Michael Mann

One of the most creative, yet less prolific, filmmakers in the history of cinema is back at directing after an eight-year hiatus. Mann just took on the screen a real person, a legend, an icon like few others. The presentation of his upcoming film, Ferrari, couldn’t but take place in Italy – in Venice, where Mann headed the VFF jury in 2012. About the surprisingly short list of feature films he directed, we will note that it is twelve items long, including Ferrari. That’s in forty-two years. Few films, but strong ones. Michael Mann educated in Britain, then moved back to America, where he works on a series of short films and documentaries. His work included also screenwriting for some of the most famous TV series of the time, from Starsky & Hutch to Miami Vice. A director of uneven style, he is able to build scenarios and narratives the most diverse: The Last of the Mohicans, Public Enemies, The Keep, up to his recent Blackhat, a film that stands outside reality, so much as it is visionary and futurist.
In general, the filmmaker keeps true to a genre that in America and France is called polar, a blend of the dark, introspective traits of film noir that often sees as protagonists law enforcement officers faced with cathartic experience that change their existence forever.
Michael Mann is a creator of characters first. When The Silence of the Lambs came out, some reminded us that the criminal genius Dr. Lecter already made an appearance, a few years earlier, in Manhunter. Al Pacino’s character in Heat is also the development of an earlier TV work. In other films, we find characters immersed in exacerbated romanticism, entranced in destructive masculinity or taking dead-end roads in a continuality of alternating personal relationships that at some inevitable point fall apart. True personal relationships are also that of the Al Pacino/Robert De Niro in Heat and of Tom Cruise the most cruel and Jamie Foxx playing cat-and-mouse in Collateral.
Mann is also a filmmaker who can blend together swirling action scenes with moments of suspension and evocative digressions, like the scene of the deer crossing the road in Collateral or the amazing handshake with the policeman Will Smith came up in Ali as the titular character was stepping out the court of law that sentenced him to five years of nothing: lights and shadows, close-ups and desolating urban long shots.