Michael Mann

Director

• Born: February 5, 1943
• Place of Birth: Chicago, Illinois

FILM DIRECTOR AND TELEVISION PRODUCER

As the creator and the producer of such television series as Miami Viceand as the writer and the director of such films as Heat(1995), Mann reinvigorated tired police genres with new energy.

AREA OF ACHIEVEMENT: Entertainment

Early Life

Michael Mann grew up in Chicago, the second son of Jack and Esther Mann. Michael Mann’s father, a Ukrainian immigrant who fled the Russian Revolution, served in World War II and was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, Mann’s father operated a grocery store before competition forced it to close. Following high school graduation in 1961, Mann majored in English at the University of Wisconsin. Seeing G. W. Pabst’s Die freudlose Gasse (1925; The Joyless Street) in a film class inspired him to become a filmmaker. After graduating in 1965, Mann enrolled in the London International Film School.

Following film school, Mann learned about film production while working in Twentieth Century Fox’s London office, where he coordinated budgets and found locations for films. His marriage to a fellow University of Wisconsin student ended during this time. Their daughter, Ami Canaan Mann, is a director. In 1968, National Broadcasting Company (NBC) News hired Mann to film interviews with striking students and workers in Paris for the news magazine First Tuesday. He spent 1969 and 1970 making television commercials. His short film Jaunpuri (1971) won awards at film festivals in Barcelona and Melbourne. Mann returned to the United States in 1971 and made the documentary Seventeen Days down the Line (1972). He married his second wife, the painter Summer Mann, with whom he had three daughters.

Life’s Work

Mann began writing for television series in 1975, including three episodes of Starsky and Hutch and four episodes of Police Story. He also directed an episode of Police Woman. During 1976 and 1977, Mann worked for Dustin Hoffman on the screenplay for what would become Straight Time (1978). Mann’s research at Folsom Prison would influence his work on The Jericho Mile (1979), his first television film, and Thief (1981), his first feature film. The Jericho Mile, written and directed by Mann, is widely considered one of the best made-for-television films. It centers on a prisoner serving a life sentence who finds meaning and redemption, a major Mann theme, through long-distance running.

During this period, Mann worked more in television than in film, creating three series. Vega$ is a private-investigator drama that ran from 1978 to 1981. A team of police detectives is the focus of the flashy Miami Vice (1984–89). Crime Story (1986–88) centers on Chicago police during 1963. In the 1980s, Mann took tentative steps in his development as a film director, making three films that had little impact at the box office. The Keep (1983) is an offbeat horror film about Nazis guarding a mysterious Romanian fortress in 1942. The story of a safecracker who wants to leave the world of crime to spend more time with his family, Thief (1981) is a more typical Mann endeavor, establishing the theme of tortured heroes torn between good and evil. The first film to feature novelist Thomas Harris’s serial killer, Hannibal Lecter, Manhunter (1986) also explores this theme. The film focuses on a Federal Bureau of Investigation profiler called out of retirement to track down a serial killer.

The promise shown by Mann was fulfilled in the following decade, beginning with an unlikely project, an adaptation of an 1826 James Fenimore Cooper novel. The Last of the Mohicans (1992) examines the difficult choices faced by its hero. In Mann’s acknowledged masterpiece, Heat (1995), work proves more important than private life. His marriage falling apart because of his commitment to his job, a Los Angeles police inspector becomes even more engaged in his duties to avoid the chaos of his private life. The life of the hero of The Insider (1999) is turned upside down when he decides to expose the wrongdoing of his employer, a tobacco corporation, on Sixty Minutes.

Mann’s interest in outsiders continued with Ali (2001), his portrait of boxer Muhammad Ali. An ordinary man is compelled to take drastic action in Collateral (2004), in which a Los Angeles taxi driver confronts a hired assassin. Mann then made a misstep in trying to bring his most successful television series to the big screen: Miami Vice (2006) was greeted unkindly by critics and was a box-office disappointment. Public Enemies (2009), the story of Depression-era gangster John Dillinger, was slightly better received. Two years later, he returned to television to work as producer on the first ten episodes of HBO's new show Luck, a drama revolving around horse racing. However, the show was cancelled by the following year, most likely due in large part to the death of three horses that occurred during production.

In early 2015, Mann ventured into a portrayal of the contemporary and increasingly dangerous issue of cybercrime with the feature film Blackhat, which he directed using digital cameras and the screenplay written by Morgan Davis Foehl. Starring Chris Hemsworth, Viola Davis, and Tang Wei, the film centers upon Nick Hathaway, a convicted felon granted a release from prison on the condition that he help a league of American and Chinese authorities to track and apprehend a dangerous global cybercrime network. The film, which opened on the same weekend as the hit American Sniper, did not perform well at the US box office and was pulled from several theaters after only two weeks. Critics cited poor marketing and the difficulty of dramatizing the subject of cybercrime as reasons why the film did not succeed.

He next produced Ford v. Ferrari, starring Matt Damon and Christian Bale, in 2019, and another automotive-themed work, Ferrari, starring Adam Driver and Penelope Cruz, in 2023. He was also busy as producer of the Max series Tokyo Vice from 2022 to 2024.

Significance

Mann’s films distinguish themselves by being sophisticated without being pretentious. In an era of cinema that emphasizes special effects, explosions, and big guns, Mann’s work is decidedly masculine but without macho posturings. The protagonists of Mann’s films resemble those in the works of Herman Melville and Ernest Hemingway, with their adherence to personal codes of conduct and their efforts to remain true to themselves when caught up in extreme circumstances. Mann is a true auteur, who has created a substantial body of work carrying his personal stamp: that of the plight of characters involved in overcoming obstacles in their paths.

Although Mann began his career in entertainment as a writer, his films have a strong visual style. He uses light and shadows to convey the psychological states of his characters; he uses physical space, whether the virgin frontier of early America or the concrete canyons of cities, to help define character. He is an adept director of actors, obtaining exceptional performances from Brian Cox in Manhunter; Daniel Day-Lewis and Wes Studi in The Last of the Mohicans; Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Heat; Russell Crowe, Christopher Plummer, and Michael Gambon in The Insider; and Marion Cotillard and Stephen Lang in Public Enemies. Seen by the motion-picture establishment as primarily a genre filmmaker, Mann has received few plaudits for his work, though he was nominated for Academy Awards for cowriting, directing, and producing The Insider. Mann is unique for being equally successful in television and in motion pictures. In addition to being one of the most popular television series of the 1980s, Miami Vice was applauded for its cinematic style, in terms of quick-cut editing, frequent camera movements, and a distinctive color palette. It also paved the way for the use of popular music in television dramas, with background songs that reflected the psychological states of the characters. The heroes of Miami Vice, undercover police officers posing as and often identifying with criminals, are representative of the complex, tormented souls who inhabit Mann’s stylized, masculine world.

Bibliography

Feeney, F. X. Michael Mann. London: Taschen, 2006. Print.

James, Nick. Heat. London: BFI, 2002. Print.

Mann, Michael. "Michael Mann Talks Blackhat, His New Edit of Ali, the Last of the Mohicans Director's Cut, Changing His Films after Release, Agincourt, and More." Interview by Steve Weintraub. Collider. Complex Media, 16 Jan. 2015. Web. 21 Apr. 2016.

"Michael Mann." IMDb, 2024, www.imdb.com/name/nm0000520/. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.

Rybin, Steven. The Cinema of Michael Mann. Lanham: Lexington, 2007. Print.

Steensland, Mark. The Pocket Essential Michael Mann. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2002. Print.