Michael Mann is offering behind-the-scenes access to his filmmaking process with the launch of his Archives site.
The online project, which can be seen here, debuted Tuesday with a focus on his 2023 feature Ferrari that stars Adam Driver as race car driver and entrepreneur Enzo Ferrari and Penélope Cruz as wife Laura Ferrari. Users can purchase access to the interactive website, and there is a plan to create future pages focused on other Mann movies.
Mann’s Archives site includes 20 previously unseen mini-documentary videos highlighting the making of the film and the technology involved. Also included are the Oscar-nominated filmmaker’s annotated script pages, notes to himself, photo storyboards and an array of audio recordings.
“Directors have no idea how any other director makes a movie,” Mann told the Los Angeles Times about the Archives project. “And so we each evolve our own particular process. This is an opportunity to pass that on, convey something I’m just very enthusiastic about.”
Mann’s filmography includes such titles as Manhunter (1986), The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Heat (1995), The Insider (1999), Ali (2001), Collateral (2004), Miami Vice (2006) and Public Enemies (2009).
Edward Saxon, a producer on such films as The Silence of the Lambs and professor of Cinematic Arts at USC, said in a statement about the archives: “A unique, essential addition to film and filmmaking scholarship. Brilliant. Immersive. As close as you can get to understanding a filmmaker’s process, and the entire Mann filmmaking process without being on set. It’s also tremendous fun.”
In his review of Ferrari for The Hollywood Reporter, chief film critic David Rooney wrote that the movie “is as unapologetically masculine as anything Mann has made and also as visceral, never more so than when it’s revving its engines and roaring around the track or along open roads in exciting race scenes.”
