Michael Mann Interview

06 July 2009

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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'.

The spirit of this guy, even when everybody's dead and gone, he has the outrageous audacity to walk through that police station, which didn't happen the day of the Biograph, it actually happened three days before, well, it was just stunning.

So for me to explore it and to try to bring the audience into some real intimate relationship with it, became the challenge of this work. To as much as possible to locate the audience in his shoes, in his skin, looking through his eyes. Y'know - what's he thinking? What's he thinking in the Biograph, when Myrna Loy, who looked like Billie Frechette, says 'Bye, Blackie', and he's watching Blackie, who's played by Clark Gable - who's derived from Dillinger.

So it's Dillinger watching Gable being Dillinger. And Gable seems to be thinking more about the future and how should I look at mortality than Dillinger is. And how did those words fall upon him? He doesn't know that there are 30 FBI agents outside, who are planning to kill him when he exits. So that was the real engagement.

That’s a really long answer I’m sorry.

- I believe Christian Bale was your first choice for Melvin Purvis, what was it about him that made you see him in the role? It says in the production notes that he kept up the Southern accent in between takes - is that something you encouraged, or do you think that actors should make that decision themselves?

That's how Christian does it. Every actor's different. Some actors will put on that - being completely in character when they show up for work. A brilliant actor - Stephen Graham, he picked up that Chicago accent [clicks fingers] in two days. And that was just amazing, and then the second I said 'cut', he's back to, you know I could barely understand him - I need subtitles! Christian, on the other hand, just dives into the deep end of this swimming pool and he's there the whole time.

The character of Melvin Purvis, if you know American culture and patterns of immigration and ethnicity - he was a member of the landed gentry. They were people who settled in the United States in the 1600s, they were from the richer southern counties of England, and they got the best land in Virginia and South Carolina.

For example, the people who settled in Appalachia, where Hawkeye's ancestors would have come from, were the people from the borderlands who got kicked off the land after the union of England and Scotland. And they got what was left over, which was this brilliant piece of real estate, the only thing is, there's a bunch of hostile American Indians who said 'this is our land', so it was dangerous. So that was the tenement slum of the 18th century.

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