Michael Mann Interview About Cars in Heat, Ferrari, Thief – The Hollywood Reporter

Michael Mann

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Starting in 1981 AD thief – The opening moments show James Caan’s former tough guy Frank driving a Cadillac Eldorado through the rain-soaked streets of Chicago at night – Cars have always played an indelible role in Michael Mann’s films, setting the tone and serving as framing devices for his characters and a path into their psyches.

In an interview with Hollywood ReporterMann spoke about the prominent role that cars played in his films during his career, which spanned four decades. the reason? “They’re not cars because “I love cars,” he notes. It’s about adding a certain subtext to a character’s motivations, and Mann’s influence – the way he literally changed the visual poetics of cars in film – goes back to thiefhis first feature.

on thiefThe director recalls that he “liked the look of the car first.” It’s a very Italian look and it should be black.

Showing Frank driving at night in El Dorado “had something to do with the fact that I wanted the audience to realize—without knowing why they felt that way—that the city of Chicago was three-dimensional and that he knew his way through it,” Mann says. As if he could pass through it, he is like a rat in a three-dimensional maze.

on thiefHe adds: “We wet the streets, which later became a cliché.”

Yet, no film resonates with him more than 1995 heat When it comes to cars – whether it’s the acid green Peterbilt crashing into an armored car, the shoot-and-run scene in downtown Los Angeles with all the cars shot up, or the cat-and-mouse scene on the freeway between Robert De Niro and Al Pacino it works. It serves as a setup for their cute dinner encounter, their first ever on-screen pairing.

When asked why he chose De Niro’s Cadillac STS and Pacino’s Infiniti J30 to drive in the freeway scene and how he used those cars to create tension in the scene, Mann, in his thick Chicago accent, offered no details. As much as he gives his emotional reasons behind the chase. “You ask me, how do you make movies?” He answers. “I mean how do you direct? I’m directed. I have a goal that I want to achieve, and with the camera and the sound and the music, I go and try to achieve that goal. It comes from defining exactly the goal. And then my job is actually to define exactly that. And it’s very casual,” I want to buy a cup of coffee.’ So I ask myself: What should I continue with?

Mann pauses, smiling, then adds, “Okay, I’ll continue it with something like a fake chase – surveillance – and then, surprisingly, De Niro has the gun under his hip and he’s ready to fight, and it’s Pacino saying, ‘Come on. I’ll buy a cup of coffee.'” There is some logic involved – I can be seen Fake chase, chase, and stop next to him.

Now 80 years old, Mann continues to influence generations of filmmakers and returns with his first feature film in eight years. Ferrari, which also happens to be his first film to be entirely about cars. Ferrari highlights the few short months in 1957 when Enzo Ferrari was on the verge of losing everything. The film was a massive undertaking, requiring the reproduction of the 1950s-era Ferrari and Maserati that competed in the perilous 1,000-kilometre Mille Miglia race in Modena, Italy.

It’s hard not to equate the director with the Ferrari brand. In 2006, Mann directed the film version of the film Miami Vice, in which Colin Farrell plays the temperamental Crockett who spends large portions of the film behind the wheel of a metallic gray Ferrari F430 Spider, the gray always the same color as the sky. (Mann had previously been an executive producer of the original 1980s TV series, which famously featured Don Johnson Crockett driving a Ferrari Daytona at night to the tune of Phil Collins’ In The Air Tonight.)

Laman, with FerrariAgain, it’s not just about cars for the sake of cars, but more about the emotions that cars represent – and the people who built them, who drove them, and who died in them.

Mann, who spent more than three decades trying to get it Ferrari He says he was drawn to “this story of the wonderful, irregular, uneven contradictions within these people. It felt like life. And the deeper you get into the people – and modernist culture – the more universal this all becomes. These are completely atypical characters. Our characters don’t resolve their contradictions.” “I felt like this was a slice of something so real and exciting that it was unique. That’s what made me think of it every time I opened it.”

For all Mann’s talk about cars, he shares a vivid memory to this day of seeing a Ferrari as a young man. “I was standing on Brompton Road in London as a film student living on nothing, and someone passed this thing that looked like a museum piece,” he recalls. “It’s cool, it exudes power and it looks a certain way and it was transcendent. I realized it was a Ferrari. It was a 1967 275 GTB/4.”

That car and what it represented stayed with him. “The first film I made, a short film outside of film school, was about Mike Hailwood, who was the world champion motorcycle racer at the time and had a Ferrari 330. Their first attraction – and the first car I bought when I got my first decent salary, Which was in progress thief -It was a Ferrari, 308 GTB. I traded in my Jaguar E for that amount.” Mann pauses and smiles, thinking about his past with his own cars and all the cars he’s owned on screen over the years. “You can drive Ferraris and own Ferraris,” he adds, looking lost in daydreams. But that doesn’t mean you’re making a Ferrari.” A film about Ferraris. It’s something completely different.