Michael Mann

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0:52Michael Mann and I met about 25 years ago through architecture. On a trip to London, he asked to visit the Lloyds Building, designed by my husband, Richard Rogers. For us, it was an honor, for if Michael was a fan of Richard's architecture, Richard was a huge fan of Michael's movies. In fact, when watching Alley, Miami Vice, Collateral, my arm would be constantly squeezed, not due to a dramatic moment of fear or tension or mystery, but at the way the buildings, streets, airports, bridges, and interiors, even elevators, were portrayed on screen. Over long dinners, Richard and Michael often compared making a movie to making a building.

1:39Michael once said, Well, at least, Richard, in a building you can say to a client, If you remove a column, the building will fall down. Try saying that about a scene to a producer. Of all the movies Michael has made, though, the one that I consider the greatest, is 60 seconds long, shot entirely underwater in a swimming pool. Michael and Summer with their children swimmingly wishing a happy birthday to Richard. No architecture in this movie, just love.

2:17So Michael, would you read the recipe for? Sure. This is a southern Italian version of a vitello tonnato with cold roast veal, fresh tomato. So it's 500 grams of cold roast veal, 250 milliliters of tomato sauce, six basil leaves, 50 grams of salted capers, two lemons, and extra virgin olive oil. Slice the veal as finely as possible. Squeeze the juice of one lemon and mix it with three times its volume of olive oil and season. and lay the veal slices over each plate, season with sea salt, and drizzle with the dressing. Spoon over the tomato sauce and scatter with the capers and basil leaves, and then drizzle with olive oil.

3:03This dish, Vitello Tonato, is very northern, and this is a southern version. And I wonder whether you have traveled from north to south in Italy. What is your Italian traveling experience? Very, but mostly we spent a little time in Naples once by a time, and then in Venice and drove around the Dolomites at different times. But mostly it's been in the media, Romagna, around Modena, Maranello, where the Ferrari factory is, then in Bologna, Milan, where all the great design is. It's very different. You were just describing northern Italy. I don't know what you ate in Naples, and this dish being so southern, that it's not even region to region or city to city.

3:50It can be village to village, family to family, the way that people eat in Italy. First time I visited the Ferrari factory, I went across the street to Cavalino, a restaurant that has been there since the 1950s. And the cuisine is modanese. So it's a big metal cart full of horribly boiled meat. The Lito Misto, that's right. I actually really love it, but they do cook it a very long time. They cook it a long time. And you get the tongue, and you get everything. My grandmother had the knack of totally destroying meat. Oh, really? I think it came from being a Russian immigrant or living. Tell me about her.

4:35So just starting going back to your child, so your grandparents came, both of them from Russia? My grandparents came from Russia. They came from about 70 or 80 miles north of Chernobyl. Did they come from the same place, or did they meet in America? No, they came from the same place. They came from overage. My grandfather had to leave under very traumatic circumstances in 1912, and it took him 10 years to get my father, who was one at the time, and my grandmother, to the United States. So your grandfather came first in 12, and then did he go directly to Chicago? No, he went to Whitechapel. He was in the British Army.

5:08Then he wasn't in the British Army. Then he went to Hartford, Connecticut. Then he was in the American Army. In the First World War then. First World War, yeah. And then 1919, he lost his hearing in the flu epidemic. My grandfather died in the flu epidemic. Did he? Same generation, you know. And then finally, in 1922, he was able to get my grandmother and my father out, and then they moved to Chicago. But she was a spectacular woman, very, very witty, very politically, very progressive. But what she killed as a cook were knishes. She made these cheese. Describe a knish. Knish is kind of a, it's a bread, small bread thing that's cooked in olive oil and has either meat or cheese on the inside.

5:54And what it's made in a cast iron frying pan that's been around for 40 years, it's fantastic. And I remember one time I was driving home from her house. I had picked up a blue earthenware container of these things, and it had a seat of a car. It was a 54 Plymouth. It was my Uncle Sam's car. He let me drive the car. There was a lot of traffic on California Avenue, and I was driving back to our house. And so I took a hard light on Catalpa and took a left down an alley and hit a gigantic pothole in the alley. And in the way time slows down, I saw this earthenware container of my grandmother's kanish start to fall off the seat in slow motion.

6:42And I saw myself heading to a telephone pole. And in an unthinking moment, it was either save the kanishes or save the car. So I reached for the kanishes and just crashed the car into the pole. To die for a kanish might not have been a great death. But that's how much it meant. It's kind of all the important early themes of basically immature life from that point forward, which is driving cars and saving conditions. So your grandmother was the cook. She made the conditions. Was she the one that overcooked the beef, or was that your mother? No, she overcooked the beef. I don't know. I think it was a standing joke in the family.

7:21My brother and I, you would chew it until your jaws ached and you couldn't masticate this. What else did your grandmother? Did she live with you, by the way, your grandmother? No, no, she didn't. So you would go to her house. Right. Was that an event to eat in her house? And my father stopped and saw her every day. And later in life, when I knew more about life, I realized it was because of probably the 10 years that they were alone together, there was a certain bond there. Because while my grandfather was gone, came the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Civil War. and there were pogroms in the area through the Civil War from the white Russians.

8:02So, you know, there were hard times. If your grandmother brought her food, did your mother, did they move towards American food? My mother was born in the United States. Okay. So my mother was born. My grandmother, no, my grandmother cooked, you know, if you cooked the way they, traditionally the way they did, you went to the store, you bought a live chicken, they killed the chicken, you brought the chicken home, you know, I'm now going back to the 1950s. And what was it like in your house? Who did the cooking at your house? My mother. Did your father ever venture into the kitchen? Yeah, he did.

8:34And he had a real sensibility for cuisine. In what way? For fruit, number one, but then also finely imported mushrooms from Poland, for example. A certain kind of mushroom barley soup. or when I was working for my father when I was a kid, when I was like 12 to 16, he had a supermarket, a small supermarket. And in the winter, I was delivering groceries, and it's 10 below and you're carrying groceries in a wagon or something, carrying a Porsche so you got cold. And he always had some gigantic pot with some kind of a massive stew, cooking in it all day long. In the grocery store. In the back of the grocery store.

9:19It was a very family kind of affair. And exotic kinds of smoked fish from Eastern Europe would show up. There'd be something hanging in the basement. But he would sell that. No, that's what we had at home. And the grocery store sold? It was just a big, yeah, just a standard kind of supermarket, neighborhood supermarket. What was the area? It was near Northwest Side. So it was kind of a mixed, kind of lower middle class, working class area. Very, very diverse population. Two waves of Polish immigrants, a very upper middle class wave of Polish immigration from the 1920s. Very sophisticated people.

10:03Jewish, Italian, some Irish. So it was quite mixed. I saw, when they had, we used to go to a church, right after, must have been 1946, 47, right after the war. there was a neighborhood church a block away that showed movies in the basement, old black and white 16mm movies. And I remember being taken there when I was very young, and I saw a movie, and I just remembered certain things about it. In 1991, when I couldn't figure out what to do next, what film to do next, I remember that railing around in my brain was this image of a Iroquois Indian with head shaved bald and combined with a red coat, a British uniform, 18th century British uniform soldier.

10:49And that's such an anomaly because we always saw, as a kid, you always saw Native Americans and cowboys or something. And that stuck in my mind and also a corollary tragedy of the death of a young woman. And I realized that this had been rattling around in my head since I was about three. And so then it was Last of the Mohicans. And so I said, well, you've got to go do Last of the Mohicans. And so this old neighborhood really had this resonance. I think things impress themselves on your memory when you're very young in ways that are huge. And then at home, who is it? You have a brother, a sister?

11:23I had a brother. And did you sit down for meals? Did your father come back? Absolutely. We waited. My father came home. He took a bath. He took a shower. We formally sat down. And he always had a shot of whiskey. He had the shot of whiskey. He had a shot of whiskey. and we had a formal dinner every night. And did that continue until you left home? That continued until I left home, yeah.

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13:28When you left home, what was that like, going from being cooked for every day and then being out there? Did you cook yourself? Where were you after? I did. I went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison. And then after four years there, I went to London. And yes, I did. I cooked for myself. I also was working as kind of a short order cook, doing breakfast in a girls' dormitory in the morning. In Wisconsin. So it was just interesting getting up at 5.30 in the morning in Wisconsin in the winter and going to cook food. A lot of food from your grandmother to your mother to the grocery store to working.

14:07Did you ever work in a restaurant? Yeah, I did. I was a short order cook one summer in a restaurant. A cook, not front of house. You worked in a back. Yeah, which is crazy. You will blanch at some of these stories from these places. We used to, because there'd be this massive rush, and it was a memory test because you were having to remember all these orders at the same time. and if somebody ordered a steak, the way we would get a steak done quickly, somebody would grab it out of the freezer, they'd throw it down the kitchen, we would catch it and dump it in a French fryer. In the fryer? In the fryer, yes.

14:37Absolutely horrible. We're probably guilty of some form of aortic manslaughter or something because there's probably regular diners who had early heart disease because they ate these things. Yeah, and that was Wisconsin. This is not Hokusou. But what about London? Because I was in London in the 60s, and I always felt there was a kind of beginning of that multicultural excitement of food. Rationing was only 15 years before, after the war, I think. And then in the 60s, there seemed to be a lot more food of Greece and Italy. It was much more vibrant. Did you remember the food of the 60s? Totally, absolutely.

15:16What was it like? My experience with Bigger Shore Cook and all this stuff, This is in the early 60s in the States. And I talk about working for my father. This is in the 1950s. But in 65, I went to London to go to film school for two years, and I stayed there for six years. And the cuisine was basically beans on toast and transport calf. Yeah. What about chip sandwiches? Did you ever have that? I wasn't big on chip sandwiches. That was the thing that amazed me. I was really big on transport calves. Yeah, did you? Beans on toast or you're having, you know, or eggs. I used to love swimming in Greece.

15:53Bacon fat, maybe, large. And the revelation was, I couldn't afford it, but the revelation was Greek food, particularly. Particularly, there's a heavy influence from Cypriot food. So it's like chef taglia sausage and those kind of things. So there's these little funky kebab stands around Charlotte Street, just north of Oxford Street, and an Indian food, which is a revelation. Yeah. Where did you live? I lived all over. I lived in Queensway very briefly, and then we were on New Kings Road. Then I lived in Balaam, then Clapham South, and back in South Ken. Did anybody ever take you to a restaurant that was...

16:30Yes. Yeah. How did that happen? I actually started making a little bit of money. And then the thing that was so attractive was, I think on Fulham Road, there was an Italian restaurant. and I was living on 10 pounds a week, literally it's five pounds for rent, five pounds for rent. But the ambiance of a nice Italian restaurant on a spring or a summer day, you know, on a Saturday or Sunday with families, which to me was so touching about the River Cafe because that ambiance is there in its fullest, most technicolor form in your restaurant and this whole extended family that you created. But were you taken to, you were in film school then?

17:15Right, I was in film school. Was that in London or outside? No, it was in London. It was in Covent Garden. It was on Charlotte Street, then I moved to Covent Garden. It was a London film school. Yeah. And what was that like? That was great. For the first time in my life, I was doing exactly only what I wanted to do, which is make film, which was a revelation to me when it happened. In my junior year at Wisconsin, I took a film history course for a, kind of cynically, I thought, oh, there's going to be three credits for looking at movies and I didn't expect to get completely mugged and hijacked by this whole notion, which occurred in a flash of light like the skies parted and the bolt of lightning came down and said, you will do this.

17:54You will become a film director. And from that point on, that was it. That's what I wanted to do. Who was there with you? Was Ridley Scott there? Was Alan Parker and Ridley Scott? Were they in the same... Did you know them then? I knew Ridley. I didn't know Alan Parker. I met Alan Parker years later, but I knew Ridley in the late 60s. I started a small production company after I got out of film school in London. We made some commercials and documentaries, and I shot some of Paris after majoring in 68. I was politically pretty involved. So life was changing and evolving. At one point, I worked at 20th Century Fox towards 69 in production.

18:33By that point, I was making enough money to kind of live reasonably. and I had a production manager I worked with whose wife was French and he was quite a spectacular cook. That was probably the first serious exposure I had to really good cuisine. Home cooking. Yeah, it was home cooked French food. And then we were spending a lot of time in France at that point and traveling to Morocco and Italy. So the world was getting to be a much larger place. And France, was that huge for you, being in Paris? Well, 68 was pretty wild. Well, we got there much later. We got there in sort of 71, but there were still the buses full of police and the Daniel Combe-Bendit.

19:12Well, I interviewed Combe-Bendit, Alain Gersmar, Alain Cravin. Wow. Do you have that footage? No. It wound up in the bowels of NBC News someplace. Can we not find it? And I tried to find it years and years ago and couldn't find it. Did you make a documentary about that from beginning to end, or is it footage for the news channel that you would send? The focus of the documentary was that the 6th of May, June had happened and what's going to be the after effect. And that's what it was really focused on. And the production at the time, which was partially true, partially not, was that the major impact was going to be amongst teenagers in the Lisez.

19:52And that there was a radicalization of the young workers, particularly young workers at the Renault factory who were CGT. and they started to look at the CGT in a very different light as being basically reactionary. But the idea that you're in a country and 40 % of the population is on strike, and if you turn on ORTF at 6 o 'clock to watch the news, there'd be some girl, she might or may not, reading the news, sitting on a desk, she may or may not have her shirt on. I mean, it was... It was close. Everybody, a youth generation had taken over, and it wasn't just students, it was students and young workers.

20:28Yeah. But then, you know, and they say that de Gaulle, that he had a plane ready. It was very, very close to him leaving. Yeah, he was basically a prisoner in the Elysee Palace. And then he made a deal, and he couldn't count on the French army in France because they would deploy, and then some, you know, girls would show up with some flowers, and the soldiers would walk away from the APCs. So it was complete chaos. So he made a deal with the French army of the Rhine, because Germany was still occupied at that point, to come in and support him. And they extorted from him, in effect, the release of Salon, who was a right-wing French general who, over the war in Algeria, was part of a plot to assassinate de Gaulle and was in prison.

21:18And that was the quid pro quo of de Gaulle getting support from the military. and they marched in from Germany and then everything dissipated. So the military quashed them. I was convinced there was always theories that the working class didn't, that it was a student-led revolution and that it just didn't have the backing. But the people who were intellectually on top of it, who were at the heart of it, knew nothing serious was actually going to happen in the real world right then and there. It was very sophisticated. The irony is that sitting in London prior to Major 68, everybody dismissed the French as café marxist or something, and then ironically that's where it happened.

22:05But 68 was just extraordinary. You're in Czechoslovakia, Mexico City. I was in Grosvenor Square on October 25th. I was there. You were there. I was in Grosvenor Square. Bill Clinton was there. Tariq Ali was there. I stood next to Tariq Ali. I have a picture by the march. It was heady times. And as I said, when Richard won the Pompadour and we went, we'd still go to the cinema on a Sunday night, and it was scary coming back because they would lock the police, just lock them in these vans for hours, and you just can imagine the tension and the fear and the horror of having to sit in there. It was extraordinary.

22:42And then when did you go to Morocco? Why was that? Went to Morocco just to be in Morocco. Went to Casablanca because I'd seen a movie called Casablanca. You had to go to Casablanca. And great food, no? Great food. I think the food in my life. Got marvelous dysentery. Did you? Living in some hut on the coast, and some healer, a woman, came in and gave me something. I don't know what it was. It must have been some opiate because I suddenly felt great, got all bound up, and then kind of continued on, toured through the Atlas Mountains a bit.

23:23Hi, this is Shirley Strawberry from the Steve Harvey Morning Show. Toyota-thon is on, and right now your local Toyota dealer is celebrating with can't-miss year-end deals on the vehicles that built Toyota's reputation for legendary reliability. Discover the stylish and efficient Camry and Corolla, both available with all-wheel drive. Or go with a RAV4 or Grand Highlander. versatile, adventurous, and ready to take you and your family wherever the road leads. Need muscle? Take it up a notch with a Tacoma or Tundra, built tough and always ready for the long haul. And no matter which Toyota you choose, you'll find smart financing and lease options available to qualified customers, making it easier than ever to get behind the wheel of the Toyota you've been waiting for.

24:14But don't wait. These year-end savings won't last. Shop the entire Toyota lineup and find a great deal today on buyatoyota.com. Toyota, let's go places. Shh, you won't believe what my new friend just told me about dinosaurs. Is your child having conversations you never imagined? Are they learning without realizing it? It's not a tablet. It's not a toy. It's Miko Mini Plus, the AI-powered companion that turns curiosity into endless learning. Hear the future of playtime. Meet the extraordinary Meeko Mini Plus. Only at Costco. When you were on a movie set, did you think about how to feed the crew?

25:02Did you eat yourself? I do, and I make sure that the food on the set is really, really great and have great catering. There's a guy named Mario in Miami who I used all the time. The Miami Vice. I couldn't tell you his last name. He's on Miami Vice and other pictures. I just bring them with me. I think that's kind of unique because I've talked to various directors and people who've worked on film, and they say it can be a disaster, the lunch. You know, they're just terrible food, and people eat unhealthy food, and then the amount of time it takes to stop for lunch and eat. It's pretty tough. Japan was interesting because the catering was not great.

25:39It's kind of cardboard bento boxes and stuff, And we improved it when I shot the Tokyo Vice Pilot in Tokyo. Did you tell me about food in Tokyo? Food in Tokyo is spectacular. You can't get a bad meal if you try to get a bad meal. We're living in Daikanyama, and within 150 meters of our apartment were probably half a dozen spectacular restaurants, any one of which would have been the best sushi restaurant in Los Angeles. Did you eat anything else other than Japanese food? Yes, Italian. Literally 150 feet outside the front door was the Princey Bakery from Milan. It had an outpost next to Sutaya, the big Sutaya bookstore.

26:22So there was fantastic Italian bakery goods every morning. French food was spectacular in Tokyo. People in Tokyo, they spend money in a different way than they do in the West. They don't spend money on living space. They spend money on clothes, on food, on cars, but not on living space. It's funny. I once spent a morning in a cafe in Milan, and I just kept seeing all these people coming in dressed immaculately and beautifully and young people. And I said, how do they afford to buy that Prada shirt, that Gucci sweater? And they live at home. They live at home. They don't pay rent. And so they stay until they get married or they really leave.