Michael Mann tells how it happened that he became a director instead of a literature professor....

[Glades]

 

... and what kind of a director he became, what was important to him, what distinguishes him from others. And he tells about the beginnings of his professional life as a writer for television series.

I transcribed a spoken interview that Michael Mann gave for elephant in 1994. So all mistakes are mine, not Michael Mann's.
I just loved the interview, it says so much about Michael Mann, his special way of making movies and his contribution to MV, that I really wanted to share it with you.

Here it is:

Michael Mann:

I was at university, I was majoring in literature. And at that time I thought I wanted to stay academia and become a professor. Do graduate work.

And as a, kind of as a joke almost I took a course in film history. I thougt that they would screen films, might be a look at some films or whatever and that would be it. And than I kind of got mugged in a way by cinema and I started looking some of the pictures and I realised even though I had had no prior deep binding interest in cinema I wanted to direct films, I wanted to make films.

And the pictures that we were looking at particulary were, that particulary affected me, the first ones that effected me, were the Russian silent pictures, and the Russian silent aera. Potemkin, Pudowkin, Dsiga Wertow, the kino-eye-movement, which is from three very different kinds of Russian pictures. And then also the German, some of the German silence ... and some of the __?__ like "The Street", Murnaus "Faust". The German "Street" film was German expressionist films during Weimar. And I just redecided that this is something I wanted to do.

Right about that time,´63, "Dr. Strangelove" opened up. And I´ve seen "Path of Glory" prior to that. I really was just swept away by. As were a number of other people, a lot of this other directors in my generation, who, in the late 50´s and early 60´s, suddenly woke up to cinema. And it was a new cinema that they woke up to. It wasn´t traditional Hollywood cinema. It was either the French New Wave, who is Truffault, Godard or more noe-classical directors like Resnais. Which ´58, ´59 in the cities and then in the new American films, early ´60, ´62, ´63. Those were the pictures that motivated people of my age to get into cinema. A very different initiation, a very different voyage into cinema than say classical Hollywood directors of one generation beyond me who had to come out here or they grew up here or somehow they got into cinema more as a vocational occupation because of the region they were living in.

Anyway, so that´s how I ended up going to decide that I should go to graduate school in film. And I went to London Film School for two years and get my graduate degree and stay looking around trying to direct.

There are only three film schools, there where a number them maybe actually seven or eight, but there are only three that actually had equipement and really had full departments. That were UCLA, USC, NYU had a small department and I think Boston University had a small department. And I looked at the syllabies of each school and decided that I didn´t really... one was documentary orientated, another was more vocational in a funny kind of way, more about, more related to the industrie

And it didn´t... I felt I wanted a more asthetical, political view towards making film. In other words: I wanted a school that had... who´s philosophy of film making was more ... was less vocational and more about cinema as an art form. And that really wasn´t the case back in 1965 when I had to make these decisions. So one went to UCLA or you go to London Film School or you can go to IDHEC in France or the Prague School if you ... You know, that´s what about it.... There weren´t that many opportunities. I took a course in film theory in one semester. We read all the film theory that was ever written. And this is before the cinealogists and all this, you know, and the mushrooming of all the mass of material been written about film. And ´64, ´65 you started ... one started with a very early stuff around turn the century. You went to Eisenstein, you went to Siegfried Kracauer, Bela Balazs, that was about it. Then you could read some of translations of "Cahiers du cinema". And some of the early stuff, that was written on Hitchcock, for example by Eric Rohmer. And that was about ... that was the body of ... the body of that was not that large. It was a much more knowable ... literature in a way.

We did some documentary shooting on Paris in 1968. And that was primarily because there were certain people there wouldn´t talk to American networks. So I was able to extort ... myself and a friend of mine, who is living in Paris that time... we were to extort a situation where ...we would ... where ... Alain Krivine and Alain Geismar: we talk to "us" we wouldn´t talk to the American networks about the events of ´68. And so we shoot some documentary footage during that time. And ended up in the _balls/archive?_ of NBC, NBC news. And... that was quite an eventful period, it was quite terrific.

I´m more, I´m definitly more interested in directing. Directing is also much more fun. It´s more immediate and it´s probably easier for me to do than writing. Which of course means I ... that I have more guilt associated to not writing than I do to not directing ... because the writing is harder. Practically it´s a solo activity. And I like damn, basically extra burden, I like having a lot of people around and working with the group. The two are inseperable to me. I would like to direct some things I haven´t written. And so far I haven´t found anything that I ever wanted to direct and I haven´t written. So I don´t know if I ever will. But I think I have more range personally as a director then I do as a writer. Which is why... But so far, everything I´ve directed, I´ve written.

It´s this big advantage to directing stuff you´ve written, you know what the scenes mean. If I had to discuss to a character with an actor I know every component, molecule of that character, or I couldn´t have written them. So it is a background, characters motivation why he does what he does, why he picked ... you know from something important about the way he dresses, his wife, with whom he is about to break up, to something unimportant like why he bought that chair. There is selection of choice in that chair that comes from who he is as a man. That chair appeals to him this chair didn´t, why? It´s all about character, so. So there is a big advantage is to what a scene means and what the totality means when you written it. -?- imagine in the writing process, I have also imagine the totality of the film. So it´s ... I´m glad I´ve written it when I´m directing it. When I´m writing it, I wished the hell it wasn´t, that I have to be sitting and writing it.

I want to make motion pictures. I want to ... I went to film school. When I left film school I had one ambition and that was to direct feature films. That was it.

Television was a means toward that. The first paying job I had in Los Angelos was writing television. First job in television was writing the first three episodes of a television series called "Starsky&Hutch"(1975-1979). I didn´t write the pilot. A guy named Bill Blinn wrote the pilot. It was two young guys who were plain cloth detectives in LAPD in Los Angelos. In the time that wasn´t that conventional. I mean, it was episodic television, which is pretty thin stuff. But it wasn´t conventional. They were ... Bill Blinn created the show I didn´t create the show. And he ...._these_ guys, they were fairly undercover and were pretty contemporary looking people. And it had never been on television portrayal of cops who look like these two cops. Right now it´s kind of an old mug, just Levi´s and running around in running shoes. But people ... cops, you never saw cops like they. Cops, cops wear at "drag net", they crew cuts and wear suits and ties. So you didn´t ... And some of the early stories had a ..., they were on some wild places. There is a car dealer in L.A. called Cal Worthington, who rides around in his car lot on a hippopotamus one week and he´s got a bear on his lead the next week and that kind of stuff. And the first thing I did was an episode based on Cal Worthington, who wants to divorce from his wife and she won´t give it and _he has_ her killed in some bizarre way...  By the way ... So it dealt with ... I don´t ... it was ... it didn´t feel ... it felt new when it came out.

The best writing that was going on in television happened at police story (1973-1979). Somebody introduced me to Liam O´Brien who is Edmond O´Brien´s, late O´Brien´s, brother who is a play writer and a fabulous guy and became kind of a mentor for me. Along with _?_ Bob Lewin. As a writer ... there is not a writer around who doesn´t have some other older writer which some point of his carrier didn´t help him. And by one point there were about eight or nine of us. We were sitting ... all writers were sitting around and we start talking about this subject and every single guy had somebody, when they were starting out, who spot them and said this guy is get a real ear for dialog. Why don´t you to sit down with me and I show you this thing about structure, and here is how to... Everybody is had this wonderful giving, very generous kind of tradition among writers in film and television and it´s quite terrific. Not the kind of Hollywood stories people hear about neccessarily, but it´s...

I got myself to a point time where I was sought after as a writer in television, and I was able to negotiate a directing job for myself because of that. And that first actual picture I directed was something called "The Jericho Mile" (1979). And... it´s that I co-wrote and directed and did very well. And the second one was "Thief" (1981) with Jimmy Caan. And the "Jericho", the character _in_ "Jericho Mile" is very much, precedes, that character, his name is Murphy, precedes Frank in "Thief". It´s almost like "Thief" in a way is part two. And it was supposed a third part to that and I had... It´s not so that the character is continuous, he´s not. Murphy ends in "Jericho Mile", but that, but some of the themes of "Jericho Mile".

 

Edited May 26, 2021 by Glades

[jpaul1]

yeah he said he turned to cinema almost by joke. he tried, and liked..