Dispatches from "Public Enemies," Part 3 (The Auteurs)

by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

I spent a few days in the summer of 2008 on the set of Michael Mann's Public Enemies, which was shooting at the time in Chicago. It was a night shoot—the death of John Dillinger (played by Johnny Depp) in front of the Biograph Theater. These observations and ruminations, which will be posted in three parts, were written at the time. Portions of these notes have since been used in other pieces, including a few posted here at The Auteurs' Notebook.

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“Who is the director?” I think that's a question most directors ask themselves, however subconsciously. What does it mean to give direction, to point a film? Just like you can define "movie" countless ways, there are a thousand different interpretations of what directing a film means. Is the director the one with the compass, leading a party through the wilderness, like Dreyer? Or is he or she the one who has map and needs the help of others to understand it, like Cassavetes? Is the director a leader who realizes his or her weaknesses, like Eastwood? The master of a painter's studio, like Renoir? The beloved head of a corporation, like Spielberg? A romantic commentor, like Sirk?

Part of what's fascinating and infuriating about Michael Mann is that the only thing you can say about his directing is that he is a director. What he does is direct movies; his activity, his thought processes don't seem to correspond to those of any other pursuits. He isn't an artist, a writer, a critic, an entrepreneur or a dramatist. He's a movie director, and he makes it seem as if it isn't necessary for a director to think that he or she is anything else.

The set of Public Enemies is fairly ordinary. Big stars, big budget, big crew. The usual walkie noise, the disinterested police, the undermanned cafeteria a short walk from the set (in this case, a church basement: cinema, always aping Christianity). From the standpoint of planning and casting, there isn't much that distinguishes a Michael Mann film from one by Ridley Scott or Gore Verbinski. If you arrived on one of their sets and weren't told who the director was, you probably wouldn't be able to guess. Watching Mann film a scene, two things pop into your head: first, you imagine how the shot will end up looking and, second, you realize how easily the scene could be shot by someone else. Take The Insider: "true story" plot, big-name actors, large budget, Panavision. These are the basic elements of dozens of movies made around the same time. Dozens of movies I'll forget while I continue to remember, say, the fabric wrapped around Al Pacino's face, or the video monitors shown together in the interview scene. A Michael Mann image is instantly recognizable, but not a Michael Mann set-up, which makes it feel as though, regardless of what he actually makes movies about, he could make a film about anything.

The consensus of the lower-level members of the crew is that Michael Mann is hard to work for. Some of them say they’re filling in for people who’ve quit. Others are hostile towards any mention of the director or the film; they’re sure it'll fail. They read the daily schedules and infer elaborate melodramas: Mann and Johnny Depp are arguing, Mann and Dante Spinotti aren’t talking, etc., etc., etc. It’s entirely possible that all of these things are true. Mann looks the part of a hardass; he's got the face of a college basketball coach.

Anyone who's spent time on the set of a large production knows that there's a certain enmity that can develop between the crew and the director: the crew, who've been hired to do their job well, know exactly what they're supposed to do. They're professionals. The thing about directing is that it isn't a job: it's work, it's an activity. A person who doesn't know anything about electricity shouldn't be handling the lights, but there are no prerequisites for directing a film. A director can be anyone. A director can come from anywhere. There is no education or knowledge required. The first directors had never even seen a film. Directors are all amateurs. Mann maybe even more so -- he has, with every film, moved further and further away from idioms. He's left behind grammar for expression.

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What's spoken about so rarely is Mann's direction of performers, his mad drive to cast egoists and passionless stars and then make them express something they seemed incapable of. Jamie Foxx has never been as charismatic as in Ali and Collateral. It's like the old Jack Lemmon problem: usually intolerable, but under the direction of Billy Wilder, one of the greatest actors imaginable. Colin Ferrell was never better than in Miami Vice, Russell Crowe never better than in The Insider. Heat is nothing without Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, and it's the best work either has done in the last quarter-century. It seems almost wrong for Mann to be casting someone as adventurous as Johnny Depp in the lead for Public Enemies; you almost wish he'd cast another actor you resent, just so you can be as astounded by them as you were by Tom Cruise in Collateral (but then again, Wilder could do wonders with willing actors, too—no one but James Stewart could've played the lead in Spirit of St. Louis, and he didn't look or sound one bit like Charles Lindbergh either).

There's that phrase: the art of directing. But it isn't an art—it's an act. Henceforth I'll write it that way: the act of directing. Every participant of a film's production is an actor in the sense that their actions affect the film (and what's acting if not action, inseparable from inaction?). The cameraman is an actor, the focus puller acts with his or her hand, the sound recordist acts with the microphone. The cinematographer plays the character actor to the director's lead, like how Chris Doyle used to be the Walter Brennan to Wong Kar-Wai's romantic Bogart. It's this indestinguishability between work and expression that forms the center of Mann's current approach. "It's not art, it's action." Maybe that's why many of the classic Hollywood directors hated being called “artists.” They could freely admit that a movie could be art, but they would never say they were artists. That's the classical studio model: not a single artist on set, yet what they end up producing together are some of the greatest works of 20th century art (remember: Rembrandt wasn’t an artist, he was a painter). But you can’t make something from nothing; there must’ve been art somewhere—and there was, hidden inside the filmmakers and the audience . That’s what made the movies so primal: it was like being shown a secret talent you didn’t know you had. A sympathy you didn’t know you could muster, an emotion or an intelligence you’d always denied yourself. The art of the movies belonged to those who watched them.