He's the Mann

The Hollywood director had the pick of top actors for his latest flick Public Enemies.

Hollywood is full of filmmakers who are uncompromising perfectionists, but only Michael Mann could boast that he not only has a favourite room to screen his films - the Zanuck theatre on the Fox lot - but also a favourite row in the theatre where he thinks you should park yourself for the optimal viewing experience.

"If you sit in row J at the Zanuck, you'll find yourself in the perfect mean, the centre of the bell curve for every theatre in America," he told me the other day, camped out in his Santa Monica offices, surrounded by memorabilia from his work, which includes a host of wildly compelling films and TV shows, including Crime Story, Heat, The Insider, Ali and Collateral.

I know some people that want to sit farther back, but that's the worst place to sit," he says. "If you're too far back, the surrounds are too large."

Even though we got together to talk about Public Enemies, his new film that stars Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, our conversation ranged far afield, because Mann often sounds more like a Marxist history professor than a filmmaker, waxing just as eloquent about the broad historical forces that shaped Depression-era gangsters like Dillinger as how the notorious criminal managed to bust out of a high-security prison armed with a wooden pistol.

At 66, Mann has the swagger and stamina of men half his age. Our interview was pushed back a couple of hours because the filmmaker had pulled an all-nighter, staying up until 9am overseeing digital transfer work on Public Enemies, which had its first public showing on June 23 at the Los Angeles Film Festival. (It opens across the UAE today.)

"It's exhilarating at this stage, when it all comes together," he explains in a voice that still had the echo of his upbringing in Chicago's working-class Humboldt Park neighbourhood. "The film feels like it's containable, in your hands, almost like it was when it was just an idea on three paragraphs on a piece of paper."

Mann is part of an elite Hollywood club of veteran directors - notably Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Ridley Scott and David Fincher - who are both held in critical esteem and act as magnets for A-list movie star talent, allowing them a freedom to pursue the kind of dark, difficult material largely out of favour with today's franchise-obsessed movie studios. Mann has never enjoyed a mega-hit - of his nine features, only one, Collateral, made more than $72 million (Dh264.3 million) in the US.

His last film, Miami Vice, was a box-office dud. But he has earned the right to make a wide range of absorbing films, largely thanks to the presence of stars including Will Smith, Tom Cruise, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Jamie Foxx and now Depp in the leading roles.

It's easy to see what attracts such star power. Mann has a great ear for dialogue, a brilliant eye for action and the beguiling charm of a guy who's comfortable hanging out with all sorts of ex-cops and hoods. His technical adviser on Public Enemies was a convicted armed robber who once, as Mann explains with a twinkle in his eye, "stole a diamond as big as a grapefruit".

Being in the Michael Mann business isn't for the faint of heart. Any number of studio heads have sworn to never work with him again, exhausted by what they view as his budget-busting intransigence. (Public Enemies cost roughly $100 million (Dh367.2 million) and came in on time, in part because the production had to be finished before last summer's presumptive Screen Actors Guild strike date.)

But after a few years pass, the stance often softens, because the artistry of the film remains long after memories of the clashes with Mann fade.

When Mann made Ali, he battled with Sony Pictures chief Amy Pascal, who was infuriated especially by the director's insistence on retaining a couple of obscenities in the picture, which prevented the film from earning a PG-13 rating that would have helped it reach a broader audience.

But now all is forgiven. "No matter what I said at the time, I think Michael is one of our most gifted filmmakers - we're always trying to develop new directing projects for him," Pascal says. "You put all the disagreements behind you because you remember the great work, not the pain of the moment."

It's not so hard to see parallels between Mann - who has the independence of an earlier generation of Hollywood filmmakers - and Dillinger, who is portrayed in Public Enemies as something of an anachronism, a lone wolf being squeezed out of the bank-robbing trade by the growing corporatisation of crime.

A key element in Mann's conception of the film - which he wrote with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman - is that it wasn't just J. Edgar Hoover's FBI that was gunning for Dillinger but the newly organised crime syndicates that saw freelance outlaws like Dillinger as threats to their nationwide business aspirations.

"Dillinger was actually obsolete, but he was so damn good at what he did that he managed to survive, despite all the horrible attrition around him," explains Mann, who makes a point in the film of showing that virtually all of Dillinger's cohorts were gunned down before he famously meets his end outside Chicago's Biograph Theatre.

"There are two big evolutionary forces at work. There's what Hoover is doing with the FBI, with information gathering and data management. And there's organised crime, being cash rich, moving into corporate capitalism, and they don't want these Depression outlaws around (inspiring the Feds to pass crime legislation) against moving money across interstate lines."

Once Mann had a finished script, he went to Depp, having been a fan of his work, especially offbeat fare like The Libertine. "Johnny is not afraid to take chances," Mann says. "I thought this was a character he could relate to internally, to mine the deeper currents within himself, the way he would if he were ever to play a musician. I wanted to see Johnny go inside this guy, to do something emotionally open and expressive."

It wasn't always smooth on the set. According to people who were there, Depp, accustomed to the clockwork production schedule on Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean films, had trouble adjusting to Mann's more idiosyncratic schedule, which often forced Depp to wait long hours until Mann was ready to proceed.

Mann says reports that Depp sometimes left the set in frustration are untrue.

"That's nonsense," he says. "He may have kept me waiting, I may have kept him waiting. That's not a big deal. For me, what goes on in a film set is sacrosanct, so I have nothing to say about what went on."

For Mann, it's all about delivering the goods, not just to the studio but also the movie goer. "When I set out to make a movie, part of the thrill is the level of commitment," he says. "I ain't playing, you bet. I don't leave things half-[done], saying, 'Well, that scene is good enough. We can move on.' That doesn't happen. The ambition - and it's a sizable one - is to make a movie that has a dramatic impact on people."