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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
"The Insider" director Michael Mann talks about corporate morality, muckraking and the drama of making real-life decisions.
Nov 4, 1999 | "Do you remember De Niro in 'Heat'?" asks Michael Mann. That 1995 crime spectacle was the last Mann movie to reach theaters before his latest, "The Insider," which starts out as an exposi of the cigarette industry, expands to debunk broadcast news and lays bare the existential anguish of white-collar America. Mann co-wrote "The Insider" (with Eric Roth) as well as directing and co-producing it -- but now he's busy diverting attention from himself.
"Think of De Niro," he repeats. "Gray!" he explains with comical exasperation, waving at his neutral-colored Los Angeles office walls. "That's what I aspire to -- gray!" This is Mann-talk for keeping the personal out of interviews. Mann doesn't want to speak about his non-working life. He feels abashed every time he does.
So he invokes the character De Niro played in "Heat": a master thief who lives in Spartan elegance and keeps off-the-job attachments to a minimum. De Niro's goal is to have nothing that would prevent him from disappearing in 30 seconds. Mann's goal is to say nothing that would distract potential viewers from staying hooked to his new movie for two hours and 32 minutes.
He needn't worry. I've been a Mann fan since his TV film "The Jericho Mile" in 1979, and I think "The Insider" is Mann at his peak. It's that rarity in movies: a realistic spellbinder, head-clearing and hypnotic. It's not merely a docudrama about Big Tobacco, Big Television and a whistle-blower who upends both. "The Insider" is a docutragedy about men who face, too late, that they are bigger than the jobs corporate America lets them do. It's a ravaging account of the hell their business dealings wreak on their bonds with friends and family.
And it gives "maturity" a good name. In his best stuff for movies ("Thief," "The Last of the Mohicans") and for episodic television ("Miami Vice" and "Crime Story"), Mann has been an iconoclast and a creator of icons. Using bold audiovisual strokes and veracious observations to tear down simplistic urban or frontier fables, he has erected more complex, modern and seductive mythologies in their stead.
Now his furious compassion burns away any patina of fantasy. In "The Insider," Mann's two lead characters -- Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), the fired head of research and development for the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation, and Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino), the segment producer who nudges Wigand into telling all for "60 Minutes" -- are knights in dented armor.
Wigand is tortured from the start: a perfectionist researcher who went to work for a tobacco giant and couldn't live with his moral compromise. Bergman's disillusionment is waiting to happen. A socially conscious, go-getting journalist, he studied with Herbert Marcuse and wrote for "Ramparts" before enlisting at CBS and teaming up with Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer). Bergman prides himself on protecting his sources, but he can't save Wigand from a media stoning.
What's already roused controversy is the movie's double-edged topicality. It doesn't just detail the cigarette companies' awareness and exploitation of their product's addictive powers. It also dramatizes how CBS News caved in when the network's general counsel suggested that Brown & Williamson could end up owning the network if "60 Minutes" aired Wallace's interview with Wigand. (Wigand signed a confidentiality agreement as part of his severance deal; CBS feared being sued for "tortius interference" -- encouraging Wigand to break his contract with B&W.)
Wallace and "60 Minutes" producer Don Hewitt have groused about their depiction in the script. But the only network figures for whom the film displays no sympathy are the general counsel herself (Ellen Kaden, here called Helen Caperelli and played by Gina Gershon) and the president of CBS News (Eric Ober, here called Eric Kluster and played by Stephen Tobolowsky).
The travails of upper-middle-class life and corporate careers are often fodder for movie comedy. "The Insider" approaches them without condescension or preconceptions; this film knows that the loss of medical benefits is a weapon as lethal as a knife or gun.
Wigand's struggle to preserve his good name and his kids' future becomes as palpable as the quest of any action hero. But Wigand is an inaction hero -- paralyzed by powerful forces, dependent on the kindness of strangers. And, despite some advance press reports, Bergman emerges as a complicated protagonist, not a bloodied-but-unbowed journalistic saint. He's bloodied, he's bowed, but he's strong enough to change his life.
Mann speaks in a Chicago accent, in a kind of elongated staccato; his disdain for personal revelation is reflected in his language. He likes to use words like "atonal," which are usually linked to more abstract arts like music or graphic design. Even in idle chatter about the visual sophistication of MTV-weaned audiences, he describes their ability to pick up "distonic little vibes."
But I do have one personal story. In 1981, the late Jonathan Benair, a screenwriter and voice actor deservedly renowned for his wit, discovered he was living in an apartment that Mann had once occupied, a block away from Canter's Delicatessen in L.A.'s Fairfax district. Not long afterward, Benair asked his favorite Canter's waitress why she'd left her post for a few days. "Oh, there was this writer," she said. "He used to come in and work at all hours, and he promised me that when he made his movie he'd fly me to the premiere." The movie was "Thief," the premiere was in Chicago and the writer was Michael Mann.
I seem to remember you smoking at the time of "Thief." You say you've been a smoker off and on, and that you stopped again before the making of this movie. I know a lot of creative people who use smoking as a sort of kick-start. Did it work that way for you?
You ever smoke?
Never did.
Well, I don't know exactly how it works but it's not a kick-starter. It's actually more of a depressant. It becomes a habitual thing and associates with memories. When I was a student living in Europe, I stayed up endless nights in Paris, where this very good friend and his wife lived, and we'd drink coffee and smoke lousy, lousy Gauloises. So there's an association, for me, with a certain kind of conviviality.
I mean, I would love smoking, except that if I take a cigarette I feel like someone punched me in the chest -- which is good, 'cause if I didn't feel that way, I'd really be in bad shape. If you could get the flavor of smoking and have an auxiliary set of lungs to take all the damage, then it wouldn't be bad. But nicotine is addictive and it's just lousy for your health.
And you have to be responsible. I'm a father. That's an issue. You have to think of the impact on your children of cigarette smoking, and of the impact on them of your own potential for early disease and earlier death. You are asphyxiating yourself on a cellular level. Everything is suffering -- your fingernails, your hair, your skin, your lungs, everything is taking a hit. That's the fact of it.
What was important to Eric Roth and myself from the outset was that there be nothing didactic or patronizing about this film. I would be offended if somebody had the arrogance and the presumption to tell me what I ought to do in my life. This film is not about "you all ought not to smoke" or "you all ought to smoke." That's an individual choice.
Eric Roth and I are both smokers. We were smoking at the bar at the Broadway Deli in Santa Monica while we wrote the screenplay. What this film is about is corporate power and malfeasance. And huge businesses that are highly profitable, that are really in a drug trade. From their point of view, they have a wonderful business -- they have a market addicted to their product.
In the movie we view what they do from the perspective of Jeffrey Wigand. And now we're getting into the reason to make the film -- the chance to explore the experience of a man who, like all of us, is far from some ideal of perfection. Jeffrey said, "I'm very much a company man." He understands corporate life, he's a product of it, he believes in it, he thinks all corporations should be run like Johnson & Johnson.
He talks about James Burke, the CEO of Johnson & Johnson, where Jeffrey once worked -- how when somebody was putting poison in Tylenol, Burke took all the bottles off the shelves of every store in America and created the safety cap. Burke didn't need the FDA to tell him to do it, he did it on his own, 'cause he's a smart business man who's also a man of science -- he's not gonna have Johnson & Johnson, his company, put on the shelf a product that's gonna hurt people. It's bad business, it's bad science, it's bad everything.
Now, Burke is Jeffrey's ideal. From that, one must infer why Jeffrey would go work for tobacco. Because, what does tobacco do? Tobacco hangs out a sign that says, "Wanted: Scientists without conscience, for double your previous salary." Jeffrey answered the ad.
But if this were "Mr. Deeds Goes to Washington," I wouldn't have been interested in making the film. Jeffrey is a normally flawed, inconsistent human being whose personality is somewhat atonal. But he ultimately personifies an anti-ad hominem perspective -- to him, life is not about who you are, it's about what you do. Jeffrey knew that if he went forward and spoke to "60 Minutes" and testified against tobacco, the sky would fall. And indeed it did.
Jeffrey knows that within his basic concept of being human, standards are often fungible, negotiable; he also knows that, at a crisis point, you are either going to betray them or you won't. And if you do, you're going to be less of yourself than you were before -- then some of you is going away. Jeffrey takes a position, the sky does fall on him, and parts of his life get deconstituted.
People think Lowell comes out very well in this film, but you can argue that Jeffrey comes out better. Jeffrey attacks Lowell bitterly in a couple of scenes. "What is it that you do? What is the function? You gonna inform people and that's gonna change things? Maybe that's just something you tell yourself to justify the status of your position. Maybe this is all infotainment, and people have nothing better to do on Sunday night." It was our intent that these questions would resound later on through the film. Because when Lowell hits a crisis, it's after things have turned around for him in terms of the story -- that's when he truly has some critical decisions to make.
And in all of the words the audience's subconscious has been collecting for over two and a half hours, Jeffrey has established the basis for the questioning of what Lowell's been doing at "60 Minutes" for 14 years. Lowell can tell himself, "I'm still that guy who worked for 'Ramparts' and I get my way with the show and have a larger audience." But is he really? It's a challenge to deal with these true-to-life issues. That's what made the material so exciting.
