On a recent afternoon at his long-time offices in West Los Angeles, Mann, sitting with the youngest of his four daughters, Becca Mann, who worked closely with her father in organising the archives, talked about the project. He appears energised by their work together.
The existence of Mann’s extensive personal archive was the initial impulse behind the online project, the simple fact that all this material was there for the posting. From there, though, it began to take on a larger purpose.
“It is a spectacular, rewarding, creative act to direct a motion picture,” says Mann, 81. “It’s a very large endeavour. The movie is two hours – making it is a year and a half. So much goes into deciding, thinking through what you are going to do.”
We’d run across some kind of crazy, beautiful document that’s covered in coffee stains and it’s got the whole crux of Heat on one page
Continuing, Mann speaks to something deeper. “Directors have no idea how any other director makes a movie,” he says. “And so we each evolve our own particular process. This is an opportunity to pass that on, convey something I’m just very enthusiastic about.”
Ferrari, set in Italy in 1957, tells the story of a turbulent period in the life of Enzo Ferrari, the Italian carmaker who created the famed brand.
Played by Adam Driver, Ferrari is seen scrambling to keep his business afloat and put together a winning motor racing team all while juggling a personal life that finds him caught between his estranged wife, Laura (Penélope Cruz), still grieving the untimely death of their son Dino, and another woman, Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley), with whom he secretly has a young son, Piero.
The new website is structured around six scenes in Ferrari, including two that Mann describes as the “most pivotal” in the movie, a sequence in which the characters attend an opera performance and a volcanic argument between Enzo and Laura Ferrari at home.
Other sections of the site deal with the re-creation of the Mille Miglia car race and the horrific, fatal 1957 crash at Guidizzolo, exploring everything from the re-creation of vintage racing cars to the special camera rigs used to capture the stunts.
Some of the most remarkable documents on the site are Mann’s personal handwritten notes, in which he can be seen working through layer upon layer of meaning and intention. “The most critical person for me to direct is myself,” he says.
Those free-flowing comments are then filtered into more formal documents for distribution to other people in the production, as ideas are refined and honed. The continuity of the process is all the more noteworthy in that the date from one page to the next can sometimes jump a number of years. (Mann’s interest in Ferrari dates back to the 1990s.)
The site’s video pieces are more extensive and in-depth than those that typically accompany a movie’s promotion. They may toggle between rehearsal footage of Driver and Woodley and the final filmed version of the same scene.
Audio sources come from Mann’s rough pre-production recordings, such as when he and Cruz discuss Laura and Enzo’s relationship long before the film’s shoot. (Mann’s pre-production photographs of Cruz in the Ferrari family’s actual apartment may be among the most striking imagery on the entire site.)
Mann’s archival material has, up to now, been stored in multiple locations, divided among paperwork, film elements and physical objects. Becca Mann began working as an archivist for her father around 10 years ago, at first just to check that the materials were being stored properly, and then saw her involvement grow over time.
“This is what happens if you hang around with him,” Becca Mann, 43, says with an affectionate smile. “I go visit storage to see if it’s dusty and then …”
“In 25 words or less, it turned into this,” adds her father with a laugh.
Becca Mann recalls making discoveries of items that she was personally fascinated by, and knew that other people would appreciate the opportunity to see them too.
“We’d run across some kind of crazy, beautiful document that’s covered in coffee stains and it’s got the whole crux of Heat on one page,” she says. “That’s where wheels started turning about how to share it – what’s the best and most appropriate and also most direct thing to do with the stuff.”
Mann himself frequently uses his archive for research on projects. For Ferrari, Mann’s working process was the same as it has been on previous movies, with the exception that there was even more attention paid to documenting the work along the way.
In explaining his interest in the archives project, he reflected on how other filmmakers have inspired his evolving practice over the years.
He cites the deep and ongoing influence of Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, as well as what he learned about storytelling from his friend, filmmaker Sydney Pollack, who collaborated on early versions of the Ferrari project.
Ferrari was seen as a box office failure, making just over US$42 million worldwide on a reported budget of US$95 million and earning no major awards recognition. Yet that hasn’t diminished Mann’s feelings towards the decades of work that went into creating it.
“I’m confident in the film’s long-term relevance,” Mann says. “I believe it’s a good film. I think Adam’s work is great. Penélope’s work is great. Shailene. The writing by Troy [Kennedy Martin] is quite terrific. No doubt about that.”
“It’s emotionally conclusive, but it doesn’t leave you with: OK, that’s over, where are we gonna get a pizza?’ It’s not fast food. There are a lot of layers to these things.”
Which Mann classic will the archive explore next? “We don’t know what we want to do next,” Becca Mann says. “We’ll learn a lot about what people respond to. This project has an enormous amount of material in it. The objective is to do something activating and alive with the archive.”
The Michael Mann Archives project provides unique insights into the distinctive working methods of a director who has been at the forefront of Hollywood for more than four decades. Allowing audiences under the hood, as it were, only deepens one’s appreciation for the intensity of work that goes into making one of his films.
“I wouldn’t want to make a movie any other way,” Mann said. “‘Make it up as you go’ is not for me.”