For Michael Mann, the detail, focus, and obsession he puts into every frame of his work is, what he believes, should draw viewers in. That being said, when the work is a two hour and forty-five minute biographical drama about a tobacco industry whistleblower, he recognizes the details may in fact be what turns people off.
Speaking in a recent interview with Vulture, Mann shared that his 1999 two-hander between Al Pacino and Russell Crowe, “The Insider,” doesn’t get the appreciation it deserves compared to some of his more popular features like “Heat” and “Ali.” Though the film received seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, it was a flop at the box office.
“For myself, that was very challenging,” Mann said of making the film. “It’s a tense psychological drama that takes place in two hours and 45 minutes. The ambition of it is the challenge: Can I engage and deliver the intensity that Jeffrey Wigand and Lowell Bergman lived through?”
The film follows the true-life story of “60 Minutes” producer Lowell Bergman (Pacino) as he works to share the information revealed by former tobacco executive Jeffery Wigand (Crowe). Both of their lives are soon turned upside down as the power of both the media industry and the tobacco industry are brought to bear on them.
“It’s a psychological assault by your adversaries, and it’s a mortal threat,” said Mann to Vulture. “Both in the construction of the screenplay that Eric Roth and I wrote, but also directorially and cinematically, how was I going to bring the audience into the intensity of that experience? Naturally, it was a wonderful place to push myself into.”
Mann’s work has received a great deal of reappraisal in the last few years with many retrospectives and special screenings of his work being shown around the country, as well as new restorations being released. Though he doesn’t like to speculate, Mann does think it may have something to do with each of films just revealing more over time.
“I put a lot into a film, and so I think sometimes they have layers of relating. They’re not simple,” he said. “They may be totally accessible — not all my films, but some of them may be accessible just as something that’s going to flow, just going to occupy you for two hours, or two hours and 45 minutes in the case of ‘Heat’ and ‘Insider’ — but there’s also a lot there, because my ambition was to put a lot of depth into it.”
