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Michael Mann on Public Enemies
By Fred Topel | Image property of Universal Pictures
Public Enemies
Michael Mann Gives Us Public Enemies
“I was mindful of Heat in one regard, and that is I elected to tell a story that starts with what's Dillinger thinking in the Biograph [Theater] moments before he’s going to walk out and get killed? When he’s seeing Clark Gable as Blackie really pose questions to him and almost send him messages, and Gable’s character, Blackie, is derived partially from Hollywood’s take on John Dillinger because he was the most famous American, second only to the President of the United States at that time. You can't make a movie about will he or won’t he survive the Biograph. Everybody knows he doesn't survive the Biograph, so I wanted to make the movie about something else. I was interested in something else, which is what's going on inside him. What's the inner life? What is he thinking about Billie? What is he thinking about the future? Why hasn’t he ever thought about a future? What does he think about death? So it becomes about the life of the man as he’s thinking about his life. That to me became a survival story. Then that means that the story’s not about will Purvis get Dillinger or will Dillinger get Purvis? That's what Heat's about. So in that sense, this became a very different course altogether for me. Heat is an absolute, it’s a dialectic. It’s a perfect counter point."
It must have been fun to do the gangster film with all the classic staples of ‘30s era cinema, like the Tommy guns themselves. “Yes, there's a thrill to it but it’s a little short-lived. They are heavier, they're a pain in the ass, they break. I mean, it has to be a bigger reason to want to make a film than that. Usually I’ll get attracted to something that may be visceral, purely visceral, but then that usually becomes a catalyst. It’ll take me in to a serious reason to want to try to immerse myself in a world and do my work in that kind of a world for about a year and a half or two years.”
For Public Enemies, those reasons included, “I was fascinated with the '30s. I knew a lot about the '30s. Then there's this fascinating mystery of why this really smart guy who definitely understands culture, gets out of prison, he's really great at what he does, gets skilled, plans these robberies in great detail and they execute well, but they can't plan next Thursday. They don't even have an idea that there is a next Thursday. So no sense of the future, no idea of putting together a couple of hundred thousand dollars and go to Brazil, go to Manila, go anywhere you want where you can live. Instead they were just scoring, scoring, scoring on this white-hot trajectory that's going to be short-lived. I couldn’t understand that but I came to kind of figure out what's going on.”
Perhaps revisiting the FBI of the J. Edgar Hoover era provides another bookend for Mann, this time to his original Hannibal Lecter film Manhunter. “Interestingly enough, the FBI when I first got in contact with them doing Manhunter, because they're behavioral science unit had pioneered all the work on typing serial killers which has now become a cliché, but at the time when we were doing it, it was brand new to even think of stuff that way, and they did it single-handedly. They were still sensitive about Hoover and I thought I was going to run into the same thing. They were defensive about it and they may have their own private thoughts. Now it’s completely ancient history, and so we had immense cooperation from the FBI in every aspect we wanted.”
Public Enemies opens to theaters on July 1st.
For the trailers, stills, posters and more movie info, go to the Public Enemies Movie Page.
Fred Topel
Sources: Image property of Universal Pictures
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