Miami Vice Draft Screenplay

Happy New Year everyone! A new year, a new Michael Mann film....can't wait!

I recently had a look at the Miami Vice movie screenplay, Michael Mann's first draft. Oh goodness, from first draft to final film it is obvious it has been hacked to pieces. It's worth looking at if you are interested in the cross over from story and character development to practical screen writing. The refining of script, as if refined by fire, is very apparent. In the first draft one senses a similar character style development from the 80's series, but this is obviously mostly cut out for the final draft, which feels more sombre. The earlier draft seems to see the film set for one of Mann's epic length, 3 hour adventures. I have never understood why critics and film company owners complain of lengthy movies - I much prefer getting a fix for 3 hours rather than just 2, or even a measly 1,5 hours. In truth, perhaps Mann realised that his character development of Crockett and Tubbs just could never have the depth, to bear any relevance to the main plot line of this movie, as limited within the framework of the screenplay already written. For this reason, it appears that a shorter script would be tighter and more appropriate.

Those are my initial reflections - if you have any, I would be interested to hear them. Those most critical of Miami Vice the movie, have said that the dialogue was incomprehensible most of the time. I personally disagree, although I did find myself straining to hear what they said occasionally. But critics also meant that the screenplay was weak. I admit to saying Miami Vice didn't in my view achieve the same alchemy as Heat or The Insider and wasn't near Mann's best work in terms of emotional engagement with the viewer, but there were some special moments and I have enjoyed watching it over and over.

Well, if you would like to see this first Miami Vice Screenplay draft then click here!

Michael Mann Heat and Insider Interview

Here is a gem of a surprise for all Michael Mann fans. A superb video interview (broadcast for a French audience) that I have not seen before with not only Michael Mann, but some cast members of Heat and the Insider. Mann talks about why he took his name off the "mutilated" TV version of Heat, which was cut down. Mann looks visibly upset talking about it. But more positively, there are some exceptional inside looks at some of the scenes and character developments in each film, along with clips of those scenes. Cast members (some will really surprise you!) from previous films convey their experiences of the director and offer insights into what makes mann so successful and driven. If you are a Mann fan, look at this - very informative.

"Les Réalisateurs" - Michael Mann (3/3)
by SoWiFo

The Music of Lisa Gerrard

One of the most compelling aspects of a Michael Mann film is the use of the soundtrack. Michael Mann appears to have the capacity (and somehow time) to explore a vast range of musical realms, a pallet of musical colours that fills in what would otherwise be just a pencil drawing of a film. More remarkably, he is just at home at the sharp end of the musical age we live in as he is with music of the past. Employing Moby has in my view been just as ingenius as talent spotting Gerrard, and I will come to him in a later post. Music is clearly a passion of Michael Mann and just as he falls in love with the work of certain cinematographers, he has also found the vehicle to express the depths of human emotion and circumstance through the beautifully haunting voice of Lisa Gerrard. Mann creates an alchemy through the juxtaposition of music, cinematography, editing, writing and acting to create in all his movies pinnacles of extreme human "moments". Lisa Gerrard's voice often (though by no means exclusively) takes us to the highest moments of emotional intensity.

One has to read about the deeply spiritual music of Lisa Gerrard to understand how this alchemy works with Mann's other ingredients. They were made for each other. I often feel I "understand" the character of Michael Mann himself more through his choice and implementation of music than sometimes through just his visual tools. Certainly, any conventional interview with Michael Mann is a blind alley if you are trying to see what drives him, what is important to him in his personal life. Mann is famously protective about his personal life, so we don't learn much about him except through his creativity.

We can also learn about Michael Mann through the work of other artists. It was through Michael Mann that I first discovered Lisa Gerrard. Here is an excerpt of an interview about her work on Michael Mann films. She also talks of working with Ridley Scott (notably Gladiator), another brilliant implementer of music into the visual realm. For the full interview and to see a collection of other interviews with her check out the Lisa Gerrard website here.

www.lisagerrard.com
How did you get involved in film scoring?

By accident, but actually because of Michael Mann. I did some work in Spain years ago for a film doing sound score and many people over the years have used lots of pieces of my music for different films and temp dubs. Michael decided to take the risk of working with Pieter Bourke and I on The Insider, that was really my introduction to major film scoring. I‘d done a Spanish film, El Nino Del La Luna (The Child of the Moon), the original score for Nadro, which was with Ivana Massetti, an Italian director, and also Baraka. I worked with Michael Stearns on this, but on only one or two pieces, and they used a licensed piece, The Host of Seraphim, from a record (The Serpent's Egg by Dead Can Dance) I'd done years before. That was the introduction to the work, that piece of music. In turn they gave us footage for a video for the Yulunga Spirit Dance (Into The Labyrinth by Dead Can Dance), a piece of music that was already released. That was quite an extraordinary gift because this was all filmed in 70mm*.

Why do you think your voice attracts certain directors who want to use you in their films?

It's really interesting because when I worked with Michael Mann somehow he felt that there was a subtext, a story that could be told with a soul fabric type consciousness music in Jeffery Wigand's life. That we saw this very withdrawn character, so he painted a very large subtext in an almost conscious, soulful, inner experience of him, through the music that Pieter and I had written. He used my voice to depict certain emotional qualities, while in Gladiator, Ridley has used the voice as a connection with the familiar, with the family, and with the things that are true and have that value in the characters life. The human voice is an interesting instrument because it can't lie. When we have these inner feelings about our true private inner feelings, we don't lie, we can't lie. They're automatic, the voices automatically unlocks this interior journey of the private. I think that's why Ridley and Michael have found an affinity with this particular interpreter. I had very interesting experiences working with both directors.

See the full interview here

Public Enemies Universal Pictures Description

The following is Universal Pictures promotional copy for Public Enemies, which is slated for release July 1st, 2009. The trailer was expected to be shown by the end of this December, but so far it hasn't been featured on Universal's site. Another July film trailer has been posted, so it makes me wonder whether Michael Mann is still pondering on how best to edit his short trailer to gain as wider audience as possible and convey not just the story of the film, but the potential depth of it beyond its realistic shoot outs. Michael Mann has historically found it difficult condensing the broad landscapes of his movies into "in-a-nutshell" trailers. Here is Universal's write up about the story of Public Enemies:

In the action-thriller Public Enemies, acclaimed filmmaker Michael Mann directs Johnny Depp, Christian Bale and Academy Award® winner Marion Cotillard in the incredible and true story of legendary Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger (Depp)—the charismatic bank robber whose lightning raids made him the number one target of J. Edgar Hoover’s fledgling FBI and its top agent, Melvin Purvis (Bale), and a folk hero to much of the downtrodden public.
No one could stop Dillinger. No jail could hold him. His charm and audacious jailbreaks endeared him to almost everyone—from his girlfriend Billie Frechette (Cotillard) to an American public who had no sympathy for the banks that had plunged the country into the Depression.
But while the adventures of Dillinger's gang—later including the sociopathic Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham)—thrilled many, Hoover (Billy Crudup) hit on the idea of exploiting the outlaw's capture as a way to elevate his Bureau of Investigation into the national police force that became the FBI. He made Dillinger America's first Public Enemy Number One.
Hoover sent in Purvis, the dashing "Clark Gable of the FBI". However, Dillinger and his gang outwitted and outgunned Purvis' men in wild chases and shootouts. Only after importing a crew of Western ex-lawmen (newly baptized as agents) who were real gunfighters and orchestrating epic betrayals—from the infamous "Lady in Red" to the Chicago crime boss Frank Nitti—were Purvis and the FBI able to close in on Dillinger.

Salon Michael Mann Interview 2

Here is another interview between a www.salon.com writer and Michael Mann. Here is an excerpt:

Michael Mann has a modus operandi as distinctive as any master criminal's. He's a hard-boiled sensualist: half muckraker and half fabulist. If he had been born 100 years ago, he'd have followed Jack London's path, not just into bare-knuckled journalism but also into transcendent evocations of the beautiful and the wild.

Talking to Mann is as surprising as it is stimulating. His unfettered intuition and exquisite awareness compel your rapt attention. It's as if you're tuning your radio dial to a brainy, original talk show host on a faint college-town station -- you strain not to miss his special code words and hard-won observations. You feel Mann gets extraordinary commitments from actors like James Caan in "Thief" (1981) or Tom Noonan and Brian Cox in "Manhunter" (1986) or Daniel Day-Lewis in "The Last of the Mohicans" (1992) because he catches them up in his enthrallment with his material.

When I listen to tapes of the marathon interview sessions I held with him five years apart, one before the release of "Thief" and the other before the release of "Manhunter," they sound as if they're halves of an ongoing conversation, whether he's discussing his past or the projects then at hand. He grew up near "the Patch," one of the roughest areas of Chicago. ("It was very aggressive, it was very masculine and it was very heterosexual.") He still has a flat-A accent. "In my neighborhood," he once told me, "anyone who carried around a camera would be considered a 'fairy.'" By his count, only 13 of his high school graduating class of 365 went on to college, Mann included. It was at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he majored in English, that movies first got their hooks into him. The film that clinched the obsession was (appropriately enough) G.W. Pabst's coruscating study of urban vice, "The Joyless Street" (1925). By the time he graduated from college, Mann knew he wanted to make movies. But he didn't like the curricula of most American film schools: "It was like vocational training. You're not supposed to do 'student' films; you're supposed to do a show reel." So, in 1965, Mann entered the London Film School, where he got an M.A. in film and did what he thought he should do -- "make two-and-a-half minute, fully symbolic statements on the nature of reality that'll shame you 10 years later." Mann stayed on in London for about six years, filming documentaries and TV commercials and working as an assistant production supervisor for Twentieth Century Fox. Having been part of the Madison campus' radical days, he began to feel the contradictions of his position: "I would make money on commercials and try to put it to use on my own projects. Some material I filmed on the Paris student riots wound up on NBC's "First Tuesday" because NBC's own people couldn't get close to the radical leaders. You never resolve these contradictions."

Read the full interview

Salon Michael Mann Interview

www.salon.com features a superb interview with Michael Mann, which intelligently investigates Mann's motivation for the film. The following is an excerpt.

The travails of upper-middle-class life and corporate careers are often fodder for movie comedy. "The Insider" approaches them without condescension or preconceptions; this film knows that the loss of medical benefits is a weapon as lethal as a knife or gun.

Wigand's struggle to preserve his good name and his kids' future becomes as palpable as the quest of any action hero. But Wigand is an inaction hero -- paralyzed by powerful forces, dependent on the kindness of strangers. And, despite some advance press reports, Bergman emerges as a complicated protagonist, not a bloodied-but-unbowed journalistic saint. He's bloodied, he's bowed, but he's strong enough to change his life.

Mann speaks in a Chicago accent, in a kind of elongated staccato; his disdain for personal revelation is reflected in his language. He likes to use words like "atonal," which are usually linked to more abstract arts like music or graphic design. Even in idle chatter about the visual sophistication of MTV-weaned audiences, he describes their ability to pick up "distonic little vibes."

But I do have one personal story. In 1981, the late Jonathan Benair, a screenwriter and voice actor deservedly renowned for his wit, discovered he was living in an apartment that Mann had once occupied, a block away from Canter's Delicatessen in L.A.'s Fairfax district. Not long afterward, Benair asked his favorite Canter's waitress why she'd left her post for a few days. "Oh, there was this writer," she said. "He used to come in and work at all hours, and he promised me that when he made his movie he'd fly me to the premiere." The movie was "Thief," the premiere was in Chicago and the writer was Michael Mann.


Read the full article

Michael Mann Video Clips

Here is a link to a short but perhaps less known clip to some interviews with actors about Michael Mann - found at TV Guide

See Spike for more Michael Mann video clips including Miami Vice behind the scenes. Click here.