Dillinger Captured by Dogged Filmmaker!

By MARK HARRIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
June 28, 2009

IT’S a Hollywood truism that for every movie that sees the light of day, a hundred others languish in the purgatory (or worse) of development. But how many movies owe their very existence to a roster of films that never happened? Such is the case with Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies,” a dual portrait of the bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) and Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), the young, ambitious F.B.I. agent who took him down.


Frank Connor/Universal

Johnny Depp and Marion Cotillard star in Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies.”

The film, which opens Wednesday, is unusual on many fronts. Its Depression-era setting, R rating and dense storytelling make it an anomaly, an Oscar hopeful planted in the middle of a season traditionally more accommodating to the shape-shifting robots of “Transformers” than to J. Edgar Hoover. It refurbishes a genre — the 1930s gangster movie — that studios have left largely unexploited in the two decades since Brian De Palma’s “Untouchables.” And, appropriately, it leaves a trail of cinematic corpses in its wake: two feature films, an HBO mini-series and a prison epic starring Mr. Depp. With its portrayal of two men clenched by obsession and its meticulous visual sheen, “Public Enemies” plays as if it were intended to be a Michael Mann movie all along. But it got there the hard way.

The project began its life, sort of, in the mind of Mr. Mann before he had even embarked on his directorial career, which now runs to 10 movies over 29 years. Mr. Mann, 66, grew up in Chicago, not far from where Dillinger spent his last months hiding out. In the 1970s, he recalled, “my wife and I used to go to art films at the Biograph,” the movie house where Dillinger spent his last night watching the Clark Gable gangster film “Manhattan Melodrama” before F.B.I. agents gunned him down on the street outside.
Fascinated by the period, Mr. Mann began work on a screenplay, not about Dillinger but about Alvin Karpis, one of the last of that era’s criminals to be captured.

The Karpis project “got me into the period,” Mr. Mann said, “trying to understand the history, imagining the tough, tough existence of these guys being pressed on both sides by twin evolutionary forces — on the one hand, J. Edgar Hoover inventing the F.B.I., and on the other, organized crime evolving rapidly into a kind of corporate capitalism” that had no room for independent criminals either. But despite several attempts to get the screenplay into filmable shape, Mr. Mann said he was never satisfied enough to proceed. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, as he directed several films that showcased his strong interest in cops and criminals — “Thief,” “Manhunter,” “Heat” — he began shifting his attention from Karpis to Dillinger, whose clean-cut looks and savvy control of his publicity made him a more movie-friendly subject.

Years later, in 1999, the author and journalist Bryan Burrough (“Barbarians at the Gate”) was at home in Maplewood, N.J., watching a documentary about another set of outlaws from the period, the Ma Barker gang. Intrigued, Mr. Burrough started reading everything he could on the subject and realized that he had found a great story: the astonishing chronological convergence from 1932 to 1934 of a rogue’s gallery comprising Dillinger, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly and the Barkers, just as Hoover was attempting to create America’s first centralized law enforcement system.

Mr. Burrough said he loved the idea of “a joint narrative of the period,” but not as a book. “I had two young sons, 7 and 5 at the time, and I didn’t relish the idea of spending the next five years of my life crisscrossing the Midwest in a rental car with McDonald’s bags piling up.” So he pitched it to Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal’s Tribeca Films, which sold the idea to HBO as a multicharacter eight-hour mini-series, with Mr. Burrough as executive producer and writer.


Michelle Litvin for The New York Times

The director Michael Mann in Union Station at Chicago.

Mr. Burrough said he quickly figured out that he didn’t “know the first thing about writing screenplays.” Beyond that the F.B.I. case files on those crimes and investigations had now become public in Washington and had made a book (and less travel) possible. By 2000 he had amicably left the HBO project, which continued in development without him, and begun researching a manuscript about the same material. Enter Kevin Misher, the studio executive who in 2001 left his job as president for production at Universal Pictures to become an independent producer.

Like Mr. Burrough and Mr. Mann, Mr. Misher was an aficionado of the era. “The cars are cool, the guns are cool, the girls are beautiful, the guys are dressed” in sharp suits, he said. “It has much more cool factor than just a quaint sepia-toned history.” Eager to revive the genre, Mr. Misher acquired the life rights to Purvis, the agent who, under Hoover’s mentorship, led the pursuit of Dillinger but broke with Hoover soon after Dillinger’s death and, disillusioned, resigned from the F.B.I. in 1935, when he was 31.

While Mr. Misher began work on a Purvis project, Mr. Burrough’s book “Public Enemies” was coming together, and the HBO mini-series was falling apart. HBO returned the rights to be resold by Mr. Burrough’s agents at the Creative Artists Agency, and Mr. Mann and Mr. Misher, now working together, quickly jumped in with an offer. Their plan: to jettison any material that didn’t concern Dillinger or the formation of the F.B.I. and use what remained as what Mr. Misher called a “research bible” for a Dillinger film. In mid-2004 they sold the project to Universal, thanks in some measure to a powerful partner: Appian Way, Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company, which stepped in when Mr. DiCaprio expressed a desire to play Dillinger.

Over the next three years Mr. Mann supervised several drafts of the script written by Ronan Bennett, the Irish novelist (“The Catastrophist”) whose qualifications for the job included time spent in Long Kesh prison as a teenager for an I.R.A. bank robbery. (The conviction was later overturned.) Eventually Mr. Mann and Ann Biderman (the creator of “Southland” on NBC) took over; the final screenplay is credited to all three.

Mr. Burrough assumed the film would never happen. “There are a million different ways for a Hollywood project to die,” he said, “and this had already died once. Then, in December 2007, I get an e-mail from C.A.A. saying not only that the movie had been green-lit, but that it was going to star Johnny Depp. I thought it was a joke.”

It was no joke. The now-or-never mentality under which every studio was operating at the end of 2007 had cost the project Mr. DiCaprio. Production of “Public Enemies” — in fact, of all movies — had to finish by June 30, 2008, before the start of an anticipated Screen Actors Guild strike. With Mr. DiCaprio committed to Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island” (opening this fall), Universal turned to Mr. Depp, whose own project, an adaptation of Gregory David Roberts’s novel “Shantaram,” about a robber and heroin addict who escapes from prison, was about to be postponed.

Mr. Bale signed on soon after, fascinated, “not only by Purvis’s pursuit of Dillinger,” he said, “but by his pursuit to achieve the vision of Hoover, and his reaction when Hoover seemed to compromise his vision of how to enforce the law.”

Despite its tortuous history, “Public Enemies” looks, on screen, as if Mr. Mann intended all along to reshape the material as a fresh chapter in his remarkably cohesive body of work. Like “Heat” (1995), which paired Mr. De Niro as a master thief and Al Pacino as a police lieutenant, the new film positions two A-list stars on opposite sides of the law — and like “Heat,” it’s a film in which the two stars barely share a scene. Like “The Insider” (1999), Mr. Mann’s most acclaimed film, “Public Enemies” looks closely at two skilled professionals who each struggle with personal codes of honor. And as in “Manhunter” (1986) Mr. Mann seems enthralled by the subject of a lawman so willing to pursue a criminal that he endangers his sense of himself.

“Honestly, no,” Mr. Mann said, laughing when asked whether the thematic consistencies are deliberate. “From my point of view, which is maybe not other people’s, it isn’t a mano-a-mano movie. What I was taken with was the love affair between Dillinger and Billie Frechette,” his girlfriend, played by the Oscar-winning French actress Marion Cotillard. “They’re symbiotic. He didn’t have a mother and was desperate for love of women. She needed a father. They were preformed for each other.”


Peter Mountain/Universal

Mr. Mann with crew on the set of "Public Enemies."


His movies are known for many things, from technological virtuosity to narrative complexity, but prominent roles for women are not among his trademarks. The character of Billie is something of an exception. Several American actresses wanted the part; Ms. Cotillard won it even though her English was less than rock steady. “But she’s ferocious,” Mr. Mann said. “She’s so focused and artistically ambitious that you knew that come hell or high water she was going to get there.”

Her character features prominently in a memorable scene, the film’s most overt nod to contemporary issues, specifically the use of torture to obtain information. That resonance, Mr. Mann said, was intentional. “In the movie when Hoover says, ‘Take off the white gloves,’ what he means is, turn informants using extortion, round up innocent family members and make their lives miserable, set aside habeas corpus, be pre-emptive,” he said. “And when Purvis, who doesn’t believe that, starts to go against his native self, it’s disastrous.”

As the start date of “Public Enemies” neared, Mr. Mann was coming off the exhausting experience of writing, directing and producing the 2006 film adaptation of “Miami Vice,” the 1980s television series that made his reputation. That film, plagued by production difficulties, threatened to spiral out of control, and disappointed at the box office, where it brought in just $63 million domestically (less than half its estimated production budget). This time Mr. Mann had to cram preproduction into 11 weeks, an unusually short time for a $100 million period movie that would be shot largely on Midwestern locations. “And then we had radical weather,” he said. “Hailstorms. So the movie became a race, in a way. Not a rush, but a race to get what I had to get.” He finished with a couple of days to spare.

Mr. Mann is known as a perfectionist, someone who wants every visual and technical detail nailed down. Surprisingly, he said that wasn’t the primary challenge on “Public Enemies.” “The biggest struggle, for me is always: Get the story to land,” he said. “Get it to work.

“You know John Dillinger is going to die in front of the Biograph. So by then the story has to have hijacked the show-and-tell nature of the plot. The story has to be about the inner experience of the guy, so that by the end, it’s not about him getting shot. Do you understand his inner experience? Is your heart with him? Do you know him? That’s the battle.”