Michael & Ami Canaan Mann interview

There is an indepth interview with Michael & Ami Canaan Mann that gives considerable enlightenment on how the father and daughter team came up with and executed the project, The Texas Killing Fields. It obviously took a great deal of Michael's time to help develop the movie. With typical attention to detail, Michael goes into how the entire movie was written, cast, shot and distributed. For those wanting to know every nuance about the working approach of Michael Mann as producer, it is worth waiting through the introduction. It will be interesting to see how Ami Mann's career develops.

The Study of Mann Interview

Michael Mann has returned to the interview table for the Directors Guild of America with F.X Feeney, who originally interviewed Mann for his wonderful published book "Michael Mann" published by Taschen (which I own). Mann obviously seems very comfortable talking to Feeney, because Mann's replies to often short questions are some of his most revealing to date. It is for this reason that this interview is a must read, with a wealth of new revelations about Mann's methodology in film and his relationship with the actors and crew he works with.

We have been left very short of Michael Mann information of late, and this occasional Michael Mann blogger has been left dry of "Mann Water" for a long time. It is therefore a tease when he gives more uncertain clues as to what his next major movie project will be. I wonder if the conversation he has with F.X Feeney next week will be made public? Read the end of the interview to see what I am talking about!

Full interview here

In the meantime, I have now bought a new plasma, a Panasonic G30 42" (THX calibration option) in readiness for Luck.

Public Enemies Michael Mann and Actor Interviews

Michael Mann Public Enemies Interview

If Public Enemies was your favourite Michael Mann film, then here are some additional interviews that may be of interest. There is a brief Johnny Depp interview where he reveals one of his genuine talents (as if he doesn't have enough already) is with aiming a gun, having grown up with them during his childhood. Christian Bale offers a full interview too. Unfortunately there are no embed sharing options for the videos, so I include the links below:

Michael Mann Interview: Public Enemies

http://www.3news.co.nz/Full-Public-Enemies-interview-with-Michael-Mann/tabid/337/articleID/112498/Default.aspx

Depp & Bale Talk Guns: Public Enemies

http://www.3news.co.nz/Depp-and-Bale-talk-guns-and-their-latest-film-Public-Enemies/tabid/337/articleID/114706/Default.aspx

Christian Bale Full Interview: Public Enemies

http://www.3news.co.nz/Full-Public-Enemies-interview-with-Christian-Bale/tabid/337/articleID/114646/Default.aspx

Marion Cotillard  Full Interview: Public Enemies

http://www.3news.co.nz/Full-Public-Enemies-interview-with-Marion-Cotillard/tabid/337/articleID/114649/Default.aspx

Film directors [Michael Mann] are embracing TV

A good article from one of my favourite sources, the LA Times - quality writing and information.

Film directors are embracing TV

Then a new HBO script, set in the world of horse racing and penned by David Milch ("Deadwood," "NYPD Blue"), landed on Mann's desk. "I really didn't want to get back into television, but the script was just so damn good," Mann said of the series "Luck," which stars Dustin Hoffman and will air on HBO next year. "It was one of the best things anyone has ever given me to direct."

Read the full article here.

Documentary of Key Scenes with Michael Mann and Actors

For as long as these videos are available online, you can treat yourself to some old but powerful Michael Mann interviews with some of our best loved Michael Mann scenes. This is wonderful footage, including actor interviews about the Tiger scene from Manhunter and that extraordinarily charged cliff scene in Last of the Mohicans. It includes scenes from Heat, and also the Insider. Actors speak about who they feel Michael Mann is, with some superb quotes to take away that sum up our favourite director. Get Michael Mann's inside story. Essential viewing, enjoy. I did... immensely. (Anyone know where these were first broadcast and who by?).


Part 1


"Les Réalisateurs" - Michael Mann (1/3) by SoWiFo


Part 2


"Les Réalisateurs" - Michael Mann (2/3) by SoWiFo

Part 3


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

Michael Mann's HBO Luck Trailer (production preview)

Michael Mann's Luck production preview has arrived - and I can barely contain my excitement. It looks AWESOME. Talk about taking your breath away. This is going to be huge. We have waited a long time for this and here it is...



Tell me what you think?! Would love to hear your views. I think in particular the in-race cameras transporting you inside the horses battling it out is extraordinarily good. People have done it before, but not as dramatically as this. You can see Michael Mann camera angles all over this preview... the oblique viewpoints with telling movements and over the shoulder intimacy. Hoffman looks perfect, and since Miami Vice I have really warmed to John Ortiz – his character looks equally promising in the flash we see of him in this. Stylistically, the visuals hit every single note with power, and I am sure Milch's script is going to deliver the storyline. I just need Dillinger to break into a bank for me so I can buy that 42" HD TV and HD subscription for Sky Atlantic... this is not going to be missed!

Incidentally, I should at this point tell you about a guy who left a comment on an earlier post here, predicting this preview/trailer would appear during the first showing of Game of Thrones. He was spot on. He had his theory over HBO marketing, which he shared with me. I am sure he won't mind me quoting him here for all your interest in future HBO trailer releases:

I forgot how exactly I worked it out, but one night I examined the reveals HBO has for teasers of brand new shows, and it usually corresponded with the premiere of a show's first episode about 3/4s of a year away or more away.

So, the first teaser of Boardwalk Empire was in January of last year, and it aired with the first new episode of Big Love's new season. Boardwalk Empire aired in September. Game of Thrones was first revealed with the first new episode of True Blood. 

Since Game of Thrones is the only close "big deal" HBO show, I would think Luck's first teaser will be paired with it. Then again, it might also be a little later with True Blood, but I imagine they want to get the marketing started soon since it's going to air around September or early next year.

Michael Mann talks about digital collateral

The following is an article I found on the net, but the source link of the article appears broken. I can say it was originally from the Hollywood Reporter. It is below in entirety:


Revving up digital cinematography

By Carolyn Giardina

Pictured: Director Michael Mann with the Viper FilmStream digital camera on the set of "Collateral" 

Leave it to Michael Mann to shake up the system. The Oscar-nominated director famous for gritty yet visually dazzling depictions of urban life and an uncompromising attitude toward his craft is now ushering digital filmmaking from the extreme reaches of science fiction and low-budget indie into the realm of high-profile studio thriller. The director has elected to use Thomson Grass Valley's Viper FilmStream camera for his upcoming "Collateral," the Tom Cruise-starrer financed by DreamWorks and Paramount, scheduled for an Aug. 6 release. 


As the first director to road-test the Viper -- much anticipated as the first cinema camera capable of storing images as data, directly to a hard drive -- Mann's choices are worth noting in a creative community coming to grips with the practicalities and pitfalls of digital imaging.


The Viper isn't the only camera Mann is using to shoot the movie, which he describes as a "multimedia" effort. He's using the Sony CineAlta high-definition camera, as well as shooting film, but of the roughly 80% of the finished film Mann estimates he's captured digitally, about 80% originated from the Viper.


Mann says his choice was driven by the film's creative needs. The story -- of a veteran hit man (Cruise) who hijacks a cab and forces the driver (Jamie Foxx) to traverse the streets of Los Angeles, transporting him from job to job until the LAPD and the FBI begin to pursue the vehicle -- seems well-suited to electronic cameras.


"Everything is pretty much driven by story, and this whole picture takes place at night," the director says. "I wanted to see into the night. I wanted the night to be alive so that it becomes very three-dimensional. That's what I was trying to get," says Mann, kicking back at the Santa Monica offices that house his production company, Forward Pass.


"There was a quality to the Viper cam that I responded to," says Mann, who is no stranger to digital cameras, having employed high-definition video for the opening sequences of his 2001 biopic "Ali." In particular, he says, the Viper's color imaging worked well for this particular film. "It had to do with the sensitivity of reds and yellows and oranges. This was not only seeing deeply into the night, seeing what you see with the naked eye and something more than you can see with the naked eye, but also the color information. It had an aesthetic that I wanted."


The Viper operates in several modes. At the high end is FilmStream, which captures unprocessed imagery -- no color correction, no compression -- in the 4:4:4 RGB color space, the full color range of an electronic image signal. (While analog film still offers significantly greater color sensitivity than any electronic medium, 4:4:4 RGB is the highest level currently offered in the electronic realm. Film scanned into the digital domain for effects manipulation or what have you is scanned at 4:4:4 RGB. By way of comparison, broadcast HD operates in a 4:2:2 YUV environment, subsampling in blue and red. The Viper also offers 4:2:2 options.)


Though other high-end digital cameras, including the CineAlta, also shoot in 4:4:4 RGB, Thomson vp strategic marketing and business development Jeff Rosica says that what sets the Viper apart is the proprietary CCDs that capture the image as well as the way the data, once acquired, is distributed. The CCDs capture 12-bit linear image, which is then transmitted and stored at 10-bit log space. "Because it's logarithmic, it actually emulates the most important properties of a 12-bit linear signal," says Rosica. The signal is then transferred to a recording device via a dual-link serial HD connection.


Mann and his team began an extensive testing phase by recording material in FilmStream onto a DVS digital disk recorder. "The total capacity was 55 minutes, and it took 35 hours to download (to videotape for dailies)," Mann says. "So obviously that wasn't ready for feature film production." 


Next, they tested S.two digital mags to store the uncompressed raw data. "So our storage went down to something that was physically manageable in a much more compact hard drive," Mann says. "But what it posed upon us was a long-term storage capacity of 330 terabytes, which is economically unfeasible with the current limits of the drive technology." (A terabyte of storage costs about $50,000.)


Mann then decided "to see what would happen if we put a mild compression on (the images)" and switched to Viper's VideoStream mode, which offers a 10-bit 4:4:4 RGB video, as opposed to data, signal and provides light image processing allowing for truer color reproduction in the field. "With FilmStream you're getting raw data. VideoStream functions more like a normal high-def camera, which allowed him to control the ASA," says "Collateral" associate producer Bryan Carroll.


Both modes lens in 2.37:1 widescreen without any loss of vertical resolution.


"We took it all the way to the equivalent of a release print, so it's not like we were looking at something on a monitor and taking it on faith," Mann says.


While employing the latest in digital imaging technologies, Mann took care to note that his storytelling fundamentals are essentially unchanged. "In our system, we impose on everybody the grammar and syntax that we are shooting film. All the disciplines apply, and that's very important on the floor during production. We are mixing a digital culture with a film culture, and it has to be film grammar."


That approach drove the design of a massive workflow system that brought together the material from the film camera, Viper, and the other camera system Mann employed, Sony's CineAlta F900 HD. The HDCAM footage essentially had to be handled as camera negative. Everything that was shot -- film and digital -- was digitized into Avids for postproduction, during which a digital color grading session will take place.


Mann cites Carroll as well as Thomson's Mark Chiolis, Laser Pacific's Leon Silverman and Terry Brown and Panavision's Nolan Murdock as integral to working out the bugs in the system.


Prior to filming, a team including Mann and A-camera operator Gary Jay, (who has worked with Mann since 1992's "The Last of the Mohicans") guided modifications to the Viper.


"The camera body itself wasn't ergonomic for use on a production," Mann says. "We wanted weights added to the rear of the camera to increase the mass and balance back there. We needed rods for the matte box and focus-bracket system because we do a lot of hand-holding. The control buttons needed covers because you could unbalance the camera and not know you did it. This is small stuff, but it's major when you just got done having a take that's brilliant, or you think that the actors were brilliant and it looks perfect, and you find out you switched it to FilmStream."


With his arsenal of camera technology, production began and Mann focused his attention on directing. Dion Beebe ("Chicago") came on board as director of photography.


As 27 pages of the "Collateral" screenplay take place in a car, mobility was a priority. There were some limitations as the Viper was cabled to its recording deck. Mann says that when he wanted complete mobility for handheld work, the crew used the CineAlta F900 (which is configured more like a camcorder, recording to either standard Sony HDCAM or SW tapes).


"The benefit is that there is a 55-minute tape, so in that sense there are fewer interruptions," Mann says. "(With film) if you are hand holding and you have a 400-foot mag in there, every three minutes and 45 seconds you are having to stop." (There are third-party developers working on Viper recording options, including a portable drive to enable cinematographers to work untethered.)


Creatively, he says, "there's no silver bullet in all of this. ... You have to know what you want, more so than film. In film, you can rely on certain conventional looks, almost like a perceptual preset about what you're used to having. Not so in video, it's a much broader spectrum so you have to know what you want.


"What I like about the Viper is it sees colors, it sees things, in a different way," Mann says. "People are reaching for more expressive ways to visualize and have emotional impact. That's what it all comes down to, the emotional impact to tell a story."

Hollywood's Best Film Directors - Michael Mann

Here is a great interview with Michael Mann, covering his entire career in his own words. Excellent behind the scenes footage. Must see. No embed code on this video. Check out the link here.