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It wasn’t a matter of approaching a stranger,” Mann said years later. “He would have been a terrific choice if he wanted to direct it.
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The real McCauley, who’d spent decades of his life in jail, was smart enough to walk away from a big score and months of preparation if everything didn’t seem right that detail finds its way into the screenplay, when the fictional McCauley decides to abandon a hit on a precious metals depository when he senses the police nearby.Īt first, Mann had no intention of directing his sprawling script-he approached Walter Hill about taking a crack at it. The script bore similarities to the actual case, right down to the coffee and conversation that Adamson and McCauley shared at one point. McCauley’s primary pursuer, detective Chuck Adamson, later became a television producer, screenwriter, and close collaborator with Mann.
Mann based the story off the real-life pursuit of Neil McCauley, a sophisticated robber who was gunned down during an armored-car robbery outside a Chicago grocery store in 1964.
Michael mann thief 1981 professional#
detective’s intense pursuit of a professional thief. Throughout the 1980s, as Mann refined his craft through three movies (between “Heist” and “Manhunter,” he also directed “The Keep,” a horror film with a troubled production), he was also working on a lengthy script about an L.A. People who want to put in 50-60 hours a week and go home and are not really conscious of life moving by, don’t really interest me very much.” “I find those kind of people interesting. “I always find it interesting, people who are aware, alert, conscious of what they do and are pretty good at it… Whether it’s a boxer like Muhammad Ali or a construction worker or a burglar or a guy running research in a tobacco company or pharmaceuticals company, like Jeffrey Wigand,” Mann would tell an interviewer for IndieWire in 2014. Like Frank in “Thief,” he’s a figure of exacting focus and sometimes glaringly odd behavior, a Mann archetype beginning to take shape across multiple films.
Michael mann thief 1981 serial#
That detective, Will Graham, is great at catching serial killers and other fiends because he can think like them-risking his own sanity in the process. In the context of Mann’s filmography, “Red Dragon” is his first feature-film stab at following an obsessive detective as he pursues his prey, in this instance a serial killer dubbed the Tooth Fairy with a nasty habit of slaughtering whole families. It’s only a matter of time, though, before Frank’s fantasy of a normal existence collides with the reality of his criminal pursuits, leading him to (literally) burn up every vestige of his life.įive years later, Mann released “Manhunter,” an adaptation of Thomas Harris’s “Red Dragon.” For many, the film is particularly notable as the first, brief on-screen appearance of cannibal psychiatrist Hannibal Lector, played with icy calm by Brian Cox. Even as he tries to snap up a middle-class lifestyle as quickly as possible, he’s plotting to break into a highly secured skyscraper and steal a load of diamonds from a supposedly impregnable vault. That “big romance” includes Frank buying Jessie a nice house with a big lawn and adopting a child under questionable circumstances. Almost immediately after meeting Jessie (Tuesday Weld), he snaps at her: “Let’s cut the mini-moves and the bullshit, and get on with this big romance.” He also spent 17 years in prison, and he seems in a borderline-angry rush to make up for all that lost time. The titular criminal, Frank (played by James Caan), has a reputation for pulling off complex, high-risk scores. This progression begins in 1981, when Mann released “Thief,” his first foray into feature films.
You could argue that much of Mann’s cinematic career up to that point was a rehearsal of sorts, allowing him to work on character and story points. Like many masterpieces, “Heat” didn’t emerge fully formed. detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) chases ultra-disciplined thief Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) across the city, but we also dip into the lives of characters tangential to that pursuit-wives, daughters, hustlers, marks, cops, and criminals who are often fully realized despite having relatively little screen-time. Michael Mann’s “Heat” (1995) is widely considered a cinematic masterpiece.