Michael Mann on His Decadeslong Drive to Make ‘Ferrari’

I’m fascinated with the women in the movie. Lina Lardi is not a mistress. She will be called a mistress in reviews because they don’t know what else to call her. She’s a second family. Hers was the home. The only pictures you ever see of Enzo in complete repose is when he’s lying on the lawn at Castelvetro with his shirt open, his tie askew, playing with young Piero, and Lina Lardi is sitting there.

Now Laura’s sensual life with Enzo is over, and her son, Dino, is dead. She’s in the world of that loss. It felt to me like her grief was a virtual prison. How do convicts behave? How do you perceive the world when you’re in a psychological prison? She’s maybe standing and walking down the sidewalk in the present, but all the rest of her is imprisoned in the past. She has no future. There is no — this horrible, cloying 21st-century term — healing. Give me a break with healing. It’s the most unnatural thing in the world to lose a child.

The mentality of a prisoner — both literally and spiritually — is a running theme in your films, starting with the first one, your Emmy-winning 1979 TV movie, The Jericho Mile, about an inmate who obsessively runs around the prison yard and starts training for the Olympics. When was the first time you visited a prison? What was that experience like?
Awesome. Dynamic. Kind of an epiphany. I came into those circumstances with the same preconceptions probably everybody has, which is that it’s an authoritarian structure and it is a physical tyranny upon convicts who are reduced in their geographical circumstances. What I discovered is exactly the inverse of that, particularly in Folsom Prison. I was there the first time on Dustin Hoffman’s Straight Time, when he was supposed to direct it from a script I rewrote. I discovered something about human nature — that when you reduce the physical circumstances, the human ego is so strong that it desires to express itself. So it will do so with flamboyance in the case of hair, clothes, tattoos. And if it can’t range, then it will focus inward on How perfect is the crease in my jeans? And so that’s why you see — the prison term is bonaroo — these perfect shirts and jeans and outfits that guys have. I expected to see gray, sallow convicts. Instead, I saw guys wearing violet running shorts and yellow T-shirts, phenomenal tattoos. A guy’s back filled with the head of Jesus, except in one half, all the flesh is gone and it’s a skull. A neo-Nazi named Steve White — who had a gigantic swastika on his abdomen that said WHITE POWER — who I cast in The Jericho Mile. Three months after I shot it at Folsom, he got killed. So everything became a compression into almost a lab of social characteristics that are very diffuse in the real world.

James Caan in Thief.
Photo: Credit: Entertainment Pictures / Alamy Stock Photo

After The Jericho Mile, you made Thief, in which James Caan’s character’s former life as a prisoner looms over the film. It’s a surprisingly political movie with Caan rebelling against the capitalistic practices of the Chicago-based mob organization. Was the film perceived as political at the time?
The film was intended to be a political analog. The only body of criticism that got it were the French critics. Nobody here got it. What’s driving Frank is Karl Marx’s labor theory of value. I saw one of the writers walking around during the Hollywood strike recently with that quote from Thief on a placard — “I can see my money is still in your pocket, which is from the yield of my labor” — which I was very complimented by.

Thief wasn’t a big hit, but it announced a style with its highly composed frames, dreamy mood, and evocative use of electronic music. What was it about that film that made you realize, This is how I want to see the world? It has such an unconventional look and feel.
It’s not a style. It’s probably a doctrine. Not a doctrine — it’s an ambition I had. I was always interested in taking cinema to an expressive place with every tool at my disposal, with sound effects and music. What I seek in a cinematic experience is to be transported somewhere. If you don’t, okay. But the last thing I’m interested in is filmed theater or the work of journeymen who just tell a story. I could absorb it, particularly if it’s got great writing. No one has an obligation to do this; it is an obligation I impose on myself for myself.

I wonder if some of that had to do with the fact that you had spent so many years in television beforehand, so there was a part of you that wanted to use the cinematic form?
No, that was my ambition from the get-go. I had an accidental career as a TV writer. I came to L.A. at a moment when the industry was going through a real slump. After Easy Rider, if you were young and knew which end of a camera to look through, you could probably get a movie made. I showed up just when all those movies that never should have been made hit. I said to myself, Great timing, Michael! And then I said, Okay, I better learn how to write. I was an English-lit major, and I’d taken creative-writing courses. I even took a TV-writing course. I got a D. Nothing was working. Bob Lewin, who became a very good friend of mine, was a story editor. I showed him some of my writing. He said, “You have a great ear for dialogue, and you wouldn’t know what a story was if it ran you over. I’ll teach you stories.” And he did.

I got hired to do rewrites on a show that was starting that he was the head writer on called Starsky & Hutch. I got fired after two weeks because senior executives at Aaron Spelling’s company had somebody else for the position: “Who do we not know? We don’t know Michael Mann — get rid of him.” In the meantime, I got an assignment to write an episode. I was living in a one-bedroom apartment with a newborn daughter and was writing at nights at Canter’s because the delicatessen was open round the clock. I was struggling financially with my patient wife. After I handed in the episode, they asked me to write a few others. So I wrote all of them. And then they offered to hire me back, but I declined. I became, for a moment in time, the flavor of the month, a hot TV writer. I did one pilot, which became the series Vega$. But then I didn’t want to work on it when I met some of the people running the show.

What was it about them?
The ideas were like ’70s glossy disco. I got immediately put off. I didn’t want characters walking around in powder-blue jumpsuits and this other ’70s shtick. If I couldn’t control that, I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. The character I had in mind would wear a T-shirt with an airbrushed flying saucer on it and not shave and was kind of busted and has become a private investigator with lousy clients doing lowball stuff until something significant comes along. The star, Robert Urich, was very good, but that wasn’t where the show was heading.

But I had a game plan, which was, You’re going to become an important enough TV writer that you can extort a directing gig. After I wrote the one pilot, which became a successful series, I wrote for what was the Succession of prestige writing in television in the ’70s, Police Story, for Ed Waters and Liam O’Brien. Then I co-wrote The Jericho Mile, and that became the first movie. I won a DGA Award and Emmys and all that jazz. The Jericho Mile was an ABC Movie of the Week, and I thought that would enable me, if it was successful, to do Thief. And it was, and Thief had good reviews. Then I realized I had not figured out what to do next. I’d never taken that game plan further than the first move. Eventually, I decided what the world needed was a Freudian fairy tale on the nature of fascism, which led me to The Keep. [Laughs.]

The Keep doesn’t work, but it’s a fascinating movie. I know you weren’t really able to finish it.
It could have. It has great parts. I was fortunate enough to work with the brilliant production designer John Box, who was a total joy. I learned so much from him. He showed up with some portion of a painting and some 18th-century Italian architect, and he said, “The whole movie lives somewhere between here and here.” I knew exactly what he was talking about. It’s extrapolation and then the projection.

Cinematographer Dante Spinotti told me there often was a room on your sets with all your visual inspirations. Do you still work like that?
Yeah, I do. I also usually try to find a piece of music that becomes a poetic modular. When you have an idea, it is about being able to hold on to it and go back and reference it, to generate what was a highly specific emotional state. To be able to manipulate your cognitive process so you can land back in that emotional state again. Because after a couple of sleepless nights four weeks in, it can become, What the hell is this? How do I want an audience to feel about this scene again?

Does that piece of music, that poetic modular, make its way into the films?
It’s going to be a key piece of music. In The Last of the Mohicans, I wanted to envelop you in this atmosphere of old-growth forest in 1757 and the frontier. And the idea of a place that was on the cutting edge between what was and what’s going to be. I kept looking for one Celtic piece of music and eventually found it. In Heat, by design, the music had to be eclectic because the whole structure of the movie is a roving central narrative perspective, where you’re with many different characters. And whichever character you’re with, you accept their values, the way they think the world works. There’s no external judgment.

Something that strikes me about Heat is how many of the film’s emotional high points and memorable lines come from characters one might call secondary. Like Breedan’s conversation with his wife when he takes the grill-man job. Or the scene when Ashley Judd waves off Val Kilmer. It’s so rare in this type of genre film for the secondary characters to get so many of the best lines and emotional high points.
That is part and parcel with the nuclear ambition of Heat, which was, Everybody has a life. And can I create a canvas that has a driven story and, at the same time, creates within each character a complete three-dimensional human being. Take Breedan’s story. He takes a job as a grill man and then he finds he’s being exploited and then is seduced into abandoning that, so he goes on this job as a getaway driver instead of enduring that dehumanization. One of the most moving lines for me in the movie is when his wife says she’s proud of him, and he says, “What the hell are you proud of me for?” That kills me every time I see it.

You’ve always tried in your work to get inside the heads of these characters. Was there a particular point when you realized this was how you wanted to tell stories?
I am fascinated with the way people think — women, men, different countries, different cultures. Now, it’s more difficult when you’re doing a period film like Mohicans. What was courtship like among the Iroquois? You’re 19 years old, and there’s a beautiful young woman you’re attracted to: How do you say, “Let’s go out”? It turns out, for the Iroquois, it was very frank, and it was also inconvenient because the Iroquois had divorce. They’d split the material goods down the middle. It was exactly like Southern California.

This reminds me of that great moment in The Last of the Mohicans when Madeleine Stowe looks at Daniel Day-Lewis and says, “What are you looking at?” He says, “I’m looking at you, miss.”
That comes from exactly that: “I think I like you. Let’s go where no one’s watching and have sex.” It’s that kind of “Would you like to go behind the tree with me?” It’s absolutely frank.

I filmed a Nike commercial with LaDainian Tomlinson, the NFL player. I wanted to know how he thinks. Not just what he does, but what does he think about what he does? What does he think before he does it? If he could slice his thought process into milliseconds, what is he thinking when you see him drop his left shoulder? Same thing with Muhammad Ali, by the way. Ali’s a genius in his analysis of people and places and language and particularly boxing opponents. I spent a lot of time with him talking about how he analyzed another fighter. He was like a chess master: “I’m gonna keep throwing these jabs at this muscle on this guy’s arm, because by about round eight, he’s going to drop it about half an inch, and I’m going to cross that with a right cross.”

That scene in Ali when Will Smith is running through a village in Zaire before the George Foreman fight and all the kids join him and he comes upon a mural of himself — that’s one of the most transcendent scenes I’ve ever seen in a film.
It was so important to get that scene right. I had all kinds of illustrators trying to draw those murals, and they all flunked. We shot it in a neighborhood called Mavalane B, which is next to the Maputo airport. I got two kids who were 14 and 8 from that neighborhood, and they did the mural. So we’re shooting the scene, we’re running through, and we have our cast and our extras cheering Ali on. Then, when he stopped at that wall, the whole of Mavalane B, all the real people, joined in with our extras and picked up Will and kept going. They’re carrying Will in the air, and it was Muhammad Ali come to life. A Pirandello-esque moment. It was magical and crazy, and we kept shooting. They just carried Will away as if this really were Muhammad Ali, the spirit of Ali and what he represented.

When I was a child in Turkey in the 1970s, people like my parents, who had no interest in sports whatsoever, loved Muhammad Ali. He was so iconic in the Middle East and that region of the world. He had become a figure of resistance for so many people.
It’s funny you say that because in my mind the movie is about his quest — not for his identity, like, Who am I?, but Who should I represent? He felt he had a political, social, and personal obligation to be correct in what he represented because he was the heavyweight champion of the world. To me, that evolved through the George Foreman fight. It also had to do with the way the stage was set and how Foreman got exploited to basically become the representation of the forces of reaction. Ali became representational of the forces of progress and the struggle of people rising up from below.

We talked about the formal ambition of Thief. That eventually morphs into the style of Miami Vice, the TV show, which you executive-produced. It was a cinematic style transposed to TV, which felt revolutionary at the time.
That was the idea. Some of the directors we initially hired were so self-censoring and self-limiting we couldn’t work with them. We paid off a couple of directors and hired directors who were ambitious. I drew from people I made movies with, particularly Mel Bourne, the production designer on the pilot, who did Thief and Manhunter with me. I was very proud of the first two years of the show. After two years, I wasn’t made for running one of these. I could have made gazillions of dollars. But I wanted to do Manhunter and moved on, and the stories nose-dived after.

A lot of people would say Miami Vice the show influenced Miami the city even more than Miami the city influenced Miami Vice.
Totally, because when I got there to start working on the show, the entire city was beige! It’s like there had been some gigantic, worst surplus sale of tan paints and they painted everything tan. It was drab. I couldn’t imagine these buildings with these streamlined Deco shapes all being beige. We started doing research into the colors that they had been in the past. And, of course, it was all these vibrant pastels. So my wife and I went to a paint store where they had a vast array of chips, and I started putting together chips that would then become the palette of the show.

The show was dealing with the Miami cocaine wars, and the cocaine wars were still going on while you guys were shooting.
After a 14-hour day and then some rewriting for the next episode, we’d fall into one of the clubs, and they always had a space for us. Some guy would send over a couple of bottles of Champagne, and he was a 22-year-old retired cocaine importer or something. He was particularly charismatic. So I might pop him into the next episode in the guest-star role.

Did you have a favorite guest star?
Miles Davis. He wasn’t the greatest actor, but he was the coolest human being on earth. Particularly in the ’50s, when his only rival was Ferrari driver Alfonso de Portago. But I have two favorite experiences in television. One was Crime Story, and the other was Luck.

Luck ended abruptly, which was heartbreaking because it was a great show and was headed in a fascinating direction. What happened there?
We were exploited by PETA because we were highly visible, and they got a lot of mileage out of it. Our safety record far exceeded the safety record for horses on the Kentucky Derby. We did everything responsibly in protecting those horses. But a horse comes back from the vet, there are two roosters fighting in the stable area at Santa Anita, the horse rears, falls backward, breaks his leg, and has to be euthanized. That was one of the three horse deaths that we had in the approximately 2,500 horse runs on the track. It was heartbreaking, but we were excessively concerned about their welfare — not just as a mental state but in terms of our actions. We became the poster child in PETA’s campaign. I have very bitter feelings about that because everybody who worked on the show loved doing it. Some of the horses we had, if they weren’t working on our show, would’ve been turned into cat food in Mexico. And David Milch’s writing was great. One of the hardest times I had on that show was trying to work on the scripts with Milch and my pal Eric Roth because the three of us would get together in my office and it’d be about two hours of comedy and then you’d have to get to work.

Tokyo Vice.

You did the pilot episode of Tokyo Vice, which premiered in 2022 and is one of the best things you’ve ever done. Are you involved in the second season?
No. I just did the pilot, but when you do the pilot, you set up the world of the show. Now that the show has aired in Japan — it’s very popular, apparently — they tell me it’s much easier to get what we want. But at the time, it was a drama to get in any location, because of a Japanese custom, particularly in Tokyo, where if somebody has a yakitori stand the size of a closet and you want to shoot on their sidewalk, you can walk in with a shopping bag full of money and he’ll turn you down because he has five customers who will come by from three to five in the afternoon. He’s not going to disturb their habits or tranquility. It’s very absolute, which is kind of wonderful.

I know you were attached to the movie Ford v Ferrari at some point. How would your version have been different from James Mangold’s?
I developed a script with Jez Butterworth. I would’ve had a real ending, which I think would be either figuratively or actually showing Ken Miles commit suicide. My theory is he drove into the wall. But I thought the film was good.

I wanted to ask about Heat 2, the novel you published last year that serves as both a prequel and a sequel to Heat. You’ve stated that you do want to turn it into a film. Was that always the intention with that story?
It wasn’t the intention, but you can’t separate the two. I don’t know how to write novels. I do know how to write and imagine screenplays, and I wanted the novel to have a cinematic pace and a story-driven structure to it. I knew everything about every one of those characters. I had imagined all of it. I keep very thorough archives. What became exciting was to have them not be the people they are in Heat, but to put them through the experiences that turned them into the people that they are in Heat.

What about the awesome specter of the cast of Heat — De Niro, Pacino, Val Kilmer? Do you go in a completely different direction, or do you get actors who can do something similar?
Well, you wouldn’t want to do the same thing. Look, this is a crapshoot. You want to reinvent these characters. There are certain qualifications. You have to be a great fucking actor to play McCauley. I think Adam Driver is a great actor, like De Niro. Then who’s Hanna, who’s Chris Shiherlis? Who can take it someplace fresh? This is not like the dilemma I had with the film of Miami Vice. In retrospect, you could not win that one. If I had to do it over again, I would’ve tried to command the same budget and not call it Miami Vice.

I think Miami Vice, the film, is one of your masterpieces. Have you made your peace with that movie? I always got the sense that you were a little disappointed with it.
Oh, no, I loved the movie. I’m just talking about the reaction. I would make the movie all over again. It doesn’t have its proper ending. Because we weren’t able to shoot those last three weeks in Ciudad del Este. We shot for three days. And so there’s a very different ending that belonged on that film. But no, there are parts of it — the whole Cuba interlude was fabulous.

You take a lot of care with the sound of your films. Sometimes people complain they can’t hear the dialogue because a line might be muffled. But it’s very expressive. The tone is sometimes more important than the dialogue.
Expressively and artistically, you have to decide what you want. There’s no difference between that and being an actor and asking yourself, What’s my action in the scene? You can’t say, “I want four things.” You have to be able to know what you want. And what you want may be in the subtext. Let’s say somebody asks you where something is on a map, and you’re explaining where it is. But the woman asking you is quite beautiful and you want to seduce her. Explaining is the activity. Seducing her is the action. You won’t touch her, but the way you’re talking to her — the action is driving. That’s the same with sound. If it’s not actively generating an experience or contributing to it, I have zero interest in it. “Well, it really happened that way.” Who cares? If you want something effective, I want to know everything about how it happened — the way somebody walked, the way they dressed, the way they talked. The way he picked up a cup if he was a convict. He didn’t pick it up like this. He picks it up like this [wraps his hand around a mug]. I know audiences are underestimated. I’ve examined this my whole life: Audiences perceive way more than people think they do.

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Driver plays an Iraq War vet who now works as a bartender. He and his brother, Jimmy (Channing Tatum), attempt to rob the NASCAR Charlotte Motor Speedway.

Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman were previously attached to play Enzo. Bale dropped out owing to health concerns around the role’s weight requirements.

Cuoghi was one of Enzo’s closest friends and confidants. He’s played by Giuseppe Bonifati.

Mann’s father was a grocer who was put out of business by a larger chain. As children, Michael and his brother tried to burn down the competing store.

Cora Munro is killed in the original novel and, in the 1936 film, throws herself off a cliff. In Mann’s film, she survives, but her sister, Alice, throws herself off instead.

The 1978 film, starring Hoffman, follows an ex-con’s attempts to lead a respectable life and his eventual return to crime. Hoffman was originally set to direct the film himself but bowed out because he kept doubting his instincts. (Ulu Grosbard replaced him.)

Most American critics focused on the style of the movie. Some found it lovely, others empty. Almost nobody mentioned its politics.

The success of Easy Rider, as well as other films such as The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde, prompted studios in the late 1960s and early 1970s to pursue more films about youth culture, often from inexperienced directors. Many of these films bombed, leading to a period of withdrawal.

Roger Ebert called Thief “one of the most intelligent thrillers I’ve seen.”

It has attained cult status, but Mann’s WWII movie was an expensive flop. It suffered from extensive postproduction issues, including the death of visual-effects supervisor Wally Veevers.

Scottish musician Dougie MacLean’s 1990 song “The Gael” provided the signature theme.

Ali had been stripped of his championship in 1967 after refusing to serve in Vietnam. When the two boxers arrived in Africa, Ali was noted for his engagement with the local population, while Foreman kept to himself.

Luck came under fire from PETA after the injury and euthanization of two horses on set during the first season. After another horse died as the second season began shooting, HBO and producers agreed to cancel the show.

Milch remembers the partnership differently. In his 2022 memoir, he wrote, “It was not a happy collaboration for me,” noting Mann insisted upon a single voice on set.

The film ends with Ken Miles’s death during a test drive. It’s shot from a distance without explaining why he crashed.

Mann’s 2006 film had a very different aesthetic and soundtrack than the TV show, which disappointed some viewers.

In Mann’s original conception, Miami Vice was to have ended with a massive battle in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay. Owing to production issues, the finished film ends with a less elaborate one in Miami.