If you love film and learning insights to favorite directors, be sure to check out this book. It's packed with interesting anecdotes, stories, and personal recollections from prominent director Michael Mann (The Last of the Mohicans, Heat.) It delves into his filmmaking process, stories from sets, and what makes him interested in taking on a project. I highly recommend this for any film lover out there.

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Quarto Publishing Group – White Lion, for an advanced copy of this look at one of the most interesting, and stylish directors working in Hollywood today, whose resume covers many genres and styles, but with a vision that is uniquely his own.

The film director has only eleven movies, and many television show to his name, but is own of the most unique stylists in the visual medium. Not only his films, but his television shows are considered not just classics, but classics that show a clear line of what was before and what followed. Heat, Last of the Mohicans,The Insider, Ali, even last years Ferrarri, all different genres of film, but clearly Mann-made. Miami Vice changed television, and police shows, moving from staid one camera shots, and police in uniform, to using the environment, pastels, and well groomed police officers that burned brightly even on cathode ray tubes. Mann's films have an outsider feel, a person making a stand in a world where bad people have power, the government is weak or corrupt, and where a person's word is the only sure thing. French film critic and filmmaker Jean-Baptiste Thoret in his book Michael Mann: A Contemporary Retrospective looks at the director, where his ideas and training come from, how he developed his vision, and a look at some of the projects that never came to be.
The book begins at the beginning, in Chicago, Illinois where Mann was born, and later was the setting for his first big commercial film, Thief. Mann was a good student, interested in English and literature, but in college he was introduced to film, specifically Stanley Kubrick, and Mann fell in love. After graduating Mann went to London to attend film school. While attending school, Paris was having it's summer of riots, protesting Vietnam, and the government with violent clashes everywhere. Mann went to Paris, with a camera and filmed shots and bits that he was able to sell to American networks. After graduating, Mann used these news contacts to pick up small jobs, and began to write for television. This led to a job doing Starksky and Hutch, not only in the writing aspect but in directing and bringing the show together. From there is was more television, and television movies which helped earn him his first directing job, the afore mentioned Thief starring James Caan. This moderate success led him to The Keep, a troubled production for many reasons, which might have set another director back, but gave Mann the need to prove himself, which he did with both his next movie Manhunter, the first to feature Hannibal Lecter, and the television show Miami Vice. And much more was to follow.

A very good look at an important filmmaker who is thought of as a person who makes movies for guys. Mann however draws on far more than that. The movie that is considered the ultimate Mann film is Heat, a movie that seems like a simple crime story, but is much more. There are scenes about families, and pressures, the fact that America's penal system continues to punish those who have paid their debt to society. Love, hate, racism, and of course trust, and living by a mortal code. Thoret discusses this and more. Thoret is very good at parsing a scene down, from point of view, color, subtext, even the words used or lack of words. Thoret can see things and explaining in a way that readers understand why this works, maybe why this doesn't that makes even a simple walk across a room, sound fascinating. The book is also well illustrated with movie scenes, and inspirations from art and other films that Thoret compares with what is happening on the screen.

Recommended for fans of Michael Mann, of course. And for fans of cinema. This is a very big book, and one that I enjoyed immensely, and has made me have to plan out when I am going to watch all eleven of these movies again.