Michael Mann Archives

Since the summer of 2019, there have been bonus episodes, and in 2022, a flurry of conversations about Heat 2, the novel cowritten by Mann and Meg Gardiner that serves as both a prequel and a sequel to the movie. Mann tells the Los Angeles Times’s Mark Olsen that he hopes to begin shooting an adaptation of Heat 2 at the end of this year or early in 2025. Yesterday, Howard got together with Kris Tapley, the host of 50 MPH, a podcast dedicated to Jan de Bont’s Speed (1994), to record an “emergency broadcast.” The virtual doors to the Michael Mann Archives had just opened.

Becca Mann, the youngest of Mann’s four daughters, has been working for her father as an archivist for around ten years. “We’d run across some kind of crazy, beautiful document that’s covered in coffee stains and it’s got the whole crux of Heat on one page,” she tells Olsen. “That’s where wheels started turning about how to share it—what’s the best and most appropriate and also most direct thing to do with the stuff.”

The solution that Team Mann has come up with is, like Mann’s films, both sleek and spectacular, an efficient machine for sparking thoughts that fly off entropically in all directions. At the moment, the Archives host a deep reservoir of material documenting the intellectual, emotional, and physical labor that went into the making of Ferrari (2023), starring Adam Driver as the racing legend and entrepreneur Enzo Ferrari; Penélope Cruz as his wife, Laura; and Shailene Woodley as the other woman in Enzo’s life, Lina Lardi.

The Archives are divided into a good handful of robust sections, most of them devoted to crucial sequences in the film set in 1957, when Enzo was preparing his team for the Mille Miglia—a thousand-mile, open-road race from Brescia in northern Italy down to Rome and back again—and when Laura, mourning the recent loss of their son, Dino, discovered that Enzo had another life with Lina—and another son.

One section of the Archives is a deep dive into an opera sequence that simultaneously maps out, anchors, and intensifies the emotional energies charging between these three characters. We hear, for example, Mann and Cruz discuss how the wallpaper in the actual Ferrari home speaks volumes about Laura’s depression, and in one phone call, Mann and Cruz tell each other that in the middle of the night before they were to shoot a scene in which Laura visits Dino’s grave, they each had the same idea: Laura must wear thick and heavy black shoes.

There are twenty short films placed throughout the site, and if your first impression is that these are going to be boilerplate featurettes, that impression will be quickly dispelled. There is none (or at least very little) of the usual talk about how wonderful it was to work with this or that person or about how every genius on the set brought their A game. Unlike most promotional featurettes, the films in the Archives are not trying to sell you a ticket. For one thing, you’ve already paid for access to the site (and the entry fee, sixty-five dollars, isn’t exactly negligible).

The films were made to enlighten, and they’re accompanied by Mann’s notes on each character, pages from the screenplay strewn with handwritten tweaks and cross-outs, scene breakdowns, and photo storyboards showing us how Mann explores a space with his phone to discover the best camera angles. A section given over to the horrific crash in Guidizzolo, which killed driver Alfonso de Portago and nine spectators—five of them children—is fascinatingly broken down to the most minute detail and measured against historical documentation of the tragedy.

“Directors have no idea how any other director makes a movie,” Mann tells Olsen. “And so we each evolve our own particular process. This is an opportunity to pass that on, convey something I’m just very enthusiastic about. I think it is the best work that any man or woman can do, period. And I’ve thought that since I was twenty years old. And my enthusiasm for it is absolutely unwavering and unremitting.”