Michael Mann Public Enemies Press Conference
You've made some classic modern day gangster films so when you went to do the 1930s, were you mindful of films like Heat and trying to avoid any comparison? Or would you embrace those?Michael Mann: "Well I don't exactly understand the question. I was mindful of Heat in one regard, and that is that I wouldn't have... I'll put it another way: I elected to tell a story that is about what starts with what's Dillinger thinking in the Biograph [Theater] moments before he's going to walk out and get killed. When he’s seeing, you know, Clark Gable as Blackie in [Manhattan Melodrama] really pose questions to him and almost send him messages. And Gable's character, Blackie, is derived partially from Hollywood's take on John Dillinger because he was the most famous American, second only to the President of the United States at that time."
"I mean, forget it, you can't make a movie about will he or won't he survive the Biograph – everybody knows he doesn't survive the Biograph, so I wanted to make the movie about something else. And I was interested in something else, which is what's going on inside him. What's the inner life? What is he thinking about Billie? What is he thinking about the future? Why hasn't he ever thought about a future? What does he think about death? You know, was he thinking about death the way Ernest Hemingway right then and there was also writing about death and reflecting, you know, if you look death right in the face just like a mandarin does when Hemingway is writing Death in the Afternoon. That's very current thinking then. Dillinger was kind of a middle class guy in that sense in that he was up with what was going on culturally. So, you know, it becomes about the life of the man as he's thinking about his life. That to me became a survival story. Then that means that the story’s not about will Purvis get Dillinger or will Dillinger get Purvis, that's what Heat's about. So in that sense, this became a very different course altogether for me. Heat is an absolute, it's a dialectic. It’s a perfect counter point."
Was there a part of you that saw this as a chance to kind of have fun with the gangster and use Tommy guns and make that kind of classical type of gangster film while making a film about things that you're interested in?
Michael Mann: "Yes, there's a thrill to it but it's a little short-lived. There are heavier, they're a pain in the ass, they break. You know, things like that. Not really. I mean it has to be a bigger reason to want to make a film than that. Usually I'll get attracted to something that may be visceral, purely visceral, but then that usually becomes a catalyst. It'll take me in to a serious reason to want to try to immerse myself in a world and do my work in that kind of a world for about a year and a half or two years. There was something about the look and feel of the Iroquois in the 18th Century and the corollary tragedy of Cora Munro that stuck in my mind from when I was three and saw a sub-60 millimeter print someplace of the old original Last of the Mohicans in 1936. And that's a visceral trigger that would just put me in somewhere and I said, 'Wow, yes,' in 19-whatever it was, in 1991 or 2. And I said, 'Oh no, I've got to make Last of the Mohicans.' And when that occurred to me, that was when I was gone and I was making Last of the Mohicans one way or another, you know?"
"But this was more complex because I was fascinated with the '30s. I knew a lot about the '30s. I had written a screenplay about Alvin Karpis that took place a couple of years after, it was '35 to '37, and the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, the literature from that period, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner. So I was really kind of steep in it, you know? And then the different ways they thought. And then there's this fascinating mystery of why this really smart guy who definitely understands culture gets out of prison, he's really great at what he does, gets skilled, plans these robberies in great detail and they execute well, but they can't plan next Thursday. They don't even have an idea that there is a next Thursday. So no sense of the future, no idea of putting together a couple of hundred thousand dollars and go to Brazil, go to Manila, go anywhere you want where you can live. Instead they were just scoring, scoring, scoring on this white-hot trajectory that's going to be short-lived. I couldn't understand that and it's a long answer but I came to kind of figure out what's going on."
