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This article was originally published on October 10.
We are recirculating it now timed toFerraris theatrical debut.
Be sure to also read ourreview of the film.
(One favorite spot: The barbershop where Enzo got a shave every morning.)
Who shall I be in this world?
Enzo asked himself as a teenager.
At the time, he had no job prospects, and his father and brother had just died.
That theme of self-actualization runs through Manns films.
It also runs through his own life.
He could also be talking about his own filmmaking philosophy.
Hes hard on himself.
If something is not going right, he beats himself up pretty good, and I do the same.
Plus he can be very funny on-camera and off.
And Enzo was funny.
I wasnt that interested in cars.
But this Ferrari was different.
My bigger obsession at the time was with what they now call MotoGP bikes.
Youre in advance of the machine.
Its a fluid and balletic experience.
Theres a great line in the film thats stuck with me.
I puzzle this out for myself all the time: Why does something look beautiful to us?
Why does something thrill us?
Why does something scare us?
In the racing scenes, we get the sense these are dangerous, imperfect machines.Theyre savage.
They can kill you in a heartbeat.
They have more power than you might handle.
They have more power than the brakes can handle.
One tiny thing goes wrong and the result is catastrophic.
The race car was the imperative of that company; passenger cars were secondary.
Enzo had a genius idea around 1947.
And at some point, he thought,Modenas filled with these wonderful craftsmen.
Why dont I throw a good leather interior into this and get a great paint job on it?
You have to keep it going by throttle control and shifting gears.
Its meant to be driven hard.
Thats why suburbanites who may have bought Ferraris in the 60s started complaining, Well, they dont run.
So he was highly defensive and strategic.
Thats why he called his autobiographyMy Terrible Joys.It made him vigilant with kind of a strafing wit.
I get a kick out of him.
Theres this footage of him.
Hell walk into a crowd; nobody notices him.
He takes off his glasses so everybody can see its him.
Then they start coming around.
So he puts the glasses back on to maintain the mystique.
You realize his mystique is strategic.
He didnt want anybody to see what he was thinking.
InFerrari,Enzo is going in circles, at least emotionally.
He doesnt want that to change.
He cant decide whether Piero, his son with Lina, will get the name Ferrari.
A lot of forces in his life are contrary to other impulses and forces.
And thats the way things operate in life.
We all carry things that are in opposition to each other.
And they dont get resolved.
They get resolved in archetypal dramas that we craft.
To me, Enzo was a giant representational picture of something profoundly human.
Hes bound to Laura; hes repelled by Laura.
How do these oppositions end in most of our lives?
That wasnt there in the 90s when Sydney Pollack and I were working with the story.
Piero Ferrari has been at the screenings.
Hes obviously seen the movie.
I wanted him to read the script over many years, and he didnt want to.
In preproduction this time around, he read it and he had things to add.
He never shaved himself.
What kind of underwear he slept in.
So they built a second door so people couldnt hear.
Then hed go on with the rest of his day.
Youve talked in the past aboutyour own father,a Russian immigrant, and his struggles.
I know he died at a young age.
What do you think he wouldve thought about you becoming a filmmaker?I think about that a lot.
I have no idea, in actuality.
But I was the beneficiary of a pretty good family and two parents who were unconditionally supportive.
Even if they didnt understand.
My grandmother was hilarious about me being an English-literature major: You speak English.
Go become a doctor, lawyer, or an accountant.
She was a very bright woman.
She had a very progressive, left-of-center perspective on life.
I was taking some courses in Russian literature.
I was readingAnd Quiet Flows the Donor something.
I asked her if she felt nostalgic about Russian things.
She stood up, spit on the floor.
You grew up in Chicago.
When did your family leave Russia?My grandfather left in 1912.
He had to flee, so he didnt have much choice about leaving anybody behind.
In 1919, he lost his hearing in the influenza pandemic.
And he was in the U.S. Army in World War I.
Did he have stories about World War I?No, he didnt talk about World War I.
My father didnt talk about World War II.
People did not talk about their trauma.
My father saw a lot of combat; he was in the Battle of the Bulge.
He was 33 when he went in.
He could easily have gotten out, but he felt very patriotic.
What is your earliest movie memory?There are two.
One was a pirate movie where the color was so vivid.
Turns out, no the colors really were that vivid.
I have no idea what pirate movie it was.
The other, I must have been 4 years old.
There was a church near our house that used to play 16-mm.
movies starting during World War II.
I was watching the 1936 version ofThe Last of the Mohicansin black-and-white with a noisy projector.
Go doThe Last of the Mohicans.
Very similar to Adam Driver, it was the intensity, the authenticity.
Hes down for the cause.
Im down for the cause.
He said yes, but he thought I was crazy to ask him to do it.
So did Adam, by the way.
What is the secret to it?Theres no secret.
If this actor is embodying Enzo, who should be embodying Laura?
And Penelope Cruz is just a force of primeval power and uninhibitedness and outrageousness.
The hairdresser would show up, do her hair, then Id go and mess it up.
Shes so beautiful youd have to hit her on the head with a hammer to make her look bad.
Im fascinated with the women in the movie.
Lina Lardi is not a mistress.
She will be called a mistress in reviews because they dont know what else to call her.
Shes a second family.
Hers was the home.
Now Lauras sensual life with Enzo is over, and her son, Dino, is dead.
Shes in the world of that loss.
It felt to me like her grief was a virtual prison.
How do convicts behave?
How do you perceive the world when youre in a psychological prison?
She has no future.
There is no this horrible, cloying 21st-century term healing.Give me a break with healing.
Its the most unnatural thing in the world to lose a child.
When was the first time you visited a prison?
What was that experience like?Awesome.
Kind of an epiphany.
What I discovered is exactly the inverse of that, particularly in Folsom Prison.
So it will do so with flamboyance in the case of hair, clothes, tattoos.
I expected to see gray, sallow convicts.
Instead, I saw guys wearing violet running shorts and yellow T-shirts, phenomenal tattoos.
Its a surprisingly political movie with Caan rebelling against the capitalistic practices of the Chicago-based mob organization.
Was the film perceived as political at the time?The film was intended to be a political analog.
It has such an unconventional look and feel.Its not a style.
Its probably a doctrine.
Not a doctrine its anambitionI had.
What I seek in a cinematic experience is to be transported somewhere.
If you dont, okay.
I could absorb it, particularly if its got great writing.
No one has an obligation to do this; it is an obligation I impose on myself for myself.
I had an accidental career as a TV writer.
I came to L.A. at a moment when the industry was going through a real slump.
I showed up just when all those movies that never should have been made hit.
I even took a TV-writing course.
I got a D. Nothing was working.
Bob Lewin, who became a very good friend of mine, was a story editor.
I showed him some of my writing.
Ill teach you stories.
We dont know Michael Mann get rid of him.
In the meantime, I got an assignment to write an episode.
I was struggling financially with my patient wife.
After I handed in the episode, they asked me to write a few others.
So I wrote all of them.
And then they offered to hire me back, but I declined.
I became, for a moment in time, the flavor of the month, a hot TV writer.
What was it about them?The ideas were like 70s glossy disco.
I got immediately put off.
I didnt want characters walking around in powder-blue jumpsuits and this other 70s shtick.
If I couldnt control that, I didnt want to have anything to do with it.
The star, Robert Urich, was very good, but that wasnt where the show was heading.
Then I co-wroteThe Jericho Mile,and that became the first movie.
Id never taken that game plan further than the first move.
The Keepdoesnt work, but its a fascinating movie.
I know you werent really able to finish it.It could have.
It has great parts.
I knew exactly what he was talking about.
Its extrapolation and then the projection.
Cinematographer Dante Spinotti told me there often was a room on your sets with all your visual inspirations.
Do you still work like that?Yeah, I do.
I also usually venture to find a piece of music that becomes a poetic modular.
To be able to manipulate your cognitive process so you might land back in that emotional state again.
How do I want an audience to feel about this scene again?
And whichever character youre with, you accept their values, the way they think the world works.
Theres no external judgment.
Like Breedans conversation with his wife when he takes the grill-man job.
Or the scene when Ashley Judd waves off Val Kilmer.
That kills me every time I see it.
Youve always tried in your work to get inside the heads of these characters.
Now, its more difficult when youre doing a period film likeMohicans.What was courtship like among the Iroquois?
Theyd split the material goods down the middle.
It was exactly like Southern California.
He says, Im looking at you, miss.That comes from exactly that: I think I like you.
Lets go where no ones watching and have sex.
Its that kind of Would you like to go behind the tree with me?
I filmed a Nike commercial with LaDainian Tomlinson, the NFL player.
I wanted to know how he thinks.
Not just what he does, but what does he think about what he does?
What does he think before he does it?
Same thing with Muhammad Ali, by the way.
Alis a genius in his analysis of people and places and language and particularly boxing opponents.
I spent a lot of time with him talking about how he analyzed another fighter.
I had all kinds of illustrators trying to draw those murals, and they all flunked.
We shot it in a neighborhood called Mavalane B, which is next to the Maputo airport.
I got two kids who were 14 and 8 from that neighborhood, and they did the mural.
Theyre carrying Will in the air, and it was Muhammad Ali come to life.
It was magical and crazy, and we kept shooting.
He was so iconic in the Middle East and that region of the world.
Ali became representational of the forces of progress and the struggle of people rising up from below.
It was a cinematic style transposed to TV, which felt revolutionary at the time.That was the idea.
Some of the directors we initially hired were so self-censoring and self-limiting we couldnt work with them.
We paid off a couple of directors and hired directors who were ambitious.
I was very proud of the first two years of the show.
After two years, I wasnt made for running one of these.
I could have made gazillions of dollars.
But I wanted to doManhunterand moved on, and the stories nose-dived after.
Its like there had been some gigantic, worst surplus sale of tan paints and they painted everything tan.
I couldnt imagine these buildings with these streamlined Deco shapes all being beige.
We started doing research into the colors that they had been in the past.
And, of course, it was all these vibrant pastels.
He was particularly charismatic.
So I might pop him into the next episode in the guest-star role.
Did you have a favorite guest star?Miles Davis.
He wasnt the greatest actor, but he was the coolest human being on earth.
Particularly in the 50s, when his only rival was Ferrari driver Alfonso de Portago.
But I have two favorite experiences in television.
One wasCrime Story,and the other wasLuck.
Luckended abruptly,which was heartbreaking because it was a great show and was headed in a fascinating direction.
Our safety record far exceeded the safety record for horses on the Kentucky Derby.
We did everything responsibly in protecting those horses.
We became the poster child in PETAs campaign.
I have very bitter feelings about that because everybody who worked on the show loved doing it.
And David Milchs writing was great.
Are you involved in the second season?No.
Hes not going to disturb their habits or tranquility.
Its very absolute, which is kind of wonderful.
I know you were attached to the movieFord v Ferrariat some point.
How would your version have been different from James Mangolds?I developed a script with Jez Butterworth.
My theory is he drove into the wall.
But I thought the film was good.
I dont know how to write novels.
I knew everything about every one of those characters.
I had imagined all of it.
I keep very thorough archives.
What about the awesome specter of the cast ofHeat De Niro, Pacino, Val Kilmer?
Look, this is a crapshoot.
You want to reinvent these characters.
There are certain qualifications.
You have to be a great fucking actor to play McCauley.
I think Adam Driver is a great actor, like De Niro.
Then whos Hanna, whos Chris Shiherlis?
Who can take it someplace fresh?
I thinkMiami Vice,the film, is one of your masterpieces.
Have you made your peace with that movie?
Im just talking about the reaction.
I would make the movie all over again.
It doesnt have itsproper ending.Because we werent able to shoot those last three weeks in Ciudad del Este.
We shot for three days.
And so theres a very different ending that belonged on that film.
But no, there are parts of it the whole Cuba interlude was fabulous.
You take a lot of care with the sound of your films.
Sometimes people complain they cant hear the dialogue because a line might be muffled.
But its very expressive.
The tone is sometimes more important than the dialogue.Expressively and artistically, you have to decide what you want.
You have to be able to know what you want.
And what you want may be in the subtext.
Lets say somebody asks you where something is on a map, and youre explaining where it is.
But the woman asking you is quite beautiful and you want to seduce her.
Explaining is the activity.
Seducing her is the action.
You wont touch her, but the way youre talking to her the action is driving.
Thats the same with sound.
If its not actively generating an experience or contributing to it, I have zero interest in it.
Well, it really happened that way.
The way he picked up a cup if he was a convict.
He didnt pick it up like this.
He picks it up like this [wraps his hand around a mug].
I know audiences are underestimated.
Ive examined this my whole life: Audiences perceive way more than people think they do.
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