Wednesday night saw the launch of a new regular series at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, produced in partnership with the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. Filmmaker Michael Mann was present for a Q&A moderated by former Times film critic Justin Chang in between a 35mm presentation of Mann’s 1999 “The Insider” and a 4K restoration of his 1995 “Heat.”
Though “Heat,” the stylish, epic tale of cops and robbers starring Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, has over the years become Mann’s signature film, the event was centered more around the brooding dramatic thriller “The Insider.” Co-scripted by Mann and Eric Roth, the film tells the real-life story of how a tobacco industry whistleblower, Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), and “60 Minutes” producer Lowell Bergman (Pacino) struggled to get Wigand’s story on the air in the face of legal threats and corporate interference.
Introducing the evening, Chang said, “‘The Insider’ occupies, I think, an interesting position, a curious position, in Michael Mann’s filmography in that it is one of his most roundly acclaimed movies and also, weirdly, one of his least appreciated.”
Chang noted that the film won four of LAFCA’s year-end awards honoring the work of 1999 — for picture, cinematography (for Dante Spinotti), actor for Crowe and supporting actor for Christopher Plummer as newsman Mike Wallace. (Full disclosure: I am also a LAFCA member.) “The Insider” would go on to be nominated for seven Academy Awards, including picture, director, adapted screenplay and actor, but would win none.
Mann, 81, took to the stage to a standing ovation. He said he had long known the real Lowell Bergman before the film and the two of them were working on a project about an Armenian arms merchant — “kind of a Sydney Greenstreet figure,” Mann said — when Bergman confided to Mann about issues he was having at work at “60 Minutes” with a particular story involving the tobacco industry,
“What you’re living through, that’s the story,” Mann told Bergman, dropping the arms-dealer idea to bring Bergman’s own tale to the screen.
“That’s the anecdote,” added Mann. “What it really was is that deep immersion in real people and personalities. And I knew how destructive the threatened litigation and the operations against Wigand [were], or what happens when a Fortune 500 company decides they’re going to destroy your life. So it was the idea of an intense immersion into these people, into these extraordinary circumstances. And the challenge of that — that was the real deal.”
Mann explained that there were secrecy precautions taken while working on the project for fear of attracting the same kind of crippling lawsuits the film itself is about. The production’s editing rooms had security measures designed by a former State Department employee who previously devised systems for the U.S. embassy in Moscow.
“We didn’t take much artistic license, but the challenge with doing 2 hours and 45 minutes is: Can I push the envelope of the experience of the film?” Mann said. “Get somewhat close to the intensity of how these events impacted on the lives of Jeffrey Wigand and Lowell Bergman? It destroyed Wigand‘s life. Bergman’s career never got back to where it was when he was with ‘60 Minutes.’”
Mann continued, “I know how dramatic it was in real life. And so what could I push to do in the whole making of the narrative to try and sensitize the audience, to subjectify you into their experience? See how they see.”
One very vocal public detractor of the film at the time of release was “60 Minutes” correspondent Wallace. As depicted in the film, Plummer’s Wallace briefly falters in his support of Bergman before recovering.
“Mike Wallace said to me numerous times on the phone, what he cared about is how he’s going to be regarded,” Mann told the Egyptian audience. “I wish he hadn’t been so sensitive. There’s a contrast to that: When I interviewed with Muhammad Ali to direct ‘Ali,’ because Ali had director approval, he said the thing that’s most important to him was that there would be no hagiography. He was proud of everything in his life, including all the flaws, because he was conscious of them and then tried to rectify his mistakes within himself. And that’s a very different attitude than Mike Wallace.”
As “The Insider” shifts from the specifics of Wigand’s story to the larger implications of corporate interference in news organizations, Bergman battles with his own corporate management to bring the story to broadcast. In one key line he says, “The press is free — to anyone who owns one.” Late in the film, Bergman also says, “What got broken here doesn’t go back together again.”
In his introduction, Chang said, “This was a movie that spoke quietly yet grippingly about an insidious threat to public health, about the corruptions of corporate-owned media and, above all, about the profound difficulty of telling the truth, whether as a whistleblower or as a journalist.“
And it bears mentioning, Chang added, that “25 years later, at a time [when] issues of public health and accountability loom ever larger, and following an election season that exposed the corruption and cowardice of the billionaire media moguls like no other, ‘The Insider’ does not speak so quietly anymore. It positively roars.”
