“Public Enemies,” opening nationwide today, is the first film to bring Michael Mann back to his native Chicago since his feature filmmaking debut, 1981’s “Thief.”  Fellow Midwesterner Ignatiy Vishnevetsky was on the set for a few days in the summer of 2008 and has been collecting his thoughts over at The Auteurs’ Notebook.  It’s a gem of a feature for Mann enthusiasts.

Vishnevetsky digs into the man and his aesthetic motives, pondering this or that on-set particular and drawing connections to Mann’s portfolio throughout.  Most of the entries seem to have been written from the location shoot of John Dillinger’s (Johnny Depp) FBI slaying outside Chicago’s Biograph Theatre.

Watching the gun-down happen over and over again in real time as takes are refined and repeated, Vishnevetsky spends considerable time in part one analyzing Mann’s approach, observing, taking it all in.  Color me incredibly envious.

Here’s a glimpse:

Some directors sit in a folding chair in headphones, watching the video assist. Some talk through their assistants. Michael Mann directs standing up. During every take, his attention darts from the monitor (there is only one and only one camera; two more monitors are set up with the little tent to shelter them from rain, but they’re blank) to the action going on twenty feet in front on him and back. A director is responsible both for something real and something filmed. A director is two people at once—a director, supervising some real event, and a filmmaker, shaping some future image.

Mann paces. After every few takes (and of this shot, there’ll be dozens) he darts over to the actors. He takes Depp aside, standing close to him, talking over actions and movements which the actor occasionally mimes out. On this hushed street, you can hear just about anyone’s voice, but not Mann’s. He talks quietly. Or, maybe, he talks just as loudly as he needs to.

In part two, Vishnevetsky gets into Mann’s decision to shoot most of “Public Enemies” in HD, a bone of contention for some viewers.  If you pick up this month’s issue of American Cinematographer magazine, you’ll hear more from lenser Dante Spinotti on all of this, but here’s what Vishnevetsky has to say:

Shooting the past in HD—why not? 1934 wasn’t in 35mm any more than 100 BC was all in marble statues. The key idea of Ali was that the 1960s were a time when people actually lived, not just some set of important moments that we can look back on. That public figures were people. It was history without irony or bemusement. Mann shooting a film set in 1930s on video isn’t a post-modern conceit: Mann genuinely believes in video’s ability to capture certain things film can’t pick up (and vice-versa—hence he’s shooting part of Dillinger’s death on 35mm). It’s a question of video’s way of capturing background movement, of the way leaves fluttering in the background can overtake the image. “What’s missing from movies nowadays is the beauty of the moving wind in the trees,” D.W. Griffith said four years before his death. Griffith, who gave us the monumental image, wished for a day when the elements of an image could subvert its composition. For waves that could look so strong that they could overtake a figure framed against the ocean. 35mm, always forgiving to the human element, gave us a way to master the world. The figure against a landscape was a figure first and a landscape second. HD—especially Mann’s beloved CineAlta camera, and especially at night—is harder to control. It’s as like we’ve razed a forest to build a city and now find trees growing on every corner.

It requires a new thinking. The director who uses it has to be looking for something that he or she wouldn’t find in 35mm. What Mann is after here is something he’s attempted to get with film before and only sometimes succeeded. The image of Malcolm X (Mario Van Peebles) dying in Ali, for instance—photographed with such tactile focus that the image becomes less about the gun shots that Van Peebles’ eyelashes. We realize that he’s blinking, that he’s still alive as shot after shot hits his body. It’s Mann’s most violent image, and that’s because it acknowledges the fragility of life. The human detail overtakes the violent center. Even more than those first few minutes of Ali—where a jogging Will Smith is shot on washed-out digital video—it’s the start of Mann’s HD tendency.

Finally, in part three, Vishnevetsky addresses the issue of Mann’s alleged difficulty on a given film set, among other things, but in light of yesterday’s installment of The Lists, I thought it worth pointing to this passage:

What’s spoken about so rarely is Mann’s direction of performers, his mad drive to cast egoists and passionless stars and then make them express something they seemed incapable of. Jamie Foxx has never been as charismatic as in Ali and Collateral. It’s like the old Jack Lemmon problem: usually intolerable, but under the direction of Billy Wilder, one of the greatest actors imaginable. Colin Ferrell was never better than in Miami Vice, Russell Crowe never better than in The Insider. Heat is nothing without Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, and it’s the best work either has done in the last quarter-century. It seems almost wrong for Mann to be casting someone as adventurous as Johnny Depp in the lead for Public Enemies; you almost wish he’d cast another actor you resent, just so you can be as astounded by them as you were by Tom Cruise in Collateral (but then again, Wilder could do wonders with willing actors, too—no one but James Stewart could’ve played the lead in Spirit of St. Louis, and he didn’t look or sound one bit like Charles Lindbergh either).

All of it is worth a read, so head on over to The Auteurs’ Notebook and dive in.

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