Michael Mann Interview - Entertainment Weekly

[DefinitelyCrockett]

This is a Michael Mann interview posted a couple of days ago on Entertainment Weekly. He discusses a variety of the shows he has worked on (including Miami Vice). What I found particularly interesting in the Miami Vice discussion was where he admits that the decline in quality of storylines after the first 2 series being his own fault.Visit the link below for the full article with photos & videos.http://watching-tv.ew.com/2012/01/21/michael-mann-interview-luck-hbo/The Michael Mann Interview, Part 1: His life and work in television, from 'Starsky and Hutch' to 'Miami Vice' to 'Luck': EXCLUSIVEJan 21201210:15 AM ETby Ken TuckerMichael Mann is the rare director-writer-producer who has maintained simultaneous careers in feature films and television, and he’s done this since the 1970s. Mann’s TV career includes not only the major hit series and cultural avatar Miami Vice (1984-90), but also television’s first serialized drama, Crime Story (1986-88), and the first weekly series to be shot in high-definition film, Robbery Homicide Division (2002-2003). As the premiere of the Mann-directed pilot of HBO’s Luck nears on Jan. 29, Mann spoke with me about the entire breadth of his TV career, starting at the beginning, with writing work on the anthology series Police Story, and the Aaron Spelling-produced hit Starsky and Hutch. Police Story (1973-77) and Starsky and Hutch (1975-79) Mann: “This was apprentice work to some extent, but more than that. I picked up invaluable skills here, due mostly to two guys. One was [producer] Bob Lewin, who ran Starsky and Hutch, who told me I had an ear for real dialogue and language but I didn’t really have any sense of how stories should tell themselves. And he became quite a generous mentor and really spent time with me developing a sense of structure. “There’s one episode I wrote, that became the first episode after the pilot had aired, called ‘Texas Longhorns,’ that’s a good example of this. It was a riff on a guy who wants to get rid of his wife, and I modeled the guy on Cal Worthington, who’s a famous Los Angeles used car dealer. “The other man who taught me a lot was Liam O’Brien—the brother of the actor Edmund O’Brien, by the way. He ran Police Story, which was an anthology series, a different cast each week. I was also lucky that I came on board that show while Joseph Wambaugh [the cop-turned novelist who’d written the bestselling The Onion Field] was still active in producing the show. “Police Story had some of the best writing on television, and one reason for that is because most of the scripts were based on real cases. So I got to sit with a police officer who experienced having a nervous breakdown after he and his wife separated. He was a homicide detective, he was working a case of the freeway sniper who was randomly shooting people in cars. And started to do a midnight bedside vigil to a young Korean girl who was brain dead, who had been shot. And then started having conversations with her. And you get these incredible stories, and in a way, both of these experiences were very formative. One, in terms of a sense of story structure, and two, that appreciation [of] the intense experiences of real people often times have a currency in them and are expressed with language that is beyond anything you can make up. As writers, we had the opportunity to sit down and talk to a police officer and hear true details, to discover the process law enforcement went through, and that kind of detail is invaluable—it’s no exaggeration to say that it set me on the path to the way I write every one of my movies and TV projects to this day. I remember sitting with a police officer who was following a break in the case of a sniper shooting, and he was also in the midst of a nervous breakdown, but he held it together to do his job and get it done right before he took care of himself. Incredible devotion and will power. It’s that intense experience of real people that I’m always trying to reproduce in my work.†Vega$ (1978-81) The first TV show created by Mann, Vega$ starred Robert Urich as Dan Tanna, a lovable Las Vegas private eye. Mann has said he wanted to do an “extreme†detective series and that one of his visual inspirations was Ralph Steadman’s hallucinogenic drawings for Hunter Thompson’s book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The series didn’t turn out that way: “I could see the writing on the wall pretty early on when what I called the ‘leisure-suit brigade’ moved in [as producers working for Aaron Spelling] took over the show. It very quickly became more fluffy. Urich was fine, he was a good performer who could have done the role the way I envisioned it, but he also fit the more breezy, lightweight style they wanted. But I had something more radical in mind. Vega$ was important for me because it began my interest in twilight zones, in areas of activity that were ignored by mass America, for the most part, and that were in the process of change—in this case, the 1950s and ’60s, when Vegas was undergoing a transition from an Outfit-controlled [i.e., organized crime] landscape to a G-rated grind-house. “Las Vegas itself was a wonderful place for a dramatist, because people going to Vegas were still inventing their own dramas when they set foot in the town: They could become whoever they wanted to be, act that out. As a setting, it was a desert with no intrinsic meaning. I saw how things worked while doing research there, clues in the smallest details: You’d see a guy pull up in his car to check into one of the hotels, and a valet would approach him and if the guy reached into his pocket for his wallet, for a tip, the valet started walking faster. If the guy didn’t go for his pocket, or he came out empty-handed, the valet would slow down, even walk away. [Mann laughs] Stuff like that, I loved: It was so honest that everything was so mercenary!†The Jericho Mile (1979) A TV-movie starring Peter Strauss as a man sentenced to life in Folsom Prison for murder; the character begins running as exercise, and eventually becomes so fast and strong, some officials think he might qualify for the Olympics. Strauss was a major star for his role in ABC’s Rich Man, Poor Man, and would win an Emmy for this Mann-written and -directed film. “There’s people who live life authentically and there’s people who live a life of fabrication. And it begins with the question of how you’re gonna do your time. And these are observations I made about Folsom when I was there with Dustin Hoffman when he was directing Straight Time. He directed it for two or three days, then he fired himself because he realized he couldn’t direct and act at the same time….It was my first time in Folsom which was the end of the line of the California Penal System, which meant it had a mature population of convicts. There weren’t guys who were freaking out because they were suddenly thrown into the joint, as if it was like San Quentin. When you kill somebody in San Quentin, then you got sent to Folsom. So the operative phrases were things like, you’d hear people say ‘this guy could do a nickel or dime standing on his ear. He could do 5 or 10 years easily.’ But that meant it was the violence and the rules were ordered. But then the gang structures inside the prison, which at that time would have been Hell’s Angels — there was no Aryan Brotherhood then — Mexican Mafia — and the Black Guerilla Family were beyond rigid. And it felt to me, viscerally, like this is lethal. It’s kind of like high school. We had 13 stabbings and one killing during the 19 days in which we were shooting. So it was obviously a dangerous place. “It felt like men were escaping into a fantasy world of alliances and group identifications and gangs…But it was fantasy. It was airbrushed Hustler and Playboy…And I walked by one cell one day in one of the cell blocks and there were these pictures on the wall of a man and his wife having sex on a conjugal visit. There was the birth of their child, in bad black and white photographs, and it just rocked me. Because I knew enough to know that this guy was doing the hardest kind of time. And the hardest kind of time is when you really are in tune with the world that you are excluded from. Every minute, every hour, every day. And that’s also a form of- That is the reality. And this guy was escaping it not at all. And that was very poignant, and that became the idea for the character Stiles [played by Richard Lawson], who gets killed part of the way through, that he didn’t have Playboy centerfolds in his cell. He had real pictures of the real life that he wasn’t part of. And Murphy was an authentic character who starts to have expectations. And if you have expectations, now you’re approaching, your head’s approaching where Lawson is, as his expectations are destroyed, because he can’t race outside. The ending of the film is really kind of a counterpoint. He runs and wins the fastest time, so there’s a triumph, and at one and the same time, he’s lost his soul.“The real hero when we went to Folsom was [co-star] Miguel Pinero. Here was Peter Strauss, a big star from Rich Man, Poor Man—but Pinero [an ex-con who'd written the award-winning prison play Short Eyes, and co-founded the Nuyorican Poets Cafe] was the guy everyone wanted to meet. Prisoners would bring him glasses of water with a napkin wrapped around it, so his fingers didn’t get wet—these small gestures of respect were their form of courtesy.†MIAMI VICE (1984-90) The show that made stars of Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas as cops who dressed in well-tailored, pastel-colored clothes. Created by Anthony Yerkovich, with Mann’s extensive involvement in the first two seasons as a producer who helped, often uncredited, in writing, directing, and casting, Vice was famously conceived by NBC president Brandon Tartikoff with the latter’s two-word pitch: “MTV cops.†The series became so famous for its use of major-act rock music on its soundtrack that lists of its songs would be printed in newspapers the morning after it aired. “The thing about this series now is that the reality of what the show did in, I would say, its first two and a half years is much different than the image of the show that’s entered the popular imagination, of what colors peoples’ memories of it—the pastel clothes, the flamingos in the opening credits, Elvis [the alligator] as Don Johnson’s pet. If you look at the first two seasons, there are some very strong, timely, serious stories being told. The decline in quality after that I ascribe completely as being my own fault; I wasn’t there nearly as much, I was getting into doing Manhunter, I was distracted. But go back and look at an episode like “Stone’s Warâ€â€”it’s almost shocking to see now: It was Contragate with music by Jackson Browne ["Lives in the Balance"], about a CIA operation to get money and drugs out of Nicaragua to finance the [iran-Contra] war. G. Gordon Liddy was a guest star. (Indeed, it is striking to watch “Stone’s War†now, and to hear Johnson’s Sonny Crockett warn of “reruns of Vietnam in Central America,†and see Liddy — one of the Watergate master-mini-minds — play an Oliver North-like character who proves his Reagan-era bona fides by laying out on a table a length of thin rope strung with the severed ears of Sandinista insurgents. Then, too, there are also cool cars…) “We wound up doing four soundtrack albums with music from the show, all of which went to #1. Glenn Frey was in the episode called ‘Smugglers Blues,’ the title taken from his song, and that episode was written by Miguel Pinero. There’s an episode called ‘No Exit’ that has an amazing cast including Bruce Willis in one of his earliest tv appearances, as an arms smuggler and wife-beater. It takes me two years to make a movie, roughly, so one of the ongoing attractions of doing a TV show is that, while you’re doing research for any project, you develop a huge backload of stuff – timely things, the way people talk, things that are happening in the culture at that time – that you can’t use if you wait for a movie release date. But when you’ve got a tv show up and running, you can get stuff out there, into the world, relatively quickly. Plus, I got to work with an awful lot of good actors and non-actors. We really ran the gamut: Giancarlo Esposito, John Turturro, Eartha Kitt, Frank Zappa, Little Richard, Lee Iacocca, Ted Nugent, Kyra Sedgwick, Leonard Cohen.†In Part 2, Mann will discuss TV work including Crime Story, Robbery Homicide Division, and the new HBO series Luck. Twitter: @kentucker

[cheetah]

Interesting interview, thanks!

[Matt5]

Great interview - interesting Mann signalled out the early Season 3s "Stone's War" as an episode - I mean he's right such a strong episode and still relevant today

[DJAngel]

Great interview - interesting Mann signalled out the early Season 3s "Stone's War" as an episode - I mean he's right such a strong episode and still relevant today

Directed by Don Johnson

[Beach_Vice]

Where's part two? Anxious to read what Mann has to say about Robbery Homicide Division. I loved that show for the 13(?) episodes it had. Was sad to see it go. It had atmosphere like no other on TV. Anxious to read part two.

[ivoryjones]

Very nice material here! Thank you!It feels weird to disagree with the series Executive Producer, especially when he was so important to the series, but I don't go with the assumption that there was a major decline in scripts after 2 and a half seasons... Perhaps Mr. Mann was somehow trying to imply very smoothly that Dick Wolf was bad to the series? I don't know.IMMO, already in season 2 there were some decadent scripts in comparison to season 1: think for a minute about "Whatever Works", the hard to believe "Tale of the Goat" and "Florence Italy" (the script of this one had a big flaw: the killer never got out of the sportscar and the car had dark glasses - the video device would never get very much from it and even if it did the close-up shown in the ep when they're watching the VHS is an absurd). Nevertheless, most of Season 2 eps were great. And that season style is impossible to resist...But keeping my respectful disagreement with the genius Michael Mann (no irony!), I'd say Season 3 is more regular than Season 2.Moreover, really undeniable script decadence had its place on Season 4, but then again some of the best eps came from that Season ("Mirror Image" is perhaps my all time favorite MV ep). And Season 5, even though it was not real brilliant, at least it kept some regularity quality-wise (no "Missing Hours", "Big Thaw", "Tale of the Goat" and so on).

[MrsEvanFreed]

Love to read why Crime Story never got a tv movie, to wrap things up.After that stupid cliffhanger.Robbery Homicide Division: Compelling cop drama, ended way too soon.Due to Tom Siezmore's personal issues.

[Frey]

Interesting interview. Thanks for posting! Funny how Vega$ didn't turn out the way he visioned it. The same thing happened with "Spenser: For Hire" which also starred Robert Urich. Robert B. Parker liked his Spenser better than the g-rated version ( compared to the violent, curse like a sailor book version) that was on tv.

[Matt5]

Directed by Don Johnson

No Directed by David Jackson but many of those Season 3 episodes Don co -directed or sometimes directed whole chunks except the episodes directed by John Nicollela ( "The Savage" ) and Richard Compton:D

[DJAngel]

No Directed by David Jackson but many of those Season 3 episodes Don co -directed or sometimes directed whole chunks except the episodes directed by John Nicollela ( "The Savage" ) and Richard Compton:D

embarrassing Why was I thinking that

[Joey Hardin]

Miami Vice:so far the best of cop&crime fight series!Knight Rider:so far the best of crime fight and show about ''one man can make a difference'' with technology.. This series have my place very big! Sonny Crockett&Michael Knight make popular culture of 80's Philip Michael Thomas and Peter Parros too (according to Black Peoples)They were amazing! But why Michael Mann create new generation of Miami Vice ?Collin Farrel & Jamie Foxx looks like very sucks!That was a parody 2006 MV! May be Knight Rider 2008 not (Cause continue of series - son of Michael Knight and different KITT version (K.I.T.T. 3000 - Originally K.I.T.T. 2000) )But Knight Rider 2008 not exactly according to me..I didn't like too Knight Rider 2008!But that very sucks! Why he didn't explain reason that ''Why his make new Miami Vice''Collin Farrel is never not be Sonny CrockettJamie Foxx is never not be Ricardo Tubbs Cause that characters owner Don Johnson&Philip Michael ThomasThey're create of Crockett&Tubbs characters..Why he explain reason that?If he real wanna do this..He make KR 2008 with same..The meaning is Crocket&Tubbs of sons or All Bureau of sons..

[airtommy]

This is a good interview.  Mann talks about some of his more obscure projects.

I found the second part of the interview:

Part 1 - https://ew.com/article/2012/01/21/michael-mann-interview-luck-hbo/

Part 2 - https://ew.com/article/2012/01/28/michael-mann-crime-story-robbery-homicide-division-luck/

I recommend clicking those links and reading it there, but in case it disappears I'm going to post the entire thing in this thread.

[airtommy]

Michael Mann is the rare director-writer-producer who has maintained simultaneous careers in feature films and television, and he’s done this since the 1970s. Mann’s TV career includes not only the major hit series and cultural avatar Miami Vice (1984-90), but also television’s first serialized drama, Crime Story (1986-88), and the first weekly series to be shot in high-definition film, Robbery Homicide Division (2002-2003).

As the premiere of the Mann-directed pilot of HBO’s Luck nears on Jan. 29, Mann spoke with me about the entire breadth of his TV career, starting at the beginning, with writing work on the anthology series Police Story, and the Aaron Spelling-produced hit Starsky and Hutch.

Police Story (1973-77) and Starsky and Hutch (1975-79)

Mann: “This was apprentice work to some extent, but more than that. I picked up invaluable skills here, due mostly to two guys. One was [producer] Bob Lewin, who ran Starsky and Hutch, who told me I had an ear for real dialogue and language but I didn’t really have any sense of how stories should tell themselves. And he became quite a generous mentor and really spent time with me developing a sense of structure.

“There’s one episode I wrote, that became the first episode after the pilot had aired, called ‘Texas Longhorns,’ that’s a good example of this. It was a riff on a guy who wants to get rid of his wife, and I modeled the guy on Cal Worthington, who’s a famous Los Angeles used-car dealer.

“The other man who taught me a lot was Liam O’Brien—the brother of the actor Edmund O’Brien, by the way. He ran Police Story, which was an anthology series, a different cast each week. I was also lucky that I came on board that show while Joseph Wambaugh [the cop-turned-novelist who’d written the bestselling The Onion Field] was still active in producing the show.

“Police Story had some of the best writing on television, and one reason for that is because most of the scripts were based on real cases. So I got to sit with a police officer who experienced having a nervous breakdown after he and his wife separated. He was a homicide detective, he was working a case of the freeway sniper who was randomly shooting people in cars. And started to do a midnight bedside vigil to a young Korean girl who was brain dead, who had been shot. And then started having conversations with her. And you get these incredible stories, and in a way, both of these experiences were very formative. One, in terms of a sense of story structure, and two, that appreciation [of] the intense experiences of real people often times have a currency in them and are expressed with language that is beyond anything you can make up.

 

“As writers, we had the opportunity to sit down and talk to a police officer and hear true details, to discover the process law enforcement went through, and that kind of detail is invaluable—it’s no exaggeration to say that it set me on the path to the way I write every one of my movies and TV projects to this day. I remember sitting with a police officer who was following a break in the case of a sniper shooting, and he was also in the midst of a nervous breakdown, but he held it together to do his job and get it done right before he took care of himself. Incredible devotion and will power. It’s that intense experience of real people that I’m always trying to reproduce in my work.”

Vega$ (1978-81)

The first TV show created by Mann, Vega$, starred Robert Urich as Dan Tanna, a lovable Las Vegas private eye. Mann has said he wanted to do an “extreme” detective series and that one of his visual inspirations was Ralph Steadman’s hallucinogenic drawings for Hunter Thompson’s book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The series didn’t turn out that way:

“I could see the writing on the wall pretty early on when what I called the ‘leisure-suit brigade’ moved in [as producers working for Aaron Spelling] and took over the show. It very quickly became more fluffy. Urich was fine, he was a good performer who could have done the role the way I envisioned it, but he also fit the more breezy, lightweight style they wanted. But I had something more radical in mind. Vega$ was important for me because it began my interest in twilight zones, in areas of activity that were ignored by mass America, for the most part, and that were in the process of change—in this case, the 1950s and ’60s, when Vegas was undergoing a transition from an Outfit-controlled [i.e., organized crime] landscape to a G-rated grind-house.

“Las Vegas itself was a wonderful place for a dramatist, because people going to Vegas were still inventing their own dramas when they set foot in the town: They could become whoever they wanted to be, act that out. As a setting, it was a desert with no intrinsic meaning. I saw how things worked while doing research there, clues in the smallest details: You’d see a guy pull up in his car to check into one of the hotels, and a valet would approach him and if the guy reached into his pocket for his wallet, for a tip, the valet started walking faster. If the guy didn’t go for his pocket, or he came out empty-handed, the valet would slow down, even walk away. [Laughs] Stuff like that, I loved: It was so honest that everything was so mercenary!”

[airtommy]

The Jericho Mile (1979)

A TV-movie starring Peter Strauss as a man sentenced to life in Folsom Prison for murder; the character begins running as exercise, and eventually becomes so fast and strong, some officials think he might qualify for the Olympics. Strauss was a major star for his role in ABC’s Rich Man, Poor Man, and would win an Emmy for this Mann-written and -directed film.

“There’s people who live life authentically and there’s people who live a life of fabrication. And it begins with the question of how you’re gonna do your time. And these are observations I made about Folsom when I was there with Dustin Hoffman when he was directing Straight Time. He directed it for two or three days, then he fired himself because he realized he couldn’t direct and act at the same time…. It was my first time in Folsom which was the end of the line of the California Penal System, which meant it had a mature population of convicts. There weren’t guys who were freaking out because they were suddenly thrown into the joint, as if it was like San Quentin. When you kill somebody in San Quentin, then you got sent to Folsom. So the operative phrases were things like, you’d hear people say ‘this guy could do a nickel or dime standing on his ear. He could do 5 or 10 years easily.’ But that meant it was the violence and the rules were ordered. But then the gang structures inside the prison, which at that time would have been Hell’s Angels — there was no Aryan Brotherhood then — Mexican Mafia — and the Black Guerilla Family, were beyond rigid. And it felt to me, viscerally, like this is lethal. It’s kind of like high school. We had 13 stabbings and one killing during the 19 days in which we were shooting. So it was obviously a dangerous place.

“It felt like men were escaping into a fantasy world of alliances and group identifications and gangs… But it was fantasy. It was airbrushed Hustler and Playboy… And I walked by one cell one day in one of the cell blocks and there were these pictures on the wall of a man and his wife having sex on a conjugal visit. There was the birth of their child, in bad black-and-white photographs, and it just rocked me. Because I knew enough to know that this guy was doing the hardest kind of time. And the hardest kind of time is when you really are in tune with the world that you are excluded from. Every minute, every hour, every day. And that’s also a form of–that is the reality. And this guy was escaping it not at all. And that was very poignant, and that became the idea for the character Stiles [played by Richard Lawson], who gets killed part of the way through, that he didn’t have Playboy centerfolds in his cell. He had real pictures of the real life that he wasn’t part of. And Murphy was an authentic character who starts to have expectations. And if you have expectations, now you’re approaching, your head’s approaching where Lawson is, as his expectations are destroyed, because he can’t race outside. The ending of the film is really kind of a counterpoint. He runs and wins the fastest time, so there’s a triumph, and at one and the same time, he’s lost his soul.

“The real hero when we went to Folsom was [costar] Miguel Pinero. Here was Peter Strauss, a big star from Rich Man, Poor Man—but Pinero [an ex-con who’d written the award-winning prison play Short Eyes, and cofounded the Nuyorican Poets Cafe] was the guy everyone wanted to meet. Prisoners would bring him glasses of water with a napkin wrapped around it, so his fingers didn’t get wet—these small gestures of respect were their form of courtesy.”

MIAMI VICE (1984-90)

The show that made stars of Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, as cops who dressed in well-tailored, pastel-colored clothes. Created by Anthony Yerkovich, with Mann’s extensive involvement in the first two seasons as a producer who helped, often uncredited, in writing, directing, and casting, Vice was famously conceived by NBC president Brandon Tartikoff with the latter’s two-word pitch: “MTV cops.” The series became so famous for its use of major-act rock music on its soundtrack that lists of its songs would be printed in newspapers the morning after it aired.

“The thing about this series now is that the reality of what the show did in, I would say, its first two and a half years is much different than the image of the show that’s entered the popular imagination, of what colors peoples’ memories of it: the pastel clothes, the flamingos in the opening credits, Elvis [the alligator] as Don Johnson’s pet. If you look at the first two seasons, there are some very strong, timely, serious stories being told. The decline in quality after that I ascribe completely as being my own fault; I wasn’t there nearly as much, I was getting into doing Manhunter, I was distracted. But go back and look at an episode like ‘Stone’s War’—it’s almost shocking to see now: It was Contragate with music by Jackson Browne [“Lives in the Balance”], about a CIA operation to get money and drugs out of Nicaragua to finance the [Iran-Contra] war. G. Gordon Liddy was a guest star.

(Indeed, it is striking to watch “Stone’s War” now, and to hear Johnson’s Sonny Crockett warn of “reruns of Vietnam in Central America,” and see Liddy — one of the Watergate master-mini-minds — play an Oliver North-like character who proves his Reagan-era bona fides by laying out on a table a length of thin rope strung with the severed ears of Sandinista insurgents. Then, too, there are also cool cars…)

“We wound up doing four soundtrack albums with music from the show, all of which went to No. 1. Glenn Frey was in the episode called ‘Smugglers Blues,’ the title taken from his song, and that episode was written by Miguel Pinero. There’s an episode called ‘No Exit’ that has an amazing cast including Bruce Willis in one of his earliest TV appearances, as an arms smuggler and wife-beater. It takes me two years to make a movie, roughly, so one of the ongoing attractions of doing a TV show is that, while you’re doing research for any project, you develop a huge backload of stuff – timely things, the way people talk, things that are happening in the culture at that time – that you can’t use if you wait for a movie release date. But when you’ve got a TV show up and running, you can get stuff out there, into the world, relatively quickly. Plus, I got to work with an awful lot of good actors and non-actors. We really ran the gamut: Giancarlo Esposito, John Turturro, Eartha Kitt, Frank Zappa, Little Richard, Lee Iacocca, Ted Nugent, Kyra Sedgwick, Leonard Cohen.”

[airtommy]

Crime Story (1986-88)

Picking up from where we left off in the Mann chronology, I suggested to Mann that if he did Crime Story today, it would probably play on HBO or Showtime or FX, and that it’s really the precursor to the idea of a televisions show as a big novel.

Michael Mann: “Well, yes. I remember I was sitting on my porch, and suddenly two things occurred to me at the same time. One was, I know this fantastic saga, this true life saga of organized crime in Chicago and its move to Vegas [in the 1960s]. I’m talking about [the career of mobster] Tony Spilotro, whom the Ray Luca character [played by Anthony Denison] was based on, as was the Pesci character in [Martin Scorsese’s] Casino. And then it occurred to me to do a serial, just like a daytime soap, except do it in prime time. I’m not sure but I think we were the first serialized show on network television. There was a lot of discussion between [NBC president] Brandon Tartikoff and myself about how do you hook viewers in in so strong a way that they’re following you — because this is all brand new, this is virgin territory — so that they would follow you from episode to episode, or do you try to be serialized, but then also have a beginning, middle and an end so that [each episode is] self-contained and also serial. And that’s what we tried to work out. Also to start the show in Chicago for about 12 episodes, and then on episode 13 take it all to Las Vegas — that was exciting to me.”

 

Dennis Farina, a Chicago law enforcement officer for 18 years, was cast as Crime Story‘s lead, the ferocious Det. Lt. Mike Torello. Farina was not a conventional-looking leading man, and I asked Mann if he met with any resistance from the network in this casting.

Mann: “By that point, after Miami Vice, I could pretty much do whatever I wanted. We shot the pilot of Crime Story during the third year of Vice, and it had altered culture — it was the most interesting thing on television. I had just directed Manhunter, I hadn’t started postproduction on it yet, and I went to Chicago to look over the production of the Crime Story pilot. So I was doing three things at the same time. No, there wasn’t any push-back on Farina. I had used him as a guest star in two Miami Vices by that point. And he had also had [been a technical adviser] and had a small role in Thief in 1980. And I introduced him to Brandon and [his wife] Lily Tartikoff and Dennis charmed the hell out of them, and that was it.”

Farina wasn’t a trained actor at that point, was he? Did you have to direct him in a different way than you would a professional actor?

Mann: “You did, but no, by that point, he had been at the Goodman Theater studying theater and he had worked at Steppenwolf a little bit, and at Remains, which was Billy Petersen’s theater company in Chicago. So he had a lot more experience. I was totally convinced he could do it. But you still wouldn’t direct him exactly the same way. He hadn’t, for example, done 14 years on stage like Nick Nolte. But I believe it’s the director’s responsibility to modify my approach to the language and orientation of the actor. And so somebody who has a lot of natural charisma but doesn’t have the tradecraft, you approach them in a very different way. Every take is going to be somewhat different. They’re not going to hit their marks the same way; there isn’t the shorthand there. You have to present the situation as if it’s impacting them for the first time, and then orientate them so that when the stimuli arrive, they have reactions. Because what I’m after is their reactions, expressed in both body language and dialogue. So it would be a little bit more like that.”

 

I looked at, in particular, a Crime Story episode your directed, called “Top of the World.” Debbie Harry [from Blondie] is terrific in that as a mobster’s girlfriend. Paul Anka was excellent in that as a mob courier. And Andrew Dice Clay does a really good job in that, as a casino executive who has this odd little local Vegas TV talk show.

Mann: “Yes, he is. He’s playing [a character modeled on] Lefty Rosenthal [a mob-associated Vegas casino executive], who DeNiro also played in Casino. And that television show he had, as inane as it is in Crime Story, it’s The Tonight Show compared to how inane the real guy was. [Laughs] I mean, we shot those [episodes] in seven days, and I think we spent like 13 or 14 days on [an episode of] Luck. I think back to shooting one of those things in 7 days…boy… “

And that episode was a particularly good showcase for John Santucci, who played Pauli Taglia, one of Ray Luca’s henchmen. He had a kind of comic exaggeration that worked in the context of the drama.

Mann: “He had some of that in life. You know, he’s the thief I based Thief on.”

He was an adviser on that film, right?

Mann: “He was an adviser on it. All the props [James Caan, as the thief] used were all Santucci’s burglary tools. And he never stopped being a thief and an informant. He’s passed away now [Santucci died in 2004], and there were times subsequent to Crime Story where you would not want to go get a cup of coffee with this guy and sit in the window.”

I guess you would have gone much further in the tale of Crime Story if you could have. I mean, by the end, Torello and his guys are kind of renegades down in Mexico.

Mann: “Well, what happened there was that we were being financed by New Line. And their book value plummeted. And Tartikoff said, ‘I have difficulty renewing a third season, I don’t know if New Line is even going to be around.’ And I think their share price went down to something like $1.18 a share or something. So it was a financial crisis that kind of did us in more than anything.” By the way, one thing I’d mention is that, the episode I directed at the end of the first season was the second-to-last. The last one had one of the best endings I’ve ever seen on television, when that atomic bomb goes off.” (Mann is referring to the mind-blowing season-ender in which Ray and Pauli escape to the Nevada desert, only to be blown up by a Yucca Flat A-bomb test explosion, set to the tune of the Jive Bombers’ “Bad Boy.”)

Drug Wars: The Camarena Story (1990)

After that, Mann’s next TV project you did was the Emmy-winning miniseries about real-life undercover DEA agent Enrique Camarena, played by Scarface‘s Steven Bauer.

How was that, working with Bauer?

Mann: “It was good. I took him into a couple of undercover situations, and he acquitted himself admirably, including one in which some undercover DEA agents were meeting a couple of emissaries from a trafficker in Mexico in a motel out by Arcadia. It was a totally benign meeting; they were there to discuss where a second meeting was going to take place, where they would flash the money, and the other guys would flash the dope. So this was the meeting to decide where the next meeting was going to happen. In other words, there weren’t supposed to be any guns or anything. And the DEA controlled the whole floor of this three-story motel, and we had surveillance into the room where this was happening. Bauer was in there with sunglasses and a hat and an undercover DEA agent, meeting these two 300-pound guys who come up from [the city of] Chihuahua with cowboy boots and big hats. And one turned out to have a shoulder holster with a big revolver in it. Bauer really got the sense of that world and captured it.

“That was a project that, when you got involved in that material, it just took you over. And you couldn’t help but be emotionally so engaged — beyond the content of making the miniseries — with the issues, with the tragedy of it, with the social ramifications [of the human toll of the drug trade]. And the martyrdom of Camarena fit into, I believe, a preconceived story structure in many of the agents’ heads, because a lot of them had gone to Jesuit high schools or were Hispanic. So they really took off their gloves and turned the whole of the DEA into a homicide bureau with one case. They were going to get everybody and anybody involved in this [huge marijuana-growing operation, and corruption in the Mexican government], and they didn’t care where the chips fell. And when other agencies, or the White House, or the State Department objected, they paid them lip service and they didn’t stop, they just went right ahead. It was quite extraordinary to be with all of these very motivated guys who were very good and very bright and well-read and operations-oriented, who were DEA agents then, and feel their commitment to clean this up. And I say regardless of where the chips fell not just because when the trafficker who Benicio del Toro played, Caro Quintero, when he kidnapped Camarena and they started to torture him, they realized he was probably going to die, they then hired a doctor to keep him alive for 48 hours. And since he was definitely gonna die anyway, it became a kind of open season for many people in the government of Mexico to find out, how much did the DEA know about operations and where their assets were. And that’s because of two things. One is, they believed something that was not true, which is that the DEA were omniscient, that they knew everything. And so you had [Mexican] generals showing up wondering what the DEA knew about their $10 million villa in Marbella [Spain] that they had. That’s the nature of the passion that became part of [the production], all the actors, and an excellent director, Brian Gibson. That imbued everybody on that show. And it won the Emmy for Best Miniseries that year.”

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Robbery Homicide Division (2002-2003)

I was looking at a couple of the Robbery Homicide Division episodes again to prepare for this interview, on lousy VHS tapes, ruing the fact that there’s no good DVD version of this, and was struck again by how everything is shot outside, everyone’s always in motion, the way it was shot in these little Los Angeles mini-malls and very tight areas. It continues to be really impressive, that use of high-definition video at that point in TV production.

Mann: “Yeah, that was very early days of Hi-Def. We shot the whole show on what’s really a newsreel camera. I mean, I think for $300 today you could buy a camera that’s better than those cameras were back then. That was the Sony F-900. And some of that, then of course, showed up in [Mann’s 2004 feature] Collateral, the use of Hi-Def. That’s the first time we were experimenting with it; we did the whole thing on Hi-Def. It was exciting. The show was about the spirit of people in the Robbery Homicide Division, who have the power in L.A. to pick up any case that rises to a certain level of importance, either because the crime’s heinous or noteworthy or complex or something, and they’ll automatically take it. So they operate throughout the city. And again, these were interesting guys to be around.”

It was shot very distinctively; there are a lot of high angles from roofs, on top of motels, or low angles, where you’re kind of shooting [star] Tom Sizemore and his crew sort of from the cement up when they’re at a crime scene. And the dialogue is striking, the way Sizemore and the rest of his team, they don’t use any contractions. Everything sounds very flatly stated, for clarity in everything they say. It’s the little things like that that jump out at you.

Mann: “Well, Tom’s a hell of an actor. He’s original and powerful and has tremendous gifts.”

Luck

You’re one of the very few major film directors who, if you look at their body of work, moves back and forth between TV and movies throughout your career. And now you have Luck.

Mann: “Well, none of this was planned. Even now, Luck was not my plan. I was thinking about making my next movie and that was hijacked by David Milch’s great script. It happened to be exactly the kind of thing I wanted to do. It was very challenging to see if you could convey character and what’s happening in people’s lives without prelude, without context, just by instant immersion. And then have audience track with about six or seven stories within 50 minutes, going on simultaneously. And you’re not at the beginning of the stories, you’re in the middle. You’re inserted into the middle of each one of these stories, except for Ace [Dustin Hoffman’s character], who’s the only one with a beginning: i.e., he gets out of prison at the start of the series. And the only traditional story construction in all of it is that the degenerates [Mann’s affectionate term for the quartet of inveterate bettors played by Jason Gedrick, Kevin Dunn, Ritchie Coster, and Ian Hart] wager a bet: Will or won’t they win it, and then what they do? That’s the only beginning, middle, and end in [Luck]. And even that’s not made to be the narrative arc of the whole show. That occurs right in the beginning. They do win, and then there’s the problem of, now what are they going to do with the money? And [they agree] let’s not collect it until tomorrow. So that’s got a ‘to be continued’ kind of feel to it. It’s always a challenge to leave context behind.

“Everything we do on Luck is absolutely no different than if we’d had been doing it in a feature film. There’s no short cuts. The specificity of what every single line might mean. Everything Dustin Hoffman does. Kevin Dunn is as authentic in the last scene of the last episode as he is in the first scene of the first episode. He hasn’t said to himself, ‘Oh wow, this works, I’m wonderful.’ There’s none of that vanity. It’s just great, authentic work. And John Ortiz [who plays trainer Turo Escalante], he’s world-class.

“And that’s what’s made Luck so exciting. That, plus the poetry of David’s creation of language and character.”

Are there things you watch on television now that you admire?

Mann: “We just happened to watch the last episode of Homeland last night, and wow. Michael Cuesta directed it, it’s wonderful. What a powerful 90 minutes of drama, period. Better than most things in theaters. And Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin certainly are the equal of anything in terms of actor ability. I also like The Killing a lot. It’s really great work.”

[RedDragon86]