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Michael Mann has repeatedly shown in films like A thief, HeatMiami Vice is Public Enemies that he is one of the greatest researchers of American films in the world. “It’s kind of like social media,” Mann tells me from his office in Los Angeles. “If you’re going to make movies, you can do them in different places and with different subjects every few years. For me, research is the best.”
With its unsettling nature and soaring beauty, Mann’s 1986 film Manhunter reimagined what an entertainer looked, sounded and felt like in the director’s prime. To commemorate his 40th birthday Manhunter: Final Cutthe 4K restoration and the director’s cut with three minutes of new footage, will see a theatrical release in New York and Los Angeles this weekend and a nationwide US release.
Adoption Thomas HarrisRed Dragon’s best-selling horror novel, Manhunter follows FBI agent Will Graham (William Petersen), who is fired from his job to hunt down a serial killer before his ritualistic execution on the night of a full moon. Graham has been called out for his ingenuity in finding the methods and motives of the killers based on their logic, although it has come at a cost. When we meet Graham at his private beach house (rented for the film by a pop artist Robert Rauschenberg) has recently returned from a mental hospital after a deranged and deadly confrontation with the last killer who captured him but came too close, Dr. Hannibal Lecter (shown on the first screen here is Brian Cox).
In a haunted and haunted dream, Graham wanders the crime scene at night trying to talk to the killer. As played, Petersen, who walks the fine line between dazed and hair-raising here, had trouble pulling himself out of his role. “Your brain may know you’re doing it, but your heart doesn’t,” said Petersen in a recent episode of The Final Cut. “Playing this game is a great activity to help you understand humanity better. But you have to be careful not to be misled.” As soon as the film wrapped, Petersen shaved off his beard and dyed his hair to get the vibe.
Stephen Lang, who plays a bankrupt reporter of the Freddie Lounds type, is remembered as a difficult but rewarding image. “I’ve worked with some directors who seem to be difficult, Jim (James) Cameron to be one of them. And when asked about the difference between the two, I said that Jim and I discuss everything. We disagree on everything. When Michael says jump, I usually say: ‘How far?’ “I don’t criticize Michael,” Lang said: “Michael can be bold and short. But you also know that he was very generous as a director. He can be many things. There is a restlessness to him, as it is in many artists. Michael is not only a filmmaker, he is an artist. Auteur.”
It’s hard not to see some of Mann himself in Graham. Known for his creative approach to research and investigation, Mann spent time in the FBI’s violent crime and behavioral science divisions while preparing for Manhunter. He also corresponded for a time with an incarcerated murderer named Dennis Wayne Wallace, who was the inspiration for the film’s killer, Francis Dolarhyde (Tom Noonan in the job description section).
“He writes what he calls ‘Jim Morrison Mann of Wallace said: “He was thinking about dating Cinnamon Cindy, a dancer who went to Mellow Yellow in Gardena, California. Their song was In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, which is why it’s used at the end of the picture. He also walked around wearing a Mad Magazine hard hat that read: ‘Help me with mental illness or I’ll kill you.'”
In Wallace, Mann also observed how childhood abuse contributed to cruelty and used this knowledge to create a character who was at once evil and sympathetic. Mann said: “If Wallace messes up anything, he’s disgusted in his face. “He was dragged to a tree outside the yard. And such abuse lowers self-esteem to a very low level. You marry a strong ego and that’s how you get Francis Dolarhyde.
“I wanted to bring up this contradiction of murderers. These people who commit the worst crimes that immediately harm themselves – how does one relate to that?
We sympathize with Dolarhyde when he falls for Reba (Joan Allen), a blind woman who works with him at a photolab in St Louis. Back at Dolarhyde’s place, they drink gin and tonics and, unknown to Reba, watch home movies of the family they plan to kill later. His eyes drift between Reba and the bikini-clad woman in the home video, a smiling mother playing with her child in the pool. There are some shared characters between this stranger at the window and the woman next to him that Dolarhyde seems to be registering. Later, they lie in bed naked and Dolarhyde kisses Reba’s hand while crying. You begin to see that perhaps beneath this man’s madness, beneath his lofty god-like view of his victims, there is an infinite need for love that he has never had. “For me this was evoking the Dolarhyde that was there as an innocent child,” says Mann. “A person who could have lived there had he not been subjected to such violence.”
Despite its macabre features, Manhunter comes across as sleek and simple a package as you can imagine. It has enough 80s B-movie DNA to make up for the bad things happening on screen. Manhunter’s greatest success is its marriage of visual appeal and psychological depth. There is a lofty, languid quality to the film’s visuals that has never been replicated: all hypermodern, minimalist spaces flooded with alien light.
The combination of Mann’s commitment to integrity in research and writing and his complete disregard for appearances makes for a truly satisfying and successful combination. Despite its initial disappointment at the box office, Manhunter has continued to dig its claws into culture and has had a lasting influence few would have seen coming. The amount that is controlled by the ice sets the table for modern information, especially the cooperation of Cliff Martinez and Nicolas Winding Refn. It’s hard to imagine the countless films and shows about crime history that exist without it.
“It was very moving,” admits Mann. “I was trying to figure out how to push the medium forward, that was in my mind. How can I make it clear that you feel like you’re in this place?”
