Michael Mann at the Lumière Festival: “We must always look forward, never back”
For almost two hours, the director of Heat, Collateral or Ali unfolded the thread of his life as a filmmaker – between intimate memories, political reflections and technical considerations. A suspended moment, like his work: tense, lucid and exciting.
Lyon, October 2025. In the main hall of the Comédie, a concentrated silence settles before the applause rises. Michael Mann steps forward, discreet smile, straight silhouette, the look of an engineer and a poet. The director of Heat, Collateral Or Ali is the guest of honor at the Lumière Festival. For almost two hours, he unfolds his life like a sequence shot: without nostalgia, but with method and intensity.
“I was desperately looking for what I wanted to do with my life,” he says in a calm voice. Maybe become a psychologist, or a literature teacher… Nothing satisfied me. Then I took a film history course. One freezing night in Wisconsin, coming out of a silent film screening, I had a revelation. It was as if the sky opened and a giant hand came down to me and said: you will make films. »
This memory, almost mystical, illuminates Mann’s entire trajectory: that of a director who never turned away from this “hand of heaven”, faithful to a requirement born from aesthetic shock. Cinema, for him, has never been about a career; it is a total commitment, a way of thinking.
He continues, as if he was still looking for the origins of this vocation.
“My first short film was called Dead Birds. It was a mixture of everything I loved: the music – Chicago blues, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf -, the image, the storytelling. It was from this fusion that my desire to direct was born. »
All of Mann is already there, in this alchemy between sound and reality. The music is never decorative, it is part of the breath, the inner rhythm of its characters. It is, he says, “the pulsation of the world”.
The filmmaker then remembers 1968. The voice becomes deeper, slower.
“That year, I was in Paris for NBC News. The students refused to speak to American journalists, but they agreed to speak to me. It was a time of chaos and awareness: the assassination of Martin Luther King, that of Bobby Kennedy, the Chicago riots, the deaths in Mexico… The world was waking up. »
He pauses.
“There was this idea of a commitment beyond oneself. It shaped my view of the world. We could no longer be neutral. I kept that in everything I did afterwards. »
In his story, the 60s become the invisible basis of all his work: the political consciousness of The Insiderthe anger of Alithe melancholy of Heat. Mann never separates the intimate from the political, nor the form from the meaning.
“ Thief is inspired by a real thief. Heat comes from a real cop. Their lives intersected. What I wanted was for all the characters to have a complete existence, for us to understand their values, their contradictions. In Heateven the driver has a life. I wanted to abolish the stereotypes of classic drama. »
During these two hours, the filmmaker not only analyzed his work, he revisited it a bit like a philosophical or even moral territory. A place where every gesture has weight, where every look counts.
Then comes Aliand with it another way of approaching reality.
“Ali wondered: I’m a black man, Muslim, world champion — what should I represent? The film tells this question. I wanted the viewer to see the world through his eyes, to hear the music of Sam Cooke, to feel the energy of Africa. »
In Mann, biography is transformed into a quest for conscience. His cinema, both physical and spiritual, captures the moment when the individual transforms into a symbol without ever losing his humanity.
And when he talks about Collateralit’s the same logic: the search for a sensory truth.
“I always wanted to capture the beauty of Los Angeles when the fog reflects the orange lights. The film couldn’t render it. Digital, yes. There was a truth there: the city breathed differently. When a new technology appears, we must not use it to imitate the old one, but to invent a new language with it. »
The conversation ends on a simple, almost intimate note.
“My advice? Continually evolve. Be authentic, even if it puts you in danger. The worst mistake is imitating yourself. When we stop questioning ourselves, we die — artistically, at least. »
Mann, 82, keeps moving forward. Before leaving the stage, he confirms that Heat 2 should begin filming in the summer of 2026. The audience stands up, for a long time.
Sixty years after his revelation in the cold of Wisconsin, he remains this man on the move, striving towards the next image. In Lyon, he taught a lesson. Always on the move. Always forward.
