Actors and Roles: Michael Mann counts the stars

Michael Mann is a visual stylist of the highest order, but he has gotten signature performances from elite actors. He reflects on some of them:

Daniel Day-Lewis in “The Last of the Mohicans” (1992)

“There’s a tremendous confidence that you get as an actor that you as a man or as a woman can do what your character does. If you’re playing Daniel Boone and you know that you can be dumped into wilderness and have breakfast, lunch and dinner, four seasons a year, and survive, it shows. When Daniel gets to the point where he can do all these things, I could see it as the director, and I think you see it as an audience. You see the guy, and he is the guy.

Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in “Heat” (1995)

“De Niro’s thief is an absolute modernist character. He has an ideology, he follows it, it’s his course through life to get where he wants to go. He has no attachments, no women, no anything. As soon as he deviates from it, it’s like a cosmic billiards table; there’s an instantaneous reaction … he’s lost all of his navigational gear. The way he believed life worked determined what happened to him and the cause-and-effect within the story. Bobby is a fantastic actor, and Al, who is brilliant in everything he does. Al’s [LAPD detective] is motivated by hunting. Not to serve and protect. The things that are evil in the world impact him the same as everyone else, but if you say, ‘Why do you do what you do?’ and you’re only allowed one answer, not two or three, it’s the ego of a big-game hunter. He’s like a junkie; he’ll sacrifice everything, including the people he cares about, to this.”

Will Smith in “Ali” (2001)

“Will Smith is one of the best people on the planet. He is unique, an unbelievable guy. Will and I both viewed the movie as Ali’s quest for identity … he realizes that people around the world have come to view him as a force of everything progressive, and they fantasized that he would be an agent that would bring them up from below. That’s his image to them and he had to fulfill that. Even if it killed him he couldn’t let himself be beaten by George Foreman…”

Tom Cruise in “Collateral” (2004)

“Tom played a hit man, and he was fantastic in his preparation. We stalked people. We set up hits. We did all kinds of stuff to the second [assistant director]. The second AD would come to work and he’d feel a slap on his back, and there’s a Post-it note on his back, and he’d turn around and there’s Tom Cruise. ‘You’re dead.’ Tom would have been stalking him for two days.”

Johnny Depp in “Public Enemies” (2009)

“We have a lot of mutual respect. I like him and I think he likes me … he and I really got to a point of complete and total rapport — this is going to sound really weird — in France after we were done and we were releasing the movie. It was a very difficult shoot. Johnny is an extremely talented guy. He took himself to some places — in some of those intense scenes — to places I hadn’t seen him take himself before. He doesn’t have formal acting training but has such a strong, intuitive sense of things. He reacts in very positive ways to things like hair and wardrobe, like Lawrence Olivier, who only became the character when he looked in the mirror. So Johnny has good company. He kind of comes alive with the feeling, the texture of things.”

Geoff Boucher