Writer/producer/director Michael Mann on Returning to Miami Vice After 20 Years: “First of all, it’s all Jamie [Foxx’s] fault because he talked me into this, starting in 2002, at Ali’s birthday party. But when the proposition became really exciting for myself, and then for all of us, was the idea of really getting into undercover work, and what it does to you, what you do to it, and the whole idea of living a fabricated identity that’s actually just an extension of yourself - and doing it in 2006. Doing it for real and doing it right now. If you think about it, that then defines a whole bunch of stuff. You’re not going to have crocodiles or alligators, and you’re not going to have sailboats. You’re not going to have nostalgia. And you’re going to do it for real, as a big picture that’s going to be R-rated, because you do dangerous work in difficult places where bad things happen. You have relations with women, there’s sexuality and there’s language, and that became an exciting proposition. It started with the real function, for the actors, and myself as well, as what is undercover work, for real? What is that stuff? And then all these folks went and did a lot of that work themselves.”
On Comparisons to the Original TV Series: “We never conceived of it as a derivative. It’s 2006, it’s ‘Miami Vice’ for real, right now, and, at its core, it has an emotional, overt way of telling its story. It takes place in the alluring, perfumed reality of Miami, in which you’ve got this layer of things that are very sensuous and beautiful, and underneath it, there’s stuff that’s very, very dangerous. So in that sense, it has an independent origin. I don’t think people will be sitting there and comparing the two. The two are co-equal. The series occupies its place in cultural history, for better and for worse, and this is 2006. It’s a new day.”
Weapons Training and the Challenge of Making Miami Vice Look Real: “Everybody went through training, and went through a lot of it. A lot of hard work went into it and they look good because they are good. They are good because they really can do everything that we see in the film, including all of the physical stuff.
The most difficult thing to acquire is all the skills that I think these folks have, in terms of really being in an undercover situation. When they’re confronted at Jose Yero’s, and these guys have responses, and they accuse Yero of being the man hooked up with the DEA, or the street theater that they put down on Isabella in the house, when they pretend that they’re bringing back the dope which we know [spoiler deleted], and the skill and the self-confidence they have came from lots of scenarios that Colin [Farrell] and Jamie [Foxx] and Naomie [Harris]and Gong Li did, with real folks who really do do this stuff. They did simulations that were very, very realistic, and they did it a lot. I’m real proud of their work, and the benefit of it is what you see on screen.”
Crockett vs. Tubbs: “Somebody reminded me of a line in the pilot. Tony Yerkovich wrote the pilot, and created Miami Vice, and there was a line in the pilot where a woman says to Crockett, ‘Do you sometimes forget who you are?’ And he says, ‘Darlin’, sometimes I remember who I am.’ And that is the core of that character, and the volatility of Tubbs and the way he would rise to anger. One episode, he gets furious because somebody shoots at him with a machine gun because machine guns scare him. And when he gets scared, he gets really angry. That spirit is the same in these characters. These characters, in that sense, in their hearts and their souls and what they reach down into when they really have to rise to the occasion, are identical. So the center of these people is the same.”
The Process of Preparing to Shoot Miami Vice: “I don’t storyboard. I do something else, which is I block it. We then train to the blocking. In other words, when everybody’s training, they’re actually training a lot of the moves that we are definitely going to use. Then I do a lot of photography of that, and that becomes where the cameras go.”
