I interviewed Michael Mann on Halloween night back in 2006. Tons of traffic. And there was a Lakers game, so getting back from the West side was a pain. The sit-down was part of a larger piece I was writing for The New York Times on Mann’s friend and colleague, screenwriter Eric Roth. It was a solid hour-long chat and one of the few moments in this business where I really had to buckle down and keep the geekgasm out of sight because not only is Mann my favorite working director, but he’s also a hell of an intimidating cat.
I pulled out my recorder, set it on the desk for the interview. He proceeded to do the same thing with his own recorder. Serious guy.
Anyway, all of this is a long way of getting around to the point that I was floored by Mann’s music collection. It may have become exaggerated in my head by now, but I seem to recall a wall of CDs behind his desk — TONS of music. It made total sense, of course, seeing as Mann has a knack for tossing wonderful, moody, sometimes refreshingly fringe music into his films.
In the 1980s he had a big crush on Tangerine Dream, for better or worse. Moving into the 1990s, the Randy Edelman/Trevor Jones score for “The Last of the Mohicans” was beautiful stand alone work (mostly Jones’s contribution), but Mann also made great use of a couple of Moby tracks in “Heat” (the famous closing credits finale and “God Moving Over the Face of the Waters” being a key moment in my own discovery of cinema as something more than I thought it was.
“The Insider” made fine dramatic use of Lisa Gerrard a year before Hans Zimmer and “Gladiator” made it “cool,” while the opening montage of “Ali” under a live version of Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home To Me” is the best part of the film. “Collateral” and “Miami Vice” allowed for Mann to hold on to an obvious interest in Audioslave for a one-two punch (with some nice Roots and Groove Armada mixed in to the former), and now, the trailers for “Public Enemies.”
Both have utilized Otis Taylor “Ten Million Slaves,” perhaps the first trailer doing a better job of showcasing it. The latest example, which debuted today, opens with an eerie tune that I couldn’t place at first. After doing some digging, I discovered the track is “Black Heart” by Calexico.
Of course, a number of our musically savvy readers probably knew that already, but it’s new to me. And further evidence that Mann knows how to use music to drive home his already striking imagery. Here’s a weird YouTube video with the song played over an old burlesque routine by Amalia Aguilar. It’s totally twisted and worth a link here at the end of this somewhat newsless day:
(By the way, there’s also a double CD out there called Director’s Cut: Music from the Films of Michael Mann if you’re REALLY into it.)