Director and Writer Michael Mann tries to identify lines from some of his most well-known films including Heat, Ali and Collateral. Along the way he discusses working with screen legends like Al Pacino, Tom Cruise and James Caan, how his early take on Hannibal Lecktor played by Brian Cox differs from Anthony Hopkins' version and why he wants Adam Driver to take over the Robert DeNiro role in Heat 2.
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00:00 Hello, I'm Michael Mann,
00:01 and I'm gonna talk about some of my films.
00:03 [upbeat music]
00:06 She's got a great ass,
00:15 and you got your head all the way up it.
00:17 This is Al Pacino in "Heath."
00:19 - 'Cause she got a great ass!
00:22 And you got your head all the way up it!
00:26 - Al always is very consistent.
00:28 He always, his best takes are always five, six, or seven.
00:31 It's never the first two he's experimenting around,
00:34 and then after five, six, or seven,
00:36 maybe it's a small change,
00:37 but the best ones are five, six, or seven.
00:39 And then after, he would deliver a take
00:42 that was fantastic, we both loved it.
00:44 He'd say, "Let me do a wild one."
00:45 "Sure, go ahead."
00:46 What that meant is that he'd be completely unplugged,
00:49 have absolutely no idea what he was gonna do,
00:51 and just let it, sometimes it was brilliant,
00:54 and sometimes it was absolutely terrible.
00:57 Often it was hilarious, usually were great.
01:00 And Azaria, this was his first day on the set,
01:03 we were three-quarters of the way through shooting,
01:05 I neglected to tell him that we had this habit
01:07 of doing this, so none of this was written.
01:09 And then Al flipped this guy down in a chair, cut loose.
01:12 - Hey!
01:13 - Hey, hey, I don't know who the fuck
01:15 you guys think you're pushing around.
01:16 - And that look of shock and amazement on Azaria's face
01:18 is 'cause we're going completely off the script
01:21 into something totally wild.
01:23 He has the powerful energy,
01:25 and it's the key component in his character,
01:27 but the specific visual of him doing some blow
01:31 off a dagger he carried in the small of his back
01:34 was too strong a message, and detracted from that energy
01:38 and that kineticism that he had naturally,
01:41 so that's why I got rid of it.
01:42 We shot it, I just took it out.
01:44 I wear $150 slacks, I wear a silk shirt,
01:47 so I wear an $800 suit, so I wear a gold watch,
01:49 I wear a perfect D, flawless, three-carat ring.
01:52 I change cars like guys change their fucking shoes.
01:55 That's Jimmy Kahn coming out of the Tuesday Weld in Thief.
01:59 (bell dings)
02:00 I wear a gold watch, I wear a perfect D,
02:02 flawless, three-carat ring.
02:05 I change cars like other guys change their fucking shoes.
02:08 He became this character.
02:10 He could shoot like him, he could use a burning bar
02:13 and open a safe, he could drill through into the lockbox,
02:17 and everything he does in the film,
02:19 Jimmy came to be able to do as part of the whole
02:21 kind of curriculum that we did going into it,
02:24 so it was such a total immersion,
02:26 and then he's a fantastic, fantastic actor.
02:29 He's brilliant as Sonny Corleone,
02:31 but this is all only Jimmy and Jimmy's identity,
02:34 and then he was surrounded by the people
02:37 who it was actually all based on.
02:39 Who told you your incompetent little fingers
02:41 have the requisite skills to edit me?
02:43 That's me imitating Chris Plummer
02:45 as Mike Wallace in Insider.
02:47 (bell dings)
02:48 Who told you your incompetent little fingers
02:50 have the requisite skills to edit me?
02:52 He came to the film because I'd always wanted
02:54 to work with him since he was almost a nascent movie star
02:57 in the late '60s, early '70s,
02:59 and the office that he's in,
03:01 we actually had a janitor go into 60 Minutes
03:04 and photograph the office,
03:05 so the set we built was an exact duplicate of 60 Minutes.
03:09 I'm a Fiend from Mojitos, Miami Vice.
03:12 (bell dings)
03:14 I'm a Fiend from Mojitos.
03:16 It was the second film I shot on digital.
03:17 The first was collateral.
03:18 I wanted to see LA the way LA looks at Mike
03:21 to the naked eye,
03:23 and the idea on Miami Vice
03:25 was to go a completely different way
03:27 into very saturated primary colors,
03:30 and we were in Uruguay duplicating Havana,
03:35 and if one does what God does enough times,
03:37 one will become as God is.
03:40 This is Brian Cox being a brilliant Hannibal lector
03:45 in Manhunter, (bell dings)
03:46 which was based on the book Red Dragon.
03:49 And if one does what God does enough times,
03:53 one will become as God is.
03:56 It's probably one of my favorite scenes.
03:58 He's in very comfortable socks in prison
04:00 talking on the telephone to Billy Peterson,
04:03 who's kicking back on the sofa,
04:06 engaged in a conversation,
04:08 a very calm conversation about horror,
04:12 and the inspiration for that whole scene
04:14 was pillow talk with Rock Hudson in Daugherty's Day,
04:18 and that's exactly what it was.
04:19 They're doing kind of pillow talk,
04:21 but the intentional contradiction between the content
04:24 and both composition and the blocking.
04:27 I thought what Brian Cox did was quite stunning.
04:29 The other lector in John Demme's film,
04:32 in its own way, was different.
04:34 The inspiration for wanting to do this
04:37 came from a lot of investigation of serial killers
04:42 prior to me encountering Red Dragon.
04:45 I like baseball movies, good clothes, fast cars, whiskey,
04:48 and you know, what else do you need to know?
04:51 I have no idea what movie this comes from.
04:53 (buzzer buzzes)
04:54 Public enemies, okay.
04:56 Johnny Depp is John Dillinger in Public Enemies.
04:59 - You like baseball, movies, good clothes,
05:02 fast cars, whiskey, and you.
05:05 What else do you need to know?
05:08 - Johnny was great.
05:08 He doesn't do these kind of roles,
05:10 and there was no makeup, there's no mask he's hiding behind,
05:14 so it was just raw Johnny Depp,
05:16 and he really brought himself powerfully
05:18 in that sense of loss,
05:19 particularly when he loses his true love
05:22 to it in the end of the movie.
05:23 Where we staged it is exactly where everything happened.
05:26 We turned two blocks of Lincoln Avenue in Chicago
05:29 back to exactly the way it was in 1933
05:32 when Johnny's head dropped when he got killed.
05:35 He was looking at the same wall
05:36 that John Dillinger looked at when that happened.
05:40 In Live a Life, there's nothing in it
05:41 you can't walk away from in 10 seconds flat.
05:44 That is Robert De Niro in Heat.
05:47 - In Live a Life, so there's nothing in it
05:49 you can't walk away from in 10 seconds flat.
05:51 (buzzer buzzes)
05:52 - Oh, well, I only take down this scene.
05:54 So that's the same script.
05:55 Sorry.
05:56 - Don't let yourself get attached to anything
05:58 you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat
06:01 if you feel the heat around the corner.
06:03 - Well, I would say it's from 10 seconds to 30 seconds.
06:05 I gave him more time to figure it out before he leaves.
06:08 - It's a doctrine of non-attachment.
06:12 And what's significant about it is that
06:14 when De Niro deviates from it with Amy Brenneman
06:18 and is attached, then his whole navigation gear
06:22 has dissipated and then he's vulnerable
06:26 to the seduction of going for Wangro,
06:30 which is what Al Pacino handed it set up.
06:33 And that's the flaw.
06:34 See how this works.
06:35 The more you buy, the more we talk.
06:37 The better you buy, the better I talk.
06:40 But if there's no more buying,
06:41 I know this line of dialogue.
06:45 I do not remember what this is from.
06:47 (buzzer buzzes)
06:48 Tokyo Vice, okay.
06:50 - See how this works is the more you buy, the more we talk.
06:55 And the better you buy, the better I talk.
06:57 But if there's no more buying.
07:00 - The person who leads the Yakuza ceremony
07:03 in the end does that professionally.
07:05 He leads those sake ceremonies.
07:08 We also spend a lot of time with former
07:10 or current Yakuza members to get into that peculiar
07:14 criminal mentality of Yakuza,
07:16 which is basically they have become,
07:18 particularly in the '90s when this is characterized,
07:20 they become Goldman Sachs with guns.
07:23 And we're moving into legitimate business.
07:26 Yo, homie, that my briefcase.
07:28 Tom Cruise in "Collateral."
07:30 (bell dings)
07:31 Yo, homie.
07:33 (dramatic music)
07:36 That my briefcase?
07:37 Tom's another, you know, he's wonderful to work with
07:40 because he is so dedicated.
07:42 Whatever you ask of Tom, he'll just throw himself into it.
07:45 And he's indefatigable, and so he's kind of a member
07:48 of the club, so that's.
07:50 I mean, how he blew that motorcycle down that ski jump
07:53 and decided to free fall.
07:54 I mean, even if with all the practice and all the safety
07:57 and all the training, I cannot imagine falling
07:59 through the air like that.
08:01 He knows I'm great, he will fall in eighth.
08:04 That's Will Smith from "Ali."
08:06 (bell dings)
08:07 He know I'm great, he will fall in eighth.
08:10 Come on, you big ugly bear, I'll whoop you right now.
08:13 Can't have a better partner than working with Will Smith.
08:16 He threw himself into the role of Ali unbelievably.
08:19 He was in preparation probably for eight, nine months,
08:21 solid boxing, five mornings a week.
08:24 One of the most complex things,
08:26 aside from the physical movement that Will had to master,
08:29 complex things was the speech pattern,
08:31 because Ali would, in these rhyming couplets of his,
08:35 would switch narrative perspective within the same speech.
08:40 And his accent is border south, it's Louisville.
08:44 The mastery of language of Muhammad Ali is sensational.
08:49 What are you not gonna tell me about Kusher Hurlitz?
08:51 Okay, this is not from a movie.
08:53 This is from a novel that myself and Mick Gardner
08:58 wrote called "Heat II," which came out last August.
09:02 And it's one of the last lines in the novel,
09:05 and it's Hannah, who was played by Al Pacino in 1995,
09:10 talking to Nate, who was played by John Voight in 1995.
09:14 And Kusher Hurlitz is in the wind, he's fled.
09:18 It sets up the fact that Hannah is gonna continue
09:21 to hunt him in perhaps the next book
09:25 or the book after next.
09:27 The world was one world in 1995,
09:29 it's a completely different world in 2002, 2003.
09:33 And I'm gone for a long time about it, so I won't.
09:37 But it's taking it, it's almost taking it,
09:41 what "Heat" was, it's almost taking it into,
09:43 in a way, kind of near future or outer space, if you like.
09:48 That was the ambition behind the novel.
09:51 Adam and I have talked about it extensively,
09:53 and from before the strike began when we were still shooting,
09:57 Ferrari, I wanted to play the Robert De Niro character.
10:00 (upbeat music)
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