Words matter. These are the best Michael Mann Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Miami is one of these great places that is a really sensual, physically beautiful place.
By the time I was 21, I knew what I wanted to do, and that was to direct films.
The best-kept secret about Don Johnson is the fact that he is a terrific actor.
Blu-ray and the technologies emerging around it are the premiere format for reproducing what we do as filmmakers. There’s more space on the disc, more bit rate.
Video looks like reality, it’s more immediate, it has a verite surface to it. Film has this liquid kind of surface, feels like something made up.
To just tell a story from beginning, middle and end doesn’t motivate me that much.
Could I have worked under a system where there were Draconian controls on my creativity, meaning budget, time, script choices, etc.? Definitely not. I would have fared poorly under the old studio system that guys like Howard Hawks did so well in. I cannot.
In ‘The Insider,’ I had violence – lethal, life-taking aggression – all happening psychologically, all with people talking to other people.
There’s a tired notion that the photojournalist has to be disengaged to be able to shoot what he shoots, and that’s such a cliched idea of what the experience is. Of course they’re engaged, and they’re not distanced.
I realized horses have personality when I bought one and I had one, who’s now out to pasture, a horse named Drifter. Before that, I was a city boy. Horses, I used to go out to the LaBagh Woods and ride at a stable once every two years or something; no idea about horses. Dogs, I knew, had personalities, but not horses.
I think it’s easy for directors to stay fresh more than actors, especially once an actor becomes a star. It’s hard for Russell Crowe to walk down a street or take a subway. I can fly coach.
Dillinger at one point was the second most popular man in America after President Roosevelt. And he was a national hero for a good reason. He was robbing the very institutions, the banks, which had afflicted the people for four years, and after four years nothing was getting any better.
We take safety very, very seriously on every film I make, and that’s why I’ve never had a serious accident or anybody killed when I make a picture.
I own a horse and ride, but I don’t know racing or betting.
Personally, I find looking at all of the supporting materials and bring it all back to me – the people I worked with, the experience of working on a project – makes it come alive again. So, I try to put those experiences into my commentary for the viewers.
I don’t underestimate audiences’ intelligence. Audiences are much brighter than media gives them credit for. When people went to a movie once a week in the 1930s and that was their only exposure to media, you were required to do a different grammar.
I’ve never made any film that I wouldn’t go back and re-edit.
A 65-ft.-wide screen and 500 people reacting to the movie, there is nothing like that experience.
Suffice it to say, every actor works differently. Laurence Olivier would put on his costume and when the wardrobe was right, he was in character. That sounds superficial, but it’s true, and look at the results.
I don’t story board. I do something else, which is, I block it. We then train to the blocking. In other words, when everybody’s training, they’re actually training a lot of the moves that we are definitely going to use, and then, I do a lot of photography of that, and that becomes where the cameras go.
I like change. I don’t like being in the same room for too long.
There’s people who live life authentically and there’s people who live a life of fabrication. And it begins with the question of how you’re gonna do your time. And these are observations I made about Folsom when I was there with Dustin Hoffman when he was directing ‘Straight Time.’
Music is always key to me, whether it’s ‘Miami Vice’ or not ‘Miami Vice.’ It’s dictated by the story, about what Crockett and Tubbs and Isabella and Trudy are doing.
I see the world from the perspective of a 5’8″ person, not someone who is 6’4″. so naturally, I’m going to choose certain lens heights over and again… Sometimes nature makes choices for you.
HBO is not an advertiser-based model, it’s a subscription model. So what’s significant to HBO is not necessarily the debut of an episode, it’s the cumulative numbers.
