Frank and his crew. After they successfully pull off a complex safe-cracking job in California, we see Frank, Barry and their families cavorting in the ocean. As is customary in all Mann films, water symbolizes safety but it will be short-lived.

Things get worse when Leo does not deliver all the money for the California score as promised because he thought that Frank would change his mind and work with him for the long haul. For the safe-cracker it is strictly a short-term gig and this causes friction between the two men. Leo resents Frank’s attitude and thinks that he should be grateful for all of the things that he has provided. So, Leo punishes Frank by beating and then killing Barry on Frank’s car lot and capturing the thief. Leo tells him to do what he is told because in effect he owns Frank and his family and he will work for the mob until he is burnt out or dead.

Frank’s only way out is to revert to his prison mentality where life means nothing for that is the only way he knows how to survive. So, he cuts himself off from everything. He sends Jessie and their child away in a cold, calculated way because he has now become dead inside – his face an impenetrable mask. Frank then blows up his home, his car dealership and the bar he owns because it has all been tainted by Leo like some kind of cancer. By destroying it all, Frank is systematically removing the virus. Before he sets out to punish Leo, Frank crumples up his postcard of dreams and throws it away. Symbolically, this represents his last shred of humanity and now he is free to perform a task that may be his last. He no longer cares if he lives or dies. Finally, Frank goes to Leo’s house and systematically kills the mobster and all of his men with a final shoot-out on Leo’s front lawn. Mann shot the climactic shoot-out at different camera speeds to create a staccato effect that he would use again in the climactic shoot-out in Manhunter. The final image of the film is Frank walking off into the night, his mission complete. He is back to square one with nothing but at least he is free.

Mann was working on the screenplay for what would become Thief, which was in fact based on the book The Home Invaders: Confessions of Cat Burglar by real-life thief, Frank Hohimer. Mann needed someone to provide him with inside details on safecracking. He was so impressed by Santucci's knowledge that he not only hired him as a technical adviser on the film, cast him in a small part as a corrupt police sergeant, but also based a significant portion of Thief on Santucci's experiences. Mann used his connections with members of the Chicago Police Department to gain access to real thieves. One man, John Bardolino, stole over $10 million in jewels, cash, rare coins, and precious metals over his career.

James Caan agreed to do Thief based on the writing of a nine-minute conversation between Frank and Jessie in a restaurant where he tells her his personal philosophy about life. Caan spent four weeks before shooting hanging around many Chicago thieves but spent most of his time with Santucci and even used most of the man's tools in the film. The actor learned how to drill through a safe and performed all the safecracking in the film himself. He was also trained to handle a gun like a professional and trained on his tools until everything became second nature.

In keeping with his documentary roots and his continuing quest for realism, Mann cast real cops and criminals in minor roles. When he began casting real life cops in his film, Chuck Adamson recommended Dennis Farina. Adamson remembers that “Michael was looking for a couple of rough, ugly guys to play henchmen and I was like, ‘I got just the guy.’ I called Dennis and said, ‘You gotta get down here.’” Farina was a detective on the local police force but was interested in acting on the side. Mann cast him in a small role near the end of the film.

Thief is perhaps the most pure and essential variation on Mann’s themes. Frank’s entire reason for existence is to create a family with Jessie. That idea was the only thing that got him through his tough stint in prison. He carries around with him a homemade postcard that is a collage of the things that are important to him. For Frank it is a physical, tangible reminder of his goals. As with all Mann protagonists, he works with single-minded determination to achieve what he wants. There is a kind of desperation to his actions; however, the deeper Frank gets in with the Mob and the tighter he tries to hold on to what is near and dear to him, the more his dream begins to slip away. The ideal of family togetherness is ultimately unattainable for Frank and so he reverts to his prison mentality where nothing matters.

While Mann was shooting Thief, he gave editor Dov Hoenig several tapes of music by German group Tangerine Dream to use as temporary cues for the film. By the time he assembled the first cut, Hoenig had produced almost a complete score based on the band’s cues with the occasional guitar piece by David Gilmour. Tangerine Dream agreed to score the film and when they arrived in the United States, Mann showed them a cut without telling them that he had used their music to score it. They were happily surprised and their final score was quite close to the temp soundtrack. Mann worked closely with the band, restructuring cues, asking for specific instrumental combinations and changing the original mixes in order to achieve a certain emotional effect.

Thief received a mixed reaction from critics of the day. Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half stars out four and wrote, “Every important performance in this movie successfully creates a plausible person, instead of the stock-company supporting characters we might have expected. And the film moves at a taut pace, creating tension and anxiety through very effective photography and a wound-up, pulsing score by Tangerine Dream.” In his review for Time magazine, Richard Schickel called the action sequences that came at the end of the film, ‘flashy but, empty exercises, pseudotragic searchings for a big finish. They make one tired and edgy—and dissipate the promise that has energized much of Thief.” The New York Times’ Vincent Canby wrote, “The movie is loaded with so-called production values. This neonlit, nighttime Chicago is pretty enough to be framed and hung on a wall, where, of course, good movies don’t belong ... The music by Tangerine Dream sounds as if it wanted to have a life of its own, as if it were meant to be an album instead of a soundtrack score.” In his review for the Globe and Mail, Jay Scott wrote, “Mann’s compressed, profane, associative dialogue – a hyperized, stylized and poeticized stream of semi-consciousness – is integrated expertly into the High Tech of Tangerine Dream, despite the handful of lines that run awry.” The Washington Post’s Gary Arnold wrote, “Caan’s performance seems dubious in direct proportion to his attempts to sound spontaneous. There’s a studied undercurrent in his would-be casual or aggressive behavior.” He also wrote, “Tuesday Weld’s leading lady ... suggests that Mann hasn’t a clue to the thought or behavior of women. Her role is painfully arbitrary and artificial.”

Caan found the role a hard one to play because his character was not "emotionally available." This existential outlook on life bled into the actor's real life. “For three months, I was a lunatic, I had migraines 24 hours a day, I lost about 20 pounds. And then when I looked at the movie, I couldn't stand it. My eyes were like two pieces of glass. They scared me. I said, ‘That guy's a killer.’” Caan faced the same problem that William Petersen would go on to face in Manhunter. Both actors delved so deeply and intensely into their dark, brooding characters that they had a tough time letting go of the character after filming had ended. But the end results certainly speak for themselves as Thief announced Mann as an up-and-coming talent to watch who had a real understanding and knack for depicting criminal types in a gritty, urban environment.

Miami Vice

It had been 17 years since Miami Vice ended its successful run on television. It became a cultural phenomenon and has since become one of the iconic shows of the 1980s. Michael Mann executive produced and acted as its guiding force in terms of tone and style for the first two seasons, helping define the show’s distinctive cinematic look. In 2006, he decided to visit Vice again, this time on the big screen in a much darker version. Although, people forget that, for its time, the show was fairly gritty in its own right (within the confines of network T.V.) and featured many downbeat endings where the bad guys got away or the protagonists won but at a terrible, personal cost.

Miami Vice was plagued by a series of production problems – nothing new for a Mann film as he faced all kinds of obstacles while making The Keep (1983) and The Last of the Mohicans (1992) – but none as well-publicized as with this project. Vice went over-schedule and over-budget with the studio claiming it to be $135 million while rumors suggested it to be in the neighborhood of $150 million. Why was this film under so much media scrutiny? Could it have been the presence of big name movie stars like Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx, both known for their extra-curricular behavior off the set? Or was it the fact that Mann decided to remake a popular T.V. show from the ‘80s?

As he did with Los Angeles in Collateral (2004), Mann presents a contemporary version of Miami that is a foreboding and dangerous place. This isn’t the neon and pastels of the T.V. show. Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) are two police officers that specialize in going deep undercover to identify and bring down drug dealers and their operations. As with all of Mann’s films we are dropped right into the middle of the action as Crockett and Tubbs are tracking a suspect in a crowded nightclub with the kind of efficiency that is customary of all Mann protagonists.

The first thing that strikes you about this scene is how it is an incredible assault on the senses with pulsating electronica on the soundtrack while Crockett and Tubbs make their way through the crush of bodies in a sweaty, claustrophobic atmosphere. In some respects, it is reminiscent of the nightclub scene in Collateral albeit with a lot less bloodshed. In the middle of all this Crockett gets an urgent call from one of his informants. He and Tubbs rush to meet him (played with sweaty desperation by John Hawkes) and find out that his family has been killed by white supremacist gang bangers. These are serious guys with heavy duty assault rifles that they use to ruthlessly kill three undercover cops without hesitation on a drug transaction gone bad.

Crockett and Tubbs soon find themselves assigned to the case with the mandate of finding out how this gang was able to discover these undercover agents and make contact with the source of their drugs – a Cuban named José Yero (John Ortiz) that operates in Central America and beyond. So, Crockett and Tubbs steal a shipment of Yero’s drugs and proceed to sell them back to him posing as experienced drug dealers. They go to South America and meet Yero in a typical Mann scene filled with tough guy speak that is sparse and all business. It’s a tense scene as the two undercover cops sell their fake reputations to Yero and try to convince the suspicious drug dealer to go into business with them. At this meeting, Crockett encounters Isabella (Gong Li), an aloof businesswoman who works for Yero and is the girlfriend to Arcángel de Jesús Montoya (Luis Tosar), the coolly confident mastermind behind the entire operation. Isabella has an air of mystery that intrigues Crockett and this grows into an intense attraction between the two of them.

Even though Mann has made it a point to distance the film from the T.V. show, the essential ingredients to the drug operation storyline are based loosely on an episode from season one entitled, “Smuggler’s Blues.” Mann even uses a few similar key lines from that episode in his film. Miami Vice goes to great lengths in showing how the international drug smuggling trade works. The director has a real eye for detail, showing in his trademark, meticulous fashion, how a massive drug transaction, done out in the ocean at night on several boats with incredible efficiency, is accomplished. These big time drug dealers have seemingly unlimited resources and Mann shows how they use sophisticated technology and weapons, that rival if not surpass anything the United States government has, to conduct and protect their extremely lucrative business.

Mann also expertly captures the way these guys speak – the sometimes cryptic lingo of both the cops and the criminals – is really like a foreign language unto itself. Mann explained in a Miami Herald article that, “Normally, if you have two undercover cops who are scamming an antagonist, you locate the audience inside the intent of the two cops. This story doesn’t let you into that inside conversation. You may be a little confused, until you get to the scene where everything clicks.” Crockett and Tubbs are dealing with the kinds of guys that would have hired someone like Vincent in Collateral with Yero as a mid-level drug dealer much like Javier Bardem’s Felix in that film.

Not much is revealed about Crockett or Tubbs’ personal lives or their backstories except that they have a very tight partnership and this is conveyed in a few minutes through looks and a verbal shorthand. We do learn that Tubbs is in a long-term relationship with fellow undercover police officer Trudy Joplin (Naomie Harris) while Crockett is a loner, only existing for the work and more than willing to fully immerse himself in his role. Their undercover work allows Mann to once again show the blurring between the law and crime as Crockett and Tubbs perform illegal tasks as their undercover alter egos. Like Neil McCauley and Vincent Hanna in Heat (1995), there is a thin line separating the two sides of the law and Crockett and Tubbs cross it repeatedly. The danger lies in losing themselves; forgetting who they are and why they are doing this work. However, they are consummate professionals and there is little doubt that this will happen. Tubbs is never once tempted and as much as Crockett loves Isabella, he knows that it will never last because of who he is and what he has to do. This does drain a little tension from the film as there is no danger that Crockett and Tubbs will really break their professional code unlike the protagonists in other Mann films.

Colin Farrell is good as Sonny Crockett in what is easily one of his strongest performances to date thanks to the excellent material he was to work with and a veteran director like Mann to guide him. He does a good job of playing a risk taker like Crockett who has nothing in his life because he is his work. Of course, meeting Isabella changes this and he ends up breaking his personal code much like Neil does when he gets romantically involved with Eady in Heat, although, not to the same life-threatening degree. Farrell is able to convey the conflict that Crockett faces as he mixes business and pleasure. Mann uses the actor’s expressive eyes to convey this internal struggle. He finally has a meaty role to sink his teeth into and does it so well, immersing himself in the character much as Crockett does in his undercover persona.

Jamie Foxx is good as Crockett’s reliable partner and moral compass. Tubbs is always there to back him up and remind him who he really is when it seems that he has forgotten. Foxx sheds his usual shtick, much like he did in Collateral (and Ali for that matter), to deliver a strong, unmannered performance. Mann regular Barry Shabaka Henley is also along for the ride as Lt. Martin Castillo and brings his customary gravitas as Crockett and Tubbs’ superior. Also of note is Tom Towles (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer) who plays the leader of the white supremacists with scary intensity. He’s played a host of nasty bad guys in the past and is very effective in this role. His character is the film’s wild card, like Waingro in Heat.

Mann has been accused of writing weak female characters in his films (although, both Jesse in Thief and Justine in Heat are notable exceptions) but Isabella and, to a lesser degree, Trudy are very strong and distinctive. Isabella is particularly significant in that she is an independent businesswoman who operates in a world dominated by men. Even when she becomes romantically involved with Crockett she does not lose her identity. She is obviously drawn to him and the beautiful Gong Li conveys this so well in the looks she gives Farrell and the intimacy they share in their scenes together. Both Crockett and Isabella are professionals and in another context could have had a life together but because of who they are and what they do, it is not meant to be.

In a surprising move, Miami Vice is Mann’s most sexually-charged film with several sensual yet artfully shot sex scenes between Tubbs and Trudy and also Crockett and Isabella. It is all tastefully done with close-ups and hand-held camerawork that reduce these scenes almost to abstraction and conveys the intensity of their passions – especially that of Crockett and Isabella. They know that it won’t last because of the nature of their profession and this makes their relationship that much more immediate and intense. Like Hanna in Heat, Crockett has no allusions about his personal life. He knows that he can’t have any attachments because his life is filled with constant danger that would put anyone close to him in jeopardy as well.

The digital camerawork gives Miami Vice a grainy, gritty look and a raw, rough around the edges texture that is perfectly suited for a film about extreme characters stuck in equally extreme situations. The digital cameras also allow Mann some incredible depth of field during the night scenes so that we can see exactly what is going on during night time raids or drug runs where it would have been a murky mess with film stock. He also captures the haunting quality of the storms rumbling in the background of scenes (they shot this film during Hurricane Katrina) that provide an eerily foreshadowing of the impending violent climax to the film.

Mann also continues to demonstrate a capacity for capturing stunning landscapes, like the shots of Crockett and Tubbs flying their small plane through vast blue skies populated with expansive, billowy clouds that dwarf the jet, or another shot of a series of waterfalls surrounded by dense jungles. He also presents the beautifully lush jungles of Colombia as exotic and alluring. Mann immerses us in the sights and sounds of Central and South America and Miami, populated by crowded market places and noisy nightclubs, showing off the local color of these exotic locations.

With Heat and Collateral, Mann has repeated shown his capacity for orchestrating elaborately staged action sequences. The shoot-out in a trailer park is particularly effective in its realism and ruthless economy (as he did with Collateral). In many respects, it is so unlike the hyper-active, hyper-kinetic action one is accustomed to in mainstream Hollywood films by the likes of Michael Bay or McG because Mann drains these sequences of any slick polish and subverts our expectations by building up incredible tension and then inserting a sudden, jarring moment of violence, even ending the sequence with an unpredictable moment of tragedy that is very gripping stuff. Mann then proceeds to top this sequence with an even more impressively staged one for the film’s climax.

The origins for this film date back to 1981 when Mann read the screenplay for the pilot episode of what would become Miami Vice. While working on the show he came to a realization: “I basically tried to substitute other folks for myself on Miami Vice. I said to myself: ‘I’m here trying to help folks making these little movies – why aren’t I directing?’” So, he went off and made Manhunter (1986) but did not get serious about making a Vice film until 20 years later when, during the filming of Ali (2001) at a birthday party of Muhammad Ali, Foxx asked Mann about updating Vice and making it into a film. Mann remembers that the actor “did 20 minutes on why I should do it, doing the sound effects and the cars and everything. Then he worked on me for about two years and I finally succumbed.” The director was resistant, at first, but then, “I sort of seduced myself with it as I was writing it. It became a personal script,” he said in a Miami Herald article. He started writing the screenplay in 2004. Foxx remembers, “one day he told me he had written 90 pages and I immediately put my bid in to play Tubbs.”

According to Mann, the appeal to the material was a fascination with “the whole phenomenon and process of being undercover. It’s a very dramatic projection for an individual, to put yourself into that world and become in some ways who you really are, because that’s what undercover work really is: turning up the volume on your impulses and throttling back on your inhibitions until it becomes your favorite identity.” He wasn’t satisfied with the show’s examination of police undercover work and how it affected someone. It was not only an interest in undercover work that Mann wanted to explore in the movie but, as he told the Daily Telegraph, “Crime is the booming branch of our time and internationally operating cartels are led at least as innovatively as legal corporations. These people maintain unbelievable networks and can deliver any merchandise to any destination on Earth with perfectly planned strategies ... our world is a supermarket of illegal goods.”

Fans of the show hoping that this new film would be a nostalgia trip were disappointed as Mann was not interested in simply rehashing the series. “I couldn’t have invested a year and a half into re-invoking a sense of the 1980s. That just wasn’t a period I was interested in. I’d be bored shooting it, and most people would be bored watching it.” The appeal of the show to him was “an attitude toward how you tell these stories about being undercover – stories that are extremely emotionally active, very passionate, somewhat serious and don’t always have happy endings.” He was also interested in revisiting the city of Miami which, physically, “especially at night, has completely changed.”

When Mann showed Universal his screenplay, they weren’t too excited about a dark, violent, audience-limiting R rated film that bore no resemblance to the show. However, after Foxx won the Academy Award for Ray (2004) and was nominated for another one for Collateral, Mann underwent prolonged discussions with then Universal president Stacey Snider who greenlighted the project at $120 million and was scheduled to start production in April 2005.

The first thing Mann did was extensive research on undercover work and what it meant to go deep undercover. He and the cast spent five months before filming in Miami training and working with undercover agents from government organizations like the DEA, FBI, ATF and SWAT running all kinds of simulated scenarios. Mann also conducted extensive research with cinematographer Dion Beebe over the course of four and half months testing digital cameras in Miami. While not reducing the costs of the film, shooting digitally allowed the image to be manipulated right on the set. It also offered a greater depth of field, especially at night when most of the film takes place.

As part of his research for the role, Colin Farrell spent some time with undercover cops including a week of running scenarios that had been set up. One day, the cops he’d been working with set up a buy for 40 kilos of cocaine from some Colombians. Because the actor had gotten on so well with the cops they invited him to the meeting assuring him that nothing would happen. However, as Farrell remembers, “the shit hit the fan – guns were pulled and I nearly had an accident in my pants because I was scared.” He thought it was real and found out the next day that it was all a set-up.

During pre-production, Farrell pushed himself through intensive weight training with months spent doing morning workouts, afternoons on the shooting range using live ammunition and nights spent on mock drug runs five miles off the coast of Miami. The actor had been experiencing serious pains in his chest, shoulders and back. He saw a doctor and had an MRI done which revealed a rib that had broken away from his sternum and two herniated discs in his back – all brought on by his intense weightlifting sessions. Farrell’s injury resulted in over six weeks of delays that pushed the production start date back to June and right in the middle of one of the worst hurricane seasons in recent memory.

As with The Insider (1999), Mann faced a battle in the media that attempted to distract from the film itself by focusing instead on the troubled production. The most damning article was written by Kim Masters for Slate that criticized Jamie Foxx and Mann via anonymous sources. Part of the film was shot in the Dominican Republic in a square in Santo Domingo that even local police avoided. Mann hired gang members to work as security. When the production moved to a more upscale, tourist-heavy Colonial District area, a local police officer approached the set and got into an argument with one of the guards (supplied by the Dominican military). The cop reportedly pulled a gun and was shot and wounded. The cast and crew heard six gunshots. Farrell remembers, “I knew straight away there were gunshots. I’m thinking that there’s 20 people down there to kidnap us and I’m going to be in a basement somewhere with a hood over my head, eating porridge and water for the next week.” Cast and crew scrambled for cover and safety until their security team dealt with the situation and order was restored. Mann tried to clarify the incident in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, saying that the man who had been shot “was inebriated. When they told him, ‘You can’t get on the set,’ the guy pulled his weapon and started firing. So they fired back. It coulda happened on Sunset here in L.A.”

While Miami was recovering from devastating hurricanes, the production set up camp in the Triborder Region where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet in the notoriously corrupt city of Ciudad del Este. Stephen Donehoo, the man responsible for getting the production in and out of the area safely, described it as a place “known for corruption, contraband, and tax avoidance. And there’s a huge Lebanese community, some of which apparently provides financial support to Hamas and Hezbollah. Some say they’re doing training for al-Qaeda, but I don’t think that’s true.” Negotiating entry into Ciudad del Este in Paraguay took almost a year with Donehoo and Mann meeting face-to-face top government officials, local gangsters, black-market businessmen, and a high-ranking customs official. The plan was to shoot for a few days in a local mall and three weeks in an abandoned building outside town where the film’s climatic gun battle was to take place – the scale of which was to rival the famous shoot-out in Heat. However, as Donehoo was getting all the equipment into Paraguay, the shoot-out in Santo Domingo happened.

Afterwards, Foxx refused to work outside of the United States which forced Mann to rewrite the ending so that it took place in Miami instead of Paraguay. Fortunately, he had written an ending set in Miami. The director claimed in the Slate article that, “the Miami ending worked out to be the better ending. It brought all the conflicting characters together in one arena.” Universal wanted the production to move back to the States and was happy when it did even though Farrell says that he would have rather stuck to the original schedule. Ironically, the day they got back and were shooting in a shipyard, they heard gunshots nearby and Mann says, “Five real undercover Miami-Dade narcs had gotten into a shootout in a trailer park five blocks away. We had to stop everything because it wasn’t safe.”

The Slate article went on to cite anonymous sources in the Miami Vice production team that Foxx exhibited diva-like behavior by showing up with an entourage and an attitude. While hardly scandalous news, the article went on to say that Foxx did not want to fly commercial to Miami to begin work on the film and that Universal Studios finally gave him access to their private jet. The Entertainment Weekly article also stated that Tubbs was supposed to be an excellent pilot but Foxx was afraid to fly. The actor also complained that he was getting paid less than co-star Farrell even though their salaries had been established before his Oscar win. In the end, Foxx got a big raise while Farrell took a small cut. To make matters worse, expensive HD digital cameras broke down with the change in barometric pressure and Gong Li had difficulty learning English and Spanish.

Apparently, Mann went through dozens of script changes while making the film which caused many headaches for frustrated crew members. The production ended up filming in Miami during hurricane season and some crew members felt that they continued to work in unsafe conditions, which Mann strenuously denied. During one squall that originated with Tropical Storm Dennis, windows were blown out of a tall building and glass rained down on a Ferrari with the convertible top down being driven by Farrell and Foxx nearly missing them and damaging the car. Hurricane Wilma struck the production just before the final showdown in Miami was to be filmed, heavily damaging the production office. Fortunately, Mann’s meticulous planning and preparation allowed the crew to re-group in a week and re-stage the finale.

By the end of the 105-day shoot, more than 100 crew members had resigned and twelve hours after wrapping the film, Farrell checked into rehab for exhaustion and a dependency on prescription medication stemming from an injury he sustained while making Alexander (2004) with Oliver Stone. Regular Mann collaborator, Barry Shabaka Henley told Entertainment Weekly, “Michael is brilliant, but [people started to] view him as Kurtz from Apocalypse Now, out there in Miami with severed heads on stakes. I couldn’t believe the stories I heard when I got back to Los Angeles. Mann had shot someone. The AD had shot someone. Foxx had crashed a plane.”

Why did the film cost so much? Extensive location shooting that involved taking a large cast and film crew all over the world. Miami Vice is estimated to have cost $235 million to make and market, making it the biggest risk for Universal Pictures in 2006. The film was projected to gross $100 million domestically and fell well short of that. Chairman Marc Shmuger said, “The studio underestimated the inherent challenges of translating Miami Vice to the big screen. As a commercial proposition, it had a familiar title but not a really deeply appealing connection to the larger audience.” Mann reportedly made $6 million plus a percentage of the box office receipts before Universal made any money.

Not surprisingly, Miami Vice divided critics. In his review for Time magazine, Richard Schickel praised Mann’s use of HD cameras: “In terms of cinematography, Mann may embody the future of large-scale commercial movies.” Newsweek magazine’s David Ansen praised Gong Li’s performance: “The great Chinese star hasn’t seemed comfortable in Hollywood fare, but Mann locates the lusty vulnerability under her snarl. There’s enough real passion between Farrell and Gong for the movie to get some emotional traction.” In his review for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw wrote, “It is one of the most laconic pieces of work imaginable: radically reticent, in fact ... Miami Vice is a bold, powerful and irresistibly thrilling movie.” New York magazine’s David Edelstein wrote, “Early reviewers have labeled Miami Vice a disaster, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. It’s a sensational trip – gorgeous gaga.”

In his review for the New York Observer, Andrew Sarris wrote, “admittedly, the ‘content’ in Mr. Mann’s new version of Miami Vice is hardly Tolstoyan in its texture, but I would argue once more, as I have so often in the past, that in cinema, at least, so-called ‘form’ can constitute ‘content’ at the highest level.” In his review for The New York Times, A.O. Scott wrote, “Miami Vice is an action picture for people who dig experimental art films, and vice versa ... Some of the most captivating sequences have an abstract quality, as if Mr. Mann were paying homage to the avant-garde, anti-narrative of Stan Brakhage in the midst of a big studio production.” However, in his review for the New Yorker, David Denby wrote, “the picture turns dealing into a kind of expensive, high-speed scavenger hunt. Sometimes the geography is so confusing that we wonder how the film crew managed to show up at the right location.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “I got the feeling that Mann remains embarrassed by the '80s-cheese, fashion-plate showiness of his beloved series, and that he was determined not to fall back into it. His movie, as entertaining as some of it is, is so cool that it's almost too cool. It takes the sin, and much of the juice, out of vice.”

Ultimately, Miami Vice is not a kitschy parody or celebration of its television source material a la Starsky & Hutch (2004) or The Dukes of Hazzard (2005) but a serious meditation of the dangers of deep, intensive undercover work and the complex drug cartels it tries to expose and ultimately break up. Kudos to Universal for daring to release a dark, very mature action thriller in the middle of summer blockbuster season in an attempt at counter-programming. Mann has created another masterfully crafted exploration into the nature of professionalism and the inevitable clash between it and the personal lives of his protagonists. This film is arguably one his darkest explorations of these themes as he strips down our notions of character development and plot to the bare essentials while showcasing his knack for visual storytelling.

Also, check out Joe Valdez's excellent look at this film over at his blog, This Distracted Globe. Jake has a fantastic look at this film over at Not Just Movies, which is definitely worth checking out.