Michael Mann and his interpretation of Miami Vice

[Glades]

There is a second part of the elephant interview that I find just as fascinating:

Thanks to this interview, many things behind the scenes of "Miami Vice" became clearer to me. Other interviews with Michael Mann that I do know tend to be more limited to a single aspect. This interview dates from 1994 and Michael Mann is telling with a certain distance, but still close enough, so that his memory is still fresh.

First some of the aspects I learned from this interview:

Yerkovich wrote the pilot before Michael Mann was involved in the project. Michael Mann then found the theme so fascinating that he really wanted to do it.

Mann made sure he had control over every aspect of the series, "And I only agreed to do it if I had total creative control over every aspect of the television series from start to finish. From the writing to the final form of the film."

Mann's summary of what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do the series:
"The idea was to make television with a bunch of people who had never made television before, because it makes it much more exciting, much more serious. For one big reason, and that's that the people who had done television, including all the network people, had a very boring, limited perspective on what you could do. What stories you can tell, how ambitious the stories could be, how wild and outrageous, what kind of endings you can have (Clip of the ending of "No exit"), how you left the audience, how sexual you could get, how wild you could get, how you characterize politics, alienation, the kind of transient nature of life, the strange way that life is so transient. Things that a rocket solid values in Iowa are the most transient in a way and have no importance in Miami. It's every thing for sale and a very fast moving place. So, stories about that. Some very strange stories get told there."

With that, it was clear that it was going to be anything but a routine show, and Michael Mann himself didn't expect the network to let him do it for too long:
"Our basic attitude where down in Miami that we were keeping telling these stories and making the show that we were making until somebody realizes what we are doing and probably told to stop doing this what we did. So we very much run the show ourselves."

Mann chose to characterize Crockett and Tubbs against the racist stereotypes of the time. DJ's own life experiences also contributed significantly to the persona of Sonny Crockett.

In addition to Crockett and Tubbs, the city of Miami, as it actually was in 1984 and as Michael Mann saw the potential, was a "main character."

And, of course, the music was a "main character" as well. Michael Mann used music in an unusual way, often as in an opera.

Mann considers MV groundbreaking in terms of themes and form in its first 2 years.
Note from me: The "backstory" on the other hand is ancient and archetypal.  This is what kept me hooked on the show. It was and is what fascinates me. Especially the contrast between the old story and the new themes and forms.

I also found it interesting that the network MV wanted to do more than 5 seasons, Michael Mann himself and DJ wanted out.

And here finally comes the transcript of the entire interview, as usual all mistakes are mine!  Joking aside, one or the other word I unfortunately didn´t understand:

Michael Mann:

After "The Keep" I was trying to find out what I could direct next. And my agent of that time, Jeff Berg at ICM, send me this teleplay for a 90-minute pilot called "Gold Coast" and said: "Universal wants to know if you wanna take this thing over and run it as a television series." And I said: "Why would I wanna go back to television?" I read this thing and it was terrific. And I said: "Yeah, if I develope the pilot with Tony Yerkovich who wrote it." And: "Let me take a look at this. Maybe I´ll do it." And I got involved and thought it was just a lot of fun .. so when time shaking up then the title Miami Vice came up. And ... we made Miami Vice.

And my send was very specific: I was gonna be the executive producer of the show. And I only agreed to it if I had total creativ controll of every aspect of the television series from the beginning to end. From the writing to the final form of the film.

Starting with and before the pilot. I´ve never directed a single episode. Because I found that keeping track of the big picture is kind of being an executive director. In other words in a feature film I pick up the locations, I´ll do the casting, I´ll pay a lot of intention to the writing. And if you do those jobs at a television show you are the executive producer not the director. The director very much gets handed the casting, his locations are preselected and he goes in the execute and shoots very quickly. But he doesn´t have the bigger controls which have to be consistently there from episode to episode, that typically in a feature film would be the directors.

The idea was do television with a bunch of people never done television before because this gonna be freed it up and made it much more exciting, made much more serious. For one big reason and that is that the people that had doing television including every people from the network had a very boring, delimited perspective on what you could do. What stories you can tell, how ambitious the stories could be, how wild and outrages, what kind of endings you can have (Clip of the ending of "No exit"), how you left the audience, how sexuell you could get, how wild you could get (Clip "Nobody lives forever", "Rites of passage", Pilot,), how you characterize politics, alienation, the kind of transient nature of life, the strange way that life is so transient. Things that a rocket solid values in Iowa are the most transient in a way and have no importance in Miami. It´s every thing for sale and a very fast moving place. So, stories about that. Some very strange stories get told there.

And I don´t think ... our basic attitude where down in Miami that we were keep telling these stories and making the show that we were making until somebody realises what we are doing and probably told to stop keep doing this what we did. So we very much run the show ourselves. And there were film makers like Leon Ichaso directing and Rob Cohen directing and Abel Ferrara directing. And that´s why I very proud of the first couple of years of that show.

I never heard of "MTV Cops". I didn´t know what, and if I didn´t know what that meant. So that had no meaning to me. About _?_ Brandon, it was in Brandons head. And so it is coincidentally related to the show. But from "MTV cops" you wouldn´t come to "Miami Vice". The work between saying two words like "MTV Cops" and Tony Yerkovich being able to write that television series and myself being able to translate that into the cinematic reality for 22 hours, was a television year, is vast. And so "MTV Cops" is end of meaningless and ...(Clip "Pilot").

I was concerned about the characterisation of the two guys. I wanted to be sure that ... I thought that it would be interesting to have Crockett be the ... as the Caucassian to be probably more liberal but Tubbs, the urban black man coming from New York who is probably futher to the right then Crockett, more sophisticated than Crockett. I wanted to invert the way the racial stereotypes characterised up to that point. There certainly was a flamboyance to Crockett that want up showing up in Dons life and Don threw a lot of ... you know, Don is a very wordly man, he brought a lot of his own life experiences in the portrayal of Sonny Crockett.

If you go undercover and particulary work drug cases and Miami, in the 80ies, the guys were doing this had to be able to pass as players in their lifestyle. That means, that they had access to 4 million dollar Brauer-yachts, they had a, they had to be driving Ferraris or Lamborghinis, they had to wear a 10-14 thousand dollar Rolex Presidentials on their wrists, they had to have the jewellery and they do. It´s exactly what they do and they do it today. And so that´s what Crockett and Tubbs had to have. And ... so it´s kind of a ... almost of a noisy, overly rich diet of the cutting edge of fashionable consumerism. And that´s what you had to be if you gonna be Crockett and Tubbs and operate in that reality.

And it happened to coincidence a moment of time exciting design. So we were making the annaul trips to Armani in Italy. And our customdesigners go to Europe at the beginning of each season and we decided what cloths we wanted on the show, what Crockett look would gonna be (Clip "Definitly Miami").

It took place in Miami which was a very exciting city right then. It has a huge cash, was northern banking capital of Latin America. It was all kinds of funny money which was up there, from drug cartell money to money that various oligarchis in Latin America were dispositing in Miami (Clip "Made for each other"). It was a wild place, a absolutly wild place. And I thought that "Scarface" was overstatement when I saw it. When I came to Miami and I realised that "Scarface" in fact were reserved. The truth of Miami was extremely wild.

Miami is Casablanca. I threw out 96 to 97 percent of the physical reality of Miami, Florida. Most of it is tan, brick buildings, neocolonial architecture. And I decided that a high rent is postmodernist and a low rent is premind deco (?) and everything else in the middle goes. And in terms of the way the place looked I wanted to give the sense of the heat of it and I worked with some colors in a certain way, pastelles and vibrating tertiary colors.

When you go to South Beach today, South Beach looks like we made South Beach look like in 1984, ´85, ´86. They basically stored all those hotels and they look the way we made them look sometimes in Miami Vice. _?_ Miami Vice these places were rat invested. It were unbelievable. And they had, you know, bars and chaines on the door. Completly _?_ (Clip "Phil the shill").

It sounds exciting, we brought in a lot of contemporary music. We had great people doing that. Jan Hammer was excellent. We required a lot of songs (Clip "Give a little, take a little"). When the show came very hot, culturally she was the hottest most contemporary thing for a while, about a year and a half, two years, first two years of the show. We did then have excess to a lot of material. People would want break their songs on the show. So we played a lot of music first time out on Miami Vice. And it was a exciting way to deal with sound.

Some of the ways we dealt with sound was unsusual. We used sound in a very operatic way. Sometimes the soundtrack become a libretto. And one episode particulary that called "Smuggler´s Blues", now there is a song and we used the lyrics like a libretto. And so the lyrics preceded the action ("Smuggler´s Blues"). And so the lyrics preceded the action. So it wasn´t that the music accompanied the action or working in some collision, which is the way music works strongest with the emotion and the visuals. It was actually preceding the event. It was a very strange story directed by Paul Michael Glaser.

We were the first show in stereo. I recall, that Carl calls said, "Hey, they telling me at NBC that they can broadcast stereo. You guys know that?" Nobody knew it. "And why we aren´t doing the show in stereo?" "Well, o.k!" So the show in stereo. "You know that also had not been a television series for about twenty years that sold a soundtrack album?" "So, let´s do a soundtrack album! We got this wonderful music we doing and put in the air." And final line was, that I felt I had always wanted to do some kind of a crime story or police story, a genre street piece, and have really contemporary music within. Was and still very excited about. And ...and be able to use that in all ways.

You can take story contents, what happening to a character you really care about, who is frustrated and then there is a mad, insane action that does the release the frustration, that maybe self destructive ("Coming in the air to night"). And take that and have that work with some of the kind exciting music, that surround and construct a dream situation, that the audience feel, that they dreaming away with the ... with what´s happen with their character. They´re so emotionally involved and intellectually involved and they´re going with that flow and time is kind of ceased for them. And they are really completely with you. That´s what motivated me to do film in first place and to do it in a contemporary world. That´s what I was able to do in that first year of Miami Vice.

We dealt with a lot of very tough issues. From ... child pornographie, homosexuality, you name it. This show is pretty cutting edge thematically as well as, I think, thematically as well as in its form the first year and a half or so. First two years. Then I went of and did "Manhunter". And when I finished "Manhunter" I did want to do a second television show, this was became "Crime Story".

Miami Vice five years was good. I mean, the network would have gone six years if we wanted to.  I didn´t want to and Don didn´t want to. Five years was enough. Is very diffcult to maintain a quality of a television series. And ... you know, as in we did the best we can. Miami Vice was absolutly of its period. Its up the middle eighties the late eighties. I recently looked at some of the episodes. Very, very interesting to look at of those again. They are strikingly contemporary. It´s a surprise. I would have thought, things changed more in ten years than they have. And they have not.

 

 

Edited December 16, 2022 by Glades

[Glades]

19 hours ago, Glades said:

you know, Don is a very wordly man, he brought a lot of his own life experiences in the portrayal of Sonny Crockett.

Michael Mann characterizes DJ as very "worldly".
I´m not sure I get this expression right. May be someone could help me?

Does "wordly" in this context means the opposite to divine, belong to a monestary? Or does it mean experienced with all things that can happen in big cities etc. to you (in contast to the rural area)? Or something else?

[wolfie1996]

1 hour ago, Glades said:

Michael Mann characterizes DJ as very "worldly".
I´m not sure I get this expression right. May be someone could help me?

Does "wordly" in this context means the opposite to divine, belong to a monestary? Or does it mean experienced with all things that can happen in big cities etc. to you (in contast to the rural area)? Or something else?

I'd say experienced, even sophisticated as a meaning. I'd agree with the first but not with the second, I think.

[pahonu]

It can indeed mean both experienced and  sophisticated, or concerned with material values as opposed to spiritual.  Mann seems to indicate the first meaning by mentioning DJ’s experiences in life prior to coming to the show.  

[Dadrian]

20 minutes ago, pahonu said:

It can indeed mean both experienced and  sophisticated, or concerned with material values as opposed to spiritual.  Mann seems to indicate the first meaning by mentioning DJ’s experiences in life prior to coming to the show.  

He does seem very knowledgeable for a detective (except for when it came to spectroscopy  ). 

[Glades]

In German world-ly / welt-lich would mean secular, profane (not sacred or holy) and nothing else. So I was a bit confused. Thanks!

[wolfie1996]

53 minutes ago, Dadrian said:

He does seem very knowledgeable for a detective (except for when it came to spectroscopy  ). 

You're  just showing off here, Dadrian I had to look that  word up!!! Hey just seen your Maserati, what a beauty. I see you're like me, black is the new black...

[Dadrian]

24 minutes ago, wolfie1996 said:

You're  just showing off here, Dadrian I had to look that  word up!!! Hey just seen your Maserati, what a beauty. I see you're like me, black is the new black...

“Read a book sometime” 

About the car, thanks. I sold it recently. I wish I could go yell at Castillo till I get something better.  

[wolfie1996]

6 minutes ago, Dadrian said:

“Read a book sometime” 

About the car, thanks. I sold it recently. I wish I could go yell at Castillo till I get something better.  

At least you  won't look like Lil Abner (dare I say that seeing where you live...?) in that fancy black one you've got now!

[Dadrian]

13 minutes ago, wolfie1996 said:

At least you  won't look like Lil Abner (dare I say that seeing where you live...?) in that fancy black one you've got now!

We live in a modest home  

[wolfie1996]

2 minutes ago, Dadrian said:

We live in a modest home  

I meant geographically, O sarky one   No pick up, baggy dungarees and checked shirt then? Must admit when Ian at the garage loaned me his old Mitsi pick up when he was working on my car, I felt I should be dressing like that to match the vehicle   At first I thought, will never get it on the drive! but eventually didn't want to give it back!

[Dadrian]

14 minutes ago, wolfie1996 said:

No pick up, baggy dungarees and checked shirt then?

I also have a black F150  

[wolfie1996]

8 minutes ago, Dadrian said:

I also have a black F150  

"Photo or it didn't happen.." what's one of them then?? Edit: looked it up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Fancy Ford pick up, eh? I like Fords. Would have accepted the invite to try out that new Mustang but my OH said"I don't like the back end on them".....still might if no definite Porsche date once July comes. If it's still there.

Edited June 23, 2021 by wolfie1996

[wolfie1996]

12 minutes ago, wolfie1996 said:

"Photo or it didn't happen.." what's one of them then?? Edit: looked it up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Fancy Ford pick up, eh? I like Fords. Would have accepted the invite to try out that new Mustang but my OH said"I don't like the back end on them".....still might if no definite Porsche date once July comes. If it's still there.

 

[wolfie1996]

Clean version of ours.

[pahonu]

2 hours ago, Dadrian said:

He does seem very knowledgeable for a detective (except for when it came to spectroscopy  ). 

Sonny doesn’t seem to know much about electronics it seems.  Remember the scene with Lester on St. Vitus Dance when they tapped Tony Amato’s phones?  I’m thinking he wasn’t too strong with Duddy’s lingo too. 

[wolfie1996]

3 minutes ago, pahonu said:

Sonny doesn’t seem to know much about electronics it seems.  Remember the scene with Lester on St. Vitus Dance when they tapped Tony Amato’s phones?  I’m thinking he wasn’t too strong with Duddy’s lingo too. 

Great episode, that!

[pahonu]

We’ll say Sonny is worldly in many other ways than in his experience with electronics!