Michael Mann on Ferrari, Heat, Collateral and his career to date | BFI in conversation

[Applause] how are you very good I think how does it um I mean I wanted to start by asking how it's how it feels to be back in London because this is kind of where it started for you this is where you're this is yeah this is where I started also at the BFI because this is the only place where you come to see movies this in the academy that used to be on Oxford Street yeah here all the time do you have fun memories of your time studying film here uh I fabulous memories about film school and uh at London film school we were first on Charlotte Street and then while I was there for two years we moved to moved to coven Garden where it is now I think and then um and then we we lived here for six years my first daughter was born in Wimbleton and so uh always back in London many years but yeah it resonates I mean it's uh particularly Soho which has changed quite a bit but it's still kind of the same yeah I work for 20th Century Fox for for about seven or eight months after I got out of film School in SoHo square and it's not there anymore unfortunately I miss that thing of seeing people running around Soho with with reels of film and that kind of thing it was it was the H of that kind of industry was it I wanted to ask if um one thing I would add though this this is a terrible place to be broke this is it's like cold and yeah expensive sitting rooms a mold day with little heaters that took a half crown and you got three minutes you got three hours of heat so so myself my one another friend of mine used to sleep in they turn sleeping in the bathtub in the common in the common restroom because the water heat they didn't charge it for the water heat or something but that that's so that part was so it's great to be broke in Southern California not not in London what do you think started your journey to tell stories why did you want to tell stories what why did I want to why did you want to tell stories uh it didn't really start by telling stories it started with um in a different kind of bition which was to impact um people with with what you were thinking and and uh uh experiencing and um and that came probably in two two parts without me really putting it together until much until a little bit later which was seeing um uh particularly uh some of maral's films particularly F and some joyless Street perhaps and then uh Dr Strange Love came out and was uh it was shortly after I saw that which is which is interesting because Strange Love is is the whole movie is a third act you can imagine what there there's a first and a second act this just the whole movie made of the third act it has such IM intensity and immediacy to it and the idea that you could make something that's so highly individualized an artistic expression that's so highly integrated individualized from one person and it's the same time you you're affecting masses of people it's not some poetic little thing that 17 people will see and um and it was shortly after that that occurred to that just suddenly struck me that you this is what you have to do and and it was was fortunate I got struck by this because I've been tortured for the last three years without KN I having a clue about what I wanted to do and kept shifting around so light bulb moment yeah absolutely do you think you still make films for the same reasons that you started making them for um no it evolves as as time goes by um I went through uh the first feature film I made was very much a uh was very much um kind of a kind of a metaphor in a sense that it's analog which was which was thief and um and it was to me it was very political it was also political to French critics but nobody it wasn't to any of the American critics um kind of took off from Marxist labor theory of value yeah you know that was the U some quotes from it and I was surprised there was one image on the social media from the recent writer strike where somebody was uh was carrying a placard they had a quote from thief on it which is um something about you know you profiting from the yield of my labor so that that was the uh that was the impetus behind things so then it changes as time goes there was a um I I had a realization in the 880s that it was almost to to make a film in which you think you're telling a story and that audience will connect with that story and change the way they think uh was was a was an outdated notion that the way media worked was that it had to be systemic meaning if uh if a sitcom was 22 Episodes a year had appliances in the kitchens of a certain standard that set of value as a norm so that expressed itself for me in a lot of ways in the first two seasons of Miami Vice which um which I had my own kind of secret agenda which is that I hated disco so it's kind of an anti- disco whoops television series how can you hate disco I hated disco um it's kind of a Mimi II generation kind of expression so so um I then had a uh I uh changed the character that Eddie alos played and it cast Eddie alos as as kind of my ideological Jesuit with a lowercase j to to uh talk about accountability responsibility and kind of a harder more U if you like Neo rock and roll perspective and so that was the can I ask you one Miami Vice geeky question please um and it's music were you responsible for the Phil Collins In the Air Tonight is responsible for the you know the Phil Collins In the Air Tonight scene cuz that's something that you do in your in all your films in the way that music does this fantastic thing of building texture and mood and kind of tells you so much my stories yeah it it was it was uh it was originally called Gold Coast and then I changed the title to Miami VI Tony yurovich wrote a fantastic toour telep playay which a pilot I didn't create it Tony did and um uh and I went down to Miami and the hole of Miami was as if somebody came out giant hand came out of the sky and painted everything tan the whole city was beige and they were starting to tear down all these wonderful streamline Deco hotels on in South Beach and I wanted to find out what they had looked like originally and um and I did do some through some research and then went to a a paint store with my wife who's a painter and started looking through paint ships to get an idea of the color palette and uh and with particular with pastels the things originally painted and VI certain vibration between different pastels and that then became the um you know the U that then became the the look of that show the um that plus very radical uh casting and probably oh I said maybe a third of the tele plays for meaning a third of the episodes of the first two first two years were uh were I think very significant um you know uh content wise the U we did something on we did something where the CIA was financing um loads of weapons to uh John Charter planes to South to Central America and bringing back cocaine and had G Gordon ly play the I agent and um and they aired on a Friday night on the following Sunday hen F got shot down which then resulted in contate so so that was which was about the same subject but uh there a lot of but then we did 22 a year which is quite a few oh I loved anyone else in the room love Miami Vice so great loved it um we've got the kind of the the slightly annoying thing about tonight is that we can't show clips of all your films which I would have so loved but we're going to show our first clip and our first clip is heat yeah and know what a weit start e absolutely what do you before we we show this clip what do you when you think about that film and you think about that time in your career what's the kind of first thing uh for me for me the the excitement about doing heat was first of all I heard the story of the uh uh a friend of M Charlie Adamson was a detective in Chicago he killed the real uh Neil McCaul in 1963 and how he regarded mccaulay struck me in a very particular way uh which is that he had tremendous respect for this guy and he had he had bumped into him almost got into a shootout in the parking lot outside the Beldon Del in Chicago and then uh Charlie said come on I'll buy a cup of coffee and sat down and had a conversation with him it wasn't exactly the conversation I wrote but the point was Charlie talked about him as uh he respected his professionalism how disciplined he was um uh he really had a sense of a threedimensional complete Humanity I already had known from uh from other work and other research I did that uh to um you know with particular John santui who's the thief that Thief is based on the um uh everybody everybody's life is as complex as each one of yours everybody has a mother a father or sister a brother a child and all those considerations and all those domestic dramas the contradictions that they carry that they have in their lives with their Partners now with their Partners within themselves and they don't get resolved they only get resolved in movies in real life we carry these contradictions and these storm of oppositional things to the Grave so you know therefore I wanted my characters particularly in in in Thea and also in um in in heat to have all that dimensionality and I I I always liked Ford madx Ford the good soldier and so with that kind of revolving narrative perspective like the ambition was is that when you're with a character his universe is your Universe you empathize with it totally his value system is your value system and that meant that when we with Hannah the alpacino character or with Bobby with the um uh Neil mcau character or with with chrisha huris Valmer uh that we see the world the way they do and then further that what if what if the way causality works is a function of the way they think the world works so that those are the conceits that then you know were were U built into that structure that screenplay um which meant that at the end there would be this kind of dialectic where you hopefully I was able to pull it off that you were empathizing with Theo 100% you want him to escape you don't want him to make the mistake he makes and then you're empathize you want him to get away and you're with you know Hannah and his in his Avid Pursuit because all I am is who I'm going after his average pursuit of Neil Mcall because he's a hunter and um uh and which would produce a uh kind of a Fugue type ending of CounterPoint at the end and um and then the irony that mcau is dying and he takes the hand of the only other person in in their universe who who's the same as he is because and their sameness is that they're fully conscious that's the only sess so there was the ambition of the drama well well as I was writing a screenplay so that was the it's that I mean we we'll watch this scene in in a and it's every time I mean I watched all so many films leading up to doing this and watching heat again was just such a joy and this moment again I've seen it so many times but it just still makes me cry every time I watch it you really kind of feel this connection it's these two characters have in that moment that you see have kind of taken the hand so let's just take a look at at this clip our first clip from he e e that's for told you I'm never going [Music] back [Music] yeah that's what's the reality of of shooting that and and and writing that that that ending you know in terms of the the location the logistics and how you build that tension we're shooting at LAX it was the same weekend that the uni bomber was threatening to blow up the airport and he had a fabulous location manager who managed to talk to the airport Authority and to still letting us actually shoot there and so the um it was it was um and these planes were coming over about 300 ft over our heads and and you you the noise and the intensity of it was so intense that you could stand there and think that you were actually working you weren't really working you were just sitting and enduring but we uh but that's the um anyway that idea though of the kind of the music that comes in there as well that Elliot who did the score for for for for is just extraordinary it's almost kind of like a a Love Theme at the very end you know when when when we see well that's the idea I mean the idea I had I I I uh I believe that films are best constructed from the end to the front and so I can't really know uh like I don't believe I can go on a voyage unless I know the destination yeah and I have to absolutely have clear in my own mind exactly what it is and it's that uh these two men dying Neil McCall is fortunate enough to have the only other person in the world who's the closest to him right with him as he's leaving existence and the uh despite the fact that that is also the person who just shot him and uh that was the ending and so when I had the ending then then in in the process of writing that's when I actually could complete the whole screenplay because I could reverse engineer that into if this is the ending and what's the end of act three if that's the end of act three what's the ending of act two and that's that was how the screen plate was constructed is that how you've always written then and how and where did that start uh yeah I learned early on that it's not a good idea to start at the beginning because by about page seven you're off on a tangent then there's a tangent off the tangent then you're totally lost by about page nine and I wrote a screenplay like that and turned it in very early on in my my career and and uh somebody said you have a good ear for dialogue but you would know what a story was if it ran you over so and a guy named Bob Luen who uh was kind enough to then take me through story construction which is which is which is quite architect meaning I could take a screenplay always if you could put in an MRI and you get the skeleton of the skeleton is has got to be absolutely right for me so the structure is is key when you come to creating something that is based around real events though like Ali for example so you have the kind of framework of a real person real events that happened and you've got to navigate which of those and and the story that you want to tell within that time frame that you want to feature within that story what what was the what was the Journey of that in terms of what end point did you know the Journey of that is absolutely fantastic which is to be with Muhammad Ali for every you know two three days a week wow all the way through uh some the writing and then the pre-production and then he was there during all the shooting we did in the United States and it was it was incredible um he was he got to approve the director he had to approve me which he did and um the uh and the first thing he said was was uh I'm not interested in h geography I I'm proud of the mistakes I made um and and the tri and the trials and tribulations I had to discover what I discovered about myself he wanted everything in watch and all he didn't want some glowing you know and um uh I asked him what at one point what was he most ashamed of and troubled by and it was he said it was his rejection of Malcolm X in front of the hotel in a c and uh he regretted that because he never saw Malcolm again because malcol got assassinated and um uh in Miami I introduced him to Malcolm's daughter who looked exactly like Malcolm redish hair light skin and uh and they you know spent about an hour or so together and she was very helpful to us and um uh aspects out the film but the um when we were doing Miami Vice during the pilot we've done some a lot of location scouting and shot some video and I happened to shot the Fifth Street Gym in Miami which is then was had been torn down by the time we came to shoot the film but we were able to we found the video and we were able to uh reconstruct exactly what the Fifth Street Gym looked like and one of his favorite things that he had was was was a bus that he had that he would drive from Louisville to or Louisville as he said Louisville to New York and so we were recreating um parts of his history with with uh in actuality there really was a location the the ship paint on the windows the F Street Gym everything was exactly as it was and it was as if he could walk into a set and it was like time travel and then we had he was there uh Howard Bingham who was late Howard bam was also close friend was there um and uh Ron Silver who who um played the trainer whose name I'm blanking on was there along along with the trainer so it was there's pictures of these people there and there the real people and there's will and everything and then um this extraordinary will turn himself into a boxer so he prepped for about N9 to 10 months um he worked probably four or five hours a day 5 days a week to become a boxer and then and it took probably about 8 months 9 months until he could uh he could successfully uh do a version of Ali's um agility and footwork particularly because Ali was perfectly proportionate you could see Ali you wouldn't know if he was 5'8 or 6'4 he was just perfectly proportioned will is it Will's trunk is longer than his legs and his hips are wider so that so to get the footwork right and to get the faint faint to get everything right cuz we did we gave up uh we boxed that was it we gave up I mean Michael bent was not as suay listening was not trying to knock out Will Smith but so sometimes some of the blows connected so the the blows were light but we we just we gave up anything phony about paed gloves and anything just went real yeah what what's the kind of preparation and the choreography around shooting things like that like you know like fights and in the ring and you know for you to have your because I know that I saw in your we did a we did a very uh we did a very precise analysis I do very precise analysis of each of of the fight I I viewed the fight as a story yeah and that each round was kind of an act of the story and if it's a if it's a thre minute uh round what are the Salient points of that round um he's dodging Liston he's wary of Liston in the beginning and then right at the end of the first round he sees Liston coming and he throws his leftand jab that connects with lon's forehead and then all of a sudden Liston has a realization of how hard this guy can hit and he and it stuns him and so that's that surprise to listen that's the story of round one and so then the if there was there may have been three or four pieces that we absolutely choreographed exactly the way they happened and then everything in between was improvisational so that's how that's how it was all approached the other thing about it that was really interesting was was ali um the the inititive Islam newspaper called Muhammad speaks the editor was had actually worked at worked at Playboy which is a very Progressive publication in Chicago when when when it began and then it's African-American and then he left and and went to edit Muhammad speaks and he was very political and in the 60s he was attuned to Third World National Liberation Front movements so when you read Mohammad speaks there is something about so and so opened up a habit dashy on 59th Street and when you got to page four there'd be something about the you know the struggles in Angola mosan Beek and uh you know Patrice lumba and the Congo so Ali was very up to was very current with uh with with third world political struggles throughout the 1960s so the position he took about against the uh war in Vietnam was not obviously not a surprise and um uh he was very very tun so it was um he was U he a fascinating guy I could go on for a long time I'm talking about him he particularly uh when he had Parkinson's um and the trouble speaking most people he encountered assumed that because he had trouble speaking they imputed that he was mentally deficient and of course he wasn't now most people endure that and then they actually start to think they are mentally deficient and they start to get depressed Ali never did um and it's uh he was anyway's amazing guy amazing to get so spend so much time with him we've got a a clip for while we're going to show [Music] now [Music] I got be man [Music] honey Invisible Man be swing [Music] with to treat you right did you [Music] do everybody with me everybody with me tonight look me yeah yeah yeah yeah oh yeah listen you ain't no champ you a CH SM like a butterfly like a be Rumble young man Rumble y'all want to lose y'all money then you better it on Sunny he know I'm great he will fall in eight come on you big ugly bear I'll whoop you right now it's an attempt to try and bring audiences into African-American culture in the 60s as it was then with segregation with uh uh with with with the contradictions uh of of Ali whose father was a sign painter painting a white Jesus in a black church and and that U and uh particularly in a well integrated piece of U piece of writing that Eric Roth and I did and uh you know and the way that you you intercut that scene as well with the Sam Cook performance in the club you know when Sam's performing and the way that it kind of cuts between those two kind of scenarios as well it's kind of it's those kind of these parallel stories one people sometimes ask me what your favorite film I don't know that I have favorite films but I definitely have favorite pieces of film so that's one of the favorite pieces of films technology something that you're always really uh kind of seem ahead of the game on as well in terms of when that shift went from to digital when digital felt like it was becoming the kind of the something that was going to really change the opportunities or or the texture or the landscape for film you you kind of jumped on board and collateral was was one of those films that you yeah then you start it you to I mean to me you're trying constantly trying to find new modes of expression more intense modes of expression to impact audience more more forcefully powerfully and and engage them more th and so media itself is always constantly evolving and of course The Cutting Edge of that is going to be the technology just like it is in architecture and um you know what something you could do different things and um and for collateral it was the desire to to the whole movie takes place in 12 hours and one night in Los Angeles and it was to evoke what night looks like in Los Angeles which is unique it's like 4:00 in the afternoon in London it's certain time certain mean it gets dark early at a certain time of year because a marine layer comes in it's about about 12200 ft and it and in that period all the sodium vapor lamps reflected off the bottom of the clouds and there was this incandescent kind of yellow glow the city and you could see forever it was like late afternoon and um so and there was no way to do that when photochemical film the only way to do that was in with video when I experimented with some video in Ali is a rooftop in the opening in fact when he's running on the street on the way to the gym he gets stopped by his cops um and uh and so we were on very much on a uh on a on a kind of a radical Forefront because it had it's a photo first photo real film shot on on on on high def on video or low def which it was so we was using a Sony f900 camera and uh and that they said we're able to see you're able to see particularly the scenes in the cab you were able to see you know the streets deep at night sequence with the coyotes for example yeah and um and I had a nightmare when we were doing the R&D we would we took three months and we were you know we get some we we' shoot some stuff send it to eilm they shoot it on the regular Motion Picture film photochemical and we look at it and today it's magenta we take the same piece send it back the next day and it's cyan so so there there was we had to rework some of the logarithms that he film to do all of this I had a nightmare about three weeks in that that uh the film didn't exist at all that I you know this is all some form of sick you know conceptual art that only exists in my memory there's nothing physical to show anybody and uh you know it turns out that that wasn't the case but that was it but it's when you you we watch a clip right now and the the aesthetic of this film is so is is is is a character almost in the film you know those colors right in in the film that that we that we kind of they're they're they really set an atmosphere they really set a mood they really set a tone um the casting in this as well I remember kind of it was there was so much said about the fact that you'd casting Tom Cruz and this and it being something that you know a role or a type of role that he'd never done before and watching the film back and seeing Tom and Jamie and you can't think of any other two people taking on these R it's just fantastic do you remember that process of casting Tom and why he was the right person for um yeah I had I had always liked Tom and I I wanted to see Tom do that kind of I've known him for a long time and I wanted him to see I wanted to see him do that kind of a part there's an obvious uh similarity or homage if you like to Lee Marvin point blank in terms of that kind of characters monochromatic and gray for a reason of if he commits a crime and he's a witness and they're trying to describe him well he was middle-aged he kind of wore a great suit had gray hair so he say an he's making himself as Anonymous as possible in his in his appearance as as uh you know kind of tradecraft um and uh and and jimie is an old and the the going back to Ali one of the most difficult parts of Ali is that when I had Jaimie in the ring in between this is between takes Jamie in the ring I had will in the ring and and and then um uh John Voit as Howard coell was in Howard coel mode as soon as he put the makeup on and cracking jokes all three of them would just stand up and have about 200 extras are all having a great time and you couldn't get anything done so this was so you going to call her who you know your lady friend the one who gave you a business card I don't know maybe maybe not what pick up the phone life's short one day it's gone you and I make it out of this alive you should call her that's what I think anyway Once Upon a [Music] Time your down leave you where you stood you I you seen it before I could read yourone tell you what and never [Music] say but now all that is gone over with never to and I can tell you why people die I you I'm shadow of [Music] the there he is hit it drop of flame so me and that Audio Slave track why that I mean in terms of you know I mentioned ear about the that you with the use of Music both needle drops and the way you you you've got such a great relationship with how you've used music in your films and that's a great example of That Song Is Telling us stuff it feels it feels part of the narrative talk to me about that choice and and why that particular Audio Slave um there is there is no logic I mean there's no there's no um just like song there's no rational I mean I hear a piece of music it it voke something a poetic impuls than me that captures the mood of it and combined with the way coyotes behave in uh in Los Angeles and the surrealism and the the two guys had have a certain moment just seeking into a very introspective searching within themselves in a moment of introspection and um we know what this sign a girl on top of the the cab kind of looks like Jada um who Jim's character had contact with before and um you know this is a moment of introspection and if I can bring audience into the inside you know the into connection with the inner life going on within characters that's what that's what this does for me so that's um this com from what was it um filming in those car scenes in particular in collateral in the car with with Tom and Jamie in terms of talk to me a little bit about that experience and how how that worked because it's kind of you know even in that shot we see that kind of pool of focus between the two in that conversation it's kind of well what I was saying what I was saying about the video when you see past past Tom's profile and you're seeing the trees against the sky you can't see that in in uh in in in photochemical the you'd have to be working at such a wide open f- stop that there'd be such a shallow depth of field that you wouldn't have any of that any of that uh any of that perspective and La particularly in that period was alive with like s helicopters in the sky and almost like signal traffic if you like and there are a certain kind of Dusty surrealism to the city it's not that way anymore you you uh the Los Angeles of of collateral um is in fact about 20 years ago and um uh right now there's a lot of new construction and and uh did that Journey with digital continue was the idea then you had such a great opportunity with what you did with that film that that's how you wanted to take that forward because with with with Public Enemies it was you know you had the choice is it am I going to shoot this on digital am I going to shoot this on film what was the reason and the choice for that being shot on digital um how do how I asked myself the question how do I want you to perceive uh 1933 yeah and uh and I decided not as um not as something period not as um because if because it could be quite beautiful and um and kind of fluid I love that about about film but if I rendered it that way it would be an object you're looking at which kind of removes audience moves audience backwards into observers as opposed to I am here in N I want to bring them into the movie I'm here in 1933 this is happening this is current yeah to make it feel current and both with collateral and with with Public Enemies it was released on photochemicals which was which is not good because release prints are notorious filmmakers know release which are notoriously bad that that was why hied up and then uh also did work towards a really fine saturation yeah and the the clip you're going to see is interesting I had uh this is the Little Bohemia is a lodge in upstate Wisconson and I had uh we're looking for locations for it I said by the way why don't you call and find out if some remnant of it still there and we made a we made a call and it turned out that the whole Lodge was was absolutely still there where these events really happened and um we talked talked to the guy who owned it and said yeah in fact he left a suitcase who left the suitcase Dillinger left a suitcase my God and I said was there anything in it oh yeah it's clothes so so we shot this exactly where it happened and the the um the the resonance for Depp and all of us to actually be in the actual bedroom Diller was in when he put his hand on the door knob there was the same door knob that cuz nothing had changed the plumbing fixtures hadn't changed nothing they even had some of the bullet holes in the wall and it was the same doorknob that Don Jones put his hand on and the Escape Route was the best Escape Route gu way Dillinger chose it and we did the same thing and the uh so everything about it is not only factual I would have changed it if if if it was if if factual was boring or just interesting not only factual but it's actually exactly where it occurred and it's um should we have a look at it let's have a look at it stop that car investigation stop that car [Applause] is [Applause] don't shoot get on the [Applause] floor [Music] [Applause] sh go it's so immersive the choice of kind of handheld in the kind of it's so immersive you feel like you're how do you I mean it's such a lame question but how do you shoot something like that you know in terms of it's It's there's so much going on there's it it feels like you know it's actually happening but in terms of the preparation and going in to shoot something like that and the choreography that's involved they yeah we you just you just Ed the word choreography which exactly the answer it's all about the choreography and choreography we were we were in um we put moan on our and um uh we happened upon which which I don't know what it's like now at the time it was really a a decayed uh Urban environment and uh when the Portuguese left in 74 they trashed everything that they could in terms of the civil engineering and we came on this Rune of a church and it was a local neighborhood dance company and we just we on a location SC 15 people walked just walked in because we heard this music and here's 30 mosan beacons dancing with a choreographer I have no idea exactly you know and and um we knew exactly I could tell exactly what Theo what the story was and through an interpreter I asked the Portuguese speaking choreographer I said this is what I think's happening in the dance they said yeah that's exactly it and I I learned from talking to him that at the heart of choreography is a story and the same as if it's a as if it's dialogue so this is really so I analyze and breakdown analyze and plan these things scen like this as uh it's all story um a pervis who is a talented amateur um uh that because the FBI was populated by accountants and lawyers according to Jerry Go's idea of having the best people in this Federal Bureau of Investigation which is all brand new except they weren't any good when they hit the street and actually got into physical combat so then they hired people like Steve White played by U by Steve Lang who were who were not the appropriate type for the FBI but actually could could were good in urban combat ex Texas Ranger and um so he makes he makes a mistake he assumes that these three innocent people driving out of there are um are are part of the dill gang gunfire happens these people got these people got killed and uh it all erupted to early he was too eager to to to move in Dinger escapes um so all of that it was we wanted chaos engendered by bad decision making and that's the uh that influence that creates the design of what's what's what's happening here and then it's then it's the pieces you know the uh this is the room it actually happened and he was asleep when it happen when when the gunfire erupted and I'm assuming there's not much of it left after that was shot so not much not much of the the building left after you shot that as well gone well we actually covered the walls with our own walls and then uh still there by the way one thing I'd mentioned is that the when suitcase arrived D suitcase that me that Johnny DPP could um we opened it up and and there was some ties some underwear some socks and when a man goes into a store and buy something or a woman goes in a store and buys something it what they choose is an expression of who they are and for the simple reason that they chose it they liked it it tells you what they liked so for John for us to actually see these uh you know solid tie with a very small pattern and then socks that were solid except they also had one very small pattern and it told you something about the Precision of his mind because he liked that design so you learn things about who Dillinger who Dillinger was cuz he was he was very bright he had been locked he had been in prisoned for 11 years he he got out within seven or eight weeks without the advantage of modern commun telecommunications or anything he had no idea what was going on in the world he's living on Surf Avenue in Chicago which which is the most desirable neighborhood to be in in that particular time and he he managed to just uh be quite brilliant about all the uh tactical uh innovations that he did in in exploiting the fact there was no law against Interstate there was no Interstate uh you couldn't prosecute anybody for for Interstate flight so you could rob a bank wiconsin flee to Illinois and you were home free that and the and the use of automob automobile was brand new the Lincoln Highway was brand new a reliable V8 was brand new and so he was constantly on the move so his tactics were were quite terrific he had never figured out what an endgame was uh like what you know so um but getting to tons of St and you know the man the personality was uh invaluable Ferrari is your new film yeah um this has been a 20 year relationship 25 years what started that that interest in in him the um what I started myself Sydney PA and Troy Kenny Martin the writer who did a brilliant job of of capturing this gold at of of the heart of of Ferrari um began this about middle 90s and um it went through various incarnations and revisions but the the central heart of it is all uh is all to the credit of of Troy and the um it wasn't because of the cars or or of in fact even Eno Ferrari it was the fact that this operatic uous melodramatic events all really occurred in the lives of these people within 3 months of 1957 the um he had he was a um talk about contradictions there was the the real answer is that their lives resonated with the edginess the asymmetry the chaos that all life does I think and as I said before it's like the the neat solution of conflict only happens in movies it doesn't happen in our lives so there managed to be a story here with the beginning of middle and an end that totally totally concluded um with a certain I won't say what it is with a certain acknowledgement that Ferrari makes and uh uh and that but the irresolution the asymmetry of it all stays intact he basically has two families and his just lost a son Dino a year earlier he and Lara have been together since the 1920s and uh she's locked in a state of grief but is a Vivace strong powerful powerful woman and um uh she's imprisoned in her mourning Enz so is in his own Silo of grief um and he instead is moving to the new the next you know on the present and the future ask what's your favorite car he says the next one um and that's the uh that the company's going broke because all he cares about is the race team he began as a race car driver and he has them that addictive mentality to the Ecstasy of it still and um uh at the same time Lara who own half the company which he needed to sign her shares over is um uh discovers the second family and legitimate son Pierro who I've known for about 25 years and and uh she calls it co P you had a CO driver that's why he didn't pay attention as Dino was dying and you're responsible for his death so this is so it is a very operatic um uh story appropriately Moda is also where pavaro comes from the sty opera house was next door to the Ferrari house um he owned like two football teams and he had he ran two he had he owned two football teams he had the Ferrari he's this incredible character we've got a couple of clips that we're going to show now and then um thank you for bringing these by the way and then we'll chat some more [Music] yeah [Music] [Music] who gives that sh [ __ ] you were supposed to save him you blame me for his death yes yes cuz you promised me he wouldn't die everything I did everything table showing what calories he could eat what went in what came out I graft the degrees of valoria the degrees of esmia diuresis I know more about nephritis and distrophy than cars yes I blame you I blame you cuz you let him die the father deluded himself the great engineer I will restore my son to health Swiss doctors Italian doctors [ __ ] I could not I did not cuz you were so consoled at Castel vetro you lost your attention you had another boy growing stronger while Dino was getting weaker what goes on in your mind he got sick distrophy kidneys they destroyed him it destroyed us what do you care huh you have another son you have another wife she's not my wife but he is my son so excited for you guys to see this film it's it's there's so much going on there's so much intimacy but then you also have these big pieces like the car race is extraordinary and I I believe that you you had you know you designed certain camera um uh tripod type things to to actually have them in the car so that you could feel like we were in the cars with the drivers I mean it is so uh an extraordinary kind of piece of film making just the car race element to itself why was that important for you to to to for it to be that way that's a great question because you also answered Dam that's exactly right it's the the again uh I wanted a director would ask himself how do I want the racing to be experienced by the audience and uh to me I didn't want the external observation long lens beautiful cars winding down roads I wanted to put I wanted the exact in exact opposite of that I wanted kind of the inverse I wanted the U as much as possible experience of of being in the car driving the car and putting you putting you in that position which means a whole bunch of things it's it's the uh you're never tracking when you're racing or driving with what the car is doing right now you're always you have a Zen focus into the next thing that's happening so that that complete U elimination of the elimination of the world except what you're focused on is part of what drops you into this kind of meditative State sometimes when everything is working right and so you're not clocking the agitation that's happening uh it's happening that's happening currently and the car is made in that period the Ferraris were the most you know technologically advanced but technology I 19 57 was that the the cars were very powerful but they didn't have obviously safety features they didn't have they didn't have braking the tires are about this wide which meant that the control had to be absolutely perfect or the car got away from you and really took off on its own um and the uh there is an accident in the film in which costal Loi um the driver gets gets killed the uh driver who had just set a record on the on the auto drum or the local track driving a Maserati the Ferrari competitor um was leaving the track as calote came to try and regain the record and he stopped at something called the Strang walini chicane and watch calote come through and miss a downshift from fourth to Third and then catapult into the air as a result of it and get killed and he wrote a paragraph about it in French was a very plain speaking man and he talked about the Ridiculousness of of our our addiction to this ecstasy and um and typically you would see your friend get killed perhaps on the mortality rate was high on Sunday you say that's it I'm never driving again by Wednesday you're back testing and by the next Sunday you're back behind the wheel and so that was a nature of it and that's very much the heart of what's an Enzo he rased uh he decided he wanted to be a race car driver um in probably about 19 about 1918 and um that he did in the 1920s and then he ran the alpha Mayo race team so that's what was in his blood and he made enough passenger cards to finance the racing that's what it's was all about um I'm glad the film took this long to be made because Adam Driver as Enzo and Penelope Cruz in particular as laa are extraordinary they're the fire both extraordinary shayen that's a flashback you're saying to the bombed out runs of the factory in 1945 when uh when shayen is pregnant then yeah um the imp imp behind it uh LOL Bergman uh played by alpacino was an old friend of mine and uh we were um we were developing a story about a uh arm Smuggler an Armenian arm Smuggler who was living in Palm Beach and um you have some great friends I love this so I knew oh God everything comes from something you know they all come from people or come from people I know I know a lot of interesting people and the uh uh and meanwhile he was going through the events of Insider and uh and I was one of maybe about 10 people he talk to and say uh you'll never guess what happened to me today Don hu walks by like he didn't know me I've known him for 15 years and and when the a bridged version aired uh I was talking to L about it you know right after there and we' seen it and then it just occurred to me I said you know forget saris sarkeesian The Armenian arms Merchant what you living through is the film we ought to do right now you know it it was such a contradiction because he didn't like w Gant and he was committing his job and his profession to support to stay in solidarity with wand and wand was a flawed character which made it worth doing if he had been some kind of perfect embodiment of various character traits you would have been you know would not have been interested in this but what L was in the and I think what the challenge was for me was was how in real life litigation could drive somebody like w again to contemplate suicide destroy his family because it's attacking your children attacking your your your your your medical your ability to pay for your kids education I mean really nasty big-time corporate litigation like that and so the challenge became can this become suspenseful because in and the mark the threshold had to be as high as you know this is actual this does happen do we do have do Eric Derk WTH and I have the skill to to U you know structure a screenplay that you know that delivered it so that was the impetus I uh I have so much depth of of uh preparation on the characters who are in heat so uh which is typical uh I wanted to know for you know for working with Bob dero for example I want to know what what Neil McCauley was doing when he was 11 in foster care and wearing mismatched clothes that made him ostracized in school at 11 and 12 is going through puberty and that makes him angry and hostile everything about a character same thing with Chris heris the Val kilber character um you know and so putting together these imaginary biographies and building them off of fragments of real experiences and real lives okay um so the the depth of awareness is so great that you know I always wanted to do something else with it I could never figure out how to uh explore this world further and then uh then I did figure out how I think and so consequently wrote the book as both a sequel and a prequel um you know kind of oscillating between the two and so that's that's the origin of the uh of the book and I get nice calls from one brother saying is there anything we can do to help which translates as where the hell is the screenplay so so I'm in the middle of writing it to you're in the middle of writing it yeah one other thing about it is that I don't know have any I don't know how even though I studied English literature I know I don't know how to write a novel so I didn't approach it as writing a novel I approached I do know how to write screenplays so I approached it as writing a screenplay meaning um four acts I wanted the narrative to have a cinematic engagement and Pace to it and uh and so it did the same kind of structure I would for very very long screenplay meaning each Act has about 130 scenes in it and and um you know so that that's where the structural you know that's that's why it's structured kind of the way it is silence film was it was incredibly Advanced because it was silent in other words so what what I liked about mnal and and some of the other uh more German expressionist filmmakers was how far they were taking the form and if if you uh see R now fous for example uh and put yourself in that position uh you know that moment in time it it it's it's a very Advanced kinds of narratives I mean I go back to Russ even you know back to eisenstein and different kinds of Montage including intellectual montage and what kind of dialectic of ideas and um it's to me it it stands the stands the stands a test of time so film kind of became retrograde in a way when sound came in because the technical requirements of sound it became very much like film theater so um you know and so then cut to 19 you know 67 or 68 when I'm deciding I want to do film the whole notion of the films being produced by Hollywood was uh was not I had no ambition to do any of that they going to do Seven Brides for Seven Brothers you know it had no no appeal to me what you know whatsoever um and you know I am Cuba the CR are flying from you know the Russian uh New Wave which not many people relate to anymore uh from the late 50s early 60s that you know the French New Wave um Angry young men in the UK was was something that uh you know was was appealing that's what that's kind that was a cem I was interested in but it was it was the expressionistic quality and the adventurousness of the um you know of the German expressionist particularly that so appealing Al didn't do much improvising he um uh there was uh there's one scene and I don't remember how much of this was written some of it was written and then he embellished on it with Ricky Harris who is a who tragically departed uh standup comedian in The Chop Shop uh where I was I was operating on one of the cameras I had to walk away because I was cracking up it's you know where uh said you know uh haris says you know you know my brother's going to meet you and that's what he's here right now and he looks under the table then he goes off singing some song about Philadelphia uh so uh you know there that was probably the only scene that that El improvised that in another moment where uh where we Al had a El's takes his best takes are always 5 six and seven or six seven and eight and uh when we when we was in the can and we had it he's you know we had a short hand he said going to do a wild one I said sure that's with that means his L's going to be completely unplugged he's going to have no idea what he's going to do and he's and he has tremendous artistic courage he's not afraid of you know highe on a violin or walking on and um uh and I'm just let it rip and sometimes it was brilliant and sometimes was absolutely awful and uh but he would shrug it we'd shrug it off we we'd move on you know and there was there was another scene where that that happened with um with yeah no in scene in Vegas When U he slams this guy into a chair and get overlarge yeah that's something I observed in Language by uh people who find themselves in in uh dire physical situations and they want to communicate something and they don't want to have to repeat it so they will say it very specifically like this they'll be they'll they'll emphasize hard consonants and put little gaps so that you get it the first time and so it it's uh it's a very commanding and a very operational mode that's where that's where it came from from uh from me and and uh know something I observed with John santui with with Charlie Adamson Charlie Adamson and his partner Dennis finina who later became an actor um and uh uh you know when they described something that happened or they were talking to somebody and they wanted that person to listen because they were conveying to them uh in in in usually a pretty forceful way some fact of life they they drop right into that Cadence they didn't want any misunderstanding and uh they could be very threatening and so that's that's really that's really where it came from um I told you Charlie also uh he plays the uh sergeant and um and when Dennis um we have to experience a thief he decided he wanted to try acting and he went to the Goodman Theater and then remains Theater which is a theater company in Chicago Ron by Billy Peterson and um uh and the Second City and actually became an actor while he was still a detective he was a very dangerous detective in real life which made for some very interesting confrontations with the actors when we were doing Crime Story CU everybody's tempers got Fray after about 14 or 15 episodes through the season and somebody would say something off to Dennis and Dennis would want to give guy a smack and he I said you you can't do that so bill smich was receiving end of one of those was one time anyway um we' run out of time I'm afraid we've got to uh get this Cinema empty so people can come and enjoy Ferrari which is amazing thank you so much thank you for your hi come on everybody

Channel: BFI

Views: 22,895

Keywords: British Film Institute (Publisher), British, film, institute, films, movie, movies, cinema, BFI, Michael Mann, directing, writing, screenwriting, books, culture, Heat, Inside Man, Thief, Ali, Muhammed Ali, Will Smith, Jamie Foxx, Tom Cruise, Collateral, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Last of the Mohicans

Id: CQkAlASM0fA

Length: 70min 2sec (4202 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 05 2024