Michael Mann: Close Up at Blockbuster.co.uk

Blockbuster.co.uk celebrates the career of consummate filmmaker Michael Mann, the writer, director and producer of Public Enemies.

Now, in his most ambitious and timely project to date, Michael Mann directs Johnny Depp in seminal gangster saga Public Enemies. The compelling tale of the fast and dangerous life of John Dillinger, it's available now, on Blu-ray and DVD, from Blockbuster.co.uk.

In the film, Mann teams with Depp to examine the man whose criminal exploits captivated a nation besieged by financial hardship. Rather than condemn him, the public readily celebrated him as a mythic figure who robbed the banks that had impoverished them and outsmarted the authorities who had failed to remedy their hard times. Dashing and charismatic, Dillinger inspired the first nationwide war on crime and led a band of accomplished armed robbers on a cascade of dazzling heists and improbable breakouts. Thrilling stuff indeed, for Depression-weary Yanks.

"Dillinger, probably the best bank robber in American history, only lasted 13 months," explains Mann of the gangster's appeal. "He was paroled in May of 1933, and by July 22, 1934, he was dead. Dillinger didn't 'get out' of prison; he exploded onto the landscape. And he was going to have everything and get it right now. In assaulting the banks and outwitting the government... to people battered by the Depression, it's as if he spoke for them. He was a celebrity outlaw, a populist hero."

For Mann, the challenge of preparing the movie was "...trying to make 1933 come alive. And be alive just the way it's alive for you right now in 2009. And that meant not just how things looked, but how people thought. How men courted women in 1933. How ex-convicts thought about life and their fate in 1933. What the material world meant to those who were hungry and denied. The desperation on the streets."

Born on February 5, 1943 to grocers Esther and Jack Mann, Michael Kenneth Mann grew up near 'The Patch', one of the roughest areas of Chicago. "It was very aggressive, it was very masculine and it was very heterosexual," he remembers. "In my neighborhood, anyone who carried around a camera would be considered a 'fairy'." One of only 13 (out of 365) of his high school graduating class to go on to college, Mann began his career as a television writer in the mid-Seventies, contributing to such shows as Police Story, Starsky and Hutch and Vega$. In 1979, he directed and co-wrote his first dramatic movie-of-the-week, The Jericho Mile, which starred Peter Strauss. It garnered four Emmy Awards and a Directors Guild Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Movies for Television.

In 1981, Mann made his theatrical film debut with Thief, a crime story that starred James Caan and was nominated for the Palme d'Or Award at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1983, he followed that film with The Keep, a vampire movie set in Nazi-occupied Romania starring Gabriel Byrne and Ian McKellen. In 1986, he directed Manhunter, his first big hit, based on the first of Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter books, Red Dragon.

Throughout the 1980s, Mann continued to work in television, most notably on the definitive, Eighties-cool crime show Miami Vice, but despite his close ties to, and incredible success with, the small screen, Mann's ambitions were cinema-sized. "A 65-foot-wide screen and 500 people reacting to the movie," said Mann, "there is nothing like that experience."

In 1992, Mann directed, co-wrote and produced American-Indian adventure The Last of the Mohicans, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe, following that with Heat, a 1995 crime thriller depicting the taut relationship between obsessive detective Al Pacino and professional thief Robert De Niro. In 1999, Mann earned Oscar nominations for co-writing, directing and producing The Insider. Starring Russell Crowe and Al Pacino, the film told the true story of Jeffrey Wigand, a tobacco-industry executive who blew the whistle on the tobacco industry, and 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman's conflict with CBS.

In 2001, Mann took audiences into the heart and struggles of Muhammad Ali in Ali, which starred Will Smith and Jon Voight, both of whom received Oscar nominations for their performances. When asked how he managed to avoid the clichés of most American boxing films, Mann responded that "...first of all, Will became a fighter. He boxed every Thursday, and worked out six hours a day five days a week. He actually trained with [Ali trainer] Angelo Dundee. So Will hit and got hit. There was choreography where we knew certain things were coming, certain historical events that we knew we had to include, but in between it was all improvised sparring. In fact, everybody who played a boxer in the film WAS a boxer. We didn't use stunt coordinators or stuntmen. We didn't have to worry about keeping it real because it WAS real."

1994 saw Mann directing Tom Cruise and Oscar-nominee Jamie Foxx in Collateral, a more intimate thriller about a contract killers' uneasy, one-night association with a cab driver, earning a Best Director BAFTA for his troubles. More recently, Mann wrote, produced and directed the big-screen version of Miami Vice, which starred Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx in the roles originally played by Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas.

Mann readily admits the dynamic between the old Vice and the new is "a profound connection and no relationship whatsoever, at one and the same time." And he's happy with that, as he doesn't like repeating himself. "I like change," he explains. "I don't like being in the same room for too long. That's why a two-year period making a movie is perfect for me, and that's why, after two years, I basically tried to substitute other folks for myself on Miami Vice [the TV show]. I said to myself, 'I'm here trying to help folks make these little movies - why aren't I directing?' So I went off and made Manhunter."

Now 66 and widely regarded as one of the greatest directors working today, Mann remains as intensely driven as ever, his distinctive perspective on life and relentless dedication to character and detail guaranteeing that every movie he makes is a unique and compelling experience. "This work is for people who are artistically ambitious," he says of filmmaking. "This is for people who like challenges. If you want to kick back and take life easy, this is not for you."

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