Michael Mann: Political Climate it’s ‘Like the ‘60s,’ Except the ‘Resistance Today’ Is in ‘South Park’
Mann said he’ll produce a Western titled “Comanche” which will be directed by Scott Cooper, whose latest film “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” played this week at Lumiere Festival
While at the Lumiere Festival in Lyon where he’s being honored with career tribute, Oscar nominee Michael Mann reflected on his time in Paris, covering the student uprisings of 1968 for NBC.
That year, he said, left an indelible mark on him and his body of work: “That experience was so formative to me personally, because ’68 was this pivotal year,” Mann told Thierry Fremaux, who heads Lumiere Festival, at masterclass. “It culminated in the Democratic Convention in Chicago and a police riot, in 500 students being killed, in the death of Martin Luther King, of Bobby Kennedy. It was the pivotal year in wakening consciousness of people.”
At the Lumière Festival, Mann is celebrated with a retrospective of 12 theatrical features, as well his pilot for the Max series “Tokyo Vice” and “The Jericho Mile,” a sports movie shot inside Folsom Prison featuring real inmates as extras.
He will receive a Lumière Award tribute from Oscar-nominated French actor Isabelle Huppert (Elle).
Regarding the long-anticipated Heat 2, Mann said: “We’re in the middle of negotiations and it looks like it will go forward sometimes in the summer of 2026.” The Amazon MGM-owned United Artists and producer Scott Stuber are in final negotiations to secure the rights to the sequel from Warner.
Asked about what different genre he’d be interested in, Mann said he could see himself directing a science fiction movie and mentioned he was a fan of “Metal Hurlant,” the French sci-fi and fantasy comics anthology published in the U.S. as “Heavy Metal.”
“I’ve always wanted to do a significant science fiction film. I haven’t done it yet,” recalling his fascination with “the new wave of science fiction in the late 60s, 70s and 80s.”
Mann said he “wanted to do a Western” and had already written two screenplays, one of which is for a film called “Comanche” which he’ll produce rather than direct.
“Scott Cooper is going to do it,” Mann said, without giving further details about the plot. Cooper was at the Lumiere Festival earlier this week for the premiere of his latest film, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, starring Jeremy Allen White and Jeremy Strong.
Mann also spoke about other filmmakers, including Christopher Nolan, whom he described as “good friend” and applauded for being “very active in the Directors’ Guild of America.”
When asked if he was potentially inspired by comics and Marvel movies, Mann suggested it was the other way around: “Chris Nolan maintains that Heat influenced Batman. I don’t exactly know how and why, except that it had to do with the idea of large-scale narrative that’s about a number of things.”
