There’s a scene midway through Michael Mann’s new movie The Insider where would-be whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, played as a sombre obsessive-compulsive by Russell Crowe, is walking around a lawn, locked in internal debate as to whether or not he should testify that his former employers, tobacco giant Brown & Williamson, knowingly added cancer-causing chemicals to its cigarettes. Attorneys and police look on; the atmosphere is hushed; the tension excruciating. Eventually, Wigand walks up to his confidante, 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (played by Al Pacino), and says simply: ”Let’s go to court.”
This, in many ways, is a quintessential Michael Mann moment, as heartstopping as any death-defying Die Hard or Bond stunt. It’s also a perfect illustration of the singular genre that Mann has carved out for himself – the cerebral action movie. True, he’s as adept at choreographing bullet ballets as any number of John Woos – those who cowered and flinched through the protracted heist in Heat will testify to that. But the key scene in that movie was the verbal face-off between Robert De Niro’s career criminal and Al Pacino’s driven cop; two men painted into opposite but complementary corners by the force of their passions and their determination to pursue them, at whatever cost.
Mann has been called a ”hard-boiled sensualist”, a sort of feng-shui’d Hemingway, and the term could equally apply to any of his anti-heroes, from James Caan’s high-class burglar in 1981’s Thief; through William Petersen’s empathic detective in Manhunter, Mann’s 1986 take on Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon; to the cigarette-industry deep throat Wigand. Though, as Mann says in his throaty Chicago rasp, ”Jeffrey has to be the most confused and unclear character I’ve ever worked with.”
The Insider is based on the real events sparked when Wigand, former head of research and development at Brown & Williamson, violated the confidentiality clause in his severance agreement by going public with his knowledge of the carcinogenic properties of B&W’s products to Bergman; Bergman then put his devastating testimony on tape in an interview with 60 Minutes’ silky anchor Mike Wallace (played with brilliantined brio by Christopher Plummer).
However, by the time the segment was due to air, Wigand had become a central witness in the lawsuits filed by Mississippi and 49 other states against the tobacco industry, and his marriage had fallen apart in the face of intimidation and threats of imprisonment from his former employers; at the 11th hour, CBS, fearing litigation, decided to pull the interview, to Bergman’s dismay and Wigand’s disgust. Eventually, the opprobrium heaped on the network forced them to backtrack, but not before Bergman had resigned, Wigand had succumbed to a near-breakdown, and 60 Minutes’ vaunted journalistic ethics were left in tatters.
It’s far from a classic two-line Hollywood pitch: a Vanity Fair article on the case ran to 24 pages, and was filled with arcane references to tobacco industry practice and obscure points of law.
What, then, did Mann see in it? He clasps his hands and furrows his already knotted brow. ”I thought the story was less about big tobacco,” he says, ”than the effect on your life when someone decides to go after you, though in this case it was a large corporation rather than a gunslinger. Way back in Thief, you had James Caan getting into these mob-sponsored heists, and when he wants out, the don says he can’t; he, the don, now owns the paper on this guy’s life. That’s also what you have here; the company owns the paper on Wigand, and is trying to destroy him, completely legally. It’s brutal, and it’s terribly dramatic.”
Mann locates the film in paranoid political thriller territory; a kind of sweatier-palmed All the President’s Men, with Pacino’s Bergman standing in for Woodward & Bernstein. It’s one of the few major Hollywood products of recent years that’s actually about something – morality, conscience, culpability – and which also has the temerity to prod American apathy in the face of corporate condescension.
Given that it’s also a drama about credibility – Can Bergman trust the insular and tormented Wigand? Can Wigand trust the story-fixated Bergman? Can anyone trust 60 Minutes not to bottle out? – some of the film’s de facto participants have criticised Mann for being too close to Bergman, the one-time radical firmly ensconced among the New York media elite. Bergman acted as ”consultant” on the movie, and, while Pacino forgoes his usual grandstanding theatrics, Mann admits that certain events have been re-jigged in Bergman’s favour – while, for instance, Wallace is seen to capitulate at CBS’s decision to kill the interview, it was actually he, and not Bergman as the film has it, who called Wigand to break the traumatic news.
Mann concedes that ”there may be something” in these criticisms. ”I’ve known Lowell for a long time, and he would occasionally bring me stories. In fact, we started thinking about a movie based on this arms merchant in Marbella that he knew. Then he began living through the Wigand thing, and it was my idea to do this film rather than his. You know, Lowell’s integrity as a journalist is a function of his accuracy and his refusal to compromise, and that doesn’t make for a real pleasant guy to be around sometimes. He’s not real negotiable, and he can be a little irritating. We may have skimped on the irritation, but I was introduced to him by someone in law enforcement, who said Lowell was one of the three journalists in America that he trusted, because of that integrity. He could have stayed at 60 Minutes and cut himself a good deal, but he’s now freelance, because he didn’t want to tell his next source: ‘Hang with me, you’ll be fine – maybe.’ Comparatively, everyone around him is shameless.”
It’s safe to say that The Insider will not be on heavy rotation in Mike Wallace’s home cinema – the veteran newsman has already informed the likes of the Los Angeles Times of his displeasure at scenes such as the one where he watches, rapt, a recording of one of his own interviews. ”I respect Mike Wallace,” Mann insists. ”But a crisis like this throws what you’re made of into high relief and, you know, even Mike Wallace makes mistakes, and guess what, there’s nothing wrong with that. I think he doesn’t like the film because it makes him seem too human; he has this idea of what his image ought to be which is very adamantine and two-dimensional.
”Actually,” he continues, ”the thinness of these people’s skins surprised me. I was like, what, they never faced a little criticism? They stick cameras in people’s faces every day for the last 32 years and they don’t like the attention turned back on them.”
More important, he says, was Wigand’s reaction. ”That was the real responsibility, because Jeffrey is complex and awkward, and we had to construct his character on all these disharmonious elements. Like, he loves his wife, but can’t bring himself to say as much; there’s a lot of dysfunctionality in him. He’s a proud man, which I think is why he did what he did.
”Brown and Williamson leaned on him like thugs, whereas if they’d finessed him, offered him a couple of hundred thousand dollars never to tell, I think they could have bought him. They challenged his dignity and his image of himself; they manufactured him to some degree. So the day of reckoning came when I screened the film for him; if he could say that that was how he felt, that the intensity of what he felt was captured, then that was my baseline. Same thing with Lowell. And they were both positive, which was gratifying. Because every other character is kind of secondary.”
Maybe so, but nothing is extraneous in Mann-land; the director likes to refer to a movie’s ”genetic coding” – an all-embracing helix of image and sound, character and story, that fuses everything, from the way a character dabs sweat off his forehead to the lighting of a suburban street to the music on the soundtrack, into a seamless whole. This exacting scrutiny elevates the pulpy, noirish elements of his material into something more elemental.
Can you think of South Beach without thinking of the pastel slacks, avant-garde vehicles and skittish Harold Faltermeyer soundtrack Mann layered over it in Miami Vice? Can you hear In-a-Gadda-da-Vida without recalling the bleached-out, brutalist architecture of Manhunter and running to bolt the doors? The Insider’s visual architecture is fittingly dense; blizzards of coded messages racing through buzzing networks, and portentous decisions taken in claustrophobic boardrooms (though they’re not smoke-filled; this could be the most conspicuously cigarette-free movie about the tobacco industry yet made).
”Everything in a film is a part of the whole and acts on it, every colour, every object,” Mann enthuses. ”You’ve got to get it right. To research this film, Al and I hung with reporters from Time magazine, and spent time inside a news operation: ABC, actually,” – he smiles wryly – ”to imbibe that excitement, the way they’ll put tapes on the air in minutes and field their worldwide correspondents on conference calls. And I had Russell do chemistry experiments,” he chortles.
Mann and his actors are a mutual admiration society. Crowe, in particular, respects his bravery, both in his refusal to glamourise the truth, putting all Wigand’s ambivalence up on screen – ”We’re programmed to accept the guy in the white hat as the hero and the guy in the black hat as the villain,” he says, ”and that’s just not the reality of the human condition” – and his creative approach to casting.
At an initial meeting, Crowe was painfully aware that he was a 34-year-old Australian reading for the part of a 52-year-old American; on telling Mann that he thought it was a waste of time, the director stared at him, before leaning forward and jabbing his finger into the actor’s chest, saying: ”I’m talking to you because of what you’ve got in here.” For his part, Mann is modest. ”I’ve got tremendous respect for actors,” he says, ”but I don’t know if that’s unusual among directors, because I don’t know how any other director operates. But no, I love actors; they produce incredible stuff.”
Actresses, however, are a thornier question. Mann has been castigated for relegating his female characters to anaemic secondary roles – usually that of Frustrated Wife, as played by Ashley Judd to Robert De Niro in Heat, and Diane Venora to Crowe in The Insider – particularly when there are few directors as good at catching the seesawing rhythms of male-female intimacy.
Perhaps it’s a legacy of his upbringing in The Patch, one of the roughest areas of Chicago, which he describes as ”very aggressive, very masculine and very heterosexual” (Mann has a certain Norman Mailer-esque academic pugilist feel about him); or his penchant for guy milieux, from the Chicago PD of Crime Story to the wild frontier of Last of the Mohicans. A mooted future project, a biopic of Howard Hughes starring Leonardo DiCaprio, is unlikely to redress the gender imbalance. ”I just go with things that consume my interest,” he shrugs. ”It’s not something I even think about.”
Whoever’s peopling them, however, there’s no denying the power of Mann’s movies; now that the US tobacco industry is on its knees – the state lawsuits were eventually settled for $246bn, and others are pending – does he feel vindicated? ”This was never about getting the tobacco industry,” he says, a little testily. ”This was about telling the very human story of these guys caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Hell, I haven’t even given up smoking, much as I’d like to.” He laughs. ”In fact, Eric Roth and I spent a year and a half writing this screenplay in the bar at the Broadway Deli in Santa Monica, because it’s one of the few places left in California where you can smoke.”
And the world’s foremost action auteur breaks into a deep, tobacco-stained laugh.
The Insider has been nominated for seven Oscars, including best director, best picture, best actor and best adapted screenplay