Michael Mann Interview

4 months ago 06th Jul 10:19

Michael Mann is a film director, screen writer and producer and is best known for his movie Heat back in 1995.

After three years out of the director's chair he returns this week with gangster movie Public Enemies, which sees Johnny Depp take on the role of American bank robber John Dillinger.

In apress conference in London the filmmaker talked about his interest in the Dillinger story .

- Michael you have brought us a range of terrific stories over the last few decades but in Public Enemies you have returned to that classic clash of law vs. lawlessness and I wondered why you chose to explore this and the life of John Dillinger?

I became fascinated with Dillinger, because of certain mysteries in his life. First of all, he was very bright, and great at doing what he did. And he's regarded as one of the best bank robbers of American history, to whatever extent that's worth. He was very very current, very contemporary. Very sophisticated.

He planned his robberies with great precision and forethought, and employed techniques picked up from the military by a guy called Herbert K. Lam - where the expression 'on the lam' came from. He mentored Walter Dietrich, Walter Dietrich, the man who died at the beginning of the movie, mentored John Dillinger. So Dillinger's time in prison is really a post-graduate course in robbing banks.

But what really interested me, is he not so much gets out of prison he explodes onto the landscape; he is determined to have everything right now. And lives the dynamics of maybe four or five lifetimes in one, and that one life is only thirteen months long and it has the intensity and white hot brilliance to it, and an indefatigable brio, that I found stunning in view of the fact that he had no concept of future. That he could plan bank robbery with great precision, but they couldn't plan next Thursday.

There was no sense of, as there was with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the Hole in the Wall gang, of making a quarter of a million dollars, then go to Brazil for a year and a half, and chill out. There was no endgame. There was this very very intense live for today, and whatever happens tomorrow, it's fated. It's not that my decision making or consciousness it's determined, it's just fated.

And it's part of current thinking in the '30s - it's within three years of Hemingway writing Death in the Afternoon, about facing death straight on if you're a matador. Writing that every story ends the same way, with death. And not something that you'll transcend, or go to heaven, or any other fiction - but not something that's depressing, it's just fact. We have Red saying, 'when your time's up, your time's up' and people had expressions like 'there's a bullet with your name on it'.